from Henry Miller on Writing:

     Every day we slaughter our finest impulses.  That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.  Every man when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.  We all derive from the same source.  There is no mystery about the origin of things.  We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there. 

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.  The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.  The position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of authority.  It characterizes themselves.  It cannot alter the eternal facts.  Great is the soul, and plain.  It is no flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals from itself.  It believes in itself.  Before the immense possibilities of man all mere experience, all past biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks away.  Before that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of.  We not only affirm that we have had a few great men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we have no history, no record of any character or mode of living that entirely contents us.  The saints and demigods whom history worships we are constrained to accept with a grain of allowance.  Though in our lonely hours we draw a new strength out of their memory, yet, pressed on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless and customary, they fatigue and invade.  The soul gives itself, alone, original and pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads and speaks through it.  Then it is glad, young and nimble.  It is not wise, but sees through all things.  It is not called religious, but it is innocent.  It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to and dependent on, its nature.  Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind.  I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect.

                                                      Emerson  

I almost went to bed

without remembering

the four white violets

I put in the button-hole

of your green sweater

and how i kissed you then

and you kissed me

shy as though I'd

never been your lover.

                                   -Leonard Cohen

hola, my friend...good to see you again.