listen carefully

  

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The moon is a white strange world, a great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. 

When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.

We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve-centre from which we quiver forever. 

Who knows the power that Saturn has over us or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time … Now all this is literally true, as men knew in the great past and as they will know again.


—D. H. Lawrence

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Although the evening is cold and starless
And the rain is raging,
I’m still singing my song during this period,

I don’t know who’s listening.
Though the world is drowned in war and fear,
At some point
Burning secretly, if no one sees them,
The love continues.

—Hermann Hesse

 

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Listen carefully,
Neither the Vedas 
Nor the Qur'an 
Will teach you this:
Put the bit in its mouth,
The saddle on its back,
Your foot in the stirrup,
And ride your wild runaway mind 
All the way to heaven.

—Kabir

 

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