Excited to unveil the cover of my new book, Positively Primal, coming to a bookshop/website near you in 2016!
read all about it (and pre-order) here
‘Never lose an opportunity to have sex or be on television…’ Gore Vidal
Bram Stoker’s Chair
another true thing
‘… life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.’ (Jonathan Franzen)
discovering William Empson
Let It Go
It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
The more things happen to you the more you can’t
Tell or remember even what they were.
The contradictions cover such a range.
The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.
some lines from Leonard Cohen
In My Secret Life
I saw you this morning,
you were moving so fast.
Can’t seem to loosen my grip
On the past.
And I miss you so much,
there’s no one in sight.
And we’re still making love
In my secret life.
I smile when I’m angry,
I cheat and I lie,
I do what I have to do
to get by,
In my secret life…
life…
signing last book, writing new book
Unexpected intrusions of beauty
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”
“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
Saul Bellow
What is Zen?
“Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.” Bodhidharma
“Letting go is the lesson. Letting go is always the lesson. Have you ever noticed how much of our agony is all tied up with craving and loss?” Susan Gordon Lydon
“…there is a way to be sane. You can get rid of all this insanity created by the past in you. Just by being a simple witness of your thought processes.
Simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness. The moment you say “this is good, this is bad,” you have already jumped onto the thought process.
It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great surprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, a watcher.
And this process of watching is the very alchemy of real religion. Because as you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty.
That’s the moment of enlightenment. That is the moment that you become for the first time an unconditioned, sane, really free human being.” Osho
