Anna B
@annabwriting
@annabwriting
“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of tem
... See moreIdentifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character.
When Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was read to me and Alice sighs, “Oh, how I long to run away from normal days! I want to run wild with my imagination,” I remember rising up from my pillow and thinking, yes, yes, that’s it exactly.
how was it possible to catch up with leisured women, who had been reading steadily from childhood?
Mindfulness is not about achieving or gaining, it’s about acceptance and the relinquishing of material desire. When you’re charging $10 a month with the promise of a ‘better life’, can you really be holding true to that compassionate and egalitarian vision?
insignificant. I knew, in that moment, and perhaps for the first time, that I would one day die, that at some point there would be nothing left of me, my mittens, my breathing, my curls, my hat. I felt that conviction for the first time. My death felt like a person standing there next to me.
https://poets.org/poem/let-america-be-america-again
This poem kept me going during the insanity of the Trump years.
Loneliness arises when thought is divorced from reality, when the common world has been replaced by the tyranny of coercive logical demands.
The Eightfold Path, however, is holistic. Each branch is intrinsically linked, and intended to be followed concurrently. Without understanding the seven other forms of guidance, let alone practising them, mindfulness becomes stripped of its essential meaning