The Urban Mermaid: July 2017

Monday, July 31, 2017

Sam Shepard

Speaking of how he creates his characters, Mr. Shepard once perfectly summed up the artful ambiguity that pervades his work and is a principal reason it seems likely to endure: “There are these territories inside all of us, like a child or a father or the whole man,” he said, “and that’s what interests me more than anything: where those territories lie.

“I mean, you have these assumptions about somebody and all of a sudden this other thing appears. Where is that coming from?

“That’s the mystery. That’s what’s so fascinating.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/theater/sam-shepard-dead.html

caught in their own web of lies

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/opinion/republicans-trumpcare-obamacare-lies.html

Pasta in Presto Pressure Cooker

1. pour (short) dry noodles into cooker.
2. cover with water. Not a lot of water, just enough to cover noodles.
3. add salt and bloop of olive oil
4. bring to boil
5. stir
6. cover cooker and immediately hit the timer for half the amount of time suggested on the package. (don't wait for hissing)
7. cool under cold water to release pressure.
8. strain through colander over a bowl, saving the precious pasta water in the fridge to use in soup or bread etc.
9. ENJOY!!!!

Take Stock

I save the pasta water, or kale water, (stock) from my pressure cooker for everything else I am cooking. It's even good in making bread or pancakes!

Peanut Sauce

Delicious on noodles, rice, meat, chicken, fish or vegetables.

Makes 2 cups

Ingredients

1 1" piece ginger, peeled
1 small garlic clove
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
2 tablespoons reduced-sodium soy sauce
1 tablespoon fresh lime juice
1 teaspoon (packed) light brown sugar
1/4 -1/2 teaspoons crushed red pepper flakes

With motor running, drop ginger and garlic clove into a blender and blend until finely chopped. Add peanut butter, soy sauce, lime juice, brown sugar, red pepper flakes, and 1/3 cup water and blend, adding more water by tablespoonfuls if needed to thin, until smooth. DO AHEAD: Peanut sauce can be made 3 days ahead. Transfer to a small bowl, cover, and chill. Bring to room temperature before using.
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/peanut-sauce-51149020

My Favorite Food!

Sauteed green peppers in olive oil and onions add ginger garlic stock or wine, soy sauce and rooster sauce. Add steamed fresh kale and frozen corn. Enjoy!
I make this at Christmas and at every other opportunity.

Senegalese Cuisine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senegalese_cuisine

Senegalese cuisine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The cuisine of Senegal is a West African cuisine influenced by North African, French, and Portuguese cuisine and derives from the nation's many ethnic groups, the largest being the Wolof. Islam, which first penetrated the region in the 11th century, also plays a role in the cuisine. Senegal was a colony of France until 1960. Ever since its colonization, immigrants have brought Senegalese cuisine to many other regions.

Because Senegal borders the Atlantic Ocean, fish is very important in Senegalese cooking. Chicken, lamb, peas, eggs, and beef are also used, but pork is not due to the nation’s largely Muslim population. Peanuts, the primary crop of Senegal, as well as couscous, white rice, sweet potatoes, lentils, black-eyed peas and various vegetables, are also incorporated into many recipes. Meats and vegetables are typically stewed or marinated in herbs and spices, and then poured over rice or couscous, or eaten with bread.

Saturday Breakfast in Kartoum Let's do this in Woonsocket RI

http://www.our-africa.org/sudan/saturday-breakfast

A problem shared is a problem solved

Every Saturday, the boys at the SOS Children’s Village in Khartoum sit together and talk about the week gone by.

If anything is worrying you, this is the time to speak up and talk with your friends or family.

All the children enjoy this special time, most of all because of the food.
Saturday breakfast

Each week, the women and girls at the village prepare a culinary feast.

There is so much food, everything a mixture of colours and flavours. What do you choose? A bit of everything!

Boys eat with boys, girls eat with girls and the older men eat together. The girls don’t complain because boys eat more. Without them, there is more to go around.

Blue Plastic Puppy-Pool

The mercury is rising. It's time to find another blue plastic puppy pool so I can sit in it and read.

Working Through our Attachment to Money

Ram Dass

I have met people who seem to be happy with very little, and I’ve met people who seem very unhappy with an awful lot.

I was teaching a fellow to fly once whose uncle was a very wealthy man. He had billions. We landed at LaGuardia airport and we pulled in and he looked up at this huge jet and he says, “Oh damnit. That’s my Uncle’s plane.” This guy who himself had twenty million, suddenly felt very poor compared to his Uncle’s billions.

I’ve watched what happens to people as they make more money; they shift the context of the people they live with, and it seduces them into more and more. The whole concept that more is better is a very deep sickness in this culture.

Some people come through life with a lot of anxiety about starvation and hunger, passed on from their grandfathers two generations back. And so they need a certain security before they’re free enough of their neurosis, or that panic or that fear to be able to be free to do inner work and be productive. Other people can go right along the edge with no savings whatsoever and seem to ride along with it, there’s no general rule.

When people see money as energy and they see that there are karmic effects to holding onto energy and they also see that those karmic effects backfire, then they start to see that part of the responsibility of having energy is learning how to pass it through, learning how to trust, and to keep giving it away. People, especially in the business world, take money too seriously.

There’s a story about my guru, it’s always kind of stuck in my mind, of the sadhu that came to visit him. The sadhu was an old fellow who had known Maharaj-ji for many years. The sadhu came in and he was quite arrogant and he sat down right on the tucket with Maharaj-ji and all the devotees were very upset that he’d sat there. The sadhu said to Maharaj-ji, “You’ve got this big temple. You’re collecting stuff. You’re really attached. You want so much.” Maharaj-ji said, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” I mean, Maharaj-ji couldn’t care less, he’d had a water pot and a doti that kept falling off and people would build temples to try to capture him.

The sadhu was sitting there playing with a little shaligram, which is a stone you do Shiva puja with, and Maharaj-ji said, “Oh, look at that shaligram! Could I see it?” So the sadhu showed him the shaligram and Maharaj-ji said, “Oh, that’s beautiful! Can I have it?” And the fellow said, “See? I knew it! You’re just greedy. You want everything. You want my shaligram and that’s part of my spiritual practices. I can’t give that to you!” Maharaj-ji said, “I’ll give you 40 rupees.” This thing is only worth 5 rupees and after a moment the sadhu says, “Well if you need it Maharaj-ji, I’ll sell it to you.” So Maharaj-ji got forty rupees from a devotee and gave it to the sadhu.

Then Maharaj-ji said to the sadhu, “Give me all of your money.” So the sadhu said, “I knew you weren’t gonna let me keep the 40 rupees.” He gave him the 40 rupees and Maharaj-ji said, “No, I want all of your money, the stuff you’ve got pinned inside your jacket.” The sadhu took out another 200 rupees and said, “Maharaj-ji, that’s all the money I’ve got.” Maharaj-ji took the 240 rupees and he threw them into the coal fire and they flared up. The sadhu freaked, “Maharaj-ji! My God! That’s all the money I had!” Maharaj-ji said, “Oh! I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t realize how attached you are!” And he took a pair of tongs, reached into the fire, pulled out all new dollar bills and handed them to the sadhu. Then the sadhu got off of the tucket.

Now if you’ve lived in the world where this is even possible, how does money look to you after that? Maharaj-ji said to me once, “All the money in the world is mine.” Now, is that total psychosis? Sounds like it, doesn’t it. Or is it? Is there some other way of understanding money in which you see it as just this kind of play energy, like Monopoly money. You just play with it.

I have the sense that as your faith gets stronger, you keep needing less and less, and when your faith is flickering, you keep wanting more security. You want to keep hedging your bets against life. But as your faith gets stronger, you just keep letting it go and letting it go.

-Ram Dass

The Dance Between Freedom and Entrapment

Ram Dass

Posted June 20, 2017

We come here and we offer each other satsang, or Sangha. We are a community of beings, and we all share the desire to awaken, and to know ourselves, and to become freed of the traps of our mind. That’s what we’ve come together for. Now, it is great joy and grace to be able to hang around Satsang all the time. It would be absolutely wonderful. However, it turns out that when you try to create a social institution to do that, you will find that it turns into an institution, and it loses the joy of the living spirit… Even as they’re attempting a design that will maintain it, because it’s really hard to do it.

I remember a vivid example. I was traveling with Swami Muktananda, and I came back to his ashram. I was in a very ecstatic space and I was dancing a lot in those days. He would play his dotara, and he had a lot of shakti, and so I would just go into it and start to dance, and we were traveling around the world doing this. So we came back to his ashram and he started to play the dotara, and I just started to get up and dance, and I was dancing, and dancing, and I started to move through the room, and I crossed the line between where the men sat and the women sat. He stopped the music and I realized that here, in this ashram, supposedly designed to ‘free’ people to be in ecstatic states, wasn’t for ecstatics, and that they don’t handle ecstatics very well.

So what I see is that it is wonderful to have satsang, and it’s a very delicate process to keep a human relationship living, as most of you, I am sure, have found out by now. You can have moments of it with people, but to keep it living, to keep the spirit of it, to keep it open, so that you don’t have to be defined by something with another person…We have made so many commitments to efficiency, and so many concessions to it, that the efficient thing now is to be the same as you were yesterday, which is why the Gandhi line is so beautiful, “My commitment is to truth, not to consistency.” Try that in a marriage, yeah, just try it.

Do we even allow ourselves the luxury of the possibility of change? Or have we ourselves created the very institutions that are trapping us and preventing us from doing the very thing we’re here to do?

I mean, I don’t know about you, but I do it too, we all do it. I mean… the minute you look away, it’s done. The minute you are not mindful or every single interaction with everybody, every moment, you’ve gone back to sleepwalking through the process, just trying to make it efficient. You say, “Well, I can’t do it with everybody.”

So then just try one, try to do it with just one.

– Ram Dass

I LOVE Ram Dass

How do We Free Ourselves from Other People’s Expectations?
Ram Dass
Posted July 21, 2017

One of the ways in which we are socialized by our caretakers growing up is that they reward us or punish us for our behavior. The result of this is that we grow up looking to others for evaluation of our behavior. Were it only our behavior it would be all right, but often we look to others for an evaluation of ourselves. Am I a good person? Am I a bad person? Do I have a right to exist?

Many of us end up constantly looking into other people’s eyes to find out who we are.

It creates considerable anxiety because other people have their agendas, and their response to us is not coming from a place of clarity. Their response is coming in relation to their own needs. It is not surprising then, that we end up with a considerable amount of attention to interpersonal relations. For most people, it is a very emotionally charged web we live in, and in order to become secure, we attempt to place people and define them in ways that are comfortable for us. So we enter into conspiracies with one another to define each other in very simple and stable and consistent ways.

We build our expectations about who each other is. Often, we become trapped in other people’s expectations about us. We learn how to treat each other in habitual ways, and we develop characteristic ways of behaving with other people. Often you can look at another person as they come down the street and see who they think they are. The way they dress, the way they walk, the way their facial muscles appear. There is an amazing amount of redundancy in telling each other who we think we are, and we enter into a conspiracy with one another that says, “I will make believe you are who you think you are, if you will make believe I am who I think I am.”

The predicament is that if either of us tries to change, the other one punishes them. If you try to grow in a relationship you often find yourself punished for that. But here we are in a retreat focused on growth, and the growth has to do with inner transformation that changes the meaning and the nature of our identity. If you have many layers of identity, but somebody only knows you on one of them, and then you attempt to bring forth another one, it’s often very threatening to another person.

We have to start to see that part of the work of freeing up a relationship has to do with our own mind, and our expectations of each other because even though it is efficient for us to remain the same, it is also very stifling to our growth.

Now it is true that one could be transformed inwardly without changing one’s outer game at all, but it is unlikely that will be able to be done. The process of spiritual awakening changes one’s values about human relationships. As we begin to sense that our own awakening is increasingly significant in our lives, we start to see the world in a very different way.

Similarly with other people, your relationships begin to mean different things, and you begin to look around for what is called “Satsang” or “Sangha.” It refers to being around a community of other people who are sharing the inner journey. Like, you come here and it’s much easier to explore the inner work along with the rest of us. So you begin to look to other people in terms of whether or not they are sharing what is happening to you inside. If you’re not careful it can be a very violent period.

-Ram Dass

Ram Dass

How do we break the chain of reactivity with those around us?

Ram Dass

Posted July 28, 2017

As one cultivates more and more of the levels of the strudel, then one sees the whole level of interpersonal relationships as just one level. When I first started to awaken, I would come home to visit my family and my father would say to me, “Do you have a job?” He didn’t ask me if I was the Buddha, or if I was enlightened, and I would get very angry at him because he had caught me in a place where he made the plane real, and I said, “I cannot stay around my family, they bring me down.” Later when I would come home more strong in my faith and inner connections, my father would ask me the same questions, and I would, in the quietness of my being, appreciate his concern and the worldview that he held without becoming reactive, and so my response would not be reactive, and it responded instead to the deeper connection that we had, and it would open the dialogue in a new way.

It is up to the most conscious person in the situation to break the chain of reactivity.

This is our work in the world. We are all living in incredibly reactive webs. If you push against it, it still has you. The art is to be in them, but not reactive to them. You can stay in a marriage in which your partner is not interested in what you value and begin to work with that vehicle for your own awakening by shifting your awareness from that of judging mind to that of an appreciating one. You will see that certain relationships have so much symbolic power for you, it’s very difficult for you not to be reactive. Somebody that is very sexually attractive to you, or somebody that is very powerful, or somebody that has a lot of money. Or if you are afraid of aging, somebody that is very old. Or if you are afraid of dying, someone who is dying. Or if you are strongly identified with your body, somebody who has a deformity.

I want you to be able to look at the people around you as the teachings that you need.

Helping my father through the final years of his life became an incredible teaching for me. I went from being very righteous about what a good person I was to be helping my father, to realizing what an incredible gift I was receiving from him. He had changed my diapers, and now I was changing his. He had fed me and now I fed him, and because I had no feeling of the unnaturalness of it, we both went through this process with joy.

It is extraordinary to be with a human being and go through changing relationships of power; to meet the person behind that and then just watch these changes in the relationship. The work of cultivating these many planes of consciousness means that you are always available to another human being, behind their storyline.

You don’t demand they give up their storyline, but you are present if they wish to.

-Ram Dass

To Everything There Is a Season

by Ram Dass

The transformation that comes through meditation is not a straight-line progression. It’s a spiral, a cycle. My own life is very much a series of spirals in which at times I am pulled toward some particular form of sadhana or lifestyle and make a commitment to it for maybe six months or a year. After this time I assess its effects. At times I work with external methods such as service. At other times the pull is inward, and I retreat from society to spent more time alone.

The timing for these phases in the spiral must be in tune with your inner voice and your outer life. Don’t get too rigidly attached to any one method – turn to others when their time comes, when you are ripe for them.

I first became involved in the journey through study, intellectual analysis and service. I found it difficult to work with methods of the heart. I would try to open my heart, but the methods seemed absurd. I recall going to the Avalon Ballroom in the early 1960’s to hear Allen Ginsberg introduce Swami Bhaktivedanta, who led a Hare Krishna chant. This chant seemed weird to me. It left me cold and cynical. I recall thinking, “It’s too bad – Allen’s really gone over the edge. This chant just doesn’t make it.” In the years since, I’ve had moments of ecstasy with the Hare Krishna chant. My heart has opened wide to the beauty of the blue Krishna and the radiant Ram, and I’ve laughed at my own changes and growth.

A student once came to me and told me that he felt turned off by devotional practices. His practice was Buddhist; his meditation was on the dharma, the laws of the universe. Yet he felt troubled that his heart was closed. So I started him on the practice of the mantra “I love you dharma,” breathing in and out of the heart saying, “I love you dharma.” He loved it.

It’s not an all-or-nothing game. You’re not totally out of one phase before you start the next – there’s a gradual shift.

– Ram Dass

Guru and Student

When the teacher finds from signs that knowledge has not been grasped or has been wrongly grasped by the student, he should remove the causes of non-comprehension in the student. This includes the student's past and present knowledge, want of previous knowledge of what constitutes subjects of discrimination and rules of reasoning, behavior such as unrestrained conduct and speech, courting popularity, vanity of his parentage, ethical flaws that are means contrary to those causes. The teacher must enjoin means in the student that are enjoined by the Śruti and Smrti, such as avoidance of anger, Yamas consisting of Ahimsa and others, also the rules of conduct that are not inconsistent with knowledge. He [teacher] should also thoroughly impress upon the student qualities like humility, which are the means to knowledge.
— Adi Shankara, Upadesha Sahasri 1.4-1.5[46][47]

The teacher is one who is endowed with the power of furnishing arguments pro and con, of understanding questions [of the student], and remembers them. The teacher possesses tranquility, self-control, compassion and a desire to help others, who is versed in the Śruti texts (Vedas, Upanishads), and unattached to pleasures here and hereafter, knows the subject and is established in that knowledge. He is never a transgressor of the rules of conduct, devoid of weaknesses such as ostentation, pride, deceit, cunning, jugglery, jealousy, falsehood, egotism and attachment. The teacher's sole aim is to help others and a desire to impart the knowledge.
— Adi Shankara, Upadesha Sahasri 1.6[48]

Wikipedia

Guruville meets the Spiritual Wasteland

Guru
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Guru (Sanskrit: गुरु. IAST: guru) is a Sanskrit term that connotes someone who is a "teacher, guide, expert, or master" of certain knowledge or field.[1] In pan-Indian traditions, guru is someone more than a teacher, traditionally a reverential figure to the student, with the guru serving as a "counselor, who helps mold values, shares experiential knowledge as much as literal knowledge, an exemplar in life, an inspirational source and who helps in the spiritual evolution of a student".[2] The term also refers to someone who primarily is one's spiritual guide, who helps one to discover the same potentialities that the gurus already realized.[3]

The oldest references to the concept of guru are found in the earliest Vedic texts of Hinduism.[2] The guru, and gurukul – a school run by guru, were an established tradition in India by the 1st millennium BCE, and these helped compose and transmit the various Vedas, the Upanishads, texts of various schools of Hindu philosophy, and post-Vedic Shastras ranging from spiritual knowledge to various arts.[2][4][5] By about mid 1st millennium CE, archaeological and epigraphical evidence suggest numerous larger institutions of gurus existed in India, some near Hindu temples, where guru-shishya tradition helped preserve, create and transmit various fields of knowledge.[5] These gurus led broad ranges of studies including Hindu scriptures, Buddhist texts, grammar, philosophy, martial arts, music and painting.[5][6]

The tradition of guru is also found in Jainism, referring to a spiritual preceptor, a role typically served by a Jain ascetic.[7][8] In Sikhism, the guru tradition has played a key role since its founding in the 15th century, its founder is referred to as Guru Nanak, and its scripture as Guru Granth Sahib.[9][10] The guru concept has thrived in Vajrayāna Buddhism, where the tantric guru is considered a figure to worship and whose instructions should never be violated.[11][12]

In the West, the term is sometimes used in a derogatory way to refer to individuals who have allegedly exploited their followers' naiveté, particularly in certain tantra schools, self help, hippie and other new religious movements.[13]

The syllable gu means darkness, the syllable ru, he who dispels them,
Because of the power to dispel darkness, the guru is thus named.
— Advayataraka Upanishad, Verse 16[22][23]

Think Hard

“There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.”
― Tobias Wolff

“I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is "depressing" because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don't seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; "witty stories," in which every problem is the occasion for a joke; "upbeat" stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We're grown ups now.”
― Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff

“We are made to persist.
that's how we find out who we are.”
― Tobias Wolff

“Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.”
― Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life

“A piece of writing is a dangerous thing," he said. "It can change your life.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.”
― Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life

“When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever”
― Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life

“The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

By Definition

“I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.”
—Michael Cunningham

The Garage Game

These guys remove tires and door panels to hide drugs. They think nobody know what they are up to. The landlord tells them get out and they hide their cars and say "We did!" but then they come back 3 weeks later and resume their activity. This goes on for 8 years!

Read

"Read as much as you possibly can. Nothing will help you as much as reading."
J.K. Rowling

“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

“I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser. ”
― Mary Harris Jones

“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“The first thing is to raise hell,” says I. “That’s always the first thing to do when you’re faced with an injustice and you feel powerless. That’s what I do in my fight for the working class.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“No matter what the fight, don't be ladylike! God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“I will tell the truth wherever I please.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“A lady is the last thing on earth I want to be. Capitalists sidetrack the women into clubs and make ladies of them.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“They began work at 5:30 and quit at 7 at night. Children six years old going home to lie on a straw pallet until time to resume work the next morning! I have seen the hair torn out of their heads by the machinery, their scalps torn off, and yet not a single tear was shed, while the poodle dogs were loved and caressed and carried to the seashore.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“I hope to live long enough to be the great-grandmother of all agitators.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“No matter what the fight, don't be ladylike!”
― Mary Harris Jones

“I have never had a vote, and I have raised hell all over this country. You don't need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions and a voice!”
― Mary Harris Jones

“My teachers treated me as a diamond in the rough, someone who needed smoothing.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“[Women need to realize that with] what they have in their hands there is no limit to what they could accomplish. The trouble is they let the capitalists make them believe they wouldn't be ladylike.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“The employment of children is doing more to fill prisons, insane asylums, almshouses, reformatories, slums, and gin shops than all the efforts of reformers are doing to improve society.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“Today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the manufacturers.”
― Mary Harris Jones

“I preferred sewing to bossing little children.”
― Mary Harris Jones

Mother Jones Quotes

My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.

I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.

I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the truth wherever I please.

Mother Jones

Writer's Almanac 7/31/17
Today is the birthday of the woman Teddy Roosevelt once called "the most dangerous woman in America" when she was 87 years old. Mary Harris Jones, or "Mother Jones" (books by this author), was born to a tenant farmer in Cork, Ireland, in 1837. Her family fled the potato famine when she was just 10, resettling in Toronto. She trained to be a teacher and took a job in Memphis, where on the eve of the Civil War she married a union foundry worker and started a family. But in 1867, a yellow fever epidemic swept through the city, taking the lives of her husband and all four children. A widow at 30, she moved to Chicago and built a successful dressmaking business — only to lose everything in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Jones then threw herself into the city's bustling labor movement, where she worked in obscurity for the next 20 years. By the turn of the century, she emerged as a charismatic speaker and one of the country's leading labor organizers, co-founding the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

She traveled the country to wherever there was labor struggle, sometimes evading company security by wading the riverbed into town, earning her the nickname "The Miner's Angel." She used storytelling, the Bible, humor, and even coarse language to reach a crowd. She said: "I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I said if he had stolen a railroad, he would be a United States Senator." Jones also had little patience for hesitation, volunteering to lead a strike "if there were no men present." A passionate critic of child labor, she organized a children's march from Philadelphia to the home of Theodore Roosevelt in Oyster Bay, New York with banners reading, "We want to go to school and not the mines!" At the age of 88, she published a first-person account of her time in the labor movement called The Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925). She died at the age of 93 and is buried at a miners' cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois.

She said: "Whatever the fight, don't be ladylike."

Sunday, July 30, 2017

Sunday Morning in the 'Hood

Olivia age 6 held her naked Barbie while sitting on my back steps. The doll had been outside all night, and I had suggested that we wash her. I filled a dishpan with soap and water. "We'll have to put some clothes on her or else she'll get arrested for indecent exposure," I joked.
"My mom takes a bath naked," Olivia replied.
"That's okay she's in her house. If she was taking a bath out on the sidewalk she'd get arrested. Let's wash and dress your doll before the police come and arrest her."
Olivia dunked the doll in the soapy water. "The suds will hide her!" she said. Her brother Adam joined us.

Two bicycle police rode up and stopped to say hello. I burst out laughing. "I just told Olivia to put clothes on her Barbie or the police will come and arrest her. And here you are!" They laughed. Olivia and her brother Adam noticed one policeman had blood trickling down his calf. "Why are you bleeding?" they asked.
"I just chased a thief through the woods. He was robbing businesses on Diamond Hill Road."
"Would you like a band-aid?" I asked. I ran inside to get paper towels, band-aids, and more soap and water.
"How did you know where the robber went?" asked Adam.
"We chased him with the sniffer dog."
"Did the dog bite him?"
"No. The dog just followed the scent. We were right behind the dog and were able to grab the thief."
"I want to be an FBI agent," Adam said.
We said goodbye to the policemen. I noticed that Lily was chewing a lot of grass. "She ate so much grass yesterday that she vomited. I'll have to take her inside," I said. I escorted her through the back door. When I came out, I heard a vomiting noise. "Wait, I thought I just brought Lily inside," I said to Adam and Olivia.
"YOU DID!" they said in unison.
"Then what was that?"
"What was what?"
"That noise from over there," I said, pointing to the far corner of my overgrown yard. "It sounds like Lily vomiting."
"Maybe it's a killer clown," Adam said. "If you want, I can go see."

Saturday, July 29, 2017

This Worries Me

Article

Teaching Swimming

I kept my date to teach Amadou my Senegalese swim student. He showed up and demonstrated amazing skill after last week's lesson. We worked on more breathing techniques, and kicking.
"I am so impressed," I said.
"You are a good teacher for me," he said.
"You are a good student, a joy to teach, not many adults are courageous about learning a new skill," I said. "You are fearless!"

"Have you been to the ocean in Rhode Island?
No, I just got here a year ago.
Maybe you can show me, someday.

"Is your family in Senegal?"
"Yes, one mile from the ocean."
"When you go visit you can show them how well you can swim."
Yes, I will.

"I have to go home now and cook" he said.
"What are you cooking?" I asked "Senegalese food?"
"Yes, of course, that is all I know," he said, laughing. "I am cooking meat and rice and vegetables for my roommate. Do you shop at the African store on court street?
Yes, and Price Rite and Stop and Shop.

Now I am dreaming of Senegalese picnic at the beach.

Allergy Hell

Current Allergy Report for Woonsocket, RI
[+]
Yesterday

4.9

medium
Today

6

medium
Top Allergens

Grasses
Plantain
Nettle

[+]
Tomorrow

7.1

medium

Remember our Dying

“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”

― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Interrogation

https://www.policeone.com/investigations/articles/6445010-Interview-and-interrogation-Breaking-the-alibi/

Body Language

Article
https://www.policeone.com/investigations/articles/6783886-Quickly-read-analyze-and-interpret-body-language/

Cheap

“Anything that just costs money is cheap.”
― John Steinbeck

“There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”

“I guess there are never enough books.”
― John Steinbeck, A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia

“I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“To be alive at all is to have scars. ”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people.”
― John Steinbeck

“My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Steinbeck

“When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Diblings: Donor Siblings

Much as I love them, my family has always been a bunch of people to whom I have no real connection. Although I am generally quite happy, I have never known what it means to feel at home.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jan/21/donor-siblings-do-ties-of-blood-matter

Dr. Secretly Fathered 200 Children

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jul/15/the-man-who-may-have-secretly-fathered-200-children

Casting Game

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/28/money-taken-cambodian-children-casting-game-angelina-jolie-movie

Leonora Carrington:“there are many egos within one person”.

I am as mysterious to myself as I am mysterious to others,” Leonora Carrington once said in an interview. Loyal to their creator, the figures in her paintings are similarly hermetic and complex, often poised between what seems like enigma and revelation, envoys of hieroglyphs we can’t quite decipher. Sometimes the horizon is dominated by a towering figure reminiscent of Bosch or Brueghel, such as her Saint Anthony, a three-headed hermit whose temptation prevails over his solitude, or the moon-faced Giantess, (or The Guardian of the Egg) – the egg from which both life and paintings (one of Leonora’s favourite mediums was egg tempera) are hatched.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/feb/27/my-highlight-leonora-carrington-chloe-aridjis

Surrealist Painter Leonora Carrington

When there's an artist in the family and a journalist...they find each other!

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/mar/25/my-wild-child-cousin-the-surrealist-painter-leonora-carrington

Have I done well—or ill

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Life Story

The house painter told me that he fell off a roof 3 flights up and when he awoke from his coma his wife had remarried his 4 kids were gone and he didn't recognize his own sister.

The other painter told me that when he was a kid he captured a wolf with milk and brandy and put it in his bedroom. When the brandy wore off the wolf attacked him.

Steinbeck

“Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.”
― John Steinbeck

the neighbors we love

My lovely neighbor took me aside to speak with her through her son age 12. One of the neighborhood kids deliberately scratched her brand new Honda when she asked him to leave her yard. She wants to move away because of this vindictive kid. They are a lovely family with two kids ages 9 and 12 that have made GOOD friends with all of the neighborhood kids so I think this would be a tragedy. The mother is from Brazil and does not speak English just Portuguese but I told her through the son age 12 who translates, "Let me see what I can do to help." I would rather see this resolved than have this GOOD family run away. I also believe the mom is terrified of the police. So, for starters maybe I can help with that. We need an officer that would be willing to listen and help a lovely single mom and her kids. They are the greatest neighbors and I hope we can help them so they feel good about staying. They are smart lovely kids who go back and forth from their Dad's place in New Bedford to here. The mother works very hard and is best friends with the woman on the first floor also from Brazil with 3 lovely sons. She is also a single mom. We need to keep them feeling safe. How I can be of help.

When we came back from our walk

We were told that two adult males fathers of the 9 year old kids who play together, had a physical confrontation involving broken glasses, bruises and pepper spray. Simultaneously and unrelated, at the red buildings another conflict ensued where a baseball bat was used. The sound of breaking glass was heard. We were out walking our dog but got "filled in" when we returned. I was glad to see the bicycle cops and cruisers and rescue as were the neighbors who were all out on their porches and sidewalks. We actually have a neighborhood full of caring people and at moments like these we bond together to reassure each other of our safety. Things just get a bit overly dramatic and scary sometimes.

The good still outweighs the bad. And I am here to say so!

Logic

My 80 year old friend and fairy god mother Sylvia came over for lunch yesterday. We had elbow pasta with Parmesanio Reggiano grated on top. When she didn't eat much I asked her why. "I'm afraid I'll get fat."
That's like taking off a wheel of your car to save gas mileage," I said. "You need food to think and be balanced and healthy."
"But I'm saving that tire!" she said.

the free, exploring mind of the individual human

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”
― John Steinbeck

All great and precious things are lonely: John Steinbeck

“There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

go to the poor people.

If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

John Steinbeck

Words to Live by

“There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.”

― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.
― Ian MacLaren

Miss Murphy in first grade

“Miss Murphy in first grade

wrote its name in chalk

across the board and told us

it was roaring down the storm tracks

of the milky way at frightful speed

and if it wandered off its course

and smashed into the earth

there'd be no school tomorrow.”

― Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Kunitz

“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“End with an image and don't explain.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

“We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

"It is out of the dailiness of life that one is driven into the deepest recesses of the self."

“You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“Forward my mail to Mars.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Testing Tree

“I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.”
― Stanley Kunitz

Friday, July 28, 2017

Teach!

“Give a bowl of rice to a man and you will feed him for a day. Teach him how to grow his own rice and you will save his life.”
― Confucius

Two Graves

“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”
― Confucius

Within Yourself

“Attack the evil that is within yourself, rather than attacking the evil that is in others.”
― Confucius

Confucius: Silence is a true friend who never betrays.

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”
― Confucius

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
― Confucius

“Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.”
― Confucius

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
― Confucius

“He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.”
― Confucius

“If you make a mistake and do not correct it, this is called a mistake.”
― Confucius

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
― Confucius

“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
― Confucius, Confucius: The Analects

“The funniest people are the saddest ones.”
― Confucius

“Study the past if you would define the future.”
― Confucius

“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”
― Confucius

“To be wronged is nothing, unless you continue to remember it.”
― Confucius

“Respect yourself and others will respect you.”
― Confucius, Sayings of Confucius

“Silence is a true friend who never betrays.”
― Confucius

“You cannot open a book without learning something.”
― Confucius

“Attack the evil that is within yourself, rather than attacking the evil that is in others.”
― Confucius

“When you see a good person, think of becoming like her/him. When you see someone not so good, reflect on your own weak points.”
― Confucius

“What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.”
― Confucius

“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.”
― Confucius

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
― Confucius

“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.”
― Confucius, The Book of Rites

“It is not the failure of others to appreciate your abilities that should trouble you, but rather your failure to appreciate theirs.”
― Confucius

“The way out is through the door. Why is it that no one will use this method?”
― Confucius

“The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.”
― Confucius

“The man of wisdom is never of two minds;
the man of benevolence never worries;
the man of courage is never afraid.”
― Confucius

“The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.”
― Confucius

“Give a bowl of rice to a man and you will feed him for a day. Teach him how to grow his own rice and you will save his life.”
― Confucius

“Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.”
― Confucius

“It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.”
― Confucius

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.”
― Confucius

Charles Simic

Health Care: The New American Sadism
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2013/04/02/new-american-sadism/
by Charles Simic

The good man understands what is right,
the bad man understands profit.
—Confucius

[...]

This is the new face of American sadism: the unconcealed burst of joy at the thought that pain is going to be inflicted on someone weak and helpless. Its viciousness, I believe, is symptomatic of the way our society is changing. Everything from the healthcare industry, payday loans, and for-profit prisons to the trading in so-called derivatives, privatization of public education, outsourcing of jobs, war profiteering, and hundreds of other ongoing rackets all have that same predatory quality. It’s as if this were not their own country, but some place they’ve invaded in order to loot its wealth and fleece its population without caring what happens to that population tomorrow. The only interest these profit-seekers have in us is as cheap labor, cannon fodder for wars, and suckers to be parted with our money. If we ever have a police state here, I’ve been thinking, it won’t be because we’ve become fascists overnight, but because rounding up people and locking them up will be seen as just another way to get rich. If the hell that Jonathan Edwards and other Puritan divines described in such gruesome and graphic detail is still up and running, I hope that’s where many of them are headed for.
April 2, 2013, 6:15 pm

You're My Napoleon

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
- Aldous Huxley

Leadership

Leadership is not a popularity contest; it's about leaving your ego at the door. The name of the game is to lead without a title.
- Robin S. Sharma

Henri Nouwen

The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power, but self-rejection.
- Henri Nouwen

Free Society

“My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.”
― Adlai E. Stevenson II

Of Human Bondage

“His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless; he was vain of the wider knowledge he had acquired from the perusal of so many books, his mind was alert, and he had not the skill to hide his contempt for his companions' stupidity. They complained that he was conceited; and, since he excelled only in matters which to them were unimportant, they asked satirically what he had to be conceited about. He was developing a sense of humour, and found that he had a knack of saying bitter things, which caught people on the raw; he said them because they amused him, hardly realising how much they hurt, and was much offended when he found that his victims regarded him with active dislike. The humiliations he suffered when he first went to school had caused in him a shrinking from his fellows which he could never entirely overcome; he remained shy and silent. But though he did everything to alienate the sympathy of other boys he longed with all his heart for the popularity which to some was so easily accorded. These from his distance he admired extravagantly; and though he was inclined to be more sarcastic with them than with others, though he made little jokes at their expense, he would have given anything to change places with them.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

In this Cabin

“Really Hagrid, if you are holding out for universal popularity, I'm afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Steinbeck

“Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

William S. Burroughs

“I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.”
― William S. Burroughs

Cyril Connolly

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."

[The New Statesman, February 25, 1933]”
― Cyril Connolly

Gene Editing

Some diseases are indeed entirely genetically determined—Huntington’s disease, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and so on. If you have the faulty gene, you will eventually have the disease. Whether you want to be told by e-mail that you will develop a life-threatening disease is something you need to think hard about before doing the test. But for the vast majority of diseases, our future is not written in our genes, and the results of genetic tests can be misleading.

Article
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/07/13/brave-new-world-of-gene-editing/

Teacher

Follow that love of bread gardens dance painting poetry. I will gladly share anything I know. Everything I've learned, I've learned the hard way. Perhaps I can make it easier for you.

John Perlman

My new proverb.

Lettuce bolts to bitterness.

John Perlman

"A Lovely Person I Know!"

My father-in-law called 'friend' the F word. I agree. I do not have friends. There are just people I know. As soon as I label someone a FRIEND all hell breaks loose! Expectations and loyalty and availability and bla bla fagghedabout it. It's much easier to say, "A lovely person I know!"

Allergy Tummy

I have discovered lime juice freshly squeezed into plain seltzer cures the Summer, Spring, Fall, allergy (histamine) tummy. For some reason my stomach does not make normal amount of acid. This is better than taking diphenhydramine generic benadryl.

Sourdough Carrot Cake

Here

John Ashbery

"I don't quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure. I don't want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience."
- John Ashbery

Thursday, July 27, 2017

Lovely Rainy Day

Lily and I walked in the rain all the way to the end of Edgewater drive. It was the first time we went out there since the heat of summer and her sprained ankle last week. When we got home I was hungry. I made toast and chopped up raw cauliflower and pickles had them with Russian dressing. I made elbow pasta for later.

Retreat into Nothingness

Dying turns many of us into counterfactual historians. But the alternate universe Taylor imagines is unusually provocative.

It’s almost inevitable that dying makes you reflect on your past, which perhaps explains why “Dying” is not merely a meditation on the present, but a journey backward in time, all the way to Taylor’s girlhood.

I was unprepared for how involving this stretch of her reminiscence would be. Half of its appeal is its simple Aussie exoticism — there’s talk of kookaburras, jackeroos. But her personal story is also packed with drama. There’s the greedy uncle who annexed the family patrimony. The grandmother who suffered a nervous breakdown. The unstable and bellicose father, an airline pilot, who was only at home in the sky.

Taylor’s prose is clear and direct, with flashes of surpassing loveliness. The poet-philosopher in her is in full bloom. “For what are we,” she asks, “if not a body taking a mind for a walk, just to see what’s there?”

This may not be quite as glorious a description of life as Philip Larkin’s “million-petaled flower of being here,” but it has a startling offhand grace.

Like Larkin, Taylor views her death as a retreat into the nothingness that preceded her. But there’s a crucial, melancholy difference: In the time between our non-existences, we’ve loved and created things. She quotes Harold Pinter, who wrote of his wife: “I shall miss you so much when I’m dead.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/books/review-dying-memoir-cory-taylor.html

Anne Lamott

“I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.”
― Anne Lamott

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
― Anne Lamott

“You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
― Anne Lamott

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Joy is the best makeup.”
― Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
― Anne Lamott

“And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.”
― Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.”
― Anne Lamott

“I do not understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”
― Anne Lamott

“You can either practice being right or practice being kind.”
― Anne Lamott

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.”
― Anne Lamott

“I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.”
― Anne Lamott

“E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.”
― Anne Lamott, Joe Jones

“You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child.”
― Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

“Hope is not about proving anything. It's about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us.”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

“It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

“You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town”
― Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

“Laughter is carbonated holiness.”
― Anne Lamott

“Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don't have time to carry grudges; you don't have time to cling to the need to be right.”
― Anne Lamott

“I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me--that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

“It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility. ”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

“No" is a complete sentence.”
― Anne Lamott

“Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare...”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

The squeaky wheel gets the grease

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Squeaky wheel"

The squeaky wheel gets the grease is an American proverb used to convey the idea that the most noticeable (or loudest) problems are the ones most likely to get attention. It is alternately expressed as "The squeaky wheel gets the oil".[1]

The origin of the squeaky wheel metaphor is unknown, but its current form is attributed to American humorist Josh Billings who is said to have popularized it in his putative poem "The Kicker" (c. 1870).[2]

I hate to be a kicker,
I always long for peace,
But the wheel that squeaks the loudest,
Is the one that gets the grease.

Mashed Potato Scoops

Article
http://www.parenting.com/article/kid-friendly-mashed-potato-scoops

Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream

For chilly summer days...

INGREDIENTS
1-1/2 cups whole milk
1 cup packed light or dark brown sugar
2 tablespoons molasses or dark corn syrup
1-3/4 cups pumpkin purée (solid pack pumpkin)
1-1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
2-1/2 cups heavy cream
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup crumbled ginger snaps, vanilla butter cookies, or graham crackers
Instructions
In a medium mixing bowl, use a hand mixer on low speed to combine the milk, brown sugar, and molasses until the sugar is dissolved, about 1 to 2 minutes. Stir in the pumpkin purée, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg.
Add heavy cream and vanilla. Turn the machine on; pour the mixture into freezer bowl, and let mix until thickened, about 20 to 25 minutes. Add the crumbled cookies during the last 5 minutes of mixing. The ice cream will have a soft, creamy texture. If a firmer consistency is desired, transfer the ice cream to an airtight container and place in freezer for about 2 hours.
Remove from freezer about 15 minutes before serving.
https://www.cuisinart.com/recipes/desserts/100/

LIFESAVERS Teaching: Swimming and Reading

I know people who do not know how to swim and some do not know how to read. These are important tools for life. I am teaching them for free.

8 Nutritional Reccomendations for Swimmers

Aaron Schwartz M.S., R.D., L.D.
https://swimswam.com/8-nutritional-recommendations-for-swimmers/
1. Make the majority of your carbohydrates complex outside of workouts.

Carbohydrates have taken a beating lately from the most recent fad diets to the popularity of both the Atkin’s and Paleo diet. No, carbohydrates are not inherently bad for you but I will agree the Western Diet consists of entirely too many carbohydrates. With that being said, carbohydrates are, or should be, an aerobic athlete’s best friend. The literature is riddled with study after study demonstrating the benefit and importance of a high carbohydrate diet for athletes, particularly aerobic athletes. Simply put, carbohydrates are the body’s fuel currency. No other nutrient burns as efficiently as the carbohydrate does. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the American College of Sports Medicine and the Dietitians of Canada all agree that carbohydrates should make up the majority of calories in your diet. Want numbers? A range, albeit large, of 6 to 10 grams of carbohydrates per kilogram of body weight is recommended. Swimmers and other mostly aerobic athletes will need closer to 8-10 g/kg.1 For a 160 pound person, this turns into 580-720 grams of carbohydrates. Outside of the actual workout itself, the carbohydrates that you want to focus on are complex carbohydrates. Examples include: Legumes (lentils, beans and peas), Whole Grains (oats, brown rice, and whole grain breads), Fruits and Vegetables.

2. Simple carbs directly before, during and directly after workouts.

It may come as a surprise to you that simple carbohydrates (or simple sugars) are not always bad, especially for athletes. Simple sugars are digested very quickly (thus the name simple) and will result in a rapid rise in our body’s blood sugar. This is typically unwarranted because if that blood sugar is not utilized, say, through exercise for example, then it will be stored in a fat cell. However, the up-side to simple sugars is that it provides a quick, easy-to-burn fuel for our muscles. Sports drinks are an excellent example of this. The carbohydrates in sports drinks are simple sugar which makes it a great, ready-to-burn fuel source during a workout. Simple sugars are important directly after a workout due to the insulin response which will be discussed shortly. Other examples include pretzels, honey and fruits.

3. A little protein before a workout goes a long way.

Protein before a workout may sound counterintuitive. However, a small dose of protein can prime your muscles for recovery even before you start your workout. In fact, The ISSN recommends consuming 0.15-0.25 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight an hour or so before a workout (about 15 grams for a 160 lb. person).2 The reason? Protein before a workout helps establish a positive nitrogen balance thus improving the uptake of protein into the muscle, preventing the breakdown of muscle tissue and delays gastric (fancy word for stomach) emptying which in turn increases satiety and prevents hunger during training.

Cuban Tostones

Recipe

Elizabeth Hardwick

"There are really only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge."
- Elizabeth Hardwick

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

― James Baldwin

Seeking

“Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.”
― Haruki Murakami

“What happens when people open their hearts?"
"They get better.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Haruki Murakami

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami

Alan Watts Quotes

"What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things."
— Alan W. Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety)

"We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe."
— Alan W. Watts

"A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter."
— Alan W. Watts

"For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" Your entire
education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now."
— Alan W. Watts

"This state of affairs is known technically as the "double-bind." A person is put in a double-bind by a command or request which contains a concealed contradiction...This is a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't situation which arises constantly in human (and especially family) relations...

The social double-bind game can be phrased in several ways: The first rule of this game is that it is not a game.
Everyone must play. You must love us. You must go on living. Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role.
Control yourself and be natural. Try to be sincere.
Essentially, this game is a demand for spontaneous behavior of certain kinds. Living, loving, being natural or sincere—all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen "of themselves" like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores—weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith—in life, in other people, and in oneself—is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time."
— Alan W. Watts (The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)

"We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree."
— Alan W. Watts (The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)

"You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate "you" to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real "you" is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new."
— Alan W. Watts (The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)

"This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. By remembering the past we can plan for the future. But the ability to plan for the future is offset by the "ability" to dread pain and to fear of the unknown. Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and future gives us a corresponding dim sense of the present. In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable."
— Alan W. Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety)

Robert Anton Wilson
"The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal."
— Robert Anton Wilson (Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins)

"But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, "The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day."
— Alan W. Watts (The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness)

"Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that "I" and all other "things" now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them - to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are."
— Alan W. Watts (The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)

"But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything---including "my" thoughts and actions---were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that "I make them"; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is therefore to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites."
— Alan W. Watts (Psychotherapy East and West)

"We have made a problem for ourselves by confusing the intelligible with the fixed. We think that making sense out of life is impossible unless the flow of events can somehow be fitted into a framework of rigid forms. To be meaningful, life must be understandable in terms of fixed ideas and laws, and these in turn must correspond to unchanging and eternal realities behind the shifting scene. But if this what "making sense out of life" means, we have set ourselves the impossible task of making fixity out of flux."
— Alan W. Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety)

"Here's an example: someone says, "Master, please hand me the knife," and he hands them the knife, blade first. "Please give me the other end," he says. And the master replies, "What would you do with the other end?" This is answering an everyday matter in terms of the metaphysical.

When the question is, "Master, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?" Then he replies, "There is enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool." That is answering the metaphysical in terms of the everyday, and that is, more or less, the principle zen works on. The mundane and the sacred are one and the same."
— Alan W. Watts (What Is Zen?)

"We therefore work, not for the work's sake, but for money—and money is supposed to get us what we really want in our hours of leisure and play. In the United States even poor people have lots of money compared with the wretched
and skinny millions of India, Africa, and China, while our middle and upper classes (or should we say "income groups") are as prosperous as princes. Yet, by and large, they have but slight taste for pleasure. Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy."
— Alan W. Watts (The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)

"Look, here is a tree in the garden and every summer is produces apples, and we call it an apple tree because the tree "apples." That's what it does. Alright, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that at least on the planet earth, the thing peoples! In just the same way that an apple tree apples!"
— Alan W. Watts

"For there is no joy in continuity, in the perpetual. We desire it only because the present is empty. A person who is trying to eat money is always hungry. When someone says, "Time to stop now!" he is in a panic because he has had nothing to eat yet, and wants more and more time to go on eating money, ever hopeful of satisfaction around the corner. We do not really want continuity, but rather a present experience of total happiness. The thought of wanting such an experience to go on and on is a result of being self-conscious in the experience, and thus incompletely aware of it. So long as there is the feeling of an "I" having this experience, the moment is not all. Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between "I" and "now" has vanished - when there is just this "now" and nothing else.
By contrast, hell or "everlasting damnation" is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained. Hell is the fatuity, the everlasting impossibility, of self-love, self-consciousness, and seld-possession. It is trying to see one´s own eyes, hear one´s own ears, and kiss one´s own lips."
— Alan W. Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety)

"As you make more and more powerful microscopic instruments, the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation. Just as when the telescopes become more and more powerful, the galaxies have to recede in order to get away from the telescopes. Because what is happening in all these investigations is this: Through us and through our eyes and senses, the universe is looking at itself. And when you try to turn around to see your own head, what happens? It runs away. You can't get at it. This is the principle. Shankara explains it beautifully in his commentary on the Kenopanishad where he says 'That which is the Knower, the ground of all knowledge, is never itself an object of knowledge.'

[In this quote from 1973 Watts, remarkably, essentially anticipates the discovery (in the late 1990's) of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.]"
— Alan W. Watts

"For the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it—as if it were quite other than himself—and then trying to grasp it.

But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship on the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts—based on the realization that the only real "I" is the whole endless process."
— Alan W. Watts (The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)

Eric Weiner:
"The late British-born philosopher Alan Watts, in one of his wonderful lectures on eastern philosophy, used this analogy: "If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or a ball. Very few people will say I've drawn a hole in the wall, because most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together--you cannot have what is 'in here' unless you have what is out there.' "
In other words, where we are is vital to who we are."
— Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World)

Ram Dass

“We're all just walking each other home.”
― Ram Dass

“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”
― Ram Dass

“We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.”
― Ram Dass

“It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.”
― Ram Dass

“The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.”
― Ram Dass

“I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion--and where it isn't, that's where my work lies.”
― Ram Dass

“The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.”
― Ram Dass

“Be here now.”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

“In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.”
― Ram Dass

“Your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness.”
― Ram Dass

“As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.”
― Ram Dass

“Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.”
― Ram Dass

“The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it's in the being. When I need love from others, or need to give love to others, I'm caught in an unstable situation. Being in love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only thing that provides stability. Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.”
― Ram Dass

“Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.”
― Ram Dass

“What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.”
― Ram Dass

“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”
― Ram Dass

“Let's trade in all our judging for appreciating. Let's lay down our righteousness and just be together.”
― Ram Dass

“The next message you need is always right where you are.”
― Ram Dass

“Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.”
― Ram Dass

“Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.”
― Ram Dass

“We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.”
― Ram Dass

“A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there's work to be done.”
― Ram Dass

“I would say that the thrust of my life has been initially about getting free, and then realizing that my freedom is not independent of everybody else. Then I am arriving at that circle where one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn't create more suffering. I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.”
― Ram Dass

“I'm not interested in being a "lover." I'm interested in only being love.”
― Ram Dass

“The game is not about becoming somebody, it's about becoming nobody.”
― Ram Dass

“Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.”
― Ram Dass

“Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama.”
― Ram Dass

“If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

“It's all real and it's all illusory:
that's Awareness!”
― Ram Dass

“We're here to awaken from the illusion of separateness”
― Ram Dass, How Can I Help? Stories and Reflection on Service

Asylum

“An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.”
― George Bernard Shaw

Useless

“Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.”
― George Bernard Shaw

'Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.'

“Written over the gate here are the words 'Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.' Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

Dig for Him

“The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.”
― George Bernard Shaw, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God

Never

“Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.”
― George Bernard Shaw

Profanation

“Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat.”
― George Bernard Shaw

How much does your soul eat?

“Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat?
Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House

Spend All

“Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

“Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat.”
― George Bernard Shaw

Quality of its Ideas

“There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Misalliance

“Oh, well, if you want original conversations, you'd better go and talk to yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Candida

“The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up against middle class morality all the time. If there's anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: "You're undeserving; so you can't have it." Buy my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don't need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don't eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I'm a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible.......Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the usual general practitioner's light-hearted way, without previous highly skilled examination of the state of the patient's blood, is just as likely to be a simple manslaughter as a cure or preventive. But vaccination is nothing short of attempted murder. A skilled bacteriologist would just as soon think of cutting his child's arm and rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound, as vaccinating it in the same.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

“We are all savages.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.”
― George Bernard Shaw

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