What you ache for

photo copyright Maranda Pleasant 2007

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living.

I want to know what you ache for,
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's
longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love,
for your dream,
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your
moon.
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your
own sorrow,
if you have been opened by life's betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of
further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain,
mine or your own,
without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy,
mine or your own,
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your
fingers and toes
without cautioning us to be careful,
to be realistic,
to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be
true to yourself,
if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not
betray your own soul;
if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty,
even when it's not pretty,
every day,
and if you can source your own life from its presence.


I want to know if you can live with failure,
yours and mine,
and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to
the silver of the full
moon,
"Yes!"

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how
much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up,
after the night of grief and despair,
weary and bruised to the bone,
and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to
be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the
fire with me and not
shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you
have studied.
I want to know what sustains you,
from the inside,
when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep in the
empty moments

-Rumi

Tribal Moon Dance. Performance.

My dance group, Tribal Moon, now has a new montage clip on youtube.com from our performance 12/13/08 at the Palmer Auditorium.  We had the largest attendance for any performance during the 12 day Holiday Art Festival keepaustinbizarre.com. We'll be opening at least twice at SXSW. Type Tribal Moon or Maranda Pleasant in the search box on youtube. YAY! Thank for all of you who attended.

Palmer Center. Austin, Texas.

Photo copyright 2008. Bernard Brown

Burning

Photo copyright 2008. Bernard Brown

2009 Intention

All of humanity is Healed and Dancing

Some of my Favorite Rilke Quotes. I'm on a quote Roll.

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.


If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.


Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.


Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

The only journey is the one within.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

All by Rainer Maria Rilke

The Gift

To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.

--Steve Prefontaine ...

Secret

Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal.
My strength lies solely in my tenacity.
--Louis Pasteur

Palmer Event Center. Austin Texas.

There's your Karma, ripe as peaches"
- Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

“I have no plans, no dates, no appointments with anybody, so I leisurely explore souls and cities.”
- Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues

More 12x12 Opening Night Photos

Remembering the Beyond

Our Changing Identity

Who you think you are is changing. Currently, you have an identity, a series of words you call your name, as well as a string of experiences you identify with. So when someone asks you who you are, you introduce yourself - most often using the name your parents thought up - and then you tell your story, based on the things that have happened to you while you've been here on Earth.

Now, however, all that is expanding as the Great Shift of the ages approaches. A memory, faint at first, of who you are beyond this Earthly existence is beginning to reveal itself. Up to this point you have identified with your body, but now you are starting to see that you are more than that. You are realizing that you are the Being inside your body who thinks and feels and senses intuitively. You are the invisible Essence encased within your skin who has inhabited countless bodies, traversed countless worlds, taken on countless identities. You have wandered deserts and dimensions, lost yourself in forests and faraway places, created situations and scenarios that appeared hopeless beyond all understanding.

And yet, here you are, lost again in time and space, but beginning to find yourself; asleep again in a violent, uncaring realm, but beginning to awaken to who you truly are: a Spirit aglow with love and light, expanding, becoming more, breaking free from your physical containment and stepping forth, fully conscious, in the midst of an unconscious world. It is all part of an organic, natural process that is unfolding, and with each passing day, each of us is letting go of old, encumbered, enslaved parts of ourself and remembering who we are in eternity.

An eternal new you is emerging and expanding now, and it is this expansiveness that you have long been waiting for.

Tony Burroughs, Payson, AZ, 12/05/08

The world you live in is splitting apart.
The old selfish ways are collapsing
and at the same time
the new spiritual ways are emerging,
heralding a better life for all.
From The Code: Ten Intentions for a Better World

Holiday Art Box Opening

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Radiant Light

...and everything was turned into radiant light...and born anew.

A new world emerges...and pain is transformed into beauty.

Maranda Pleasant Gallery. 12x12 Show.

Difference

“When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.

Praise God for those two insomnias!
And the difference between them.”
RUMI

Walls

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” RUMI

Holiday Ideas

Jugglingstore.com

Maranda Pleasant Gallery Opening

Clark Kent Made an appearance

Opening. Holiday Show. MP Gallery. 480+ Peeps

Opening. MP Gallery.

From the Ground up

Started talking and the line went dead
Never heard a single word you said

Babe I said I'd give my right arm,
Every day that I decide on

Baby baby you're the world to me

My head is roaring like a waterfall
Give me everything or not at all
You don't have to turn the sound up
Babe I want you from the ground up

--David Gray

Currently remembering that he's one of the most amazing singer/songwriters/poets of our time.

Turning the Car Around

If people are truly, madly, deeply in love with each other, they will find a way.

Dallas yesterday. Houston tomorrow. Palmer Center Show and Performances and Packing for Paris.

Tribal Moon performs Dec.13th Palmer Center 6.30pm

Opening Night

12x12 holiday Art Show. Saturday

The New Gallery Has My logo

My laughter

my love

my time...

ready for the opening weekend.

200 panels received. 175 coming. All $100 each

The Holiday Art Box Show 2008

kicks off Saturday 6-10 at 2235 E. 6th.

The presale for collectors and designers is Friday the 28th.5-9pm

All Along

The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.~Rumi

Art concussions feel like this.