Fernando Pessoa

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveller. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.

What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood.

Again I see you, but me I don't see! The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken and only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!

I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.

The Book of Disquiet

abundance

"Terrorism is the art of fear." - Salman Rushdie

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Mandalay, Burma

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Dear one I am here for you. Love, compassion, joy, freedom.

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Contradictions - the lost writings of Kafka.

"Stay at your desk and listen.  Or don't even listen, wait for it to bother you ... Don't even wait, be quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it with writhe in front of you in ecstacy."

The nature of experience. What can writers do?

Celebrate abundance. We live in an abundance beyond our needs ... the abundance of plant, insect and bird life supplies beauty and marvels and enigmas ...

abundance of energies astonish, delighted, entranced ... sensibilities & energies ... we have to entertain the people about us, to support & empower them to accompany them when their paths become painful ...

travel reveals a deeper reality than the one we find at home ... a person in exile is always home

 "A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second." - Salman Rushdie

Jack London

"I am life. I have lived 10,000 generations.

I have lived millions of years ...

I have possessed many bodies.

All the spirit and mystery and the vital fire & life of me am off and away.

I have not perished and the body is not I."

Jack London

Anais Nin

"The role of the writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."

"I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits."

"I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

- Anais Nin

Beauty's Mirror

I’m broiling on the balcony of my Oregon tree house.

Getting down and dirty after 1,001 years away from the typewriter.

Covered in construction dust needing oil it’s a small portable dangerous machine.  It’s capable of transforming life energies and weaving adventures. Threads follow the needle.

I am a peripatetic traveler, literary outlaw, photographer and journalist.

I’m lucky to get it down now and make sense of it later.

I’m a mirror in the mandala of my labyrinth. I am Labrys, from the Greek for a two-headed axe. I write with passion and vision. Short fast and deadly.

Punctuation is a nail.

My mirror reflects everything.

Beauty needs no tongue.

I’m confidant and self-reliant. I explore the human condition. Visual storytelling.

Human energies, frequencies and vibrations reflect languages, lives and attitudes.

I absorb being, joy, anger, jealousy, ignorance, desire, fear, greed, passion and suffering.

Hurl your thunderbolt unto death.

Meditate on the process of your death.

Suffering is an illusion.

The world is an illusion.

Grasping is suffering.

Values, attitudes, joy, belief systems and dreams evolve in my mirror.  

Your mask eats your face.

My mirror is free of dust.

I evolve emotional trust, wisdom, peace and love with truth and compassion.

I experience forgiveness with emotional honesty.

Creativity dances in language.

These truths don’t surprise you after 1,001 years of wandering.

Everything you know is a lie.

Keep a diamond in your mind.