via FlowingData:

“As intelligence goes up, happiness goes down. See, I made a graph. I make lots of graphs.”
–Lisa Simpson

If you need somebody, call my name
If you want someone, you can do the same
If you want to keep something precious
You got to lock it up and throw away the key
If you want to hold onto your possession
Don’t even think about me

If you love somebody, set them free

If it’s a mirror you want, just look into my eyes
Or a whipping boy, someone to despise
Or a prisoner in the dark
Tied up in chains you just can’t see
Or a beast in a gilded cage
That’s all some people ever want to be

–Sting, “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free”

image via In Obscuro

“Each person has a unique way of seeing and being in the world that reflects the myriad events and life experiences that make one person’s autobiography different from another’s. Even if we are adherents of an orthodox religion, the sacred often appears to us in odd and intimate ways that may seem meaningless or trivial to an outsider. Those pivotal moments when we are wonder-struck, love-struck or terror-struck tend to be so private, so idiosyncratic that we don’t know how to talk about them. We stutter in an effort to put into words an experience that is ineffable.

But what cannot be said straight can be told on a slant. The experience of the sacred can be sung, chanted, danced, put into a poem or embedded in personal narratives, autobiographies and stories. We may point to ways, places and times in which we have glimpsed the Infinite in some finite disguise. Poets have caught a fleeting glance of it in “a flower in a crannied wall” or in a ‘tiger, tiger burning bright in the forest of the night” Norman McLean’s family found in fly fishing the enacted metaphor of grace and love. It has appeared as a holy man or woman–shaman, prophet, healer, avatar, Bodhisatva–or as a snake, bear, cow, pig, horse, river or spring. An Indigo Bunting no less than Jesus or the Dali Lama may become a living metaphor of the Divine.

This brings me to the feathery messengers who have been my private angels. As I explore the epiphanies and metaphors that have been central to my life I often turn back to an enchanted time in childhood when I wandered freely in the woods. It was in these wild places that the love of birds and the quest for G– intwined to fashion the double helix that has informed my journey.

I have not always been swept off my feet by the appearance of a Black and White Warbler or a Bald Eagle. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a bird is just a bird, not a metaphor. But the sightings of some birds have opened new vistas, inspired my mind to ask new questions, my imagination to soar, and my spirit to expand.”
–Sam Keen

“How are you?”
“Perfect, thank you. I’m travelling incognito.”
“Oh? As what are you disguised?”
“I am disguised as myself.”
“Don’t be silly. That’s no disguise. That’s who you are.”
“On the contrary, it must be a very good disguise, for I see it has fooled you completely.”
–Nasreddin

I want to be different, like everybody else I want to be like
I want to be just like all the different people
I have no further interest in being the same,
because I have seen difference all around,
and now I know that that’s what I want
I don’t want to blend in and be indistinguishable,
I want to be a part of the different crowd,
and assert my individuality along with the others
who are different like me
I don’t want to be identical to anyone or anything
I don’t even want to be identical to myself
I want to look in the mirror and wonder,
“who is that person? I’ve never seen that person before;
I’ve never seen anyone like that before.”
I want to call into question the very idea that
identity can be attached
I want a floating, shifting, ever changing persona:
Invisibility and obscurity,
detachment from the ego and all of it’s pursuits.
Unity is useless
Conformity is competitive and divisive and leads only to
stagnation and death.
If what I’m saying doesn’t make any sense,
that’s because sense can not be made
It’s something that must be sensed
And I, for one, am incensed by all this complacency
Why oppose war only when there’s a war?
Why defend the clinics only when they’re attacked?
Why are we always reactive?
Let’s activate something
Let’s fuck shit up
Whatever happened to revolution for the hell of it?
Whatever happened to protesting nothing in particular, just
protesting cause it’s Saturday and there’s nothing else to do?
–King Missile, “It’s Saturday”