Life in a Nutshell

Dec 02

The Beauty of Mindful Solitude

• Swami Vivekananda: It is our own mental attitude which makes the world what it is for us. Our thoughts make things beautiful, our thoughts make things ugly. The whole world is in our own minds. Learn to see things in the proper light.
• Abraham Cowley: Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.
• Giacomo Leopardi: Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

If it's true with poetry, it's true with love...

• Robert Frost: It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry, as in love, is perceived instantly. It hasn’t to wait the test of time. The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but we knew at sight we never could forget it.

Nov 29

It Goes Without Saying

• Gabriel: I'm a sucker for love.
• Ellis: We all are...

Nov 13

An SMS Text I Received Today

• The rain wont stop, its been coming down for 2 days. When I was a kid I would often go out to my back yard and stand under the rain, as if it were to wash away
• I felt clean, that is one thing I still love about the rain, after a long down pour and the sun finaly shines through everything looks clean. The streets shine
• rain drops and everything has the smell of nature, fresh and clean like if everything was given a new begining. Somethimes life is so beautiful it overwhelms me
• that I have to sit and be consumed by all it's beauty.

“Entre deux coeurs qui s’aiment, nul besoin de paroles.” — Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

Nov 05

A Half-Eaten Chocolate Doughnut Hole

Nov 02

“Whether true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on their lives, and particularly on their destinies, as what they do.” — Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Oct 31

“Kindness unrepaid weighs more heavily than a great mountain or the ocean.” — Tsongkhapa, Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path

Oct 30

Written by a Friend in 1996

i am reading a book
in it there is a character
an old man
who spends all his days sitting around with pulleys and pipe
inventing interesting things that no one can really use
but he is optimistic
and that is his role in the village
the optimists
so even though his inventions have no use
the village has a use for him
his wife spends all her time in the fields and tending the kids
she does all the work to keep them alive
while he lounges and thinks up new ways to get water to flow uphill
and keeps the village pleasantly optimistic
it was not mentioned
but i am sure his name was ellis

goodnight love

Oct 10

Combat-Ready Marine