awakeinthedream

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The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.

Thomas Merton (via quotethat)

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Photo by Michael Durana

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How does an apple ripen? It just sits in the sun.

Thomas Merton, From Merton’s Palace of Nowhere by James Finley (via dk-thrive)

[awakeinthedream]

[awakeinthedream]

For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough. We insist each day wrap it’s knuckles through our heart strings and pull. The lows. The joy. The poetry. We dance at the edge of a cliff, you have fallen off. So it goes. You will climb up again. You rare girl, once again, you have a body that belongs to no lover, to no father, belongs to no one but you. Wear your sorrow like the lines on your palm. Like a shawl to keep you warm at night. Don’t mourn the love that is lost to you now. It is a book of poems whose meters worked their way into your pulse. Even if it has slipped from your hands, it will stay in your body. You loved a man who treated you like absinthe, half poison and half god. He tried to sweeten you, to water you down. So you left. And now you have your heart all to yourself again. A heart like a stone cottage. Heart like a lover’s diary. Hope like an ocean.

Anais Nin letter to Clementine von Radics (via venuschild)

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[awakeinthedream]

It takes all the strength of my desire for me to expose myself to these things that so wound my heart – to expose myself without a defence.

Simone de Beauvoir,  When Things Of The Spirit Come First: Five Early Tales  (via wordsnquotes)

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On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself–on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.

Simone de Beauvoir (born on this day in 1909)

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Photo by Josefa Holland-Merten

[awakeinthedream]

Having a lover/friend who regards you as a living growing criatura, being, just as much as the tree from the ground, or a ficus in the house, or a rose garden out in the side yard… having a lover and friends who look at you as a true living breathing entity, one that is human but made of very fine and moist and magical things as well… a lover and friends who support the criatura in you… these are the people you are looking for. They will be the friends of your soul for life. Mindful choosing of friends and lovers, not to mention teachers, is critical to remaining conscious, remaining intuitive, remaining in charge of the fiery light that sees and knows.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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No matter how deeply I go down to myself my god is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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Photo by Josh Withers 

[awakeinthedream]

Imagine being born into a dream: a mass illusion transformed over thousands of years by billions of people into what today you call reality. The billions of people subdivided into territories they called countries, into belief systems they called religions and into groups they called races. Countries subdivided into states, provinces and cities, which then subdivided into neighborhoods that subdivided into buildings or single-family homes. Religions divided into conservative and liberal sects, which then grew into more conservative and liberal branches. Races divided themselves by all of the above, including color, tone, ethnic makeup, and financial status. Each group then teaches and defends that its way is the way and its truth is the truth, and each group creates its own reality out of what it believes. Each group then tries to sell you on its current forms and laws, telling you that this is what is “right.” Each teaches you that the closer you are to following its form, the happier, more successful and peaceful you will be. And somewhere deep within, you know that it is your right to be happy and to be at peace. So you buy into it, and regardless of how little sense the illusion makes, you keep participating for if you stop you will be judged as an outcast, a trouble-maker, a bum. You are taught that if you stop participating in the group’s way of life, your hopes for happiness, success and peace will also end. The group tells you that if you go against the norm, you will not find happiness, peace or success. So you buy into the illusion the group offers, believing that there is no other way. You carefully weave and contour the illusion into one you can live with for now. But my friend, regardless of how you choose to weave, contour and experience the illusion, it is still an illusion.

James Blanchard Cisneros

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Photo by Josefa Holland-Merten

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Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke