Carl Jung: There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul.  One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

Not till old age did I learn to love silence.
Sometimes it is more exciting than music.
In the silence emerge tremulous signals
and at the crossroads of memory
you hear names
which time had tried to stifle.
― Jaroslav Seifert

Tom Nichols: T****'s obsession with these vulgar memorials to his own vanity is a reminder of the darkness around him, of his hostility to democracy, his loathing of honor, and his disordered mind.

Perhaps the president is looking ahead to the day he is no longer the most powerful man in the world, and it pains him to think that he would be reviled—or, worse, forgotten. If so, he seems determined to leave his mark on America’s capital even if it requires scarring it with militarized obscenities.

Tom Nichols 

the mind is formed by struggle, not by tranquility.

 

One electrical pole is not enough to cause a spark; it takes two. The single word “acts” only when it encounters a second that provokes it out of its usual tracks to discover new possibilities of meaning. Where there is no struggle, there is no life.

This is due to the fact that the imagination is not some hypothetical faculty separate from the mind: it is the mind itself in its totality, which, applied to this or that activity, always makes use of the same procedures. And the mind is formed by struggle, not by tranquility.

[…]

A certain distance between the two words is necessary. One must be sufficiently strange or different from the other, and their coupling must be fairly unusual, for the imagination to be compelled to set itself in motion to establish a relationship between them and construct a (fantastic) whole in which the two elements can coexist.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/06/07/gianni-rodari-the-grammar-of-fantasy/

Sad Pierre's Shoes

Sad Pierre was given a pair of beautiful shoes. These were not ordinary shoes. These shoes laughed and laughed. Pierre was horrified and annoyed. Even when he took them off,  he couldn't make them stop laughing.

So after many days he decided to bury them in his backyard. 

He began digging and digging until the hole was very deep and he dropped them in and covered them with dirt and breathed a sigh of relief. Finally he had some peace and quiet.

The next day his dog dug them up and carried them back to him and the laughter kept him awake all night.

So in the morning he borrowed his neighbor's axe and chopped up the shoes until there were very small pieces, the size of grains of rice. Then he sprinkled them into the adjoining rose garden. 

The crows and blue jays heard the laughter and brought the pieces back to his door and the shoes magically became whole again, laughing even louder.

Pierre held his hands over his ears and screamed.

The next day Pierre gathered a bunch of stones and filled the shoes dropping them in the well that night. Then he went to sleep.

The next morning laughter woke him up! 

A farmer had found the shoes floating in his well and left them at Pierre's door. 

Pierre decided to put on his shoes even though they were wet and he walked around in a circle. Everything became very quiet except for the squishy noise the shoes made from being soaked. 

Then he heard a whisper: You can't kill me. I am laughter. If I die you'll die with me.

And Pierre laughed and laughed and danced and smiled for the first time in his life wearing his magic shoes.

Mouse Trap

The humane mouse trap advises that we read the mouse a few Billy Collins poems while taking the mouse for a drive in an old blue Pontiac. We must drive for at least two miles before setting him free. Otherwise he'll know his way back to our peanut butter.

So we decided to drive the mouse across the country.

I've heard that all the east coast mice get taken to the west coast and the west coast mice are driven to the east coast. This is called Democracy.  In fact we've determined that this mouse is from San Francisco so he'll be happy to be returning home. He liked my sour-dough bread crumbs, but was pining for the real thing.

Autumnal Equinox

The Agonies

Fifty-degree weather combined with autumn outdoor mold can cause some of us sinus headaches.

I call them anvil headaches. Luckily taking a hot shower and sinus medicine coupled with walking and swimming can help take away the pain.

“The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.”
― Harlan Ellison, Strange Wine

You must never be afraid to go there. Harlan Ellison

 “The passion for revenge should never blind you to the pragmatics of the situation. There are some people who are so blighted by their past, so warped by experience and the pull of that silken cord, that they never free themselves of the shadows that live in the time machine...

And if there is a kind thought due them, it may be found contained in the words of the late Gerald Kersh, who wrote:"... there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.”
― Harlan Ellison, The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective

 “Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.”
― Harlan Ellison

I talk about the things people have always talked about in stories: pain, hate, truth, courage, destiny, friendship, responsibility, growing old, growing up, falling in love, all of these things. What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads. I try to go into those places in me that contain the cauldrous. I want to dip up the fire, and I want to put it on paper. The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.

HARLAN ELLISON

 Happiness is a quality of the soul…not a function of one’s material circumstances.

 Aristotle

 "... it is interesting to note how any randomly chosen word can function as a magic word to unearth those fields of memory that had been resting under the dust of time."

 Gianni Rodari The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories p37

The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories by Gianni Rodari

An experiment in invention is a beautiful thing when children have fun with it even if rules get broken in the process, because it is the children themselves who are the goal.

 Gianni Rodari The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories p107

 “Reality can be entered through the main door or it can be slipped into through a window, which is much more fun.”
― Gianni Rodari, The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories

For the past forty-seven years I have devoted most of my time and energy to writing. It has been a vocation in the original sense of the word, that is a religious calling, one I was helpless to deny. For me writing has never been about self-expression. Writing has been about tending the spirit and making real the soul.
- Julius Lester

 To write and not tell the truth? That would be death for any writer. But more, it would be death to the imagination. And if the imagination dies, what would happen to the souls of children?
- Julius Lester

Hashtag Muffins in a Waffle Iron

I didn't want to heat up the kitchen so I made my bran muffin batter and made small hashtag waffles.