As the stock markets came crashing down, a different kind of global devastation received scant notice. The World Conservation Congress revealed that 25 percent of the planet’s mammal species and one out of eight birds are on close to extinction. We’re not just talking about exotic animals in remote hideaways, but rabbits and deer and cardinals and turtledoves. As you meditate on how to reinvent yourself in the wake of the financial shifts, Cancerian, please hold a vigil in your heart for the endangered creatures. The two crises are related, after all. The greed to turn everything into a means of generating money has led humans to both despoil nature and risk the crazy gambles that have savaged the economy. The more you understand that, the better your intuition will be as you make personal decisions affecting your future relationship with money.

(via freewillastrology)

sometimes in that crazy good way, it feels like the universe is speaking to you…even if you don’t really believe in all that.

I’m not sure how to describe This American Life, Ira Glass’ radio show that was around a full decade before I started seeing his defaced posters in subways. I had no idea what the premise was so for the record showtime, those ads weren’t very effective.  So from wikipedia: “Primarily a journalistic non-fiction program, it has also featured essays, memoirs, field recordings, short fiction, and found footage.”

All I know is that its wonderful. Funny and moving at times. Insightful. Powerful. Truthful. I’d love to attempt to find as many other adjectives ending in ‘ful’ as I can think of, but I think I’m going to listen to the Babysitting episode instead.

Maybe it is better to get off the beaten path for a while.

“The thing that blinds us and deafens us is the ceaselessly moving mind, the preoccupation we have with our thoughts. It is the incessant internal dialogue that shuts out everything else. That is the problem with trying to take a preconceived photograph. Before you even walk out of the building, you blind yourself. All day long we talk to ourselves. We preoccupy ourselves with the past, or we preoccupy ourselves with the future, and while we preoccupy ourselves, we miss the moment and miss our lives. Looking, we do not see. It is as if we were blind. Listening, we do not hear. It is as if we were deaf. Loving, we do not feel. It is as if we were dead. Preoccupied, we do not notice the reality around us. How can we be present? How can we taste and touch our lives?

The answer to these questions is not outside yourself. To see this truth requires the backward step, going very deep into yourself to find the foundation of reality and of your life. To see it is not the same as understanding it or believing it. To see it means to realize it with the whole body and mind. To realize it transforms one’s life, one’s way of perceiving the universe and the self, and of expressing what has been realized.

– John Daido Loori

-Toni Morrison

(picked up by my good friend nic)

A few years ago I loaned it to someone who wrote in the margins, underlined passages, tore the spine and kept it for a year before returning it. Oft times things of that nature, personal notes in books I find interesting only because they hold a bit of a person and a bit of their mystery (though less so when the book happens to be mine). It leaves questions and doors and windows in someone else’s psyche. Here is what she underlined :

‘You’ll get over it…’ It’s the cliches that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it. The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over…This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

– C.S Lewis

whiskey river.

I very much like this word. The way the “o” brushes against the hard consonant, K. The brush of your tongue against the top of your mouth when rounding out the word with “ta.”

I like it because as one gets older, as life begins to complicate (as life does) a lot more elements that delve into the realm of mokita seems to materialize.

…If we agree never to mention what happens, its almost as if it never did…

I like it because I was lying in bed and thinking of mokita kept me awake enough to write briefly to you about it.

good night,
good luck,

teeny