Anais Nin

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anais Nin

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
― Anais Nin

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin 

Apples of the Earth and Tree

 I fried the last two onions of 2020 in olive oil and added leftover cooked cubed potatoes and frozen spinach and Adobo and bloops of Chianti and salt and it was good. End of the year contents of fridge supper.

 Then I took the leftover cooked Irish oatmeal and made a sourdough oat corn wheat rye to bake tomorrow.

 Now we're making a vat of applesauce from 4 varieties of ripe apples; Baldwins Empires Cortlands Spencers.  We pressure cooked the vat of apples for 5 minutes. Then we used our food mill to separate the skins and cores. 

We finally wore out the food mill. I believe she's processed over 100 gallons in her life. She was showing signs of cracking. So we're using a strainer and wooden spoon and it's working.

Jean Valentine

 "Sound is everything to me." 

—Jean Valentine

 "So if you want to help an artist, give them some silence." 

—Jean Valentine

Fernanda Santos

Usually, this time is a period to reflect and to set intentions for the year that’s about to begin. Many people can’t wait for this year to be over, as though ditching the 2020 calendar would wipe away the pain and sacrifice of the past 12 months. I’m not fond of 2020, but I don’t hope that time would pass any faster than usual. The experience of losing my husband and, eventually, finding myself again after his death taught me how precious time is. I want to spend all of mine wisely.

Fernanda Santos

Kate Cohen

Now I meet colleagues via video chat, where — depending on the platform — I am a disembodied face, a name or even just my initials. No longer am I a physical being with a size, weight and questionable wardrobe; I am my voice, my ideas, my work.

Kate Cohen

Superstitions

Here

Perfect

the lady with the perfect body showed up at the pool again this morning

I didn't think anyone really looked like that. 

 

she keeps to herself 

I can't decide if she is stuck up or shy.

 

perhaps shy. 

 

I say hello

she smiles and says hello back.

 

she works remotely from home for an insurance company 

her voice has notes of bored sarcasm in it

as if she's sick of people thinking she is flawless and beautiful.

 

I got up at 4AM for decades, she said, it would be nice to sleep in.

 

she gets out and buries her face in her yellow towel

slowly dries off like a cat

and vanishes.

Kim Addonizio

 "Dead Girls" by Kim Addonizio

Hayden Saunier

How to Move In  (poem)

Day Players in the Makeup Trailer  (poem)

14 Degrees Below Zero in the Grocery Store Parking Lot  (poem)

more poems

Mark O'Connell

Self-doubt is the best friend and the worst enemy of the writer. Because being a writer isn’t like being a tennis player or a boxer, where you presumably have to hunt down and ruthlessly eliminate the source of any flickering shadow of suspicion that you might not be destined for victory. As a writer, you have to take your own misgivings seriously; you have to attend, now and then, to the little voice in your head or the booming baritone in your gut that wishes you to know that what you are writing is entirely without value. The trick, of course, is to know when to listen to it and when to tell it to shut its stupid fat face.

MARK O’CONNELL

Pool Ladies

Yesterday we stepped into the driveway to go to the pool at 6AM and we were surprised. We had forgotten the car was in the shop, so we turned around and went inside and I made toast.

"So you feel if you're late you might as well be really late?" my husband asked.

 "I feel like I need something in my belly before we walk."

 After toast Bill and Romeo walked me to the pool in the dark and abandoned downtown. We did see a few zombies.

 

When we arrived the girl at the front desk said, "I was worried!" The ladies in the pool said, "We were worried about you!" I told them that I forgot my car was in the shop,  and so I walked. Everybody thought that was hilarious.

 

Today Margo offered to pick me up at 5:45 since it was going to be 16 degrees out and windy. I accepted. At 5:30 I thought, "She'll be right on time I'd better be ready."  I gathered my swim bag and coat at the  door. At 5:44 I stepped onto the porch ready to go. She arrived at exactly 5:45, didn't see me up on the porch, and started to pull away. I came down the stairs and hailed her.

"Where were you?" she said. "I had to look up at the moon," I replied, which was true.

"Oh I love the moon, I talk to her," she said.

"Of course you do," I said, smiling in the dark as we drove away.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

The First

The first wealth is health. 

 Ralph Waldo Emerson

To Be Yourself

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

 Ralph Waldo Emerson

Montaigne

Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom; whoever writes about it merely respectfully and by rule leaves more than half of it behind. 

Montaigne

Louise Erdrich

 "Sorry eats time, be patient. Time eats sorrow." 

—Louise Erdrich.

Madeline L'Engle

I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.

MADELEINE L’ENGLE

Roxanne Gay

Amazing article by Roxanne Gay

After two sessions, I decided to try someone else. He was a brash, handsome older man who got under my skin, forcing me to face uncomfortable truths, forcing me to get comfortable with feeling my feelings — something I’ve avoided for most of my life. At some point during many of our sessions, he says, “You’re mad at me,” and I pretend I am not and he knows I am lying, and onward we go, doing the necessary work of breaking me down so that, someday, I might build myself back up again.

I had weight-loss surgery, but I am still the same person who went under the knife. I still have that yawning cavern inside of me that I want to fill with food, only now I cannot fill it with food. I’m rarely hungry, but I am ravenous. Want continues to rage desperately beneath the surface of my skin. I turned to food when I was sad and happy and lonely and scared and anxious. I turned to food, and away from everything else; it was my comfort and my friend. Food helped me survive something I did not think I would survive. Food numbed the uncomfortable feelings I very much did not want to feel.

And then, that comfort was gone. I’ve lost the best friend I never had the courage to acknowledge but who was my constant, loyal companion nonetheless. I am left holding the shattered pieces of whatever has been left behind, trying to assemble them into something new, something that serves me better.

Fisherman's Wife

 He is the old fisherman’s wife who wished for everything and sooner or later he will end up with nothing. The wife sitting in front of her hovel was poorer after her series of wishes, because she now owned not only her poverty but her mistakes and her destructive pride, because she might have been otherwise, but brought power and glory crashing down upon her, because she had made her bed badly and was lying in it.  

-Rebecca Solnit article

The American Buffoon

The American buffoon’s commands were disobeyed, his secrets leaked at such a rate his office resembled the fountains at Versailles or maybe just a sieve (this spring there was an extraordinary piece in the Washington Post with thirty anonymous sources), his agenda was undermined even by a minority party that was not supposed to have much in the way of power, the judiciary kept suspending his executive orders, and scandals erupted like boils  and sores. Instead of the dictator of the little demimondes of beauty pageants, casinos, luxury condominiums, fake universities offering fake educations with real debt, fake reality tv in which he was master of the fake fate of others, an arbiter of all worth and meaning, he became fortune’s fool. 

-Rebecca Solnit article

A True Tyrant

A true tyrant does not depend on cooperative power but has a true power of command, enforced by thugs, goons, Stasi, the SS, or death squads. A true tyrant has subordinated the system of government and made it loyal to himself rather than to the system of laws or the ideals of the country. This would-be tyrant didn’t understand that he was in a system where many in government, perhaps most beyond the members of his party in the legislative branch, were loyal to law and principle and not to him. His minion announced the president would not be questioned, and we laughed. He called in, like courtiers, the heads of the FBI, of the NSA, and the director of national intelligence to tell them to suppress evidence, to stop investigations and found that their loyalty was not to him. He found out to his chagrin that we were still something of a democracy, and that the free press could not be so easily stopped, and the public itself refused to be cowed and mocks him earnestly at every turn.

-Rebecca Solnit article

This One Imagined

This one imagined that the power would repose within him and make him great, a Midas touch that would turn all to gold. But the power of the presidency was what it had always been: a system of cooperative relationships, a power that rested on people’s willingness to carry out the orders the president gave, and a willingness that came from that president’s respect for rule of law, truth, and the people. A man who gives an order that is not followed has his powerlessness hung out like dirty laundry. One day earlier this year, one of this president’s minions announced that the president’s power would not be questioned. There are tyrants who might utter such a statement and strike fear into those beneath him, because they have installed enough fear. 

-Rebecca Solnit article

A Man Who Wished

A man who wished to become the most powerful man in the world, and by happenstance and intervention and a series of disasters was granted his wish. Surely he must have imagined that more power meant more flattery, a grander image, a greater hall of mirrors reflecting back his magnificence. But he misunderstood power and prominence. This man had bullied friends and acquaintances, wives and servants, and he bullied facts and truths, insistent that he was more than they were, than it is, that it too must yield to his will. It did not, but the people he bullied pretended that it did. Or perhaps it was that he was a salesman, throwing out one pitch after another, abandoning each one as soon as it left his mouth. A hungry ghost always wants the next thing, not the last thing. 

-Rebecca Solnit article

Equality Keeps us Honest

 Equality keeps us honest. Our peers tell us who we are and how we are doing, providing that service in personal life that a free press does in a functioning society. Inequality creates liars and delusion. The powerless need to dissemble—that’s how slaves, servants, and women got the reputation of being liars—and the powerful grow stupid on the lies they require from their subordinates and on the lack of need to know about others who are nobody, who don’t count, who’ve been silenced or trained to please. This is why I always pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation. When you don’t hear others, you don’t imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters. This is about a need for which we hardly have language or at least not a familiar conversation.

-Rebecca Solnit article

Rebecca Solnit

 Some use their power to silence that and live in the void of their own increasingly deteriorating, off-course sense of self and meaning. It’s like going mad on a desert island, only with sycophants and room service. It’s like having a compliant compass that agrees north is whatever you want it to be. The tyrant of a family, the tyrant of a little business or a huge enterprise, the tyrant of a nation. Power corrupts, and absolute power often corrupts the awareness of those who possess it. Or reduces it: narcissists, sociopaths, and egomaniacs are people for whom others don’t exist. 

-Rebecca Solnit 

source

Rebecca Solnit

The man in the white house sits, naked and obscene, a pustule of ego, in the harsh light, a man whose grasp exceeded his understanding, because his understanding was dulled by indulgence. He must know somewhere below the surface he skates on that he has destroyed his image, and like Dorian Gray before him, will be devoured by his own corrosion in due time too. One way or another this will kill him, though he may drag down millions with him. One way or another, he knows he has stepped off a cliff, pronounced himself king of the air, and is in freefall. Another dungheap awaits his landing; the dung is all his; when he plunges into it he will be, at last, a self-made man. 

- Rebecca Solnit

 source

Aimee Mann

“Some people look away, but I believe facing it is what makes it get better. It’s what you don’t know that hurts you the most. I’m a person who wants to know.” 

— Aimee Mann

Rebecca Solnit

"We gain awareness of ourselves and others from setbacks and difficulties; we get used to a world that is not always about us; and those who do not have to cope with that are brittle, weak, unable to endure contradiction, convinced of the necessity of always having one’s own way. The rich kids I met in college were flailing as though they wanted to find walls around them, leapt as though they wanted there to be gravity and to hit ground, even bottom, but parents and privilege kept throwing out safety nets and buffers, kept padding the walls and picking up the pieces, so that all their acts were meaningless, literally inconsequential. They floated like astronauts in outer space." 

Rebecca Solnit

source

Steve Edwards Poem

Driving at Night

Every house has a story.
Every house aches. 
I could park 
in the driveway & be 
someone else a minute.
Walk through the front door
saying, "It's me!" 
& half-believe I'm home.
Light that makes everyone
beautiful, spilling 
from kitchen windows 
onto lawns. Bare bulb
hung in the garage, 
the Corvette no one drives
under its tarp. 
Every house weeps. 
Every house leans 
toward the tree-line, listening
to crickets, or the creek,
or the dog down the street
baying at the stars.
Every house hates itself.
Every house watches me
drive by & begs:
Please, take me with you.
As many as I can, I do—
though I can't save them.

Steve Edwards@The_Big_Quiet

Icelandic word

HUNDSLAPPADRÍFA is an Icelandic word for especially heavy snowfall. It literally means ‘snowflakes as large as dogs’ paws’.

David Crow

“Language could be used as an instrument of control, a way of establishing hierarchies that suggest one set of people is better or more special than another. Through language, one automatically identifies one's place within a social and cultural hierarchy and we all carry with us illogical attitudes about the bearers of particular language, based on our own cultural background and continued exposure to local political ideals.”
― David Crow, Left to Right: The Cultural Shift from Words to Pictures: The Cultural Shift from Word to Image

Symbolic Embodiment

“It was held that the six great arts – visual art (including architecture and photography), drama, dance, music, film and literature – form a family of related, if largely autonomous, practices: they all work through the aesthetic, all address the imagination, and all are concerned with the symbolic embodiment of human meaning.”
― Peter Abbs

Peter Abbs

“Paradoxically, our imperial global Anglo-American language is dull with the glitter of its own decay. In response, the new meta- physical poet might consider the following cleansing strategies: keep faith with the canonical writers of the past, study Homeric Greek, excavate etymologies, embrace threatened languages, practice the fine art of translation, listen regularly to the musical flow of the breath and the beat of the heart, switch off the television, become a votary of silence.

Here lies the beginning of freedom.”
― Peter Abbs, Against the Flow: The Arts, Postmodern Culture and Education

Barry Lopez Wisdom

In conversations over the years with other writers and artists, about what we're actually supposed to be doing, I've been struck by how often, deep down, the talk becomes a quest for the same mysterious thing. Underneath the particular image in question, the particular short story or musical composition, we're looking for a source of hope. When a conversation about each other's work doesn't pivot on professional jargon or drift toward the logistics of career management, when it's instead deferential and accommodating, we're sometimes able to locate a kind of Rosetta stone, a key to living well with the vexing and intractable nature of human life. If any wisdom emerges in these conversations, it offers sudden clarification. It's the Grail shimmer. You feel it, and you can't wait to get to work.

 

BARRY LOPEZ

Rebecca Solnit

 I have often run across men (and rarely, but not never, women) who have become so powerful in their lives that there is no one to tell them when they are cruel, wrong, foolish, absurd, repugnant. In the end there is no one else in their world, because when you are not willing to hear how others feel, what others need, when you do not care, you are not willing to acknowledge others’ existence. That’s how it’s lonely at the top. It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and they are buffered from the consequences of their failures.

Rebecca Solnit

article

Loretta LaRoche

 https://lorettalaroche.blog/2018/03/28/too-much-is-too-much/

Jack Kornfield

If you can sit quietly after difficult news; if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm; if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy; if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate; you can fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill; if you can always find contentment just where you are: you are probably a dog.

Jack Kornfield

Esther Freud's 7 Rules

 Esther Freud’s 7 Rules For Writing

1. Cut out the metaphors and similes. In my first book I promised myself I wouldn’t use any and I slipped up ­during a sunset in chapter 11. I still blush when I come across it.
2. A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn’t spin a bit of magic, it’s missing something.
3. Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more. What is left often springs into life.
4. Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won’t matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.
5. Don’t wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key.
6. Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they’ll know it too.
7. Never forget, even your own rules are there to be broken.

Source: The Guardian

The Good

 “Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.”

― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Thoughts

 “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.” 

― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Some Changes

“Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.”

― Eckhart Tolle

Give Up

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

Life

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.”

― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Zen Masters

 “I have lived with several Zen masters -- all of them cats.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Peace

“You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.”

― Eckhart Tolle

Eckhart Tolle

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

Real Beauty

 “Real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.”
― Barry Lopez

Bridge

 “For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.”
― Barry Lopez, About This Life

Stories

 “We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.”
― Barry Lopez

Arctic Dreams

“What does it mean to grow rich?
Is it to have red-blooded adventures and to make a ‘fortune,’ which is what brought the whalers and other entrepreneurs north?

Or is it, rather, to have a good family life and to be imbued with a far-reaching and intimate knowledge of one’s homeland, which is what the Tununirmiut told the whalers at Pond’s Bay wealth was?

Is it to retain a capacity for awe and astonishment in our lives, to continue to hunger after what is genuine and worthy? Is it to live at moral peace with the universe?”
― Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

How?

 “How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”

― Barry Lopez

Barry Lopez

“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”
― Barry Lopez

“Remember on this one thing, said Badger. The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves. ”
― Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel

“Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.”
― Barry Lopez

Dave Barry

Year in Review

Francis Bacon

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

Francis Bacon 

(and yes, France is bacon)

Good Morning

I woke up at 3 and knew I would because I went to sleep at 7. I came downstairs at 3:30 AM to let my dog out to pee and noticed a black suburban blocking the driveway. Three people got out, two men and a woman. The man and the woman crossed the street talking rapidly. The talking man patted his thigh to make sure he had the small package. Meanwhile the driver stayed behind and peed on the back rear tire before getting back into the drivers seat to wait.  It was all I could do to not walk down the driveway and get the license plate for the detectives. Don't, I told myself. Make some coffee and listen to the classical music  playing on the radio. They're probably drunk and high and you don't need to get involved at this hour."

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

 

“I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together. ”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre , Nausea

“My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
But you have to choose: live or tell.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where? To this very moment...”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.”
― Jean Paul Sartre, La náusea

“Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Little flashes of sun on the surface of a cold, dark sea.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I jump up: it would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns: "I have to fi. . . I ex. . . Dead . . . M. de Roll is dead . . . I am not ... I ex. . ." It goes, it goes . . . and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I. The body lives by itself once it has begun. But though I am the one who continues it, unrolls it. I exist. How serpentine is this feeling of existing, I unwind it, slowly. ... If I could keep myself from thinking! I try, and succeed: my head seems to fill with smoke . . . and then it starts again: "Smoke . . . not to think . . . don't want to think ... I think I don't want to think. I mustn't think that I don't want to think. Because that's still a thought." Will there never be an end to it?
My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think . . . and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment, it's frightful, if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence. Thoughts are born at the back of me, like sudden giddiness, I feel them being born behind my head ... if I yield, they're going to come round in front of me, between my eyes, and I always yield, the thought grows and grows and there it is, immense, filling me completely and renewing my existence.”
― Jean Paul Satre, Nausea

“I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been In the way. In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been In the way in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way: I was In the way for eternity.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I do not think, therefore I am a moustache”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mirror-and me. the true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts. It is true that I had realized a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But until then I had believed that it had simply gone out of my range. For me the past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state of vacation and inaction; each event, when it had played its part, put itself politely into a box and became an honorary event: we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be-and behind them... there is nothing.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness...and suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“She suffers as a miser. She must be miserly with her pleasures, as well. I wonder if sometimes she doesn't wish she were free of this monotonous sorrow, of these mutterings which start as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn't wish to suffer once and for all, to drown herself in despair. In any case, it would be impossible for her: she is bound.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I want
to vomit—and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Get Rid of Nausea

 16 ways

Romjul

The days between Christmas Eve (when we celebrate) and New Year's Eve is called "Romjul" in Norwegian. Great word that English needs.

 -Ole A. Imsen @Weirdmage

What does it translate as?

literally "yule space" basically "christmas adjacent"

source

We're Not Really Strangers

 Article

 and website

Hazards of the Holiday

food safety

Contradiction

“One must live in the middle of contradiction...There are simply no definitive answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.” 

Barry Lopez

Power of Observation

“It is through the power of observation, the gifts of eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place first rises up in our mind; afterward it is memory that carries the place…” 

- Barry Lopez, ‘The American Geographies’

out of your mind and into your heart

 stories

Amy Lowell

 The Letter

Amy Lowell - 1874-1925

Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper
Like draggled fly's legs,
What can you tell of the flaring moon
Through the oak leaves?
Or of my uncertain window and the bare floor
Spattered with moonlight?
Your silly quirks and twists have nothing in them
Of blossoming hawthorns,
And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth, virgin of loveliness
Beneath my hand.

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
And I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon.

Born in 1874, Amy Lowell was deeply interested in and influenced by the Imagist movement and she received the Pulitzer Prize for her collection What's O'Clock.

Paul Hollywood + San Francisco Sourdough

 Episode

The French Way of Eating

 Read

Alice McDermott

We're all there trying to make the story, novel, or chapter as good as it can be. It’s a constant struggle to get it down, get it clear, and understand that your intentions are the same, whether you’re an undergraduate writing a short story or a writer with seven published novels. The continually reassuring thing is that we’re all novices when we start a new work.

ALICE McDERMOTT

Cocktail Sauce

so good

Ghirardelli Brownies

 Recipe

Isobe Mochi

 Recipe

Pounding Mochi!! (video)

HOME Recipe

Sydney Ladensohn

 If I’m writing a book, I occasionally just abandon the problematic chapter and work on something else. I know I’ll have to return to it eventually, but sometimes the break makes for clearer thinking. 

-Sydney Ladensohn

Phoebe Martone

Since people are writing a lot about Christmas cookies, visions of cookies are floating in my head.

I've never been a cookie baker, so I usually buy high quality cookies when I can find them in the stores or bakery. I think I really should try to bake some. I love butter cookies and oatmeal cookies the best.

 

When I was a little kid, my mother tried to bake some chocolate cookies, and they burned. I can remember sitting on the floor on the linoleum, digging the dark cookies off a cooled-off cookie sheet and eating what I could salvage. I must have been 5 or 6 or 7.

 

Years later, whenever someone baked chocolate cookies, I was disappointed at the taste -- until, one day, somebody burned their chocolate cookies. Boy, those burned chocolate cookies tasted just right.

-Phoebe Martone

Martin Amis

I’m one of those terrible shits who works on Christmas  Day. It’s what I want to do. 

MARTIN AMIS

Orange Vanilla Pizzelles

 large recipe I have yet to try these!

Authentic Lemon Pizzelle

 Recipe source

• 3 large eggs
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup corn oil
• 1 tsp lemon extract (my adaptation)
  
• zest of 1 lemon (my adaptation)
  
• 1 1/4 cup flour
• 3/4 tsp baking powder
• pinch of salt

I prefer a lighter pizzelle -  35 to 40 seconds in the pizzelle iron.  We also made orange pizzelle using orange extract and orange zest in place of the lemon.  Next we will make anise and vanilla as per the author's recipe.

Nope

I'm so glad that Talkative Ed and Albert both mentioned their desire to slim down. It's not just women who are vain and frustrated in this department. Here's  Ed, a 78 year old man who lifts weights and swims and  61 year old Albert who is a groundskeeper at the hospital. Al loves to cook. I ran into Al 2x today the second time was at the supermarket and we talked about our favorite kitchen tools...Instantpot, for one. "My wife's making a cheesecake, I don't eat that stuff, " he said. "Not even a bite?" my husband asked. "Nope," he said.

Lindsey Heatherly Poem

"I would sit next to Ms. Martha in the church pew and how she always had peppermint gum and wore rings on every finger. How she would slide each one of them off her hands and let me try them on throughout the service."

 read Lindsey Heatherly's complete poem here.

Helen Pidd

When you are little, so much of life is new and strange that you quickly accept even the strangest things as being perfectly normal. But I remember thinking it was odd that so many of these very old women were clutching dollies and teddies, and also that they were draped in jewellery. Most of them had no family, received no visitors and were not able to go out to a shop, so a charity would send them beads and brooches, which they would wear over their nighties.

-Helen Pidd article

Dream

I dreamed Fauci visited WOONSOCKET.

Gregory Ferrand Art

https://gregoryferrand.com/

Smart Dog

This morning I was looking for ROMEO our dog's black KONG toy and after searching the house and the car I said "ROMEO where is your emoji? (We call it the poop emoji, because it looks just like that.) "Where is your toy?" And he went right over to it and found it. It was hidden behind a chair leg and sneakers.

Dream

I dreamed it was snowing through a hole in the ceiling of the bathroom. There were two very tall male detectives standing around inside the bathroom. It was all happening in the pink bathroom from my childhood, the one off my parents bedroom.

Walter Mosley

I wake up, write three hours—a thousand words. The next day, I reread that thousand words I wrote yesterday. And then I write my next thousand words. And that goes on and on, until I get to the end of the novel. If you write every day, the next day ideas have bubbled up from someplace that you had no idea was there.

WALTER MOSLEY

Capricorn

Capricorn Zodiac Sign Capricorn Horoscope

Element: Earth

Quality: Cardinal

Color: Brown, Black

Day: Saturday

Ruler: Saturn

Greatest Overall Compatibility: Taurus, Cancer

Lucky Numbers: 4, 8, 13, 22

Date range: December 22 - January 19

Capricorn traits

Strengths: Responsible, disciplined, self-control, good managers

Weaknesses: Know-it-all, unforgiving, condescending, expecting the worst

Capricorn likes: Family, tradition, music, understated status, quality craftsmanship

Capricorn dislikes: Almost everything at some point

Capricorn is a sign that represents time and responsibility, and its representatives are traditional and often very serious by nature. These individuals possess an inner state of independence that enables significant progress both in their personal and professional lives. They are masters of self-control and have the ability to lead the way, make solid and realistic plans, and manage many people who work for them at any time. They will learn from their mistakes and get to the top based solely on their experience and expertise.

Belonging to the element of Earth , like Taurus and Virgo, this is the last sign in the trio of practicality and grounding. Not only do they focus on the material world, but they have the ability to use the most out of it. Unfortunately, this element also makes them stiff and sometimes too stubborn to move from one perspective or point in a relationship. They have a hard time accepting differences of other people that are too far from their character, and out of fear might try to impose their traditional values aggressively.

Saturn is the ruling planet of Capricorn, and this planet represents restrictions of all kinds. Its influence makes these people practical and responsible, but also cold, distant and unforgiving, prone to the feeling of guilt and turned to the past. They need to learn to forgive in order to make their own life lighter and more positive.

Capricorn – the Goat of Fear A goat with the tail of a fish is created to face fear and create panic. It is the sign of decisions made to be protected from monsters in our minds, lives, and immediate physical surrounding. Always ready to transform into something that scares those scary things off, Capricorn speaks of each natural chain reaction of fear, where one scary thing leads to many others, rising up as defensive mechanisms that only make things worse. Immersed in their secrecy, they face the world just as they are – brave enough to never run away, but constantly afraid of their inner monsters.

Charles Mingus

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

 CHARLES MINGUS

Brenda Ueland

“No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.”
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

Aimee Bender

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language. If you write a page a day for 30 days, and you pick the parts where the language is working, plot and character will start to emerge organically. For me, plot and character emerge directly from the word—as opposed to having a light-bulb about a character or event. I just don’t work like that. Though I know some writers do, I can’t. I’ll think, Oh, I have an insight about the character, and when I’ll sit down to write, it feels extremely imposed and lasts for two minutes. I find I can write for two lines and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level, and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there’s something more to say. This means I’ve hit on something unconscious enough to write about—something with enough unknown in there to be brought out. On some level I can sense that, and it keeps me going.

AIMEE BENDER

Chocolate Walnut Tart

 My husband's students made this and it was delicious.

Timpano

Dr. Anthony Fauci's birthday is tomorrow --he's turning 80. Until this interview I'd never heard of the Italian delicacy, Timpano.

Timpano Alla Big Night (Drum of Ziti and Great Stuff)

https://www.recipelink.com/cookbooks/1999/0688159028_1.html

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/fauci-christmas-birthday-interview-covid/2020/12/22/b55ffb2e-3afd-11eb-98c4-25dc9f4987e8_story.html

https://www.prouditaliancook.com/2014/06/celebrating-timpano.html

Back in the Pool

 On returning to Swimming:

"It needs to be a low intensity ‘reacquaintance’ session where you are getting used to moving your body through water again and it is all low stress. The first week back in the water, whether pool or open water, should all just be 30-40 minutes of steady swimming, all at low intensity."

Article

Mary Oliver

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination”

 — Mary Oliver

Tom Stoppard

"Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little." 

― Tom Stoppard

Sandra Cisneros

"I think art is there to heal us, to transform that pain to enlightenment. I think that is what art is about." 

 — Sandra Cisneros

Jeanette Winterson

“I read more in the winter, write more, think more, sleep more. I don’t plan any of this – rather I don’t resist the seductions of darkness.” 

 — Jeanette Winterson

James Baldwin

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it. 

—James Baldwin

Natalie Goldberg

“Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.”

 — Natalie Goldberg

William Butler Yeats

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” 

 — William Butler Yeats

2 New Lindsey Heatherly Poems

 Here

The role of the artist

“The role of the artist, in part, is to develop the conversations, the stories, the drawings, the films, the music—the expressions of awe and wonder and mystery—that remind us, especially in our worst times, of what is still possible, of what we haven’t yet imagined. And it is by looking to one another, by attending to the responsibilities of maintaining good relations in whatever we do, that communities turn a gathering darkness into light.”

- Barry Lopez 

Barry Lopez

 "Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion."
- Barry Lopez

New Eyes

Once it’s done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you’re ready, pick it up and read it, as if you’ve never read it before. If there are things you aren’t satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision. 

NEIL GAIMAN

Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash: I've got a thing about trains

Train train train I've got a thing about trains
I get a sad kind of feeling when I see a passenger train
In this fast movin' world that we live in nobody rides 'em much these days
Maybe I'm a little sentimental cause I know that things have to change
But I'd still like to go for a train ride cause I've got a thing about trains

Train train train you're fading from the scene
But you've had your days of glory train train train

Train they say you're too slow for travelin' but I'm gonna miss you some day
When my little boy says daddy what was it like to ride a train
I'll just say it was a good way to travel when things didn't move quite so fast
And I'm sorry son that you can't ride one the trains are the thing of the past

Train train train you're fading from the scene
And I'm gonna mourn your passing train train train
I've got a thing about trains

Songwriter: Jack Clement Year: 1970 Album: "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash"

December 21, 2020

Today is the shortest day of the longest year.

God

@TheTweetOfGod

Remembering Tracy

Tracy, 

We ALL LOVED YOU.

You will be missed.

Obit

facing your deepest fears

 Writing is facing your deepest fears and all your failures, including how hard it is to write a lot of the time and how much you loathe what you’ve just written and that you’re the person who just committed those flawed sentences (many a writer, and God, I know I’m one, has worried about dying before the really crappy version is revised so that posterity will never know how awful it was). When it totally sucks, pause, look out the window (there should always be a window) and say, I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing.

REBECCA SOLNIT

Diana Nyad

 I have the pandemic to thank for this precious time with my old hound, Teddy

by Diana Nyad

Slum Landlord Issues

The neighbor tenant keeps their dog on their porch, serving as a yard. The dog pees on deck and it rolls off onto the tenants deck and yard below. These are slum-landlord issues!

Upside Down

 The amount of light entering the eye is controlled by the pupil, which is surrounded by the iris – the coloured part of the eye. Because the front part of the eye is curved, it bends the light, creating an upside down image on the retina. The brain eventually turns the image the right way up. source

Laura Kasischke

This is the glimpse of the god you were never supposed to get. Like the fox slipping into the thicket. Like the thief in the night outside the window. The cool gray dorsal fin in the distance. Invisible mountain briefly visible through the mist formed of love and guilt.

          And the stranger’s face hidden in the family picture. The one

          imagining her freedom...

read the complete poem

Laura Kasischke’s most recent collection of poetry, Space, in Chains, was published in 2011 by Copper Canyon Press. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan.

Dream

 I was teaching an art class. I told the students to bring in a pile of your favorite clothes, dump them on the floor and make a painting of them. Then bring in your most hated clothes and do the same. Feel the difference.

Christmas Elf

Today when we were leaving to walk Romeo we saw a young  girl in the middle of the street directing traffic. She was about age 20 a short and slender 90 pounds dressed as a Christmas elf. She wore red tights and a green mini skirt with little bells and a jester's hat and a candy cane mask. As we turned we saw a man face down on the pavement. He was wearing the gray and blue AMAZON delivery jacket and his delivery van was there with the driver's side door wide open. I ran back into the house  and called the rescue. We've got them on the way, thank you, dispatch said. When we arrived at the church parking lot 1/4 mile down the street we could hear the sirens. I hope he's okay.

Language

“Language is the only homeland.”
― Czesław Miłosz

When a Writer is Born

 “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

Robert Creely

I Know a Man

By Robert Creeley

As I sd to my   

friend, because I am   

always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his   

name, the darkness sur-

rounds us, what

can we do against

it, or else, shall we &

why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for   

christ’s sake, look   

out where yr going.

  University of California Press, Robert Creeley, “I Know a Man” from Selected Poems of Robert Creeley, copyright © 1991