See You Somewhere...

When searching my inbox last night for an e-mail from Nora, to get the specifics of her phrasing, I came upon this sign-off to a short but sweet one thanking me for lunch: “see you somewhere… xox.” Somewhere, it turns out, is everywhere. I see Nora in the home I wouldn’t live in if not for her, the shot list I make in the van to set in the morning, and the jacket I slip into when the sun comes down (she always sent links along with tips). I see her when the craft services on set isn’t up to par, or in the process of getting to know a man who seems to understand. I see her in the worst hair moments and the best soup moments. I know I am only one of hundreds of women, people, who will miss Nora’s company, and millions who will miss her voice. The opportunity to be friends with Nora in the last year of her life informs the entirety of mine. I am so grateful.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/06/lena-dunham-remembers-nora-ephron.html#ixzz1zDN8RbE1

And Miles To Go Before I Sleep

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

... Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening, Robert Frost

A Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

... Mevlana Jalalludin Rumi

We Need Silence

“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass - grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.”

... Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta

But You Do

In your life you meet people. 

Some you never think about again. 

Some, you wonder what happened to them. 

There are some that you wonder if they ever think about you. 

And then there are some that you wish you never have to think about again. 

But you do. 

... C.S. Lewis

We Need Humanity

We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. 

... Charlie Chaplin

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously for matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements. In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movement deterritorialization and destratification.”

"To a certain degree, the traditional logic of desire is all wrong from the very outset: from the very first step that the Platonic logic of desire forces us to take, making us choose between production and acquisition. From the moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack: a lack of an object, a lack of the real object."

“Lack is created, planned, and organized in and through social production… It is never primary; production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack. It is lack that infiltrates itself, creates empty spaces and propagates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production.”

"The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs (manque) amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one's needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy."

... Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

Regarding The Pain Of Others

"Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering of more than a century and a half worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists."

“So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent - if not inappropriate - response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may - in ways we might prefer not to imagine - be linked to their suffering, as the wealth as some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.”

... Regarding The Pain Of Others, Susan Sontag

That's Just Fine With Me

There is nothing special about me

I am just a lil star

If it seems like I'm shining brightly

It's probably a reflection of something you already are

I forget about myself sometimes

When there's so many others around

When deep inside you feel the darkest

That is where I can always be found

There is nothing special about me

I am just a lil star

If you try to reach out and touch me

You'll see that I'm not really that far

I may not be the brightest nor am I the last one you'll see

But as long as you notice, that's just fine with me

Everything's just fine with me

There is nothing special about me

I am just a lil star

I've been running and jumping, but barely

Getting, getting over the bar

I plan on being much more than I am, but that's in due time

But until then I'm guilty, and being human is my crime

Being human, that is my crime

... Lil Star, Kelis featuring Cee-Lo

I Keep Them In A Jar

To ten million fireflies

I'm weird cause I hate goodbyes

I got misty eyes as they said farewell

But I'll know where several are

If my dreams get real bizarre

'Cause I saved a few and I keep them in a jar

... Fireflies, Owl City

Your Living

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life;

not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.

... Kahlil Gibran

For Now

A few times in my life I have had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds, the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think.. And things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh, yet I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything else, they fade. I have lived for these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realized that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be... for now.

A Moment Of Silence

If you allow yourself a moment of silence 

you'll be able to hear the sound of your soul, 

listen.. whats within you is all you need to know.

Stillness

Seek out a tree and let it teach you stillness

... Eckhart Tolle

Quieter

The quieter you become,

the more you are able to hear.

... Rumi

The Contemplative Life

‎"The contemplative life must provide an area, a space of liberty, of silence, 

in which possibilities are allowed to surface and new choices become manifest"

... Thomas Merton

UntukMu Selamanya

dimalam yang sesunyi ini

aku sendiri tiada yang menemani

akhirnya kini ku sedari

dia telah pergi tinggalkan diriku

adakah semua kan terulang

kisah cintaku yang seperti dulu

hanya dirimu yang kucinta dan kukenang

didalam hatiku takkan pernah hilang

bayangan dirimu untuk selamanya

... Kisah Cintaku, Peterpan

ku masih merindukanmu

walaupun kini kau telah bersamanya

tak pernah mampu ku cuba lupakanmu

sungguh tak bisa

aku mengganti dirimu dengan dirinya

sungguh tak sanggup

aku berpaling darimu

sungguh tak bisa

ku mencintainya untuk melupakanmu

sungguh tak sanggup

aku berpindah dari hatimu

... Untukmu Selamanya, Ungu

Embrace The Darkness In Which I Swim

i'm just a dreamer but i'm hanging on

though i am nothing big to offer

i watch the birds, how they dive in then gone

it's like nothing in this world's ever still

and i'm just a shadow of your thoughts in me

but the sun is setting, shadows growing

a long cast figure will turn into night

it's like nothing in this world ever sleeps

oh sometimes the blues is just a passing bird

and why can't that always be

tossing aside from your birches crown

just enough dark to see

how you're the light over me

Home Again

I left my head

Many times I've been told

All this talk will make you old

So I close my eyes

Look behind

Moving on, moving on

So I close my eyes

Look behind

Moving on

Lost again

Lost again

One day I know

Our Paths will cross again

Smile again

Smile again

One day I hope

To make you smile again

I won't hide

... Home Again, Michael Kiwanuka

Live The Questions Now

“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.”

... Letters To A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

The Sense Of An Ending

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”

“We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”

“When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK."

“History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.”

“But I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time—love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.”

... The Sense Of An Ending, Julian Barnes

Never Let Me Go

"I come here and imagine that this is the spot where everything I've lost since my childhood is washed out. I tell myself, if that were true, and I waited long enough then a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy. He'd wave. And maybe call. I don't know if the fantasy go beyond that, I can't let it. I remind myself I was lucky to have had any time with him at all. What I'm not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time."

“It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that. But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we'd understood that back then- who knows?- maybe we'd have kept a tighter hold of one another.”

“When we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we grow up, and we were free to travel around the counry, we would always go and find it in Norfolk... And that's why years and years later, that day Tommy and I found another copy of that lost tape of mine in a town on the Norfolk coast, we didn't just think it pretty funny; we both felt deep down some tug, some old wish to believe again in something that was once close to our hearts.”

“Because maybe, in a way, we didn't leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and no matter how much we despised ourselves for it -- unable quite to let each other go.”

... Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro