Breathe, and they fade...

Let's go ahead and start out with a few nice quotes from my Buddhist book by Chogyum Trungpa Rinpoche:
"You have to completely conquer the feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with your human nature and that therefore you need discipline to correct your behavior...discipline is simply the expression of your basic goodness."
"You understand that your life, as it is, contains the means to unconditionally cheer you up and cure you of depression and doubt."
"Wherever you are, it is a palace."
"Dignity comes from using your inherent human resources, by doing things with your own bare hands--on the spot, properly and beautifully."

These are the quotes I wrote down from my few pages of reading today, they probably express my mood as well as anything I could say. These quotes are today's lifeline.
It is so hard not to get dragged down by the aggression, doubt and fear that people are constantly unloading on each other. It is doable for me to work toward eliminating these things in my own life, and then I encounter the people I share the planet with and I feel poisoned. This is where practice comes in--the practice of meditation, of basic goodness, of moving toward and through any doubt and fear that could ever plague me until I prove it to be illusion.
I believe the Trungpa quotes may count as today's life changing reference, but I will throw in something extra for good measure...today I memorized one of my favorite Dylan Thomas poems to work with in my voice class. Read it out loud:

"I fellowed sleep" by Dylan Thomas

I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,
Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper's eye,
shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.
So, planning-heeled, I flew along my man
And dropped on dreaming and the upward sky.
I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,
Reaching a second ground far from the stars;
And there we wept I and a ghostly other,
My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;
I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.
'My fathers' globe knocks on its nave and sings.'
"This that we tread was, too, your father's land."
'But this we tread bears the angelic gangs
Sweet are their fathered faces in their wings.'
"These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade."
Faded my elbow ghost, the mothers-eyed,
As, blowing on the angels, I was lost
on that cloud coast to each grave-grabbing shade;
I blew the dreaming fellows to their bed
where still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.
Then all the matter of the living air
Raised up a voice, and, climbing on the words,
I spelt my vision with a hand and hair,
How light the sleeping on this soily star
How deep the waking in the worlded clouds.
There grows the hours' ladder to the sun,
Each rung a love or losing to the last,
The inches monkeyed by the blood of man.
And old, mad man still climbing in his ghost,
My father's ghost is climbing in the rain.