today is a great day to die

"Today is the best day of my life," is what my usual motto is, but today has been just extraordinarily delightful.

It just gets better and better. Everything seems just perfect today. All faculties have been functioning at optimal or near-optimal, especially my interpersonal skills. I am completely elated and perhaps that's why I'm feeling more self-aware than usual too. I bet all 3 of my bio-rhythms are at their crests today coz I'm really fuckin high!! :D

Of course this won't last, and that's why I'd like to die today. Preferably after the Ashtavakra Gita session tonight ;)

unclaimed

To make love with a stranger is the best.
There is no riddle and there is no test.

To lie and love, not aching to make sense
Of this night in the mesh of reference.

To touch, unclaimed by fear of imminent day,
And understand, as only strangers may.

To feel the beat of foreign heart to heart
Preferring neither to prolong nor part.

To rest within the unknown arms and know
That this is all there is; that this is so.


-- Vikram Seth

quote for helianthus

The flower that follows the sun does so even on cloudy days.


Robert Leighton

anticipation of love

Neither the intimacy of your look, your brow fair as a feast day,
nor the favor of your body, still mysterious, reserved, and childlike,
nor what comes to me of your life, settling in words or silence,
will be so mysterious a gift
as the sight of your sleep, enfolded
in the vigil of my arms.
Virgin again, miraculously, by the absolving power of sleep,
quiet and luminous like some happy thing recovered by memory,
you will give me that shore of your life that you yourself do not own.
Cast up into silence
I shall discern that ultimate beach of your being
and see you for the first time, perhaps,
as God must see you --
the fiction of Time destroyed,
free from love, from me.


Jorge Luis Borges
(translated by Alastair Read)

thought for the day

Free from the least attachment he enjoys whatever comes to him unsought, even as the eyes perceive their objects without desire or hate. Such experiences do not therefore produce either joy or sorrow in him. Even though he appears to be engaged in the performance of appropriate actions in this world, his consciousness is not distracted in the least. Whatever may befall him in accordance with the laws of time space and causation, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, he remains inwardly undisturbed.


Swami Venkatesananda
Yoga Vasistha

letter to helianthus

Day turns into night turns into day. There is still no sight of you and no respite for me. The flowers in my vase bloomed just a moment ago, but are already withering. The trees that were radiating a bright green, now stand naked. The clouds are nowhere to be seen in the dome that was veiled in black only recently. People enter and leave the inn of my workplace and they board and alight from the train of life itself, moving onwards forever to a perhaps unknowable destination. Like their futile journey, I endeavour to find the secret of immutability, that mystics call love, amidst this constant whirlwind of change, and even though I falter and hallucinate like a thirsty desert-wanderer, I know that a perennial brook flows somewhere beneath this arid wasteland of confusion. I know this because I once received a tantalizing sip from the fragrant waters and now I cannot seem to palliate this enervating thirst. I long to be with you, my beloved. Sacrosanct dweller of my heart, when will this thirsty straggler be blessed with the divine nectar of thy lips?

the quitter

when you're lost in the Wild,
and you're scared as a child,
and Death looks you bang in the eye,
and you're sore as a boil,
it's according to Hoyle
to cock your revolver and . . . die.
but the Code of a Man says: "Fight all you can,"
and self-dissolution is barred.
in hunger and woe, oh, it's easy to blow . . .
it's the hell-served-for-breakfast that's hard.

"you're sick of the game!"
well, now, that's a shame.
you're young and you're brave and you're bright.
"you've had a raw deal!"
i know -- but don't squeal,
buck up, do your damnedest, and fight.
it's the plugging away
that will win you the day,
so don't be a piker, old pard!
just draw on your grit; it's so easy to quit:
it's the keeping-your-chin-up that's hard.

it's easy to cry that you're beaten -- and die;
it's easy to crawfish and crawl;
but to fight and to fight when hope's out of sight --
why, that's the best game of them all!
and though you come out of each gruelling bout,
all broken and beaten and scarred,
just have one more try -- it's dead easy to die,
it's the keeping-on-living that's hard

robert w. service