"To regret one's own experience is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul."

                                           ~ Oscar Wilde

Rilke says...

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

                                     ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Surprisingly, very surprisingly to myself, I seem to begin to find myself amongst some of my most ancient answers, this last while.

For the Unknown Feral

Passing grey feathers flattened in the road, I thought I would re-post the following, in honor:

Dance Upon a Chimney Pot

    Sitting in the coffee shop window this morning, thinking and planning and worrying, and drawing on a napkin, I looked out and saw against sky two pigeons silhouetted on a chimney pot.  It is a bright, frozen day, with only a distant chill whisper of spring, but one pigeon was doing his bowing dance to the other, circling and bobbing, rounding his chest, no doubt cooing his burred song.  He made me smile, and watch, and forget my thoughts.
    Soon, his lady flew away.  The pigeon paused in his dance.  I thought he would stop, or fly away, too. But after a moment of looking this way and that with his tiny head, he began his dance alone against the clear blue, turning in a pattern which, however instinctual, was a very song of delight, of joy in being, of love without care of return.
    No cramping fear of the morrow, though one pecks a meager living on a sidewalk, no shadow of foiled desire, no shame in the perception of others, indeed in a small gray bird a pure call to cast one's very soul upon the waters.

"Training is needed in order to love properly; and to be able to give happiness and joy, you must practice DEEP LOOKING directed toward the other person you love. Because if you do not understand this person, you cannot love properly. Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. That is the message of the Buddha."

                                              ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

"It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony."

                                                         ~ Benjamin Britten

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

                                                   ~ Albert Einstein