The body is a sacred garment: it is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honour, and with joy and with fear as well. But always, though, with blessing.
Martha Graham, I Am A Dancer (1952)
Monday, October 31, 2022
The Body
Looking at the past
“Looking at the past is like lolling in a rocking chair. It is so relaxing and you can rock back and forth on the porch, and never go forward. ”
― Blood Memory
Think of the magic of the foot
“Think of the magic of the foot, comparatively small, upon which your whole weight rests. It's a miracle and the dance is a celebration of that miracle.”
―
Martha Graham
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others”―“Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are great because of their passion.”
―“What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.”
―“I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.”
―
Developing our Wings
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young
Out on the Edge
“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Player Piano
The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― A Man Without a Country
Upton Sinclair
“There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.”
― The Jungle
Sunday, October 30, 2022
We thought we were saving time
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it. Let’s take another familiar example from our own time. Over the last few decades, we have invented countless time-saving devices that are supposed to make life more relaxed – washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, telephones, mobile phones, computers, email. Previously it took a lot of work to write a letter, address and stamp an envelope, and take it to the mailbox. It took days or weeks, maybe even months, to get a reply. Nowadays I can dash off an email, send it halfway around the globe, and (if my addressee is online) receive a reply a minute later. I’ve saved all that trouble and time, but do I live a more relaxed life?
Sadly not. Back in the snail-mail era, people usually only wrote letters when they had something important to relate. Rather than writing the first thing that came into their heads, they considered carefully what they wanted to say and how to phrase it. They expected to receive a similarly considered answer. Most people wrote and received no more than a handful of letters a month and seldom felt compelled to reply immediately. Today I receive dozens of emails each day, all from people who expect a prompt reply. We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.― , Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins
“Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness begins within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.”
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
- Dopamine: Known as the “feel-good” hormone, dopamine is a neurotransmitter that’s an important part of your brain’s reward system. It’s associated with pleasurable sensations, along with learning, memory, and more.
- Serotonin: This hormone and neurotransmitter helps regulate your mood as well as your sleep, appetite, digestion, learning ability, and memory.
- Oxytocin: Often called the “love hormone,” oxytocin is essential for childbirth, breastfeeding, and strong parent-child bonding. It can also help promote trust, empathy, and bonding in relationships. Levels generally increase with physical affection.
- Endorphins: These hormones are your body’s natural pain reliever, which your body produces in response to stress or discomfort. Levels may also increase when you engage in reward-producing activities such as eating, working out, or having sex. https://www.healthline.com/health/happy-hormone
Sugar
“In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”
― Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
Each Year
“Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.”
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari
A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is. Yuval Noah Harari
Krishnamurti
Wisdom comes when there is the maturity of self-knowing. Without knowing oneself, order is not possible, and therefore there is no virtue. Krishnamurti
Marcus Aurelius
Be satisfied with even the smallest progress, and treat the outcome of it all as unimportant. Marcus Aurelius
Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife
“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”
― Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife
John Adams
“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”
― The Works Of John Adams, Second President Of The United States
A room without books is like a body without a soul
―“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
―“Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.”
―
Krishnamurti
“When the individual is in conflict within himself he must inevitably create conflict without, and only he can bring about peace within himself and so in the world, for he is the world.”
― The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti
Tolstoy
How to live your life is the only real knowledge. Leo Tolstoy
Life is constant movement, and therefore goodness in life is not a certain state, but the direction of movement. Leo Tolstoy
He who sees his life as a process of spiritual perfection does not fear external events. Leo Tolstoy
A person cannot have complete understanding of the meaning of life. A person can only know its direction. Leo Tolstoy
Life is the constant approach to death; therefore, life can be bliss only when death does not seem to be an evil. Leo Tolstoy
Your understanding of your inner self holds the meaning of your life, and it makes you free. Leo Tolstoy
Grow spiritually and help others to do so; it is the meaning of life. Leo Tolstoy
Saturday, October 29, 2022
Characters
Yesterday while walking downtown I saw a beat up white van pulling out of the Bank of America parking lot. There was a scruffy older man driving and a toothless woman in the passenger seat. On the dashboard was a gray cat sleeping in the sun, oblivious to the motion of the vehicle.
I saw a woman wearing thigh high black leather boots walking down the sidewalk sporting a witches hat. She probably works at the motorcycle shop.
Then I saw the woman who swaggers like a cowboy wearing her usual leopard-print stretch pants walking on Social Street.
A Cooking Animal
“My definition of man is a cooking animal. The beasts have memory, judgement, and the faculties and passions of our minds in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook.”
― The Journals, 1762-95“I am so fond of tea that I could write a whole dissertation on its virtues. It comforts and enlivens without the risks attendant on spirituous liquors. Gentle herb! Let the florid grape yield to thee. Thy soft influence is a more safe inspirer of social joy.”
― London Journal, 1762 - 1763
Patience
“A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.”―“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.”
― May Sarton
Half the world
“If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine--why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'?”
― Journal of a Solitude
food for thought, food to grow on
“In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.”“I can tell you that solitude
Is not all exaltation, inner space
Where the soul breathes and work can be done.
Solitude exposes the nerve,
Raises up ghosts.
The past, never at rest, flows through it.”
―
― At Seventy: A Journal
John Steinbeck: In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath, as well as East of Eden, and the novella, Of Mice and Men. The Grapes of Wrath also won a National Book Award and was made into a film in 1940.
During World War II, he wrote some government propaganda, most notably, The Moon Is Down, in 1942. The novel depicted the Norwegians under the Nazis. He also served as a war correspondent.
He wrote 27 books and five collections of short stories. Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
Here are six things you can learn from John Steinbeck on writing. These tips were included in a 1962 letter to the actor and writer Robert Wallsten. They were later included in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters.
John Steinbeck’s 6 Writing Tips
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
Forget your generalised audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theatre, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech. He finishes with ‘I know that no two people have the same methods. However, these mostly work for me.’ source
No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
we should remember our dying
It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
―
A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Beauty in Truth
“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”
― East of Eden“Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.”
―“There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”
― East of Eden“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
― Cannery Row
― East of Eden
“When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― East of Eden
Steinbeck
“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”
―“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”
― The Grapes of Wrath
It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.
“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.”
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
“I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.”
“All great and precious things are lonely.””
“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.”
“I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”
“When a child first catches adults out — when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just — his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
“To be alive at all is to have scars. ”
“Anything that just costs money is cheap.”
“It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.”
“I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.”
“Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”
“But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed – because ‘Thou mayest.”
“You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.”
“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.”
“I guess I’m trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.”
“For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more. And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have.”
“Don’t make everyone know about your sadness.”
“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself….A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
“It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.”
“Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.”
“You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.”
“He had an idea that even when beaten he could steal a little victory by laughing at defeat.”
“Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk.”
“No one wants advice – only corroboration. ”
“It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.”
“There’s a responsibility in being a person. It’s more than just taking up space where air would be.”
“Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.”
“Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.”
“Don’t you love Jesus?’ Well, I thought an’ I thought an’ finally I says, ‘No, I don’t know nobody name’ Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people.”
“It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.”
JOHN STEINBECK
be what no one else but you can be
The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been before.
Creativity in living is not without its attendant difficulties, for peculiarity breeds contempt. And the unfortunate thing about being ahead of your time is that when people finally realize you were right, they’ll say it was obvious all along. You have two choices in your life; you can dissolve into the mainstream, or you can be distinct. To be distinct, you must be different. To be different, you must strive to be what no one else but you can be . . . *
* By Alan Ashley-Pitt (Aardvarque Enterprises, 116 W. Arrellaga Street, Santa Barbara, California 93104).
The 1973 self-help book “The Wonderful Crisis of Middle Age” by Eda LeShan contained a discussion about creativity that included a version of the saying, and the author did not attribute the words to Albert Einstein. She stated that the quotation was from a poster she had seen, and in a footnote she identified Alan Ashley-Pitt as the creator: [2]
Friday, October 28, 2022
Stepping Out
When I stepped outside with Romeo pup I noticed a long ladder leaning against the second floor wall of the green house down the street. It was making a magnificent shadow.
When I got downtown I saw flashing lights. Three cars were stopped on the main road and two police cars had arrived. It looked like a three car pile up in front of Walgreen's.
On my way home I saw a lady wearing 50 skinny dyed braids. She pulled a stuffed animal out of a bag. It was a fuzzy squirrel. She was showing it to a man working at the car wash.
Back on my street my neighbor was walking towards me sporting magenta hair and wearing her famous red bathrobe over matching red knee-length leggings. She held a two-liter bottle of sugar free Coca Cola in her arms.
I love your colors, I said.
Thank you, dear!
Even your toenails are bright green.
And they glow in the dark, she said, holding out her green rhinestone-studded claws. I cupped my hand around her fingers to see.
Yes they do!
My grand-daughter loves them.
The Story
My baking yeast expired at the end of last month. I bake bread often and use my 22 year old sourdough starter along with the yeast. I was on the fence about whether to order new yeast. It comes in two one-pound blocks so I contacted another bread baking friend to give away one pound. He graciously accepted.
Then I read an article that said the old yeast is still good for 2 years but might be sluggish so I fished the old unopened one pound block out of the trash barrel which had already been wheeled to the street.
Now I have two blocks of yeast and I wonder which one to use. The new one or the old one. I feel like an idiot. I have tied myself into a knot of shame and frugality. And I knew I would. It's receive-mode, the introverted, self-doubt time of year.
Do I open and test the old yeast and see how alive it is or open the new one which expires in February? It doesn't really matter and yet in my mind it's a no-win situation. There's nothing left to do but laugh at myself.
Secrecy
“There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.”
― Joseph Pulitzer
Observe
“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”
― The Hound of the Baskervilles
Dr. Jonas Salk
It's the birthday of the man who developed the polio vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk, born in New York City (1914) who developed a polio vaccine at the height of a polio epidemic in the mid 1950s, when parents were so worried about their children that they kept them home from swimming pools in the summer. Salk's discovery was that a vaccine could be developed from a dead virus, and he tested the vaccine on himself, his family, and the staff of his laboratory to prove it was safe. The vaccine was finally released to the public in 1955, the number of people infected by polio went down from more than 10,000 a year to less than 100. Salk was declared a national hero. - The Writer's Almanac
Carolyn Knapp
“I loved the way drink made me feel, and I loved it's special power of deflection, it's ability to shift my focus away from my own awareness of self and onto something else, something less painful than my own feelings. I loved the sounds of drink: the slide of a cork as it eased out of a wine bottle, the distinct glug-glug of booze pouring into a glass, the clatter of ice cubes in a tumbler. I loved the rituals, the camaraderie of drinking with others, the warming, melting feeling of ease and courage it gave me.”
― Drinking: A Love Story“Addiction to alcohol is also a neurological phenomenon, the result of a complex set of molecular alterations that take place in the brain when it’s excessively and repeatedly exposed to the drug. The science of addiction is complicated, but the basic idea is fairly straightforward: alcohol appears to wreak havoc on the brain’s natural systems of craving and reward, compromising the functioning of the various neurotransmitters and proteins that create feelings of well-being.”
― Drinking: A Love Story
let in fresh air
“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.”
― Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami
And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
― Kafka on the Shore
“What happens when people open their hearts?" "They get better.”
“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment. ”
― Norwegian Wood
When the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready… The teacher will disappear.
Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.
To hold, you must first open your hand. Let go.
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
Stop thinking, and end your problems.
Stop leaving and you will arrive. Stop searching and you will see. Stop running away and you will be found.
Those who flow as life flows know they need no other force.
Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.
Become totally empty.
Quiet the restlessness of the mind
only then will you witness everything unfolding from emptiness.
If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot achieve.
Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream.
Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.
There is no illusion greater than fear.
– Lao Tzu
R. D. Laing
Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.
Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone.
R. D. Laing
There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain. R. D. Laing
“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”
―“They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game”
―
The Note
We drove past a silver Chevy Corvette parked on a lawn with a hand written note in the window. I wonder what it says, I said to my husband. I can guess.
Dear Buyer, I bought this midlife crisis mobile. It gets 20 miles per gallon but lemme tell ya, it's a total chick magnet. I have gone through five divorces with this baby. You have been warned.
Thursday, October 27, 2022
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.”
―
“Anything we fully do is an alone journey.”
―“Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.”
―“Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make it so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, or drop a jar of applesauce.”
―
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
― Writing Down the Bones“We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter. . . Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer's task to say, "It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home." Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.”
― Writing Down the Bones“If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.”
― Writing Down the Bones“I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me... I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life... I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I'll ever have.”
― Writing Down the Bones
“Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.”
―
the construction of a self
The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.
― Appetites: Why Women WantI'm still prone to periods of isolation, still more fearful of the world out there and more averse to pleasure and risk than I'd like to be; I still direct more energy toward controlling and minimizing appetites than toward indulging them.
― Appetites: Why Women WantThe freedom to choose...means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.
―
Unlike some people who love to go out, I love to stay home. Laurie Colwin
My idea of a good time abroad is to visit someone's house and hang out, poking into their cupboards if they will let me.The thing about homebodies is that they can usually be found at home. I usually am, and I like to feed people.
Cooking is like love. You don't have to be particularly beautiful or very glamorous, or even very exciting to fall in love. You just have to be interested in it. It's the same thing with food.
One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends.
Cooking is like anything else: some people have an inborn talent for it. Some become expert by practicing, and some learn from books.
The fact is that modern life has deprived us of life's one great luxury: time.
When I was alone, I lived on eggplant, the stove top cook's strongest ally. I fried it and stewed it, and ate it crisp and sludgy, hot and cold. It was cheap and filling and was delicious in all manner of strange combinations. If any was left over, I ate it cold the next day on bread.
Not everyone can write a book or paint a picture or write a symphony, but almost anyone can fall in love. There is something almost miraculous in that.
Somehow or other, I always end up in a kitchen feeding a crowd.
- Laurie Colwin
Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking
“In foreign countries I am drawn into grocery shops, supermarkets and kitchen supply houses. I explain this by reminding my friends that, as I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology, it is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.”
― Home Cooking
“Dinner alone is one of life’s pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.”
― Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen
Ginamarie's Chicken Soup
Soup is one thing I do make and with confidence. Chicken soup from scratch is my favorite, followed by lentil and pea. I too don't like fatty foods so no cream soups in my repertoire. I used to use the crock pot, the same crock pot given to me by Aunt Callie when I got engaged in 1978. But now I use a regular stove top soup pot because I prefer to saute the veggies and skim the fat which doesn't work in a crock pot.
Here's my chicken soup recipe.
Whole chicken - boiled with a bay leaf or two until it easily shreds. (or left over roasted chicken-carcass and all)
Carrots, celery, onions, garlic - all chopped and semi sauteed in olive oil with basil, oregano, rosemary, thyme, salt & pepper -- just until the colors of the veggies become bright.Shred the chicken, remove bay leaf and add the shredded chicken back to the stock.Add the semi-sauteed veggies to the chicken stock with a new bay leaf or two.Let simmer for a while - taste to see if you need more seasonings.If you need more liquid - add any organic chicken stock.A nice handful of fresh chopped parsley is added to the soup while it's cooking but close to serving time. You want the parsley to be cooked rather than raw. Adding a good amount of fresh chopped parsley, makes the soup taste bright - is the best way I can describe it.Serve with crusty bread.
Stay Brave
Every time I clip my dog Romeo's nails I feel victorious. I wear my reading glasses and he stands on the raised bed outdoors. I keep his treats on the table next to us, but out of reach. This is 99 percent of why it's no longer traumatic. I am no longer inside bent over to reach his paws on the dim bathroom floor. Outside the daylight is bright and I can see well. When he is standing above ground level I'm a bit closer to him. I snip a weensy bit off of each nail every week or two and we both stay brave.
Caroline Knapp
The dog’s agenda is simple, fathomable, overt: I want. “I want to go out, come in, eat something, lie here, play with that, kiss you. There are no ulterior motives with a dog, no mind games, no second-guessing, no complicated negotiations or bargains, and no guilt trips or grudges if a request is denied.
― Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and DogsDogs possess a quality that's rare among humans--the ability to make you feel valued just by being you--and it was something of a miracle to me to be on the receiving end of all that acceptance. The dog didn't care what I looked like, or what I did for a living, or what a train wreck of a life I'd led before I got her, or what we did from day to day. She just wanted to be with me, and that awareness gave me a singular sensation of delight. I kept her in a crate at night until she was housebroken, and in the mornings I'd let her up onto the bed with me. She'd writhe with joy at that. She'd wag her tail and squirm all over me, lick my neck and face and eyes and ears, get her paws all tangled in my braid, and I'd just lie there, and I'd feel those oceans of loss from my past ebbing back, ebbing away, and I'd hear myself laugh out loud.
― Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs
You will have created something.
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
Kurt Vonnegut
Shape the Dough
Last night while the granola was baking I shaped the sourdough bread dough into the mini loaf pans. Since it was past my bed time, I placed the dough into the fridge to proof overnight. Now, at 5AM they are baking starting from a cold oven. I love predawn baking. This way it doesn't cut a hole in the day.
Wednesday, October 26, 2022
Chicken soup for breakfast?
Chicken soup for breakfast?
Why not? I'm sure somewhere in the world it's considered breakfast. And somewhere on the planet right now it's dinner time.
Viktor E. Frankl
“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”
― Man's Search for Meaning“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Man's Search for Meaning“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
― Man's Search for Meaning“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
― Man's Search for Meaning
James E. Harmon
The right wing has a large proportion of authoritarian personalities. They tend to believe man is, by nature, basically evil. Surrounded as all of us are by the bigness of impersonal forces which seem beyond our power to control, they look for the 'enemy', so that they can hate him. At different times in history 'the enemy' has been the witch, the demon, the Communist (remember Joe McCarthy?), and now sex education, sensitivity training, 'non-religious humanism', and other current demons.
- attributed to James E. Harmon
― On Encounter Groups
Robin Williams
I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.
No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.
Don’t associate yourself with toxic people. It’s better to be alone and love yourself than surrounded by people that make you hate yourself.
The human spirit is more powerful than any drug – and that is what needs to be nourished: with work, play, friendship, family. These are the things that matter.
If we’re going to fight a disease, let’s fight one of the most terrible diseases of all, indifference.
You will have bad times, but they will always wake you up to the stuff you weren’t paying attention to.
The human body was designed by a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?
You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.
Robin Williams
Saul Bellow
We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans — convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.
Saul Bellow
In the greatest confusion, there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves. Saul Bellow
Imagination is a force of nature.
All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
“A writer is a reader moved to emulation.” ― Saul Bellow
“A plan relieves you of the torment of choice.” ―
“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
―
“I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”
―
“People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.”
― Conversations with Saul Bellow
“A man is only as good as what he loves.”
―“One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”
“Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.”
― Herzog
― Ravelstein
“Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.” ― Saul Bellow
“When the striving ceases, there is life waiting as a gift.” ― Saul Bellow
“I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevsky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.” ― Saul Bellow, Saul Bellow quotes on writer
“Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces — down to the last glassy splinter.” ― Saul Bellow
At the end of a play the lie is revealed.
People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want. ―All drama is about lies. All drama is about something that’s hidden. A drama starts because a situation becomes imbalanced by a lie. The lie may be something we tell each other or something we think about ourselves, but the lie imbalances a situation. If you’re cheating on your wife the repression of that puts things out of balance; or if you’re someone you think you’re not, and you think you should be further ahead in your job, that neurotic vision takes over your life and you’re plagued by it until you’re cleansed. At the end of a play the lie is revealed. The better the play the more surprising and inevitable the lie is. Aristotle told us this.
―
The trick is leaving out everything but the essential. ―
If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun.
“Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment.”
―
I had gotten used to the idea
I had gotten used to the idea that people lived and you loved them, or didn’t, and then they died and you were bound to miss them, often even if you didn’t love them.
― Lucky Us
Amy Bloom
I have been lonely in my life but never when drinking strong coffee, wearing my fleecy slippers, and standing in my own kitchen.
― White Houses
Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories.
Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.
― A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories
Some people are your family
Some people are your family no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms.
― Love Invents Us
Noticing the Difference
Learning to listen, letting people finish their sentences, and most of all, the habit of noticing the difference between what people say and how they say it. {on the habits of psychoanalytic training and practice applied to fiction writing} The gap between what people tell you and what's really going on is what interests me.
―
Tolstoy
One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one’s flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one’s pen. Leo Tolstoy
Freethinkers
“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking...”
―
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
Mayonnaise
I was in the mayonnaise aisle of the supermarket when I noticed I was standing on a gigantic hamburger. I squatted down and touched the enormous advertisement under my feet wondering if it was a magnet. It wasn't. It was a three foot by four foot sticker glued to the linoleum. I felt violated. Leave the damn floor alone mayonnaise advertisers. And I continued on my way.
Harley and Martha
What I want to know, Martha, what is going on? First it was the fasting. Then it was the retreats. And now you're adopting a family of refugees. What crime did you commit? What sin are you're paying for?
I don't know, Harley, Martha said, sobbing. I just feel compelled to do these things and then one thing leads to another.
I think you should ask yourself why. Not that they are bad things to do but what's the root of it? The origin of the drive? If you feel inadequate, take a look at it.
Martha was sobbing. I've always felt inadequate. You know that. You urged me to get involved with things. You thought it might help me.
Yes I did but not by sacrificing your well-being. You are allowed to be here. You are allowed to live your life. There's nothing wrong with helping others and contributing to society. But I'm worried about where this is coming from. You don't have to be Mother Theresa, you know? You are allowed be Martha Sternberg of Wilmington.
Martha laughed, blowing her nose. I love you, Harley.
Alice tip-toed back into her bedroom. She had felt her mother's anxiety mounting for weeks. It was a relief to finally hear her talking.
Paul Theroux
Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.
Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.
Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial.
Paul Theroux
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
―
“I don't know what I think until I write it down.”
―“Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”
― Blue Nights“People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Marguerite Duras
When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.
― The Lover
Monday, October 24, 2022
Chicken Soup Weather
We're having a soft day and the rainy weather will continue so I'm made chicken soup. I
made six quarts of soup using garlic, olive oil, onions, oregano,
parsley, basil, canned whole tomatoes, carrots, kale, Adobo and 6
chicken breasts. I added the celery and diced sweet potato afterwards
because there was no room in the pot. The celery cooked a bit in the
residual heat while also helping it cool down. The sweet potato will
cook when I heat it up. Today I added water, soy sauce and Cholula. It tastes fabulous.
Voices
Do you know why your mother brought you in? he asked.
Because I hear voices.
What kind of voices?
They're thoughts actually. Thoughts that tell me to do things.
What kind of things?
Pick up my clothes off the floor, go back and shut the door. Or else something bad will happen.
Like what?
I don't know.
Fictional Snippet
I must be a genius, he said, pouring himself another cup of coffee. I recognize every piece of music they play on this station.
That's because they only play twelve songs, dad. That's how they get your money. They make you think you're a genius. It's all flattery.
Smart ass, he said, adding too much cream and two heaping spoonfuls of sugar to his coffee.
Dad, that's not coffee. What you're drinking is hot ice cream.
Where did you come from?
A dorky storky brought me one stormy night. It was purely accidental. The stork was heading for the island. He got tired and stopped here.
Ah, I see, he said, walking over to her. He gave her a kiss on the top of her forehead.
John Thorne
Traditionally, Matt and I get Chinese takeout for Thanksgiving, a holiday I actively dislike. Despite its name, Thanksgiving is really the Family Holiday. Even Christmas pales beside it: that day's focus is on giving and receiving even more than togetherness. Strangely though, being alone on Christmas is to be almost hauntingly empty; you feel like a ghost. But being alone on Thanksgiving is rather wonderful, like not attending a party that you didn't want to go to and where no one will realize you're not there. At Thanksgiving, you gather with your family and stuff yourself with food as if it were love—or the next best thing —then stagger back to your regular life, oversatiated and wrung out. Christmas, however, creates expectations that are never met, so you leave hungry and depressed, with an armload of things you didn't want and can't imagine why anyone would think you did.
-John Thorne
The Writing
Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up. But the writing is a way of not allowing those things to destroy you.
― John Edgar Wideman
John Edgar Wideman
They beat me, and fucked me in every hole I had. I was their whore. Their maid. A stool they stood on when they wanted to reach a little higher. But I never sang in their cage, Bobby. Not one note.
― Fever
Brenda Ueland
Why should we all use our creative power....? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.
Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.
Brenda Ueland
Brenda Ueland: the right thing to do!
Running is the right thing to do! I am free, healthy with a good complexion. It is that automobile addict who should be ashamed: driving in a sealed car in warmed-over carbon monoxide and smoking a seegar. I am the Goddess! He is a bug in a monkey nut!Brenda Ueland
Be Recklessly Yourself
Unless you listen, people are weazened in your presence; they become about a third of themselves. Unless you listen, you can't know anybody. Oh, you will know facts and what is in the newspapers and all of history, perhaps, but you will not know one single person. You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.
Brenda Ueland
Creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad-tempered. They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of yourself, bad or good. For true listeners know that if you are bad-tempered it does not mean that you are always so. They don't love you just when you are nice; they love all of you.
Brenda Ueland