oh jocelynn

dance, when you’re broken open.
dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
dance, in the middle of fighting.
dance in your blood.
dance when you’re perfectly free.

— Rumi

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

— Rumi

a glass of water
on the window sill

sauce pan
scrambled eggs

some rules.

1. Live now; be concerned with the present rather than with the past or future. We spend too much time daydreaming about the past or future, and this habit distracts and detracts our energies and awareness from the present. 
2. Live here and deal with what is present rather than what is absent. One of many avoidance strategies we use is to focus on what is missing rather than on what we have, on who is missing rather than who is here. 
3. Stop imagining and experience the real. Imagining takes us away from what is and blocks our experiencing and awareness. We sometimes lose sight of what is real for us. 
4. Stop unnecessary thinking, and taste, see, and feel. When was the last time for example, that you ate an orange without thinking about the concept of orange but just sensing every feeling, taste, and smell? We have allowed thinking to block out our senses, and we need to take the time to get back in touch with our senses. 
5. Express rather than manipulate, explain, justify, or judge. Learn to express yourself directly, to ask for what you want, to accept yourself and others for what they are, not for their verbal competencies. 
6. Expand your awareness by giving in to unpleasantness and pain as well as pleasure. True awareness includes negative experiences as well as pleasurable ones, and if we use our energies to block out the negative, we will also lose some of our ability to sense the positive. 
7. Accept no “should” or “ought” other than your own, and follow no idol. The words “should” and “ought” have caused more difficulties than just about any other words in the English language. We must assume responsibility for our rules and practices and our own behaviors. 
8. Take full responsibility for your actions, feelings, and thoughts. This is the essence of maturity in Gestalt thought. We must stop blaming others and situations and take full advantage of our autonomy and the choices that do exist within any situation. 
9. Surrender to being you as you are. Accept yourself for who you are and what you are and not what you or others think you should be. 

(Effective Helping: Interviewing and Counseling Techniques, Barbara F. Okun, Ricki E. Kantrowitz)

I am human and nothing human is foreign to me.

— Terence

Leonard Freed

Harlem Summer Day

We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.

— Annie Dillard

Two Reasons Why I Like Men

highlyflying:

anniewilkins:

(1) The vulnerability of their legs

in shorts,

(2) The innocence of their bare chests

in August.

-Dorothea Grossman

(Or May.)

Resounding yes.

(Source: syllablefingers)