Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, Sorrow is the greater.” But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy. Only when you are empty are you at a standstill and balanced. When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, your joy or your sorrow must necessarily rise or fall.
-Kahlil Gibran, from The Prophet
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Kahlil Gibran
Amanda Milkovits
He took my childhood.’ Small-town R.I. leader faces sex abuse claims
By Amanda Milkovits Globe Staff,July 31, 2019, 7:00 a.m.
UPDATE:
Police investigate another accusation against prominent Bristol ...
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/rhode-island/2019/08/03/...bristol.../story.html
Interim Bristol Police Chief Brian Burke said that another person reported allegations ... By Amanda Milkovits Globe Staff,Updated August 3, 2019, in 10 hours.
Following Globe investigation, Bristol town leader loses job, faces ...
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/rhode-island/...globe...bristol...job.../story.html
By Amanda Milkovits Globe Staff,Updated August 2, 2019, in 8 hours ... After a Globe story detailed the accusations against Bristol resident David E. Barboza, ...
Balance
“Guilt, regret, resentment, sadness & all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past & not enough presence.”
– Eckhart Tolle
Compassionate
“Forgiveness is a transformative act because it asks you to be a more empathetic and compassionate person.”
― Kamand Kojouri
Courage
“Courage is often associated with aggression, but instead should be seen as a willingness to act from the heart.”
― Donna Quesada, Buddha in the Classroom: Zen Wisdom to Inspire Teachers
Maezumi Roshi
“Have good trust in yourself … not in the One that you think you should be, but in the One that you are.”
– Maezumi Roshi
To Study
“To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by all things.”
– Dogen
Melting
“Melting our attachment to self is the most powerful medication for bringing mental and emotional imbalances in check.”
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
Tao
“Not being tense but ready.
Not thinking but not dreaming.
Not being set but flexible.
Liberation from the uneasy sense of confinement.
It is being wholly and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come.”
― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do
Suzuki Roshi
“A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, “Why is there so much suffering?”
Suzuki Roshi replied, “No reason.”
Knitting Sutra
“Letting go is the lesson. Letting go is always the lesson. Have you ever noticed how much of our agony is all tied up with craving and loss?”
― Susan Gordon Lydon, The Knitting Sutra: Craft as a Spiritual Practice
Like a Fish
“A follower of the way has neither form nor shape, neither root nor trunk; nor dwelling place; like a fish leaping in the water.”
– Rinzai Zen proverb
Dogen
“If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?”
– Dogen
Alan Watts
“Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
– Alan Watts
D.T. Suzuki
“Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?”
– D.T. Suzuki
Breathing
“Zazen is an activity that is an extension of the universe. Zazen is not the life of an individual, it’s the universe that’s breathing.”
– Dogen
The Real Miracle
“The real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth.”
– Thích Nhat Hanh
In Spite of Everything
“The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.”
– Jack Kornfield
Extremely Pliable
“Only when you can be extremely pliable and soft can you be extremely hard and strong.”
– Buddhist Proverb
Let Go
“Let go over a cliff, die completely, and then come back to life — after that you cannot be deceived.”
– Zen Proverb
Point
“My finger can point to the moon, but my finger is not the moon. You don’t have to become my finger, nor do you have to worship my finger. You have to forget my finger, and look at where it is pointing.”
– Osho
Ikkyu
“Like vanishing dew,
a passing apparition
or the sudden flash
of lightning — already gone —
thus should one regard one’s self.”
― Ikkyu
Interelated
“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
Preparing Food
“Preparing food is not just about yourself and others. It is about everything!”
– Shunryu Suzuki
Jon J Muth
“It is easy to believe we are each waves and forget we are also the ocean.”
― Jon J. Muth
Feet in a Bucket
I despise the heat. But I am feeling good in spite of the temps. I filled a 20 gallon bucket with ice cold water and sat in the shade with my feet in the bucket. It's still too hot out. So I am back indoors reading about how to make your own ICE VEST!
Summer Hoodie
I am wearing my hoodie next to the air conditioner and fan. This is how much I need to chill in the summer heat.
Rubber Ducky Orange Kitty and Purple Frog
I went and purchased 3 rubber squeak toys at the dollar store for Romeo. I throw them in the kiddie pool and he fishes them out. Romeo LOVES them! But I can't get him to STOP until I throw a tennis ball!! Then I have to throw another tennis ball under the garden gate to get him to drop the one in his mouth. Very complicated. He was so obsessed with the ball that rolled under the gate, that I was able to hose him off and he didn't even care! Now he is CLEAN for sleeping in our bed.
Helen Russell
“Only do it if you love it – because it isn’t an easy option..."
What’s your advice to new writers?
Enjoy getting older – I’m far bolder and more confident in my prose now than I was in my 20s.
Don’t be scared by the sheer volume of what ‘a book’ looks like when you’re grappling with a 100,000 word document – tackle it a chapter at a time and you’ll get there.
And only do it if you love it – because it isn’t an easy option. It’s an unusual lifestyle and a lot of work. I sweat when I write – it becomes a physical thing, acting out dialogue and blocking movement. You have to live it.
Helen Russell is a British journalist, author and speaker. Helen has previously worked for The Sunday Times, Take a Break, Top Sante and on new launches for Tatler Asia, Grazia India and Sky. She joined Marie Claire as editor of marieclaire.co.uk in 2010 and was BSME-shortlisted in 2011 and 2012. Helen now writes for magazines and newspapers around the world, including Stylist, The Times, Grazia, Metro, and The Wall Street Journal. Helen is a columnist for The Telegraph, a correspondent for The Guardian and her first book, The Year of Living Danishly, is now a bestseller. She is also the author of Leap Year and Gone Viking.
https://advicetowriter.squarespace.com/interviews/2017/11/14/helen-russell.html
Natalie Goldberg
My goal is to write every day. I say it is my ideal. I am careful not to pass judgment or create anxiety if I do not do it. No one lives up to his ideal.
NATALIE GOLDBERG
Without a Collaborator
I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.
AGATHA CHRISTIE
Writing Diet
Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.
RAY BRADBURY
Keep Going
The writers who are prepared to keep going are the ones who are going to make it. I can guarantee that a writer with 80 percent of the talent and 100 percent of the desire will be so much better than the person with 100 percent of the talent and only 80 percent of the desire. It always works that way.
COLUM McCANN
Fairfield Porter
Who the hell is Fairfield Porter? My husband asked.
He made boring paintings of rich people sitting in chairs, I said.
He laughed.
He made boring paintings of rich people sitting in chairs, I said.
He laughed.
Mood Lift or Living in a Buddhist Proverb
My mood lifted finally after 10 weeks. This is my cycle. Now I am swimming to stay on earth. I feel like I am living in a Buddhist proverb, and I guess we all are. What to do when I feel sad? Swim. What to do when I feel happy? Swim.
Water Scare
Last night as I was swimming laps I saw a slender brown teen sinking vertically and thrashing to rise up. I wasn't sure what I was seeing. Was he playing a game? He came up for air and gasped. I asked him are you okay?
I almost drowned.
His mom and Aunt were there too. We were in the deep end. They were also scared by what happened. I spent the rest of the swim time showing the man how to push up from the water. Swimming can be hard for slender men and they do not like to wear life vests. Women have built in life vests-- breasts! It's true! I told him swim in shallow water until you are secure. You can always stand in shallow water. I had the same experience when I was 7 on vacation with my parents. The lifeguard fished me out and I remember it like it was yesterday. I hope you stay friends with the water in spite of your scare, I said.
I almost drowned.
His mom and Aunt were there too. We were in the deep end. They were also scared by what happened. I spent the rest of the swim time showing the man how to push up from the water. Swimming can be hard for slender men and they do not like to wear life vests. Women have built in life vests-- breasts! It's true! I told him swim in shallow water until you are secure. You can always stand in shallow water. I had the same experience when I was 7 on vacation with my parents. The lifeguard fished me out and I remember it like it was yesterday. I hope you stay friends with the water in spite of your scare, I said.
Night Blackberries
Last night while walking Romeo we picked black raspberries in the dark on Elbow Street. Fr. Onisie Romanian priest came out and invited us to his backyard picnic table for special Canadian gin a friend gave him. "I have to share this," he said "a special gift is no good without sharing!" and he made us each a gin and tonic. I had Romeo on the leash and a long-haired white skunk walked in and out of his yard. "that's my skunk," he said laughing. Luckily we did not get sprayed. A beautiful and rare moment of friendship in the neighborhood.
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Loves
A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board.
― D.H. Lawrence
Glass Bottle of Ego
When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.
― D.H. Lawrence
Courage and Marmalade
The only rule is, do what you really, impulsively, wish to do. But always act on your own responsibility, sincerely. And have the courage of your own strong emotion.
― D.H. Lawrence
I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred orange and scrub the floor.
― D.H. Lawrence
Surrender!
When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance. I am very certain now that, as I said therein, if I truly become what I wish to be, the burden will fall away. The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one’s whole being, is that you alone control nothing.
― Henry Miller, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953
Loneliness
I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my 'idea of them'.
― Anaïs Nin
May Sarton
The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the "creative" is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
Rita Dove
I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.
RITA DOVE
Aditi Khorana
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
To follow your inner weirdness. Every writer has their own unique perspective and we start out imitating our favorite writers, but trusting your own weirdness produces the most compelling and unique work.
What’s your advice to new writers?
Keep going. Writing is the best resistance against the furnace of this world. Create like your life depends on it.
Aditi Khorana
One Thing
There is only one genuinely ghastly thing hack jobs do to #writers, and that is to waste their precious time.
KURT VONNEGUT
Play!
My father, without, I think, realizing what he was doing, made me think of writing as play rather than work. He was always telling me stories, encouraging me, taking an interest in my toy theater, and so on. And it seems to me that writing has been a game that I have gone on playing ever since. I am inclined to think of writers who bore me as being “workers.”
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
Monday, July 29, 2019
Yiyun Li
One assignment I give my beginning fiction students is to read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. There are so many things to learn from that novel. I ask them to write one page to try to imitate Baldwin. Sometimes students realize how hard it is to write just one page of good writing. In Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin has one passage about taking a train ride. I point out to my students that he describes all the strangers as intimate friends. And he describes an intimate lover as a stranger. I think that’s what you want to learn from Baldwin. You don’t write strangers as strangers; you write strangers like your best friend, with that intimate feeling.
YIYUN LI
Stan Getz and Chemex
I pulled out the Chemex coffee pot last week when our Braun drip machine broke after 30 years. I was flooded with memories of my childhood visits to my parents' artist friends. They always made Chemex coffee and played Stan Getz, true bohemian beatnicks who traveled the world and wore berets.
Good News!
I just received a contract to publish one of my vignettes in an anthology for young adults (Simon and Schuster 2021). I am so excited.
Meanwhile I have been swimming daily to try to stay on earth and lift off my 3 months of blues. Now I need to swim to stay on earth after the good news.
Meanwhile I have been swimming daily to try to stay on earth and lift off my 3 months of blues. Now I need to swim to stay on earth after the good news.
Stanley Kunitz
It's the birthday of poet Stanley Kunitz (books by this author), born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1905). His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father committed suicide in a public park before Kunitz was born, and his mother, Yetta, erased all traces of Stanley's father from the house, and refused to speak about him. She opened up a dry-goods store and sewed clothes in the back room, working overtime to pay off the debts that her husband had left behind, even though legally she was not obligated to pay them.
One thing his mother did not destroy were the books his father had left behind, books by Tolstoy and Dickens. One of Kunitz's favorite books was the dictionary. He said: "I used to sit in that green Morris chair and open the heavy dictionary on my lap, and find a new word every day. It was a big word, a word like eleemosynary or phantasmagoria — some word that, on the tongue, sounded great to me, and I would go out into the fields and I would shout those words, because it was so important that they sounded so great to me. And then eventually I began incorporating them into verses, into poems. But certainly my thought in the beginning was that there was so much joy playing with language that I couldn't consider living without it."
His first job as a boy was riding his horse down the streets of Worcester and lighting the gas lamps at night. He became a reporter for the Worcester Telegram, went to Harvard, and stayed for his master's degree. He wanted to pursue his Ph.D., but the head of the English department at Harvard told him that Anglo-Saxon students would resent being taught by a Jew.
So he moved to a big farm in Connecticut, and worked as a reporter and farmer. He sold fresh herbs to markets in Hartford. Kunitz was drafted into World War II, and when he came back, he was offered a teaching position at Bennington College. In 1949, the college tried to expel one of his students — Groucho Marx's daughter Miriam — right before her graduation because she had violated a curfew. Kunitz helped organize a protest of the decision, and the president of Bennington showed up at his house and told him to stop immediately. Kunitz took the plant that he was potting and threw it in the president's face, then quit.
He published a second book, but it was barely noticed. He was so unknown that his third book, Selected Poems (1958), was rejected by eight publishers — three of them refused to even read it. When it was finally published, it won the Pulitzer Prize. When someone asked W.H. Auden why nobody knew about Stanley Kunitz, Auden said: "It's strange, but give him time. A hundred years or so. He's a patient man."
It was more than 10 years before he published his next book, The Testing Tree (1971), and slowly but surely, people began to take notice. He was appointed the tenth Poet Laureate of the United States when he was 95 years old. He died at the age of 100.
He said: "It is out of the dailiness of life that one is driven into the deepest recesses of the self."
- Writer's Almanac
Grandmother
As my grandmother used to say, “with so narrow a point of view the person can see through a keyhole with both eyes.”
-Clarissa Pinkola Estes
path of the sacred heart
Archive for the ‘from The Dangerous Old Woman manucript’ Category
path of the sacred heart, The Dangerous Old Woman, the journey, wise women
Early Provisions for the Journey Ahead
In from The Dangerous Old Woman manucript on May 8, 2010 at 6:30 PM
Dear Brave Souls of the Tribe of the Sacred Heart
Just some vittles and nourishments for later, once the fireside of The Dangerous Old Woman is banked until next we meet in the clearing in the night forest once again…
from The Dangerous Old Woman manuscript,
“It is women’s work to bring the ultimate art forward: Living in the soul, rather than living in the overculture. To enter the soul, be it, teach it with as much wit, meaning, grace and grit—and cackles—as possible.”
“One of the best things about gathering years is the right to cackle with impunity.”
“As a woman gathers more years, she becomes more bold, which is not the same as brave: Brave is jumping in. Bold is jumping in led by angels. In age, we learn to know the difference. For certain, ‘older is bolder…’”
“In old tales, there are plenty of bitter old creatures railing about shrieking me me me. One of the masteries of age, is to divest of bitterness which acts as a dam to the inspiratus and to one’s sense of calm in ‘being enough.’ Bitterness is self-imposed ‘prison of unhappiness’ where the feelings of isolation and rage seem to enliven us, but in fact, only deaden us to love and creative force.”
“If you are chronically seething, look not so much to your ‘designated enemy,’ but to your envy and your pride… Try to understand both, strive toward correcting the illusions and delusions that create and feed black jealousy and petrified-eyed pride. Envy and pride are angers that come from forgetting your promesas, forgetting your own El destino, forgetting to put Source without source at center, instead of ego-bilge.”
“Like a very young child learning to crawl who becomes stuck under a chair and cries out til the child’s mother pulls gently at its legs teaching it to crawl backward… learn to back out of the tangle. Your heart and soul will thank you, and Lady Wisdom will smile that you are free.”
“Will there be, no matter how one lives one’s life, a lotus of good witches and a snarl of ‘bad witches’ somewhere within and-or outside each woman’s life? Count on it. As in the old tales, they all show up in many disguises.”
“In my immigrant and refugee family’s old story handed down, the’ whiteness’ Snow White carries is not about her skin color. It is about the eternal purity of her sweet soul, despite all else contravening.”
Peace be with you entirely.
With love,
dr.e
https://aftermidnightwriter.wordpress.com/category/from-the-dangerous-old-woman-manucript/
CODA: the image above is an applique from my collection of The Sacred Heart I’ve cared for through the decades. It is, I think, an idea about the creative force without Source, able to shine regardless of being pierced by thorns.
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés
“When people ask, Where have you been these past twenty years, why don't you come out very often? I say, I’ve been in my cave underground, working, writing, caring for la familia…. but stay tuned… there will be sightings.”
“If given the choice, choose what makes your life larger rather than smaller.”
“Some people mistake being loving for being a sap. Quite the contrary, the most loving people are often the most fierce and the most acutely armed for battle… for they care about preserving and protecting poetry, symphonic song, ideas, the elements, creatures, inventions, hopes and dreams, dances and holiness… those goodly endeavors that cannot be allowed to perish from this earth, else humanity itself would perish…” from The Dangerous Old Woman
”If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman… have faith… there is yet time…” from Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
https://aftermidnightwriter.wordpress.com/about/
Sunday, July 28, 2019
The Chair
The chair was out on the curb this morning. I sat in it and it felt good. I carried it home with one hand while balancing it on my hip and holding my dog's leash in my other hand. It was a crazy sight. When I got home after walking 4 blocks I showed my husband. He's used to this sort of thing with me. "There's another chair on the curb but it's in Blackstone, I saw it yesterday," I said. "Let's go get it."
"Now?"
"Yes, before someone else gets it." We drove the mile and a half and I could see it in the street.
"There it is," I said. "Just to make sure, I'll ring the doorbell." I jumped out and climbed onto the front porch. I heard a dog bark and a tall man came out.
"May I help you?"
I was smiling and wearing my big straw hat. "Yes, I was wondering if that chair in the street is being thrown out?"
"No, that's my favorite chair, that's the only chair I can get out of," he said, laughing.
"I'm so embarrassed."
"No, don't be."
"I just figured I'd better check. Where I come from things in the street are for trash pick up. You might want to move it into the yard."
"Nobody comes down here to the dead end."
"I do when I walk my dog," I said, laughing.
"Now?"
"Yes, before someone else gets it." We drove the mile and a half and I could see it in the street.
"There it is," I said. "Just to make sure, I'll ring the doorbell." I jumped out and climbed onto the front porch. I heard a dog bark and a tall man came out.
"May I help you?"
I was smiling and wearing my big straw hat. "Yes, I was wondering if that chair in the street is being thrown out?"
"No, that's my favorite chair, that's the only chair I can get out of," he said, laughing.
"I'm so embarrassed."
"No, don't be."
"I just figured I'd better check. Where I come from things in the street are for trash pick up. You might want to move it into the yard."
"Nobody comes down here to the dead end."
"I do when I walk my dog," I said, laughing.
Biscuit Memories
Thursday, November 5, 2015
Biscuit Memories
I went to Joblot today (it is a minor addiction and I need a monthly fix). I remember, as a tiny child, eating digestive biscuits and drinking hot chocolate as a treat when we would take to the bomb shelter during the terrible nightly raids over Southern England! Going there is like going on vacation. Then I went to "The Big Bunny" supermarket in the Asian and Latino laden town of Southbridge. They have wonderful veggies at 1/2 the price of the supermarkets in places like Northhampton whose clients also seek out Thai eggplants and 20 different kinds of hot peppers. I also shop at an amazing market (Asian) in Worcester, that would scare the shit out of my Worcester acquaintances just by the pungent smell as you go in the door. It also assuages my wander lust. Very few items have prices and the owners speak little English but the total on the receipt makes me think it is cheap. I miss and mourn Egypt terribly. The Dominican Republic and Egypt are my 2nd and 3rd homes - really deeply rooted.
Oh! Its suddenly dark! And snow due tomorrow.
-A.P.
Sean Lopolito
It started with a simple question around a fire at Lafayette Campground in the White Mountains of New Hampshire:
What do you want in a job?
It didn't take much thought for me to determine that my current employment was not what I wanted to do long term and for me to create a quick list of "wants":
- I want to enjoy coming to work every day
- I want to employ and support people who are passionate about their jobs
- I want to create a brand and product that resonates with a local audience
- I want to give back to the communities where we do business
What I kept coming back to was that I wanted to translate my love of beer, brewing, friends and family into a profession. I wanted a brewery...and lucky for me, I have a supportive wife.
When Lops Brewing opens, it will be the culmination of an 18 month journey as I transition from concept and planning to execution. There is a lot of work left to do before the first beer is poured, but I have a great team to support my efforts.
I look forward to meeting you all and providing great beer in a comfortable welcoming environment.
Sean Lopolito
The Robot Wife
The Robot wife is my name for our new coffee machine. We can program her to make coffee for us while we are in the other room working. I make all of my ice cubes by filling the plastic cube trays that came with our house. After the coffee has chilled I put it in the fridge overnight to get cold. The next morning I enjoy it with ice and halved with skim milk in a thermos. I can only handle 4 ounces though.I should mention that my electric pressure cooker is my other robot wife. I set up rice and walk away. It turns itself off yet keeps warm.
Mr. Eyebrows
One of the swimmers I've known for a few years who is dashing with his pure white hair and black bushy eyebrows came in to the YMCA today. He told me a story about falling through the ice one winter when he was 9. "It was December and we were playing hockey on the ice out in Burrillville. It was 1965. There were four of us and it was a deep man-made pond for cows. It had 3 inches of ice on top, only three of us got out alive. The other kid couldn't swim. I can still see him, he was bobbing up and down. We couldn't save him because we were scrambling to save ourselves. I'll never forget it, but this is part of life."
Crazy World
Last night we walked along the pond and I ran into two people I know who live there. Both people started talking about wanting to own guns because the world is so crazy now and wondered how to go about getting a gun permit. When my husband and I got back into the car I said, Wow we walk along the beautiful pond to relax and everyone is afraid of who knows what. We return home to the city, and all its problems, and people smile and chat and seem pretty secure.
Where Beauty is
I mean I think, for instance, to give a very simple example of it is that if you are in the middle of your life in a busy evening, 50 things to do, and you get a phone call that somebody that you love is suddenly dying — it takes ten seconds to communicate that information, but when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world, because suddenly, everything that seemed so important before is all gone, and now you are thinking of this. So the given world that we think is there, and the solid ground we are on, is so tentative. And I think a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and I think that very often how we cross is the key thing.
Ms. Tippett:
And where is beauty in that?
Mr. O’Donohue:
Where beauty is, I think, is — beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. And I think, when we cross a new threshold, that if we cross worthily, what we do is we heal the patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught somewhere. And in our crossing, then, we cross onto new ground, where we just don’t repeat what we’ve been through in the last place we were. So I think beauty, in that sense, is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.
https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty-aug2017/
Thresholds
John O’Donohue:
Well, I think that the threshold — if you go back to the etymology of the word “threshold,” it comes from “threshing,” which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness. And I think there are huge thresholds in every life.
https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty-aug2017/
Time and Stillness
Ms. Tippett:
So I’m assuming you would suggest that more people need to create more space and stillness, but I think what you’re also saying is that simply by thinking differently about time, by approaching it differently, by putting on a new imagination, we can have a different sense of it. Is that right?
Mr. O’Donohue:
That’s absolutely right, because I think that if you take time not as calendar product, but as actually the parent or mother of presence, then you see that in the world of spirit, time behaves differently, actually. I mean when I used to be a priest, it was an amazing thing — you’d see somebody who would be dying over a week, maybe, and had lived, maybe, a hard life where they were knuckled into themselves, where they were hard and tight and unyielding, and everything had to err in its way to their center. And suddenly, then, you’d see that within three or four days you’d see them loosen. And you’d see a kind of buried beauty that they’d never allowed themselves to enjoy about themselves surface and bring a radiance to their face and spirit.
Ms. Tippett:
And why did it surface then?
Mr. O’Donohue:
Because suddenly, like, there was a recognition that the time was over and that their way of being could no longer help them with this and that another way of being was being invited from them, and when they yielded to it, it will become transformative. And it just means that actually, when you change time levels, that something can transform incredibly quickly.
https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty-aug2017/
Anam Ċara: John O'Donohue
Anam Ċara, which is also a different way of kind of analyzing the human condition: “It’s strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you.”
John O'Donohue
Well, I think it makes a huge difference, when you wake in the morning and come out of your house, whether you believe you are walking into dead geographical location, which is used to get to a destination, or whether you are emerging out into a landscape that is just as much, if not more, alive as you, but in a totally different form, and if you go towards it with an open heart and a real, watchful reverence, that you will be absolutely amazed at what it will reveal to you.
https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty-aug2017/
Saturday, July 27, 2019
Mood Brain
I swam my usual amount at the pool this morning and it felt good. It was a lot harder to stay the course because I was so chatty but I persisted and achieved it. I'm glad I did.
I moved into transmit-mode after three months. This is the way it goes. My Jeckyl & Hyde cycle is 3 months long. Now the challenge is to continue being a farmer to steady myself. It's easy to be a farmer when I am in receive-mode. It's easier to fly up to the moon when I'm in transmit-mode. So I make myself go to bed and sleep and I must swim to calm down and find my center. This is a hard won lesson. Getting sleep and exercise and proper nutrition. It saves my life.
I never stop learning and performing behavioral experiments on my mood brain.
I moved into transmit-mode after three months. This is the way it goes. My Jeckyl & Hyde cycle is 3 months long. Now the challenge is to continue being a farmer to steady myself. It's easy to be a farmer when I am in receive-mode. It's easier to fly up to the moon when I'm in transmit-mode. So I make myself go to bed and sleep and I must swim to calm down and find my center. This is a hard won lesson. Getting sleep and exercise and proper nutrition. It saves my life.
I never stop learning and performing behavioral experiments on my mood brain.
Energy Demanded
Don't people know that it's the hardest work in the world? Joseph Conrad said that he had loaded hundredweights of coal all day long on a ship in Amsterdam in the wintertime, and that is was nothing to the energy demanded for a day's work writing.
Mary Lee Settle
Detective Novel
When I'm working on a serious and solid book ... I read about a detective novel a day. It's the best legal dope in the world. It makes you feel good until the next morning you can work again.
Mary Lee Settle
Pure Joy
Anyone who has a choice and doesn't choose to write is a fool. The work is hard, the perks are few, the pay is terrible, and the product, when it's finally finished, is pure joy.
Mary Lee Settle
Mary Lee Settle
A good editor may spot when something is missing; a bad editor tries to tell you what to put there.
MARY LEE SETTLE
Friday, July 26, 2019
First
“First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or hear or smell or taste, you have something.”
― T.C. Boyle
Enemy
“To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of man.”
― T. Corraghessan Boyle, A Friend of the Earth
Inseperable
“Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain.”
― T.C. Boyle, A Friend of the Earth
The Beauty
“But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it."
[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]”
― T.C. Boyle
Writing
“Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self?”
― T.C. Boyle
Believe
“In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life."
(Barnes & Noble Review, email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009)”
― T.C. Boyle
Voice
Tommy Tomlinson Discovers The Power of Voice After Nearly Losing His Own
Just as his career as an award-winning journalist was taking off, cancer threatened to take it all away.
https://www.ourstate.com/tommy-tomlinson-discovers-voice-after-throat-cancer/
written by Tommy Tomlinson
Sweet Tea
Sweet Tea is a Symbol of the South
written by Tommy Tomlinson
https://www.ourstate.com/southern-roots-sweet-tea/
When He Died
“And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
I Believe in Libraries
“I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”
― Ray Bradbury
Come Round
“But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Book Smell Good
“I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.”
― Ray Bradbury
Touch
“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Don't
“Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things.”
― Ray Bradbury
Precise Moment
“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Let Go!
“Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.”
― Ray Bradbury
Remake a World
“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury
Change Something
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Cups
“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
― Ray Bradbury
Reality
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
Longhand
I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Julian Tepper
I still feel strongly that the one thing a writer has above all else, the reward which is bigger than anything that may come to him after huge advances and Hollywood adaptations, is the weapon against boredom. The question of how to spend his time, what to do today, tomorrow, and during all the other pockets of time in between when some doing is required: this is not applicable to the writer. For he can always lose himself in the act of writing and make time vanish. After which, he actually has something to show for his efforts. Not bad. Very good, in fact. Maybe too romantic a conceit, but this, I believed, was the great prize for being born … an author.
JULIAN TEPPER
Pierre Delattre, Episodes
“All our lives are miraculous if only we are willing to view them that way. The world keeps on pulsing new amazements, providing a constant series of epiphanies, illuminations, peak experiences. If, out of inattention, cynicism or a moribund view of the world, we don’t respond to the wondrous, then we get what we expect: a confirmation that life is unsurprising.”
― Pierre Delattre, Episodes
"The Divine is in the ordinary."--Pierre Delattre
In each generation there are individuals who live at the center of and help develop the principal themes of the age. Though many of these people are not widely known, their lives are exemplary and their influence among a generation's leaders is profound. Pierre Delattre has been, since the 1950s, one of these people, a voyager who remains in the vanguard.
"Episodes" consists of distilled moments of autobiography: Delattre has captured the humor, the edge, and the sudden illuminations of the defining moments of his life and his generation. These are tales of his encounters with Albert Schweitzer, Richard Brautigan, Charles de Galle, the Dalai Lama, and Neal Cassady, and of his ministerial work running a North Beach landmark; the Bread and Wine Mission, during the beat/hippy golden age.
These are mystical, cautionary tales by a humorist whose focus is on how superbly the divine is expressed in the ordinary. Delattre is a bit the philosopher, but more the theologian.
Pierre Delattre is a writer, painter, and teacher who currently lives in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains between Taos and Santa Fe. He is the author of two novels, "Walking on Air" and "Tales of a Dalai Lama," as well as many stories and poems.
Strong
Democrats are just going to have to run a strong presidential campaign about how to make the country better.
Gail Collins
Swimming Saved My Life
I’ve gotten so many private messages asking me what caused this recent positive change in my mental health that I’ve lost count. The answer is simple. Exercise. Whether you struggle with a mental illness or not, exercise is something we all need in our lives to stay healthy. Being diagnosed with a goody bag of mental disorders and then seeking treatment, taking medication, and getting support from my family/friends are all things that help me survive. But I don’t want to just survive. I want to live! Bringing back intense exercise into my life has pulled me out of my dark, lonely cave and taken me from simply existing to really living for the first time in my life.
You don’t have to train like a professional athlete, but breaking a sweat on a regular basis will make a huge difference in how you feel both physically and mentally. The fact that so many of us separate our mind and body makes it difficult to see exercise as a way to keep your brain healthy. Change how you view exercising and staying active. Choose to look at it as a way to make your brain healthy and happy instead of viewing it as a way to help you look a certain way/squeeze into those jeans that used to fit when you were in high school.
Forcing myself to change how I approach getting in shape has completely transformed the way I feel about exercise. It’s no longer about vanity, but instead it’s all about sanity. It not only keeps me sane, but it makes me incredibly happy and helps me feel the most alive I have ever felt. And who doesn’t want that? So start moving! Go for a walk around your neighborhood or simply around your room! Jump on your bed like you used to when you were a kid. Just move. It will help more than you can imagine.
I know it’s hard to listen or believe when doctors, therapists, psychiatrists, friends, or anyone tells you that exercise improves your mood, especially when you’re struggling with depression, anxiety, or any everyday life battles. But maybe it will speak louder to you if it’s coming from someone who’s gone through some serious mental health struggles. I’ve been stuck in a state of not even being able to leave my bed let alone the house for longer than I’d like to admit. Trust me, getting your body moving will in turn get your mind moving in a more positive direction. If you don’t feel like doing it for yourself, then do it for me! It breaks my heart reading your messages and hearing you giving up on yourselves the same way I gave up on myself not long ago.
So please stay safe, healthy, happy and hopeful. I’ll continue to be here if you need someone to talk/vent to.
Hope this helps and encourages you to put your health and happiness as a top priority.
source
Eccentric Chemist Dr. Peter Schlumbohm
The CHEMEX® coffeemaker was invented in 1941 by the eccentric chemist Dr. Peter Schlumbohm. Throughout his career he developed over 300 patents, ranging from cocktail shakers to automobiles. His focus was on making everyday objects more functional, attractive and enjoyable to use.
When designing the CHEMEX®, Schlumbohm desired to not only make brewing the perfect cup simple, but also to have the vessel be a thing of beauty. Being a chemist, he studied and understood clearly the chemistry behind the extraction of flavor and caffeine from coffee beans.
It was this knowledge that led him to invent the double bonded CHEMEX® paper filters for a perfect extraction every time. For the carafe, Schlumbohm was inspired by the Bauhaus school of design and non-porous labware that would impart no flavor of its own. Using these elements he fashioned the hourglass shape that has now become an iconic part of American history. Made simply from one piece of borosilicate glass and adorned with a wooden collar and rawhide tie, the CHEMEX® is pure in both form and function. It has been recognized and awarded by both the scientific community as well as the art and design communities. The CHEMEX® can be found in museums throughout the world and is included in the permanent collection at the Brooklyn Museum, Corning Museum of Glass and MOMA, NY.
The Museum of Modern Art displayed it as one of the best-designed products in 1943.
The CHEMEX® coffeemaker was also selected by the Illinois Institute of Technology as one of the 100 best designed products of modern times.
CHEMEX® Corporation has been a family owned company for over 30 years. We are honored to carry on the historical and iconic legacy of Dr. Schlumbohm and his Chemex coffeemaker.
Chemex® Coffeemaker
11 Veterans Drive
Chicopee, MA 01022
Phone: 413-331-4460
Hours: Mon-Fri 8:30-5:00
info@chemexcoffeemaker.com
Birthday of Carl Jung
It’s the birthday of Carl Jung (books by this author), born in Kesswil, Switzerland (1875). He was the founder of analytic psychology. He noticed that myths and fairytales from all kinds of different cultures have certain similarities. He called these similarities archetypes, and he believed that archetypes come from a collective unconscious that all humans share.
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Toni Morrison
“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean.”
― Toni Morrison
Love
“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
you need to free somebody else
“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
― Toni Morrison
Anger
“Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever."
[Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]”
― Toni Morrison
Claiming
“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved
Fly
“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
You Must
“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison
Sacred and not Sacred
“Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn’t matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us. Make space for all these paradoxes to be equally true inside your soul, and I promise—you can make anything. So please calm down now and get back to work, okay? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
What do You Love?
“What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Elizabeth Gilbert
“But to yell at your creativity, saying, “You must earn money for me!” is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Dedication
“You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
Human
“Sometimes, when people get treated as less than human, the best way to help them feel better is to simply treat them as human. Not as victims.”
― Jason Reynolds, All American Boys
Dreams
“Dreams don't have timelines, deadlines, and aren't always in straight lines.”
― Jason Reynolds, For Every One
Jason Reynolds
Article
“You can't run away from who you are, but what you can do is run toward who you want to be.”
― Jason Reynolds, Ghost
Step Back
When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
STEPHEN KING
State Nicknames
https://www.50states.com/nickname.htm
Capital Cities & Nicknames
Alabama Montgomery Yellowhammer State
Alaska Juneau The Last Frontier
Arizona Phoenix The Grand Canyon State
Arkansas Little Rock The Natural State
California Sacramento The Golden State
Colorado Denver The Centennial State
Connecticut Hartford The Constitution State
Delaware Dover The First State
Florida Tallahassee The Sunshine State
Georgia Atlanta The Peach State
Hawaii Honolulu The Aloha State
Idaho Boise The Gem State
Illinois Springfield Prairie State
Indiana Indianapolis The Hoosier State
Iowa Des Moines The Hawkeye State
Kansas Topeka The Sunflower State
Kentucky Frankfort The Bluegrass State
Louisiana Baton Rouge The Pelican State
Maine Augusta The Pine Tree State
Maryland Annapolis The Old Line State
Massachusetts Boston The Bay State
Michigan Lansing The Great Lakes State
Minnesota St. Paul The North Star State
Mississippi Jackson The Magnolia State
Missouri Jefferson City The Show Me State
Montana Helena The Treasure State
Nebraska Lincoln The Cornhusker State
Nevada Carson City The Silver State
New Hampshire Concord The Granite State
New Jersey Trenton The Garden State
New Mexico Santa Fe The Land of Enchantment
New York Albany The Empire State
North Carolina Raleigh The Tar Heel State
North Dakota Bismarck The Peace Garden State
Ohio Columbus The Buckeye State
Oklahoma Oklahoma City The Sooner State
Oregon Salem The Beaver State
Pennsylvania Harrisburg The Keystone State
Rhode Island Providence The Ocean State
South Carolina Columbia The Palmetto State
South Dakota Pierre Mount Rushmore State
Tennessee Nashville The Volunteer State
Texas Austin The Lone Star State
Utah Salt Lake City The Beehive State
Vermont Montpelier The Green Mountain State
Virginia Richmond The Old Dominion State
Washington Olympia The Evergreen State
West Virginia Charleston The Mountain State
Wisconsin Madison The Badger State
Wyoming Cheyenne The Equality or Cowboy State
A Cat Named Ozone
He has a cat named Ozone. It's all white except for a gray diamond on it's forehead. "I think I'm in love with his cat," she said.
o·zone
/ˈōˌzōn/
noun: ozone
a colorless unstable toxic gas with a pungent odor and powerful oxidizing properties, formed from oxygen by electrical discharges or ultraviolet light. It differs from normal oxygen (O2) in having three atoms in its molecule (O3).
short for ozone layer.
informal
fresh invigorating air, especially that blowing onto the shore from the sea.
Tarragon Man
"Yes. Swimming is great. I am 72. I swim 2 miles most days. I took up serious swimming at age 60...after having a double bypass. I am in Florida for the winter and the pool is about 500 feet from our condo.
Life is so much more fun when you are healthy...and avoid sugar, all flour products, junk food, potatoes and other starches.
I swim with a snorkel and a diver's mask, so I don't get water up my nose, even when flipping at the ends of the pool."
Why
“When asked, "Why do you always wear black?", he said, "I am mourning for my life.”
― Anton Chekhov
Fine Weather
“What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.”
― Anton Chekhov
Ask Questions
“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
― Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Day-to-Day
“Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
― Anton Chekhov
Alive
“Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies only the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
Show Me
“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov
a letter to Nikolay
“Civilized people must, I believe, satisfy the following criteria:
1) They respect human beings as individuals and are therefore always tolerant, gentle, courteous and amenable ... They do not create scenes over a hammer or a mislaid eraser; they do not make you feel they are conferring a great benefit on you when they live with you, and they don't make a scandal when they leave. (...)
2) They have compassion for other people besides beggars and cats. Their hearts suffer the pain of what is hidden to the naked eye. (...)
3) They respect other people's property, and therefore pay their debts.
4) They are not devious, and they fear lies as they fear fire. They don't tell lies even in the most trivial matters. To lie to someone is to insult them, and the liar is diminished in the eyes of the person he lies to. Civilized people don't put on airs; they behave in the street as they would at home, they don't show off to impress their juniors. (...)
5) They don't run themselves down in order to provoke the sympathy of others. They don't play on other people's heartstrings to be sighed over and cosseted ... that sort of thing is just cheap striving for effects, it's vulgar, old hat and false. (...)
6) They are not vain. They don't waste time with the fake jewellery of hobnobbing with celebrities, being permitted to shake the hand of a drunken [judicial orator], the exaggerated bonhomie of the first person they meet at the Salon, being the life and soul of the bar ... They regard prases like 'I am a representative of the Press!!' -- the sort of thing one only hears from [very minor journalists] -- as absurd. If they have done a brass farthing's work they don't pass it off as if it were 100 roubles' by swanking about with their portfolios, and they don't boast of being able to gain admission to places other people aren't allowed in (...) True talent always sits in the shade, mingles with the crowd, avoids the limelight ... As Krylov said, the empty barrel makes more noise than the full one. (...)
7) If they do possess talent, they value it ... They take pride in it ... they know they have a responsibility to exert a civilizing influence on [others] rather than aimlessly hanging out with them. And they are fastidious in their habits. (...)
8) They work at developing their aesthetic sensibility ... Civilized people don't simply obey their baser instincts ... they require mens sana in corpore sano.
And so on. That's what civilized people are like ... Reading Pickwick and learning a speech from Faust by heart is not enough if your aim is to become a truly civilized person and not to sink below the level of your surroundings.
[From a letter to Nikolay Chekhov, March 1886]”
― Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters
A Sweating Horse
“You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.”
― Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.
-Anton Chekhov
Discoveries
Our coffee maker finally died yesterday after 24 years. Today I am making a pot pour-over coffee and it is delicious BLACK. Maybe this will be my new method.
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Three Loaves of Sourdough
I just baked three sourdough wheat corn oat rye bread. The house is filled with the delicious aroma.
Dream
I dreamed I was visiting friends in Prague and they were having a party in their apartment. I had three small loaves baking in their crowded oven filled with other foods guests had brought to bake. I locked their apartment door because in the dream there was a war going on and we didn't want any surprises.
Fionnuala Walsh
Fionnuala Walsh: 'Long distance swimming is meditation'
The only Irish female holder of the Triple Crown of open water swimming is looking for a new goal
“Some people want to be astronauts, some people want to climb Everest or be mathematicians and I wanted to swim the English Channel.”
“Taking on something like that is absolutely massive. Not only does it affect you, it affects your family and your friends.
“On top of swimming, you need to be sure that you are also doing strengthening and conditioning, and you need to do yoga to make sure you are getting enough stretching.
“You have to eat well and you have to eat enough so that you have got enough energy.
“Basically your whole world revolves around swimming. And on top of that, you have to work.”
“Swimming is meditation,” she says, “if you work really, really hard, at the end of a 10 or 12-hour day, there is nothing more enjoyable than to go for a swim, ideally in the sea.”
Her next challenge might be a round Ireland swim, she says, a feat never accomplished by a single, open water swimmer but something, she says, that would take years of commitment: “There are lots of people who talk about swimming around Ireland, but they don’t talk about doing it under Channel Swimming rules. It’s never been done as a solo. I would love to do that.”
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/get-swimming/fionnuala-walsh-long-distance-swimming-is-meditation-1.2468607
Swimming
This focus on timing when to breathe also gives swimming a yoga-like quality: all you’re thinking about in the water is getting a good lungful while all you can hear is air bubbles passing by your ears. It’s very peaceful and, as you’re not aware of anything else happening around you, your mind tends to empty itself of life’s stresses and strains. So, coming out of the water, even after a long swim, you feel a good deal more relaxed than when you went in.
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/get-swimming/fitness-50-lengths-a-lunchbreak-secrets-of-a-regular-swimmer-1.2108398
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
I Love Broccoli
I love broccoli! After swimming today I chopped a bunch of broccoli crowns into florets and put them in my skillet turned up the heat and then added some olive oil. I tossed the broccoli florets to distribute them in the oil. Then I added a chicken bullion cube dissolved in 6 oz of boiling water and added it to the broccoli and covered it to steam it a few minutes. I like the broccoli when it's bright green, flavorful and slightly aldente (with bite).
Ice Rink
For our the next heat wave I promise to find my way to the nearest ice-rink and skate until my toes are numb and cramped and I am dying for warmth.
Raymond Burns Poem
Personal Effects
by Raymond Burns
The lawyer told him to write a letter
to accompany the will, to prevent
potential discord over artifacts
valued only for their sentiment.
His wife treasures a watercolor by
her father; grandmama's spoon stirs
their oatmeal every morning. Some
days, he wears his father's favorite tie.
He tries to think of things that
could be tokens of his days:
binoculars that transport
bluebirds through his cataracts
a frayed fishing vest with
pockets full of feathers brightly
tied, the little fly rod he can still
manipulate in forest thickets,
a sharp-tined garden fork,
heft and handle fit for him,
a springy spruce kayak paddle,
a retired leather satchel.
He writes his awkward note,
trying to dispense with grace
some well-worn clutter easily
discarded in another generation.
But what he wishes to bequeath
are items never owned: a Chopin
etude wafting from his wife's piano
on the scent of morning coffee
seedling peas poking into April,
monarch caterpillars infesting
milkweed leaves, a light brown
doe alert in purple asters
a full moon rising in October,
hunting-hat orange in ebony sky,
sunlit autumn afternoons that flutter
through the heart like falling leaves.
- Raymond Byrnes, published in Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Poetry Anthology. © Split Rock Review, 2018.
How do You Steal a Republic?
“How do you steal a Republic? By convincing its people that they cannot govern themselves—that freedom is their enemy and that fear is their ally.”
― Chuck Wendig, Life Debt
Essence
“You grab the core essence of a true problem and swaddle it in the mad glittery ribbons of fantasy — and therein you find glorious new permutations of conflict. Reality expressed in mind-boggling ways. Reach for fantasy. Find the reality.”
― Chuck Wendig
Question Marks
“Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason: they will hook the reader and drag them deeper into the story.”
― Chuck Wendig
Dialogue
“Dialogue is a little bit jazz, a little bit hand-to-hand combat.”
― Chuck Wendig, 250 Things You Should Know About Writing
Stories
“Stories have the power to make people feel. To give a shit. To change their opinions. To change the world.”
― Chuck Wendig, 250 Things You Should Know About Writing
Stories are like Wine
“Stories are like wine; they need time. So take the time. This isn’t a hot dog eating contest. You’re not being judged on how much you write but rather, how well you do it. Sure, there’s a balance — you have to be generative, have to be swimming forward lest you sink like a stone and find remora fish mating inside your rectum. But generation and creativity should not come at the cost of quality. Give your stories and your career the time and patience it needs.”
― Chuck Wendig
The Way
“If you want to find the way forward, then stop looking for maps and start walking.”
― Chuck Wendig
Head like a Wrecking Ball
“Gotta have a head like a wrecking ball, a spirit like one of them punching clown dummies that always weeble-wobbles back up to standing. This takes time. Stories need to find the right home, the right audience. Stick with it. Quitting is for sad pandas.”
― Chuck Wendig, 250 Things You Should Know About Writing
High-Five
“Creativity needs time. We’re all dying. Fuck stagnation. High-five creation.”
― Chuck Wendig
Chuck Wendig
“Writers are made--forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and insecurities--over the course of many, many moons. The writer you are when you begin is not the same as the writer you become.”
― Chuck Wendig, 250 Things You Should Know About Writing
Drawing Blood
When my doctor told me I had to have a routine blood test, and that I had to fast for ten hours beforehand, I panicked. "You're asleep 8 of the ten hours," my husband reminded me.
When I walked into the kitchen this morning I looked at the clock and remembered that my last food was an apple I ate at 9PM. If I skipped my morning coffee and breakfast I could get the test today. I googled the location of the blood lab. There's one right here in town and it opens at 7AM. I went upstairs and woke up my husband. "If we get over there I can have the blood test and be done," I said, already feeling woozy from no calories. "Okay," my husband said getting out of bed. "I guess this is why hunger strikers drink water," I said as I packed water and a banana for the half-mile ride home.
When I walked into the kitchen this morning I looked at the clock and remembered that my last food was an apple I ate at 9PM. If I skipped my morning coffee and breakfast I could get the test today. I googled the location of the blood lab. There's one right here in town and it opens at 7AM. I went upstairs and woke up my husband. "If we get over there I can have the blood test and be done," I said, already feeling woozy from no calories. "Okay," my husband said getting out of bed. "I guess this is why hunger strikers drink water," I said as I packed water and a banana for the half-mile ride home.
Dream
I know my mood is lifting when I have word dreams.
I dreamed three words:
Manhole, cockpit, pussywillow.
I dreamed three words:
Manhole, cockpit, pussywillow.
Monday, July 22, 2019
The Muse
I may write for two weeks “the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.” And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, “Okay. Okay. I’ll come."
MAYA ANGELOU
Beth Kephart
“Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.”
― Beth Kephart
City Scene
I glanced out the window and I saw a man in the parking lot showing a 10 year old kid how to use a rifle. The man wore a red bandana on his head. I watched him place three mountain dew soda cans on the tailgate of the trailer out back. Then he brought out a wooden kitchen chair from the apartment and placed the gun on top to steady his aim and fired a shot. I yelled for my husband to come see. "That's the kid, the juvenile delinquent who was setting fires. The man is showing him how to fire a gun."
"Call the police," my husband said.
"Call the police," my husband said.
Philtrum
Philtrum - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philtrum
For humans and most primates, the philtrum survives only as a vestigial medial depression between the nose and upper lip. The human philtrum, bordered by ridges, also is known as the infranasal depression, but has no apparent function.
Garrison Keillor
The taste of tomatoes eaten off the vine and the pleasure of shade in the midst of brilliance. To change the world, you must start out by loving it. It’s fine to march but don’t forget to dance.
This is the good life as I know it, a day of work followed by a conversation with my lover in the shade of the backyard, feasting on salad.
-Garrison Keillor
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Cooking and Baking
I am baking granola today in spite of the heat wave. I pressure cooked a pot of basmati brown rice.
Then I made a carrot salad in the pressure cooker adding a homemade vinaigrette (olive oil, red-wine vinegar, mustard, hot 'rooster' sauce, Adobo, salt, sugar) to cook into the carrots + a few onions. Afterwards I added dill weed. Delicious hot or cold.
Then I made a carrot salad in the pressure cooker adding a homemade vinaigrette (olive oil, red-wine vinegar, mustard, hot 'rooster' sauce, Adobo, salt, sugar) to cook into the carrots + a few onions. Afterwards I added dill weed. Delicious hot or cold.
Emotional Discovery
“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
Alice Miller
“The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.”
― Alice Miller
Refreshing
Our YMCA pool was nice and cool today. It was most refreshing and delicious in the heat wave.
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
The Pain
“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
Ram Dass Quotes
“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
“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
“The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.”
― Ram Dass
“Be here now.”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now
“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
“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
“The next message you need is always right where you are.”
― 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 only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now
“We're here to awaken from the illusion of separateness”
― Ram Dass, How Can I Help? Stories and Reflection on Service
The Details
“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
― Ernest Hemingway
Defeat
“But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
The Fall
“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Hemingway
“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
War
“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference
Ready
“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Give that to People
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
― Ernest Hemingway
True
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway
Vulnerable
“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”
― Ernest Hemingway
Use It!
“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.”
― Ernest Hemingway
Strong
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
― Ernest Hemingway
Superior
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway
You Can't
“You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Heat Wave Ice Skating
Did you know Mount Saint Charles Adelard Arena ICE RINK will be open tomorrow morning as a cooling station? I am sooooooo curious to go see if anyone will be skating!
Amounting to Nothing
I have this terrible fear that I will amount to nothing. That was the threat my mother made to me when I phoned home at age 20 to tell her I loved my job washing dishes at a fancy Italian restaurant. "You won't amount to anything if you like washing dishes," she snapped.
I still love washing dishes every morning before I start my day.
Have I amounted to anything?
I still love washing dishes every morning before I start my day.
Have I amounted to anything?
“The game is not about becoming somebody, it’s about becoming nobody.”
Ram Dass
Heat Blizzard
We are having what I call the heat blizzard. When I lived in North Carolina this was typical summer weather. I called it the heat blizzard because it was just as difficult to walk to the end of your driveway to get the mail as when there was a blizzard.
Dream
I was in NYC. A woman was demonstrating her skills on a trapeze set up in her apartment. There were a few of us there watching when she fell flat on her back. I went up to her and asked would you like me to call an EMT. "Yes please" she said. Her dog was there, a big husky. I brought him over to comfort her until medics arrived. "He can stay with my doorman's family," she said referring to the dog. "They have taken care of him before." I imagined the dog living with other people for a while. She seemed very distant from her pet. "But you'll be home tonight, wouldn't you want him with you?"
Friday, July 19, 2019
Summer Iced Tea
Tetley black tea (three teabags) brewed with (one teabag) Celestial Seasoning's Black Cherry Berry herb tea cooled and combined (halved) with apple cider makes a fabulous iced tea.
I've discovered that this tea is even better diluted with lots of ice especially during a heat wave!
I've discovered that this tea is even better diluted with lots of ice especially during a heat wave!
Crazy Heat
Today after an early morning of rescue-the-sprouting-potatoes I made my favorite German potato salad using my pressure cooker. I was on a roll and I steamed kale, hard-boiled eggs and brown basmati rice. Then I went swimming and I felt calm and centered. When I returned home I decided to wash the sheets. I love hanging them up on the line in the crazy heat because I know they will dry in minutes.
Philip Roth
You begin every book as an amateur.... Gradually, by writing sentence after sentence, the book, as it were, reveals itself to you.... Each and every sentence is a revelation.
PHILIP ROTH
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Truth
“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
The Stories
I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there’s a house under there, and I’m pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That’s how I feel. It’s like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: ‘If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK."
STEPHEN KING
Oscar Hijuelos
Writing is not an easy thing to do day after day. You need a sort of physical energy as you get older. You gain insight, but you’ve lost energy.
OSCAR HIJUELOS
Friendship
“Time doesn't take away from friendship, nor does separation.”
― Tennessee Williams, Memoirs
Refuge
My work is emotionally autobiographical. It has no relationship to the actual events of my life, but it reflects the emotional currents of my life. I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you’re going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Orhan Pamuk
For me, a good day is a day like any other, when I have written one page well. Except for the hours I spend writing, life seems to me to be flawed, deficient, and senseless.
ORHAN PAMUK
The Individual
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don’t give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Jessica Grose
Being around people who were not my people made me feel lonelier than being alone.
-Jessica Grose
Each of Us
“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Ursula K LeGuin
“I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.”
― Ursula K LeGuin
Participate
“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
True
“Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
Not Knowing
“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Imagination
“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
In Your Spirit
“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
The Treason of the Artist
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Remade
“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
Eaten by Dragons
“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
We Read
“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin
The Journey
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Arundhati Roy
I am a teller of stories. For me, that’s the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.
ARUNDHATI ROY
Ursula Le Guin
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well, they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
URSULA LE GUIN
Distance
As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.
WILLIAM TREVOR
Anaïs Nin
The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.
ANAÏS NIN
Pool Party
Yesterday I filled the blue plastic kiddie pool with water and I threw in the three squeak toys I had just purchased. Romeo cocked his head when I made them squeak. He'd step into the pool, fish one out, then prance around squeaking it. Each toy had a different pitch of squeak. The sound would distort inside Romeo's mouth. My husband laughed so hard he was crying. He joined in, grabbing a toy making it squeak and tossing it in the air. Romeo jumped up and caught it. I stood barefoot in the pool to stay cool, rinsing off the mud and slime from the toys as they landed.