[Slideshow: “The Dark Tarn of Auber–or Not, Respectively,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Written words can be a source of entanglement as well as of liberation; unless the right person takes it at the right time, the elixir turns to poison. Please be careful.

(Torei Enji [source])

…and (ibid.; italicized portion):

You may think that you have died and even that you have risen again; but both will be a dream.

This has a terrible meaning, especially for imaginative people. We read of spiritual efforts, and our imagination makes us believe that, because we enjoy the idea of doing them, we have done them. I am appalled to see how much of the change [which] I thought I had undergone lately was only imaginary. The real work seems still to be done. It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself—to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed, & then to find yourself still in bed.

(C.S. Lewis [source])

…and (ibid.):

One suggestion is to regard your personality as a pet. It follows you around anyway, so give it a name and make friends with it. Keep it on a leash when you need to, and let it run free when you feel that is appropriate. Train it as well as you can, and then accept its idiosyncrasies, but always remember that your pet is not you. Your pet has its own life, and just happens to be in an intimate relationship with you, whoever you may be, hiding there behind your personality.

(Wes Nisker [source])

…and (ibid.):

One of the biggest factors in stress is cognitive distortion — we make an absurd situation into a catastrophe. We create our own reality out of it. Like, “You make me crazy!” Well, nobody makes you crazy; you make your self crazy. There is a tremendous amount of humor in that . If we could just take a breath and step away and be witnesses to our own absurdity, we’d be cracking up most of the time. What humor can do is make your life less of a problem. A laugh is a break. It removes the dark lens that you see your life through and gives you a lighter lens that gives you clarity. As you step away and get less involved in getting pissed off, you achieve a certain level of enlightenment. In other words, humor takes you to a higher place.

(Loretta Laroche [source: unknown])

Not from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

An Improvement in Stairs

Through the oculus of the bus terminal at Boston’s South Station, light falls
for a hundred feet. A shock, a god, a pillar of light, like that of the Pantheon

if the Pantheon had a McDonald’s, a Dunkin’ Donuts, surly young workers
at the Greyhound desk, & an escalator rising to its height—

just like it, that light. A patent for an early escalator called it an improvement
in stairs. An improvement, surely, how I’m standing still & still, somehow,

going up & up & up. My favorite patents are the ones Houdini sought for tricks
never performed: a block of ice he would leave whole, a box within a water-filled box

he would escape from dry. (I should mention: at least one thing in this poem is a lie.)
I can disappear, too: from one place, from another. There’s nothing quite as nice

as leaving, when you’re in the mood. There’s nothing quite as nice as coming back.
Years ago, I stood beneath the Pantheon & thought how beautiful, how sublime,

how like the bus terminal at South Station, if it had a Dunkin’ Donuts.
During the war, Houdini offered to teach soldiers headed to the front

how to escape torpedoed vessels, German handcuffs. As a kid
in Appleton, Wisconsin, he’d dreamed of playing baseball—

the stage of the stadium, the long fly making its escape.
The way there is a place in the game called home

& the goal is to get there
again & again.

(Mairead Small Staid [source])

…and:

In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow old woman, as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can. The great powers are testing to see if humans have yet learned to recognize the greatness of soul in all its varying forms.

(Clarissa Pinkola Estés [source])

…and:

Driving Home from Keyworth’s

Sharing the lap belt, we slide imperfectly into each other
as Dad speeds through an overpass. His daddy raised

Porsches—he raced Porsches—but he is not his father. He doesn’t have
the money to have bad ideas and this is a new truck so we

better not touch something we’re not supposed to. My brother
and I share a Zippo and Swiss Army Knife. All we are allowed

to light are our own birthday candles. Mom says we can cut
the beige-dead slack off of grass. Wanna see the seat belt catch

fire? one of us whispers. The other one replies, No, let’s watch
Dad drive. So we do. Our love is not yet fooled away from worship.

Everything our father does has wings. And because we behaved
while he left us in the car with the engine running as he ducked

into Keyworth’s Hardware store, Dad lets us pretend to steer.
Each of us on a knee, our inherited hands, pulling. We tussle

up the driveway. They are saving us an ashtray fortune, dimes
collide with quarters. My brother, his blond hair, calls out about

a squirrel five yards away that might run into the road. Dad shouts
with joy-of-the-moment, Kids! We raise our keen eyes and yodel

and howl—I’m being ridiculous now. But have you ever sat next
to a person and known the home of your own name?

(Tennessee Hill [source])

…and:

The mustard-pot got up and walked over to his plate on thin silver legs that waddled like the owl’s. Then it uncurled its handles and one handle lifted its lid with exaggerated courtesy while the other helped him to a generous spoonful.

“Oh, I love the mustard-pot!” cried the Wart. “Wherever did you get it?”

At this the pot beamed all over its face and began to strut a bit, but Merlyn rapped it on the head with a teaspoon, so that it sat down and shut up at once.

“It is not a bad pot,” he said grudgingly. “Only it is inclined to give itself airs.”

(T.H. White [source])