Leah Sookoo > Recent Status Updates

The only book I want to read at bars and cafes and on park benches and beneath dim lights and in the centre of the hum of conversation because I am completely absorbed by the language and ideas.

Our language, this language that only you and I speak and that nobody has spoken before and that nobody will ever speak again because it's ours and ours alone, is invented every day with one single aim, to weld together the hemispheres of our souls.
- she says.
And Creation's first visible animal appears.
- he says.

Any silence in a film, any white space separating the panels in a comic, any full stop followed by a new sentence on the pages of a novel, the blank spaces on your credit card, and any time two lovers fall silent and look at one another and are suddenly lost for words, it is the terrain of - the living, direct vision of - one moment in the life of this surreptitious, unspeaking god.

Dust, with all its smells, flavour and texture, is made of the union of excretions and silence. But, inside these newmade motes, there will again be silence, and more of it, a scandalous lack of sound that mysticism seeks to recycle and explain by inventing the presence of a mute, surreptitious god, a divinity that never speaks to us but nonetheless somehow demands that we explain ourselves.

The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever.
You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days' triviality.

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it because you select your materials, invent your task and pace yourself

Any rule is worth testing, be it conscious or unconscious. Challenge your assumptions and methods. You might find a better way. And even if it’s not better, you’ll learn from the experience. All of these experiments are like free throws. You have nothing to lose.

Oscar Wilde said that some things are too important to be taken seriously. Art is one of those things. Setting the bar low, especially to get started, frees you to play, explore, and test without attachment to results.

This is not just a path to more supportive thoughts. Active play and experimentation until we’re happily surprised is how the best work reveals itself.

We are not obligated to follow this calling because we have a talent or skill. It's worth remembering that we are blessed to get to create. It's a privilege. We're choosing it.
We're not being ordered to do this. If we'd rather not do it, let's not do it.

There's a reason we are drawn to gazing at the ocean.
It is said the ocean provides a closer reflection of who we are than any mirror.

Turning something from an idea into a reality
can make it seem smaller.
It changes from unearthly to earthly.
The imagination has no limits.
The physical world does.
The work exists in both.

How do we pick up on a signal that can neither be heard nor be defined? The answer is not to look for it. Nor do we attempt to predict or analyze our way into it. Instead, we create an open space that allows it. A space so free of the normal overpacked condition of our minds that it functions as a vacuum. Drawing down the ideas that the universe is making available.

Most of the time, we are gathering data from the world through the five senses. With the information that's being transmitted on higher frequencies, we are channeling energetic material that can't be physically grasped. It defies logic, in the same way that an electron can be in two places at once. This elusive energy is of great worth, though so few people are open enough to hold it.

We are all antennae for creative thought. Some transmissions come on strong, others are more faint. If your antenna isn't sensitively tuned, you're likely to lose the data in the noise. Particularly since the signals coming through are often more subtle than the content we collect through sensory awareness. They are energetic more than tactile, intuitively perceived more than consciously recorded.

I turned and looked at the figure in the painting. Suddenly it was impossible not to see how straight up and down she was, like the guards in front of Buckingham Palace, or some other very important, exquisite – almost sacred – place.

If you really wanted to change you had to believe that you were both yourself and your baby; you had to let yourself be completely reborn within one life. Of course the danger was in risking everything, destroying everything, for nothing. As I had done tonight.

Creativity is rich with unexpected possibility. Know-how is mere fragmented mechanics which lacks tradition, context, and surprise. Analysis is always subsequent to and parasitic on creativity. Our culture is becoming crowded with analysts, and much of what passes for creativity is merely clever know-how. When creativity dries up, the analysts turn on themselves and begin to empty out the inner world…

Language is a great power. When something flows into the shore of your life, one of your first responses is the attempt to name it. A name should never trap a thing. In the Jewish tradition, for instance, if you knew the name of a thing, you had an inkling of its secret and mystery.

Words keep things present. Language has a secret life, an undercurrent murmuring away, audible in rhymes and rhythms, ambiguities and assonances. Most official uses of language are hostile to this undercurrent. The poetic use of language honors these possibilities, keeps them alive and sometimes reanimates the "ordinary" language we speak without thinking. Yet often our language is over-finished and cripplingly tight

Every yesterday prepares you for today. What today brings could not have reached you yesterday or a hundred days ago. Time is more careful in its sequence than we often notice. Time ripens according to its hidden rhythm. In its heart, time is eternal longing.

Regardless of how you look back on your life, you cannot force it out of the order in which it has unfolded. You cannot de-sequence your life.

One of the most beautiful images of continuity and sequence is the river. Always in motion towards the ocean, it continues to look the same. As Heraclitus said, "You cannot step twice into the same river." In a matter of seconds, both you and the river are different. The river is the ideal of continuity. It preserves the fluency of continual change and yet holds the one form.

They saw themselves as guests in a living, breathing universe. They had great respect for the tenuous regions between the worlds and between the times. The in-between world was also the world of in-between times: between sowing and reaping, pregnancy and birth, intention and action, the end of one season and the beginning of another.

Post-modern culture is so lonely, partly because we see nothing in this interim region. Our way of thinking is addicted to what we can see and control. Perception creates the mental prison. The surrounding culture [..] informs the perception. Part of the wisdom of the Celtic imagination was the tendency to keep realities free and fluent; the Celts avoided the clinical certainties which cause separation and isolation