It’s always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see.

— Patricia Hampl

We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something – make something – with it. A story, we sense is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.

  — Patricia Hampl

Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow—or kneel or get knocked down—to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.

Patricia Hampl

To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom. Jiddu Krishnamurti

There’s a cost to the choice of loving work — and there’s honesty in admitting it can be worth it.

Joan Vennochi 

The zombies stagger up the driveway looking for their fix. Their dealer is holding office hours in a white Toyota Avalon in the neighborhood parking lot. The front fender is on the ground. Over the past three weeks a few emaciated women take turns sleeping in the car overnight pinning up a white sheet to block the morning sun. 

Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning

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Choosing it Changes Everything

I play and keep playing because I choose to play. Even if it's not your ideal life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything. Andre Agassi, Open, an autobiography (p359)

you can feel completely despairing and hopeless and in over your head and lost and incompetent in the course of writing a book, but that doesn’t mean all those things are true.

 “I don’t think I could have worked on Fountain City for five years and generated as much material as I did if I didn’t have steady work habits. I think that if I learned anything, it’s that you can feel completely despairing and hopeless and in over your head and lost and incompetent in the course of writing a book, but that doesn’t mean all those things are true. You can fight your way through those periods to a new appreciation of what you’re doing and to a firmer grip on the material. If I had known that with Fountain City, I might have fought just a little longer to try to pull it together.” Michael Chabon

One who believes in himself has no need to convince others. Lao Tzu

Miss Manners, the master of tactful behavior, put it best. “An invitation is not a subpoena.”

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 Smart Pencils

by Ron Lauderbach

I keep hundreds of pencils I picked up off the ground during my teaching career in a PF Flyer shoebox, under my bed. They wait for a colorful slip-on eraser I attach when I bring one back to life.   My found pencils are not rookies from a yellow Ticonderoga box, but seasoned veterans, bearing bite-marks and other scars—proof of lives lived. Many are surprised by my electric   sharpener, a device that did not exist when they were dropped. Some have art class paint on them and others grease from auto-shop. I have one that says Oscar loves written on its roundness, but the name of Oscar’s lover   has been sharpened away. I like to write with my found pencils. I believe they impart wisdom from their past lives. A lot of pencils advertise businesses and institutions, many of which are   gone forever. I have one pencil with a student’s name I remember on it, in my car, in case I ever see him around town. I have some ink pens too, but dry—unable to reveal secrets.

__________

From Snapshots, Kelsay Books, 2022, RON LAUDERBACH.

“Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

A field of conscious presence or You cannot lose something that you are

“Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it's their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

All you really need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at ease with yourself. Eckhart Tolle

We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world. Gabor Maté

 “A therapist once said to me, “If you face the choice between feeling guilt and resentment, choose the guilt every time.” It is wisdom I have passed on to many others since. If a refusal saddles you with guilt, while consent leaves resentment in its wake, opt for the guilt. Resentment is soul suicide. Negative thinking allows us to gaze unflinchingly on our own behalf at what does not work.

We have seen in study after study that compulsive positive thinkers are more likely to develop disease and less likely to survive. Genuine positive thinking — or, more deeply, positive being — empowers us to know that we have nothing to fear from truth. “Health is not just a matter of thinking happy thoughts,” writes the molecular researcher Candace Pert. “Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-suppressed anger.” Anger, or the healthy experience of it, is one of the seven A’s of healing. Each of the seven A’s addresses one of the embedded visceral beliefs that predispose to illness and undermine healing.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours.

 “Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.”
― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.”
― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“When I am sharply judgmental of any other person, it's because I sense or see reflected in them some aspect of myself that I don't want to acknowledge.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction