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Michael Pollan On Psychedelic Experience

789a7-img_2648Michael Pollan

The idea took hold of me. It was a little like being shown a door in a familiar room — the room of your own mind — that you had somehow never noticed before and being told by people you trusted (scientists!) that a whole other way of thinking — of being! — lay waiting on the other side. All you had to do was turn the knob and enter. Who wouldn’t be curious? I might not have been looking to change my life, but the idea of learning something new about it, and of shining a fresh light on this old world, began to occupy my thoughts. Maybe there was something missing from my life, something I just hadn’t named.

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Madeleine L’Engle On Self Consciousness

C304E1D0-4F7C-48AE-ACCD-7778E687E661.jpegMadeleine L’Engle (November 29, 1918–September 6, 2007)

When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves.

🎂 Happy Birthday Madeleine L’Engle (November 29, 1918–September 6, 2007). In Memoriam🌹

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David Paladin On Balance

35E013C1-01F8-4FA3-9730-B374029A1978.jpegDavid Paladin (November 04, 1926 – 1984)

If we were to take the Tao symbol, put a pin at its center and spin it. We would have neither yin nor yang, but a whole, a new image as a result of the blending of the two. When you blend the good and the bad you learn to dance and flow with both expressions…No event is all black or white.

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Anne Beattie On Time

26B50678-E912-4F13-BCAD-B321F85A5DFF.jpegAnne Beattie (September 08, 1947 -)

When we came in she had her chair sideways by the window looking out at the snow, and she said, without even looking up to know it was us, that the doctor had said that sitting and staring at the snow was a waste of time. She should get involved in something. She laughed and told us it wasn’t a waste of time. It would be a waste of time just to stare at the snowflakes but she was counting, and even that might be a waste of time, but she was only counting the ones that were just alike.

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Virginia Woolf On Life

09AFDF5A-A064-46D2-9E49-C9D22825FA1EVirginia Woolf  (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941)

How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.