Yes, I listen to the trees and hear what they say and I think that they hear what I say. Not what I say, since trees don’t speak English, but the trees are very aware of what I’m doing to them and to the ground around them. And by me I don’t mean Timothy Leary. They don’t talk that language.

— Timothy Leary

Just as we see that fallow land, if rich and fertile, teems with a hundred thousand wild and useless weeds, and that to set it to work we must subject it and sow it with certain seeds for our service; and as we see that women, all alone, produce shapeless masses and lumps of flesh, but that to create a good and natural offspring they must be made fertile with a different kind of seed; so it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they will throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination.

As when the light of waters in an urn,
Trembling, reflects the sun or moon, in turn
It flickers round the room, and darts its rays
Aloft, and on the panelled ceiling plays.

[Virgil]

And there is no mad or idle fancy that they will not bring forth in this agitation:

They form vain visions, like a sick man’s dreams.

[Horace]

The soul that has no fixed goal loses itself; for as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere:

He who dwells everywhere, Maximus, nowhere dwells.

[Martial]

Lately when I retired to my home, determined so far as possible to bother about nothing except spending the little life I have left in rest and privacy, it seemed to me I could do my mind no greater favor than to let it entertain itself in idleness and stay and settle in itself, which I hoped it might do more easily now, having become heavier and more mature with time. But I find —

Ever idle hours breed wandering thoughts

[Lucan]

— that, on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their strangeness and foolishness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make even my mind ashamed of them.

..

— Montaigne
(Translated by Donald M. Frame)

BE PURE. Be Icarus and Dionysus both. Look into the face of others and ask – with your wings and with your eyes – for their pain. And when they offer up their suffering, their sorrow and grief, heartache and sadness, take it all into your mouth, your beak, and hold tight but careful like a stork carrying a baby. Bundle it all together and carry it away, up toward the sun, continuing toward the heat with a pureness of heart. Let it overtake you, let the sun burn the gift you’ve brought. Let it burn you as well, if it must. Sacrifice.

— Aaron Burch

The Canadian philosopher [Terence McKenna] recommended taking large doses of hallucinogens alone if possible, in the dark and without music or other forms of outside stimulation. He believed this was the only way for people to realize their full potential. In his book Food of the Gods (1992), McKenna asserts that early man’s ability to evolve from the apes stems from his partaking of the psilocybin-containing mushroom Stropharia cubensis. Five million years ago, “magic mushroom” consumption freed primates from the daily grind of survival and awakened their creative potential, resulting in both the development of language and religion and the invention of practical tools. At the same time, psychoactive mushrooms increased sexual desire and thereby increased the birth rate. Unfortunately, a climate change caused the mushrooms to disappear ten thousand years ago, and the baleful period of animal husbandry, male domination, and monotheism began.

— Ingo Niermann and Adriano Sack, The Curious World of Drugs and Their Friends

The essayist was unconvinced that his occasional hashish experiments in the late 1920s had revealed any hidden truths in themselves, but did feel that they allowed him to explore the illusive surface of things. “The opium smoker or hashish eater experiences the power of imbibing at a glance a hundred sites from a single spot.” This is the so-called “profane illumination.” If experienced permanently as an addiction, it can make an individual “more suitable” for the daily struggle for existence. Addicts just look better, because “unkindness, fanaticism about being correct, and pharisaism” have disappeared. This “intensifying attractiveness” was for Benjamin a primary motive of addiction.

— Ingo Niermann and Adriano Sack, The Curious World of Drugs and Their Friends

From hidden centers, from the depths it emerges: to rest, to move no more — : withdrawal, regression, aphasia. Hours are filled with the satisfied desire to drift along as formless life. To call this animalistic is to be mistaken: this process is far below the animals, below the reflexes, it is near roots, chalk, and stone.

Potent brains are not strengthened through milk but through alkaloids. An organ of such small size and great vulnerability, which not only approached the pyramids and gamma-rays, lions and icebergs, but created and invented them, cannot be watered like a forget-me-not; it will find its own supplies.

Myriads of molecules observed the harmony. Here the laws no longer acted under the veil of appearance; matter was so delicate and weightless that it clearly reflected them. How simple and cogent everything was.

— Ernst Jünger, Visit to Godenholm

It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.

— Montaigne

PREDICT THE WEATHER. Don’t tell anyone, don’t share predictions or spread rumors. Don’t take pride in correct guesses. Keep track, logs. Ignore forecasts, percentages, possibilities. Amass records, case histories. Avoid the impulse to diagnose. Organize the data into charts, graphs, lists. Put in alphabetical order, then numerical – small to large, reverse. Randomize. Study time tables, ebbs and flows, the phases of the moon. Repeat everything you’ve learned and watched and kept track of until it comes as second nature, like multiplication tables in grade school. Repeat again, then forget it all, purge. Watch the sky. Think of nothing. Close your eyes. What do you see?

— Aaron Burch

It goes on and hurries to some end,
just circling and turning without a goal.
Flashes of red, of green, of grey whirl past,
solid shapes barely glimpsed.

Sometimes a smile comes toward us,
and, like a blessing, shines and is gone
in this dizzying parade with no destination.

— Rilke, New Poems

Against time and the damages of the brain
Sharpen and calibrate. Not yet in full,
Yet in some arbitrated part
Order the facade of the listless summer.

Spies, moving delicately among the enemy,
The younger sons, the fools,
Set somewhat aside the dialects and the stained skins of
feigned madness,
Ambiguously signal, baffle, the eluded sentinel.

Edgar, weeping for pity, to the shelf of that sick bluff,
Bring your blind father, and describe a little;
Behold him, part wakened, fallen among field flowers shallow
But undisclosed, withdraw.

Not yet that naked hour when armed,
Disguise flung flat, squarely we challenge the fiend.
Still, comrade, the running of beasts and the ruining heaven
Still captive the old wild king.

— James Agee

Hmm.

Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me . . .
I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their
….counterpart of on the same terms. . . .

For the great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals,
For that, the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders,
The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrified foreign despots . . .

Without extinction is Liberty, without retrograde is Equality,
They live in the feelings of . . . men and . . . women.

— Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself and Beyond Blue Ontario’s Shore

I have a friend
At the end
Of the world.
His name is a breath

Of fresh air.
He is dressed in
Grey chiffon. At least
I think it is chiffon.
It has a
Peculiar look, like smoke.

It wraps him round
It blows out of place
It conceals him
I have not seen his face.

But I have seen his eyes, they are
As pretty and bright
As raindrops on black twigs
In March, and heard him say:

I am a breath
Of fresh air for you, a change
By and by.

Black March I call him
Because of his eyes
Being like March raindrops
On black twigs.

(Such a pretty time when the sky
Behind black twigs can be seen
Stretched out in one
Uninterrupted
Cambridge blue as cold as snow.)

But this friend
Whatever new names I give him
Is an old friend. He says:

Whatever names you give me
I am
A breath of fresh air,
A change for you

— Stevie Smith