words by rumi

(image via foundmagazine)

(quote by osho)

My face catches the wind
from the snow line
and flushes with a flush
that will never wholly settle.
Well, that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young forever, to pass.
I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty
and only pretty enough to be seen
with a man who wanted to be seen
with a passable woman.

But now that I am in love
with a place that doesn’t care
how I look and if I am happy,
happy is how I look and that’s all.
My hair will grow grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake,
my waist thicken, and the years
work all their usual changes.

If my face is to be weather beaten as well,
it’s little enough lost
for a year among the lakes and vales
where simply to look out my window
at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors
and to what my soul may wear
over its new complexion.

weathering by fleur adcock

throughout my 33 years on earth, i have traveled numerous roads, steered off track more times than i would like to mention, ventured into many unknowns, stepped right into situations that i KNEW would end disastrously with immeasurable heartache, and walked countless miles in shoes that did not fit, only to discover the painful blisters that confirmed my journey, fortunately, heal in time. i would not, strange as it may seem, erase a single moment i have encountered because each one has taught me a lesson that is worth its weight in gold. i am still learning every day, but i can say with unwavering certainty that experience refines us. this is the beauty of becoming older. some things just keep getting better.

a very dear friend of mine, who reads me like a book, sent this incredible poem by may swenson to me a few days ago.

i always felt like a bird blown through the world. i never felt like a tree. i never wanted a patch of this earth to stand in, that would stick to me. i wanted to move by whatever throb my muscles sent to me.

i never cared for cars, that crawled on land or air or sea. if i rode, i’d rather another animal: horse, camel, or shrewd donkey. never needed a nest, unless for the night, or when winter overtook me. never wanted an extra skin between mine and the sun, for vanity or modesty.

would rather not have parents, had no yen for a child, and never felt brotherly. but i’d borrow or lend love of friend. let friend be not stronger or weaker than me.

never hankered for heaven, or shield from hell, or played with the puppets devil and deity. i never felt proud as one of the crowd under the flag of a country. or felt that my genes were worth more or less than beans, by accident of ancestry.

never wished to buy or sell. i would just as well not touch money. never wanted to own a thing that wasn’t i born with. or to act by a fact not discovered by me.

i always felt like a bird blown through the world. but i would like to lay the egg of a world in a nest of calm beyond this world’s storm and decay. i would like to own such wings as light speeds on, far from this globule of night and day.

i would like to be able to put on, like clothes, the bodies of all those creatures and things hatched under the wings of that world.

i love looking at this face.

the photo and following story glimpse into the life of richard zimmerman, an extraordinary man who chose to live alone in caves that he dug himself with a pick, shovel, and prybar. i am in absolute wonder of this wise, unique, self-sufficient soul who defined true freedom through his courageous choices. he gives a whole new meaning to follow your own way.

Known as the “Salmon River Caveman,” Richard Zimmerman lived an essentially 19th century lifestyle, a digital-age anachronism who never owned a telephone or a television and lived almost entirely off the land.

“He was in his home at the caves at the end, and it was his wish to die there,” said Connie Fitte, who lived across the river. “He was the epitome of the free spirit.”

Richard Zimmerman had been in declining health when he died Wednesday.

Few knew him by his given name. To friends and visitors to his jumble of cave-like homes scrabbled from a rocky shoulder of the Salmon River, he was Dugout Dick.

He was the last of Idaho’s river-canyon loners that date back to Territorial days. They are a unique group that until the 1980s included canyon contemporaries with names like Beaver Dick, Cougar Dave and Wheelbarrow Annie, “Buckskin Bill” (real name Sylvan Hart) and “Free Press Frances” Wisner. Fiercely independent loners, they lived eccentric lives on their own terms and made the state more interesting just by being here.

Most, like Zimmerman, came from someplace else. Drawn by Idaho’s remoteness and wild places removed from social pressures, they came and spent their lives here, leaving only in death.

Some became reluctant celebrities, interviewed about their unusual lifestyles and courted by media heavyweights. Zimmerman was featured in National Geographic magazine and spurned repeated invitations to appear on the “Tonight Show.”

“I ride Greyhounds, not airplanes,” he said in a 1993 Statesman interview. “Besides, the show isn’t in California. The show is here.”

Cort Conley, who included Zimmerman in his 1994 book “Idaho Loners”, said that “like Thoreau, he often must have smiled at how much he didn’t need. É What gave him uncommon grace and dignity for me were his spiritual life, his musical artistry, his unperturbed acceptance of life as it is, and being a WWII veteran who had served his country and harbored no expectations in return.”

His metamorphisis to Dugout Dick began when he crossed a wooden bridge over the Salmon River in 1947 and built a makeshift home on the side of a hill. He spent the rest of his life there, fashioning one cavelike dwelling after another, furnishing them with castoff doors, car windows, old tires and other leavings.

“I have everything here,” he said. “I got lots of rocks and rubber tires. I have plenty of straw and fruit and vegetables, my dog and my cats and my guitars. I make wine to cook with. There’s nothing I really need.”

Some of his caves were 60 feet deep. Though he “never meant to build an apartment house,” he earned spending money by renting them for $2 a night. Some renters spent one night; others chose the $25 monthly rate and stayed for months or years.

He lived in a cave by choice. Moved by a friend to a care center in Salmon at age 93 because he was in failing health, he walked out and hitchhiked home.

Bruce Long, who rented one of his caves and looked after him, said the care center “had bingo and TV, but things like that held no interest for him. He just wanted to live in his cave.

“People said he was the only person they’d ever known who was absolutely self-sufficient. He didn’t work for anybody. He worked for himself.”

Born in Indiana in 1916, Zimmerman grew up on farms in Indiana and Michigan, the son of a moonshiner with a mean streak. He rebelled against his domineering father and ran away at a young age, riding the rails west and learning the hobo songs he later would play on a battered guitar for guests at his caves.

He punched cows and worked as a farmhand, settling in Idaho’s Lemhi Valley in 1937 and making ends meet by cutting firewood and herding sheep. In 1942, he joined the Army and served as a truck driver in the Pacific during World War II. When his service ended, he returned to Idaho and never left.

He raised goats and chickens, tended a bountiful vegetable garden and orchard and stored what he couldn’t eat or sell in a root cellar. A lifelong victim of a quarrelsome stomach, he survived largely on what he could grow or make. Homemade yogurt ranked among his proudest achievements.

He was married once, briefly, to a pen-pal bride from Mexico. The other woman in his life, Bonnie Trositt, tired of life in a cave, left him for a job as a potato sorter and was murdered by her roommate. He claimed to see her spirit in the flickering light of a kerosene lamp on the cave walls.

He rarely went to church, but read and quoted continually from the Bible.

(article and photo found here)

so i guess this is why i never open up a newspaper.

or tune into the nightly news.

my head would be spinning 24/7 if i did.

it’s not that i am oblivious to what is going on outside of my quiet, “make love, not war” world, but i find repetitive updates on violence somewhat disturbing and pointless. ideally, we would all do what needs to be done to survive (and by survive, i mean, live with a roof over our head, food on the table and love in our hearts) and then go home at night to be with our lover, our family, our friends. it seems fairly simple to me. but instead, men and women must leave their families to fight in foreign lands so that i can live my life as i choose.

don’t get me wrong, i CHERISH my freedom. and i know that many lives have been spent so that i can rest easy at night with a pillow under my head and tranquility in my soul. but going even deeper than that, why do we have to FIGHT for peace in the first place? whose ego has become so gigantic that he feels a need to create violence so that innocent creatures have to suffer? whose existence is so miserable that he has chosen to hate rather than love? no matter how hard i try, i can not wrap my head around it. the root of the problem is FEAR, ego, lack of love and compassion, hunger for power and money, greed, FEAR. when you get rid of these and replace them with love and awareness, you have peace. everything else is secondary.

(photo via livingthepoem)

(photos via jennifershesaid)

(quote by rumi / photo via visualize)

(photo via visualize / quote by osho)

quote by marcus aurelius

quote by kabir

don’t tell me how to live my life
don’t tell me how to pray
don’t tell me how to sing my song
don’t tell me what to say