“May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days.”

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Ray Bradbury as quoted in Advice to Writers, Jon Winokur, 2000

“May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake the world.”

If you are to take to the world, may you be in love every day, while you create and play in your way, the way, which is yours.

On Work : Kahlil Gibran

Then a ploughman said, “Speak to us of Work.”
And he answered, saying:
You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth. For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.
When you work, you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.
Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison? Always you have been told that work is a curse and labor a misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,
And in keeping yourself with labor you are in truth loving life,

And to love life through labor is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.
But if you in your pain call birth an affliction and the support of the flesh a curse written upon your brow, then I answer that naught but the sweat of your brow shall wash away that which is written.
You have been told also life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary.
And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge, And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,

And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,
And all work is empty save when there is love;
And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.
And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,

And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching. Often have I heard you say, as if speaking in sleep, “he who works in marble, and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone, is a nobler than he who ploughs the soil.
And he who seizes the rainbow to lay it on a cloth in the likeness of man, is more than he who makes the sandals for our feet.”

But I say, not in sleep but in the over-wakefulness of noontide, that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass;
And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving.

Work is love made visible.
you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger .
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.
And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

Kahlil Gibran

Don’t Listen To Them Without Listening…

Everyone has an opinion.

Podcasts, blogs, videos, books, and access to a billion minds floating lost in the world…

These minds open and desperate to find a key to their challenges, these minds, listening to people speak as if the voice they hear are some how knowing.

And these voices that are speaking lack the humility or awareness to know what they don’t know.

And so they speak with a confidence that is false and faltering.

But to listen is to discover.

It’s in their language, the words they use to describe what they profess to know.

Listening is an art, a skill, an ability that if practiced and played with, will reveal the voices that lie.

I’m not talking about the news media, the movies, or the mainstream.

I’m talking about the people who have easy access to tools to spread their words, words not messages, words that in one context create a pretend authority and expertise, a knowing which isn’t true.

In other words people lie and they lie knowingly and they lie unconsciously.

And they do it all of the time.

You must listen.

Listen…

Listen well…

And then listen some more…

And again, don’t listen to me, listen to your own experience to know if it is so.

And if you “Think” than you don’t know. ( I think… )