5th Chakra (Visuddha): Power of Words, Power of Truth, Power of/for the Collective (hint – we are all connected).

“There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”  ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

“Written words can also sing.” ~ Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

“It is through stories that we weave reality.” – Paul Kingsnorth, The Dark Mountain Project

“It is hard, today, to imagine that the word of a poet was once feared by a king.” – The Dark Mountain Project

“But there is no Plan B and the bubble, it turns out, is where we have been living all the while. The bubble is that delusion of isolation under which we have laboured for so long. The bubble has cut us off from life on the only planet we have, or are ever likely to have. The bubble is civilisation.”  – The Dark Mountain Project

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” ~ Muriel Rukeyser

“Don’t compromise yourself, you’re all you’ve got.” – Janis Joplin

“What a curious power words have.” ~ Tadeusz Borowski

I’m always pleased when somebody sings a song of mine. In fact, I never get over that initial rush of happiness when someone says they are going to sing a song of mine. I always like it.

[…]

That song enters the world and it gets changed, like everything else — that’s OK as long as there are more authentic versions. But a good song, I think, will get changed. – Leonard Cohen

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” – James Baldwin

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. ~ Elmore Leonard

You’ve already got a younger generation that’s like “bring on the singularity.” The idea of it used to be a dystopian nightmare. But the trauma has already been erased. I think we have to kick back against it but I don’t even know how to. We all just suck it up and try to “swim with the tide but faster.” – Anohni

“I teach self-reliance, the world’s most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.” – Bill Mollison

“I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view.” – Allen Ginsberg

“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.”  ~ Ben Okri

“There are always meaningful songs for somebody. People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes, people are getting through the day, with songs that we may find insignificant. But their significance is affirmed by others. There’s always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. That’s what dignifies the song. Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.” – Leonard Cohen

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” ― Jack Kerouac

“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”  ~ Edward Abbey

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”  ~ V.S. Naipaul

“None of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked petal on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” – from Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert

“To live and let live, without clamor for distinction or recognition . . . to write truth first on the tablet of one’s own heart – this is the sanity and perfection of living, and my human ideal.” ~ Mary Baker Eddy

“I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth. All I have are stories, night thoughts, the sudden convictions that uncertainty spawns.” – Anne Enright, The Gathering

“You are song, a wished-for song.”- Rumi