This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow – this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.
To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balancedlife.
Someday you’re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing…
In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.
The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying the only thing more impossible than stayin the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.g was leaving.
I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, ‘There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who’s in charge?
Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.
Infatuation is not quite the same thing as love it’s more like love’s shady second cousin who’s always borrowing money and can’t hold down a job.
Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
The Bhagavad Gita–that ancient Indian Yogic text–says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.
It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.
You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.
Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.
You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.
One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
If I am truly to become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian…I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too.
We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.
The day is ending. It’s time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, Let go.
There’s no trouble in this world so serious that it can’t be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.
The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.
All I could say was, “I don’t know what to do.” I remember her taking me by the shoulders and looking me in the eye with a calm smile and saying simply, “Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.
I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.
Looking for Truth is not some kind of spazzy free-for-all, not even during this, the great age of the spazzy free-for-all.
Look for God, suggests my Guru. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.
I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light.
Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: ‘You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.
I want to be with God all the time. But I don’t want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what i want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.
I couldn’t care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.
In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, ‘I’ve always been a big fan of your work …
Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years–I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.
True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and that night, going back to bed was the only possible answer.
I’m choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I’m making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.
You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.
Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.
Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark.
Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?
I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water.
Religion is for those who don’t want to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there.
In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: “Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite.
You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.
With each reunion (we) had to learn each other all over again. There was always that nervous moment at the airport when I would stand there waiting for him to arrive, wondering, Will I still know him? Will he still know me?
That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.
Listen to the whispers or soon you will be listening to the screams.
Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?
My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face. Then my heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced: “I want a spiritual teacher.
I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.
Venice is beautiful, but like a Bergman movie is beautiful; you can admire it, but you don’t really want to live in it.
Every religion in the world has had a subset of devotees who seek a direct, transcendent experience with God, excusing themselves from fundamentalist scriptural or dogmatic study in order to personally encounter the divine.
Flexibility is just as essential for divinity as is discipline. Your job, then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity.
As the saying goes, “Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them.” Why would I want to keep my limitations?
Fear is a desolate boneyard where our dreams go to desiccate in the hot sun.
I am touched that you are trying to comprehend me. A friend could not be more loving.
The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.
Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.
In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.
There is a reason they call God a presence – because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.
Dear Lord, please show me everything I need to understand about forgiveness and surrender
The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship – just so long as those prayers are sincere.
This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.
It may be that same-sex couples will save the institution of marriage.
Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.
Marriage is a game. They (the anxious and powerful) set the rules. We (the ordinary and subversive) bow obediently before those rules. And then we go home and do whatever the hell we want anyhow.
It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us.
The emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership.
I see marriage as an operation that sews two people together, and divorce is a kind of amputation that can take a long time to heal. The longer you were married, or the rougher the amputation, the harder it is to recover.
By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons.
we must take care of our families wherever we find them.
… “The world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing the terms of the world,” says an old Buddhist teaching. In other words: Get used to it.
I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others.
Do you have the courage? Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.” (quoting Jack Gilbert)
The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash.
There’s this human capacity for joy and endurance, even when things are at their worst. A joy that occurs not despite our suffering, but within it.
I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady.
… you should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead.
Devo farmi le ossa is how they say it in Italian. “I need to make my bones.
If you don’t learn to travel comfortably alongside your fear, then you’ll never be able to go anywhere interesting or do anything interesting.
I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.
A good-enough novel violently written now is better than a perfect novel meticulously written never.
[There is a] quiet glory [in] merely making things, and then sharing those things with an open heart and no expectations.
Creativity is a crushing chore and a glorious mystery. The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.
And at the end of your days, you can thank creativity for having blessed you with a charmed, interesting, passionate existence.
Work with all your heart, because – I promise – if you show up for your work day after day after day after day. you just might get lucky enough some random morning to burst into bloom.
We are all walking repositories of hidden treasures.
It might have been done before, but it hasn’t been done by you!
It has taken me years to learn this, but it does seem to be the case if that I am not actively creating something, then I am probably actively destroying something
Your fear will always be triggered by your creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into the realms of uncertain outcome, and fear hates uncertain outcome.
You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures
Fear is always triggered by creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into realms of uncertain outcome. This is nothing to be ashamed of. It is, however, something to be dealt with.
I have never created anything in my life that did not make me feel, at some point or another, like I was the guy who just walked into a fancy ball wearing a homemade lobster costume.
Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.
Do what you love to do, and do it with both seriousness and lightness. At least then you will know that you have tried and that–whatever the outcome–you have traveled a noble path.
We are all just beginners here, and we shall all die beginners.
I was doing something I’d never done before. And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?
Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don’t need to show me thier badges. I know these guys very well.
But the very fact that this world is so challenging is exactly why you sometimes must reach out of its jurisdiction for help, appealing to a higher authority in order to find your comfort.
… most of my prayers are expressions of sheer gratitude for the fullness of my contentment.
Nothing is so essential as dignity…Time will reveal who has it and who has it not.
Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.
At no moment in history has a bright young girl with plenty of food and a good constitution perished from too much learning.
To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver.
To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy.
My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn’t that crazy? To still have a broken heart almost two years after a love story ends?
For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities.
Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies
I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It’s the least you can do, really, as a polite guest.
What is it about the American obsession with productivity and responsibility that makes it so difficult for us to allow ourselves a little time to solve the puzzle of our own lives, before it’s too late?
Loneliness watches and sights, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over… himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He’s going to make me sleep with him again tonight, i just know it.
So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.
Being content with what you have already is an art form that leads to a peace that can’t be replaced by anything else.
We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace.
Step forward out of your own lingering residual sense of smallness, take up every inch of life that is your blessed inheritance, and DO YOUR THING.
I saw the apartment almost as a sanatorium, a hospice clinic for my own recovery. I painted the walls in the warmest colors I could find and bought myself flowers every week, as if I were visiting myself in the hospital.
You learn to smile even in you liver?”Even in my lire, Ketut. Big smile in my liver.
I wanted to call a time out, to demand that everybody just STOP until I could understand everything.
Then I give her a grim shake of my head and say aloud, ‘This blows ass.’ She nods sympathetically. She doesn’t understand, but of course, in her way she understands completely.
Well… “why” is a hard question to answer in any language.
I am openly prideful, secretly judgemental, and cowardly in conflict.
I am a better person when I have less on my plate.
Please go to this pizzeria. Order the margherita pizza with double mozzarella. If you do not eat this pizza when you are in Naples, please lie to me and tell me that you did.
The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.
And always remember that people’s judgements about you are none of your business.
Admittedly, I am not the one who looks fantastic in everything, but still I cannot help loving myself.
We must all get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something
The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely to fall in love.
But it is my understanding that the health of the planet is affected by the health of every individual on it. As long as even two souls are locked in conflict, the whole of the world is contaminated by it.
This is what intimacy does to us over time. That’s what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other’s stories. (p.237)
The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.
This much I do know – I’m exhausted by the cumulative consequences of a lifetime of hasty choices and chaotic passions.
Nothing is so essential as dignity. Time will reveal who has it and wi has it not.” -Beatrix Whittaker
So this was the Ashram’s final joke on me? Once I had learned to accept my loud, chatty, social nature and fully embrace my inner Key Hostess – only then could I become The Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple, after all?
I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along.
Most of my writing life consist of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and that’s how it gets done.
Guilt’s just your ego’s way of tricking you into thinking that you’re making moral progress. Don’t fall for it, my dear.
That’s just your ego, trying to make sure it stays in charge. This is what ego does. It keeps you feeling separate, keeps you with a sense of duality, tries to convince you that you’re flawed and broken and alone instead of whole.
The other day in prayer I said to God, “Look – I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?”.
Also, I could finally sleep. And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch–there’s not a chance.
Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.
Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family’s history.
The Buddha taught that most problems – if only you give them enough time and space – will eventually wear themselves out.
All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life without having babies.
There was no better path to autonomy for an ambitious young businesswoman than to be married off to a respectable corpse.
I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort to reach such a point of sober discernment.
Yeah, baby! And you are the magnet and I’m the steel! Bring to me your leather, take from me my lace!
What kind of God do you believe in? my answer is easy: I believe in a magnificent God
Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.
Richard didn’t even have time to ask if I thought I’d ever amount to anything in this life before I looked him eye to eye and said, “I already have, mister.
We need courage to take ourselves seriously, to look closely and without flinching, to regard the things that frighten us in life and art with wonder.
At some point, you really just have to finish your work and release it as is-if only so you can go on and make other things with a glad and determined heart.
We must understand the need for perfectionism is a corrosive waste of time, because nothing is ever beyond criticism. No matter how many hours you spend to render something flawless, somebody will always be able to find fault with it.
Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say – no detail spared in the quest for perfection.
Or, as Sextus, the ancient Pythagorian philosopher, said, “The wise man is always similar to himself.” –
At no point in history has a bright young girl with plenty of food and a good constitution perished from too much learning.
That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.
During my first few weeks in Italy, all my Protestant synapses were zinging in distress, looking for a task. I wanted to take on pleasure like a homework assignment, or a giant science fair project.
Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one.
… both pleasure and devotion require a stress-free space in which to flourish…
… the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity.
It may seem a simple pleasure to spoil our children with a treat of sugar, but that pleasure becomes a sin when the sugar was grown by human beings held in unspeakable misery.
If you really want to get to know someone, you have to divorce him.
Don’t we have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for awhile.
But I love him.””So love him.””But I miss him.””So miss him. Send him love and light every time you think about him, and then drop it.
There are always two figures in a marriage, two votes, two conflicting sets of decisions, desires and limitations.
I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. I couldn’t wake him to share in my distress.
Her solitary nature means she needs a family to keep her from loneliness my gregarious nature means I will never have to worry about being alone…
Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight.
At some point, you gotta let go, and sit still, and allow contentment to come to you.
Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.
Just say what you want to say . . . and say it with all your heart.
Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away…meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny.” – Wayan
The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.
The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us,…The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being’s difficulty in coming to viruous balance with himself.
You can let yourself off the hook anytime you want, Liz. That’s the divine contract of a little something we call free will.
sometimes the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else – Richard
You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.
Religious ceremonies are of paramount importance in Bali ( an island, don’t forget, with seven unpredictable volcanoes on it-you would pray, too).
… the rules of transcendence insist that you will not advance even one inch closer to divinity as long as you cling to even one last seductive thread of blame.
And we have a little herb garden, which survived the winter thanks to global warming. It makes me feel like a cool, old Italian housewife, that I kept my rosemary alive outside all winter.
I know I’m not a self-indulgent idiot; I also know I’m not the second coming of Deepak Chopra. If I had believed either of those, or both, as some people do when they get famous, that’s when the mental illness arrives.
Oh, I just want what we all want: a comfortable couch, a nice beverage, a weekend of no distractions and a book that will stop time, lift me out of my quotidian existence and alter my thinking forever.
You know, why at the end of your life should you assemble thousands of pages of ‘Why am I so sad, why am I so depressed?’ Instead, assemble thousands of pages of why you’re so content.
I don’t think you can come into your wisdom until you have made mistakes on your own skin and felt them in reality of your own life.
Marriage is not simply a romantic union between two people it’s also a political and economic contract of the highest order.
My career started young and I was really ambitious, and then I had success and I hung out with people who were much older. I think I might have been temporally misplaced, so I thought I was 40. It was a premature midlife crisis.
I think a lot of people who feel as though they desperately want to be married oftentimes simply desperately want to have a wedding.
I myself have never been enchanted by the dream of the white wedding, and, heaven help us, the expectation that this exquisitely catered event should be ‘the happiest moment’ of one’s life.