I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant … - Peter Matthiessen

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I don't believe there's a red state in America where people believe you should cut Medicare, Social Security and veterans' benefits rather than doing away with corporate tax loopholes.

Peter Matthiessen

I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange. . . There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.

Alone, Animal, Elephant, Inspirational, Life, Motivational

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Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.

Armor, Beauty, Life, Simple, Spiritual

Zen is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake. We tend to daydream all the time, speculating about the future and dwelling on the past. Zen practice is about appreciating your life in this moment. If you are truly aware of five minutes a day, then you are doing pretty well. We are beset by both the future and the past, and there is no reality apart from the here and now.

Daydream, Dwelling, Five, Past, Reality

In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.

Lies, Lying, Secret, Spiritual, Take, Teacher

The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.

Heart, Knowing, Meaningless, Mountain, Secret, Sun

The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I have found what I was searching for without ever having discovered what it was.

Discovered, Feelings, Found, Landscape, Restless