PERFECT Dragon

Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasures.
Rainer Maria Rilke

PERFECT Psychic

Here's a shout out in honor of the passing of Paul, the psychic octopus:

Octopuses are smart. They can be readily trained to distinguish between different shapes and patterns. They have been observed practicing observational learning and playing. They often break of their aquariums and into others in search of food. They have even boarded fishing boats and opened holds to eat crabs.

The octopus is the only invertebrate which has been conclusively shown to use tools.

If they lived longer than their average 4 years, can you imagine how smart they would be?

PERFECT Fitzgerald

If you're strong enough there are no precedents.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

PERFECT Medicine

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire

PERFECT Sense 3

Every advance in culture is, psychologically, an extension of consciousness that can take place only through discrimination. Therefore an advance always begins with individuation, that is to say with the individual, conscious of her isolation, cutting a new path through hither to untrodden territory. To do this she must first return to the fundamental facts of her own being, irrespective of authority and tradition, and allow herself to become conscious of her distinctiveness. If she succeeds in giving collective validity to her widened consciousness, she creates a tension of opposites that provides the stimulation which culture needs for its further purpose.
Carl Jung

Face to Face by Edmund Dulac

PERFECT Waldo

The great majority of men (women) are bundles of beginnings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson



Art by Paul Klee

PERFECT Sense 2

People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.
Charles Fort









Northern Lights, Norway 2010

PERFECT Louis

I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.
Jules Verne

(Welcome to the world, Louis)

PERFECT Peace

In order for the world to become peaceful, people must become more peaceful. Among mature people war would not be a problem - it would be impossible. In their immaturity people want, at the same time, peace and the things which make war. However, people can mature just as children grow up. Yes, our institutions and our leaders reflect our immaturity, but as we mature we will elect better leaders and set up better institutions. It always comes back to the thing so many of us wish to avoid: working to improve ourselves.
Peace Pilgrim (Mildred Lisette Norman)

PERFECT Roma

Jazz attracted me because in it I found perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn't have.
Django Reinhardt

PERFECT Einstein

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Albert Einstein

PERFECT Big Easy

There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.
Boris Vian

PERFECT Roots

We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life and if this life has adapted itself to new functions and conditions, it uses the same old basic principles over and over again. There is no real difference between the grass and the man who mows it.
Albert Szent-Györgyi

Tree of Life by Gustav Klimt

PERFECT Miss iss ippi (Ippi ssi ssiM)

The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.
Mark Twain

PERFECT Song for the Times

Three blind mice, three blind mice,
See how they run, see how they run,
They all ran after the farmer's wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,
Did you ever see such a thing in all your life,
As three blind mice.
English Nursery Rhyme

PERFECT Musing

Why is it that we focus so much on our beginnings/early years as the imprint for moving forward? You were abandoned as a child. Your father committed suicide when you were a teenager. Your mother was an alcoholic narcissist. Your father a philanderer. Your grandfather a swindler. Psychiatry brings us back to visit the injustices as if in returning to the past you can alter it. Instead you remain there, feeling those sad, lonely, angry, bitter emotions. I say, bummer that you had a tough beginning. Because, pal, it's just the beginning. If you live a long life, you're going to encounter an incredible amount of unpleasantness, death, deception, and abandonment. You're going to feel immense grief and the foundation for much of your later adulthood is going to be built on the missing of important people in your life. And yet, you go on.

Just sayin.

Me, as much as I've suffered in the past, I have absolutely no desire to linger there. I would rather be, as in this gorgeous Edmund Dulac illustration: She Was Always Picking Flowers.

PERFECT Will

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries. On such a full sea we are now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.
William Shakespeare

PERFECT Poison

Go and catch a falling star
Get with child a mandrake root
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devils' foot ...
John Donne

PERFECT Fourth Way

The greatest barrier to consciousness is the belief that one is already conscious.
Peter D. Ouspensky

PERFECT Marley

"Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds."
Bob Marley

PERFECT Geurbois

Claude Monet on Cafe Geurbois, where the bohemians met on Sundays and Thursdays to inspire each other with discussions that:
"sharpened one's wits, encouraged frank and impartial inquiry, and provided enthusiasm that kept us going for weeks . . . One always came away feeling more involved, more determined, and thinking more
clearly and distinctly."


Terrace of a Cafe in Montmartre
by Vincent Van Gogh

PERFECT Teddy

Let us speak courteously, deal fairly, and keep ourselves armed and ready.
Theodore Roosevelt

PERFECT Just Sayin ...

From the Book of Proverbs comes this prescription: “Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto them that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.” A Sumerian cuneiform tablet of pharmacopoeia dated to about 2100 B.C. is generally cited as the oldest preserved record of medicinal alcohol, although Egyptian papyri may have preceded the tablet. Hippocrates’ therapeutic system featured wines as remedies for almost all known acute or chronic ailments, and the Alexandria School of Medicine supported the medical use of alcohol.
Alcohol in the Western World: A History

PERFECT Reminder

New truths begin as heresies.
Susan Sontag

PERFECT Colossal

The ancient Olmec - who predated the Mayans - were one of the first civilizations in the Americas and the first civilization to build pyramids. They thrived between 1200 and 400 BC and left behind fascinating artifacts, like the colossal heads.

PERFECT Isak

Some people tell me that the capacity for dreaming belongs to childhood and early youth, and that as your faculties of seeing and hearing ebb away your talent for dreaming will go with them. My own experience tells me that it is the other way. I dream today more than I ever did as a child or a young girl, and in my present dreams things stand out more clearly than ever, and more to be wondered at.
Isak Dinesen
Shadows on the Grass

PERFECT Attitude

Yes, it's hot. Yes, it's summer.
And, yes it's just a season away from autumn.
Toast every night if necessary.
Defy the heat!

PERFECT Isis

Hope is a thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings a tune without words
And never stops at all.

And sweetest, in the gale, is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That keeps so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea
Yet, never, in extremity
It ask a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson

Isis, the duck

PERFECT Ditty

The codfish lays a million eggs
The little hen but one
The codfish never cackles when her little task is done
So we praise the little hen
The codfish we despise
Which proves my friends and countrymen
It pays to advertise.
Anonymous

PERFECT Wright

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Stephen Wright

PERFECT Soul

Oh soul,
you worry too much.
You say,
I make you feel dizzy.
Of a little headache then,
why do you worry?
You say,
I am your moon-faced beauty.
Of the cycles of the moon and
passing of the years,
why do you worry?
You say,
I am your source of passion,
I excite you.
Of playing into the Devil's hand,
why do you worry?
Oh soul,
you worry too much.
Read more...
Rumi

(photo by Beth Arnold)

PERFECT IF

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling

---

PERFECT Dove

"...Everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease an herb to cure it, and every person a mission. That is the Indian theory of existence."
Mourning Dove/Christine Quintasket

PERFECT Glad

The name Gladiolus is derived from the Latin word - gladius - which means "sword." The flower signifies honor, strength of character and infatuation and was a favorite of Monet and Gertrude Jekyll.

PERFECT Rumi

Don't go away, come near.
Don't be faithless, be faithful.
Find the antidote in the venom.
Come to the root of the root of yourself.
Rumi

PERFECT Biology

Imaginal cells - it doesn't get more magical than this, transforming a caterpillar to a butterfly.

PERFECT Blog

Nic Cage has a face that lends itself perfectly to niccageaseveryone!

Nic Cage as Sitting Bull by David Smith.

PERFECT Laureate

"Those of us who can write, meaning those of us who are able to write and those of us who are committed to writing, have a duty to write for ... the unjustly mistreated, whether they're people or not. Animals."
W. S. Merwin

PERFECT Dread

In defense of penny dreadfuls:
Literature is a luxury, fiction is a necessity.
G. K. Chesterton

PERFECT Word

Coined by J. R. Tolkien: Eucatastrophe - a joy that brings tears.

PERFECT Isle of the Dragonflies

Did you know that nature's most efficient invention in space, design and function is INSECTS?

PERFECT Comeback

Fact: Pablo Picasso had a difficult birth and was not breathing when he finally emerged from the birth canal. The midwife said he was too blue and impossible to revive and left him for dead. His uncle thought otherwise and blew cigar smoke into his face. The shock brought Picasso back to life.

PERFECT Romance

Speak low if you speak love.
William Shakespeare

PERFECT Chesney

One thing I like about jazz, kid, is that I don't know what's going to happen next. Do you?
Bix Beiderbeck

PERFECT 100+

When asked if she gets tired of life, Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist Rita Levi-Montalcini, 101, says: NEVER!

PERFECT Question

The United States ranks LAST. You gonna stand for this?

PERFECT Aurora

Aurora is the effort
Of the Celestial Face
Unconsciousness of Perfectness
To simulate, to Us.
Emily Dickinson

PERFECT Summer

Great is the sun, and wide he goes
Through empty heaven with repose;
And in the blue and glowing days
More thick than rain he showers his rays.

Summer Sun
Robert Lewis Stevenson

PERFECT Solstice

"Whatever is dreamed on this night, will come to pass."
William Shakespeare

PERFECT Sense

Anyone you know? From Sakyong Mipham: Our own mind is our worst enemy. We try to focus, and our mind wanders off. We try to keep stress at bay, but anxiety keeps us awake at night.... We can create an alliance that allows us to actually use our mind, rather than be used by it.