Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nancy Aronie

Thursday Author Talk will present Nancy Aronie, founder of the Chilmark Writing Workshop on Martha's Vineyard, author of Writing from the Heart on May 3, 2012 at 7:30 p.m. in the Main Library Periodical Room. Sponsored by the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library, the event is free and open to all.

Rumi

That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquility.
-Rumi

Marc Chagall

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.
-Marc Chagall

The Return of Odysseus

by George Bilgere

When Odysseus finally does get home
he is understandably upset about the suitors,
who have been mooching off his wife for twenty years,
drinking his wine, eating his mutton, etc.

In a similar situation today he would seek legal counsel.
But those were different times. With the help
of his son Telemachus he slaughters roughly
one hundred and ten suitors
and quite a number of young ladies,
although in view of their behavior
I use the term loosely. Rivers of blood
course across the palace floor.

I too have come home in a bad mood.
Yesterday, for instance, after the department meeting,
when I ended up losing my choice parking spot
behind the library to the new provost.

I slammed the door. I threw down my book bag
in this particular way I have perfected over the years
that lets my wife understand
the contempt I have for my enemies,
which is prodigious. And then with great skill
she built a gin and tonic
that would have pleased the very gods,
and with epic patience she listened
as I told her of my wrath, and of what I intended to do
to so-and-so, and also to what's-his-name.

And then there was another gin and tonic
and presently my wrath abated and was forgotten,
and peace came to reign once more
in the great halls and courtyards of my house.

-George Bilgere.

Bocce in Bouley Field

This morning all the bocce players were out in the park behind Bouley field. I saw them on my walk with Lily. There's a seniors bocce league that meets every Thursday Morning at 8:30-10:30AM. Today was their first day. They play for about two to three hours (three games) a week through the summer. They love Lily! Last year I made a photo documentary of them. One woman drives down from Mendon Massachusetts to play with serious players.

Making Music

Making music together increases kids' empathy.
read

Nothing is Hidden

In my neighborhood dramas play out
on tenement porches.
Men yell at their dogs and mothers scream
at their children.
Saturday nights teenagers drive around town
throwing their beer bottles at the stone walls.
Kids buy cans of whipped cream from Walgreen's
for the nitrous, tossing the empties in the shrubs.
Girls too young become parents overnight
while the feral cats yowl in heat,
and it all repeats, spinning into space.
Nothing is hidden

Alissa Nutting

Prelude to a Kiss by Alissa Nutting

read here.

Marion Cunningham

Home cooking is a catalyst that brings people together. We are losing the daily ritual of sitting down around the table (without the intrusion of television), of having the opportunity to interact, to share our experiences and concerns, to listen to others. Home kitchens, despite the increase in designer appliances and cabinetry, are mostly quiet and empty today. Strangers are preparing much of our food. And our supermarkets, which once considered restaurants and fast-food places the enemy, have joined the trend by enlarging their delis and offering ready-to-eat food they call "home-replacement meals." But bringing ready-cooked meals home is not the same as cooking in your own kitchen, where you are in control of the ingredients you use, where you fill the house with good cooking smells, and where you all share in a single dish, taking a helping and passing the platter on to your neighbor. Nothing can replace that.
-Marion Cunningham, from the introduction to Lost Recipes.

Florida Scott-Maxwell

Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition.
-Florida Scott-Maxwell

The Peace of Wild Things

by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-Wendell Berry, from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

Joseph Campbell

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.
-Joseph Campbell

One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.
-Joseph Campbell

Krishnamurti

If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti

T.S. Eliot

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

-T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Pupa

A pupa (Latin pupa for doll, pl: pupae or pupas) is the life stage of some insects undergoing transformation. The pupal stage is found only in holometabolous insects, those that undergo a complete metamorphosis, going through four life stages; embryo, larva, pupa and imago.

The pupae of different groups of insects have different names such as chrysalis in the Lepidoptera order and tumbler in the mosquito family. Pupae may further be enclosed in other structures such as cocoons, nests or shells.

Some pupae remain inside the exoskeleton of the final larval instar and receive the name of puparium (plural, puparia); the flies of the families Stratiomyidae, Syrphidae and others have puparia.
-Wikipedia

Courage

It takes great courage to see the world in its tainted glory and still love it.
-Oscar Wilde

Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I'll try again tomorrow.
-Mary Anne Radmacher

Abraham Verghese

We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot. I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound.
-Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

Marion Woodman

When we are young, few of us have established an inner marriage when we commit to an outer partner. We believe the outer partner is the Beloved, while the true Beloved is hidden away in a coffin - maybe a coffin that traps the soul in insatiable desire that freezes it to matter. As life continues, however, we begin to realize we cannot enter an outer relationship unless we are coming from our own inner marriage. Until the Bride and Bridegroom creatively love each other, the outer relationship is starving.
-Marion Woodman

Carl Gustav Jung

The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is the world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me.
-Carl Gustav Jung

Kaleidoscope

Know that everything is moving and rearranging in new patterns, just as in a kaleidoscope. You can't glue down the pieces and still have it work. All you can do is admire the beauty.

Sanctuary

I have a strong desire for sanctuary, in my work and in my home. I do not want to be a control freak but I do get outraged when my boundaries are violated. I live in a city by choice, where it might seem that sanctuary is nearly impossible, but I have spoken with people who live in suburban and rural areas and they too have conflicts with boundaries, territorial and otherwise. So what is sanctuary, and how does one maintain it in the face of continuous change and encroaching human beings? How do we keep our sanctuary rather than giving it over to others? My upbringing was full of boundary violations, and I was ignored or shamed if I objected or resisted. Perhaps today I am reliving my childhood violations with every neighborly boundary violation. I have to remind myself that I am allowed to be fierce but I mostly need to be courageous. My ultimate sanctuary is between my ears. I have to rein my boundary in, from the neighborhood, past my yard and house, to where it ultimately lies; at my skin. The sanctuary of my mind is what I need to maintain and defend.

Robert Doisneau

Seeing sometimes means constructing a little theater with the materials at hand, and then awaiting the arrival of actors.
-Robert Doisneau, Paris

Clutter has been outlawed. But a little disorder is a good thing. That's where the poetry lurks.
-Robert Doisneau, Paris

Spontinaeity has been outlawed. People are afraid of life.
-Robert Doisneau, Paris

Nin Andrews

Check out The Secret Life of Mannequins a new chap book by Nin Andrews.
Order here.

Anne Lamott

Expectations are resentments under construction.
-Anne Lamott

May Sarton

Help us to be the always hopeful
Gardeners of the spirit
Who know that without darkness
Nothing comes to birth
As without light
Nothing flowers.

-May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

May Sarton

One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private, and one must also believe in the vehicle for expressing them, in the talent.
-May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

May Sarton

Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
-May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

Rebecca Solnit

We are eternally perplexed by how to move towards forgiveness or healing or truth, but we know how to walk from here to there, however arduous the journey.
-Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust