listen to the language we use

Writing can be a very dramatic pursuit, full of catastrophes and disasters and emotion and attempts that fail. My path as a writer became much more smooth when I learned that, when things aren’t going well, to regard my struggles as curious, not tragic…. We have this very German, romantic idea that if you’re not in pain, and if you’re not causing pain by making your art, then you’re not really doing it right. I’ve always questioned that.… I mean, listen to the language we use to talk about creative process: “Open up your vein and bleed.” “Kill your darlings.” I always want to weep when people speak about a project and say: “I think I finally broke its back.” That is a really fucked-up relationship you have with your work! You’re trying to crack its spine? No wonder you’re so stressed out! You’ve made this into battlefield! We should know enough about the world to realize that anything that you fight fights you back.

ELIZABETH GILBERT

The Domino Effect

The past two Saturdays after my swim I read all day recovering from the week which lead to exceptional Sundays. I have a lot more respect for rest and reading days. 

Yesterday after many rainy weekends I decided to seize the moment and weed wack our tiny yard while Bill was home to help with electrical cords and dog supervision. It took 10 minutes. 

Then I had an idea. I suggested we move our round glass outdoor table and 3 chairs and umbrella off of the cement to the newly whacked yard. Then I saw I finally needed to rake the leaves after nine months! I dumped them over the fence into our overgrown big yard to continue composting.

 

The table is now hidden and buffered by the evergreen bush so we no longer have a view of the drug dealer car in the shared parking lot which has been 24/7 nonstop parade of addicted zombies coming up and down the driveway. We can repossess our property by being in it!

We ate supper (leftover mashed potatoes with scallions and kale) under the colorful umbrella at the table and enjoyed hearing the sounds of happy children playing tag in the lot. A few hours earlier the kids had a BBQ with their families on the far side of the parking lot under the big trees. Perhaps they were feeling the same way. 

 

Then it started to rain but we stayed out for a few more minutes. We got up and gathered our dishes and closed the umbrella. As soon as we were inside the wind picked up and there was a downpour.

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

REBECCA SOLNIT

It makes me sad to see how far too often people are loved when they are fake, and hated when they are truthful. 

– Karen Salmansohn

Don’t let people pull you into their storm. Pull them into your peace. Pema Chödrön

Sometimes I think it would comforting to invent a new set parents.

I make things. 

Why not create a new set of parents?

For starters they would be receptive and kind. 

They wouldn't try to impress me or blame me for everything. 

They wouldn't be addicted to alcohol and pills. 

They'd have love in their hearts.

They'd show up! 

I don't write like my mother, but for many years I spoke like her, and her particular, timorous relationship with language has shaped my own. There are people who move confidently within their own horizons of speech; whether it is cockney, estuary, RP or valley girl, they stride with the unselfconscious ease of a landowner on his own turf. My mother, Rose, was never like that. She never owned the language she spoke. Her displacement within the intricacies of English class, and the uncertainty that went with it, taught her to regard language as something that might go off in her face, like a letter bomb. A word bomb. I've inherited her wariness, or more accurately, I learnt it as a child. I used to think I would have to spend a lifetime shaking it off. Now I know that's impossible, and unnecessary, and that you have to work with what you've got.

IAN McEWAN

Dream

I dreamed I was swimming in a circular blue tile pool. It was doughnut-shaped with a hollow in the center. Another YMCA.

I saw a man driving away with an upholstered chair draped across his windshield blocking the view. That's not good, I thought. He's just going around the corner, someone said. 

I remember you from China town, the driver said to me.

Really? New York Chinatown 1978?

Why I Love Being Married to a Chemist

by Barbara Crooker

Because he can still cause a reaction in me
when he talks about SN2 displacements,
amines and esters looking for receptor sites
at the base of their ketones. Because he lugs
home serious tomes like The Journal of the American
Chemical Society or The Proceedings of the Society
of the Plastics Industry, the opposite of the slim volumes
of poetry with colorful covers that fill my bookshelves.
Because once, years ago, on a Saturday before our
raucous son rang in the dawn, he was just
standing there in the bathroom, out of the shower.
I said Honey, what’s wrong? and he said Oh,
I was just thinking about a molecule.

Because he taught me about sublimation, how
a solid, like ice, can change straight to a gas
without becoming liquid first. Because even
after all this time together, he can still
make me melt.

“Why I Love Being Married to a Chemist” by Barbara Crooker from Les Fauves. © C & R Press, 2017

Peter Grosz

Read  

Peter Grosz is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning writer who has worked for Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Amy Sedaris and can be heard regularly on NPR’s “Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me!”

Dream

I dreamed I saw my old apartment on Jewett Street in Providence after 45 years. It was now condos and there was a working fireplace.

Seasonal shifts are heavily linked to a surge in vivid dreams. As daylight hours and room temperatures fluctuate, our internal body clocks adjust, increasing melatonin production and altering time spent in REM sleep. This natural disruption frequently leads to more intense, memorable dreaming.

When you’re making decisions based on what gives you purpose or what lights you up, boom! That’s self-love—

 Creating a safe zone all your own is an act of self-love

Cold Weather Craving Mash and Greens

Yesterday it was 40 degrees out in the morning. I wore my hat and scarf and gloves when walking my dogs. By the afternoon I was craving mashed potatoes.

Russet potatoes cubed with skin on (4 minutes) in the instant pot with tiny amount of water. Mash with potato masher and add a drizzle of heavy whipping cream and then salt to taste. Sprinkle on fresh scallions.

Rinse kale in a tub of cold water and then use scissors or a knife to chop it into 2 or 3 inch pieces. Steam it in the instant pot for 4 minutes. Add olive oil and Adobo seasning.

Enjoy together. Scoop potatoes with ice-cream scoop!  

Years ago my friend Susan and I imagined  being street vendors of savory food selling scoops of mashed potatoes in a cone in place of ice cream.

Advice for Artists, By Michele de Bragança

• Trust yourself. Don’t try to paint like your favorite painters — find your own voice.
• Be your own teacher. Don’t just stick with what works or what sells, try new things — a good painter’s work is always evolving.
• Work really hard (paint every day), and never give up. You will always have setbacks, and many rejections. You never really “get there.” The carrot keeps moving forward. We are blessed to love what we are doing enough to weather these disappointments. As Kevin Macpherson says, “Painting is sort of like fishing. You are out there enjoying the beautiful day, feeling the wind, taking in the sights and sounds —you never really know if you are going to get anything or not!”

 

Three Things: Write Read & Daily

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

Letter to Gustave Flaubert from George Sand

To Gustave Flaubert, at Croisset Nohant June 21, 1868

Why am I not the ... river which cradles you with its sweet murmuring and which brings you freshness in your den! I would chat discreetly with you between pages of your novel, and I would make that fantastic grating of the chain* which you detest, but whose oddity does not displease me, keep still. I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the carriages and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a thousand birds in the country, the movement of the ships on the waters; I love also absolute, profound silence, and in short, I love everything that is around me, no matter where I am; it is auditory idiocy, a new variety. It is true that I choose my milieu and don't go to the Senate nor to other disagreeable places. 

*The chain of the tug-boat going up or going down the Seine.

George Sand Gustave Faubert Letters translated by A.L. McKenzie (p171) 

Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write?

RAINER MARIA RILKE

You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Marcus Aurelius 

I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have.

I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Power of Swimming on Mental Health

 https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/the-power-of-swimming-on-mental-health/

Athlete, psychiatrist, and Chief Medical Officer of Brightside Health, Dr. Mimi Winsberg, told me that while exercise in general stimulates the BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) — key ingredients in the health and growth of brain cells — swimming may actually outperform other forms of exercise.

“Swimming may be particularly good for our brains,” Winsberg wrote in an email. “In addition to enhancing sleep length and quality, it also seems to boost mood, reduce anxiety, and improve cognitive function. Animal studies have shown that swimming exerts these positive effects on mood both by stimulating the growth of new brain cells, and the neurochemicals they produce.”

Sara Anstis

https://www.contemporaryartissue.com/8-artists-to-watch-in-2026/ 

https://fabianlang.ch/armory-show

https://saraanstis.com/ 

Broccoli

Broccoli is my favorite vegetable but the reheated leftovers are often bitter. 

Broccoli leftovers taste bitter primarily because glucosinolates (naturally occurring sulfur compounds) break down into sharp, pungent byproducts as the vegetable ages or sits in the fridge. Additionally, enzymes in the plant start to degrade, releasing strong flavors that are further intensified by oxidation. 

Understanding exactly why this happens can help you manage and even prevent that strong taste:

• Enzymatic Breakdown: When cooked and stored, the cellular structure of broccoli degrades. This process releases enzymes that convert glucosinolates into isothiocyanates and other sharp compounds that taste highly bitter to our receptors. 
• Oxidation & Spoilage: Storing cooked broccoli for more than 3–4 days or improperly sealing it causes oxidation. This causes a strong, sometimes sour or ammonia-like sulfur smell and taste.
• Genetic Sensitivity: Your own biology might be the final culprit. Roughly 75% of people inherit the TAS2R38 gene, which acts as a bitter taste receptor. If you have a dominant version of this gene, you are much more sensitive to these naturally occurring compounds. 

How to Prevent the Bitter Taste

• Quickly Blanch: If you are meal-prepping or freezing, quickly blanching broccoli in boiling salted water for 1–2 minutes, then shocking it in an ice bath, deactivates the enzymes that cause bitterness. 
• Proper Storage: Always store leftover broccoli in airtight glass containers or sealed bags to limit oxidation.
• Neutralize with Acid: If your reheated broccoli tastes a bit bitter, splash a little bit of lemon juice, lime juice, or vinegar over it. The acid will help neutralize the bitter compounds on your palate.

The French City That Champions Its Trees In scenic Sceaux, a one-of-a-kind Tree Charter protects and nourishes the urban canopy as “a long-term investment.”

 Article

Think before you speak. Read before you think.

 Fran Leibowitz

The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.

 Fran Leibowitz

Life is something that happens when you can’t get to sleep.... I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. Sleep is death without the responsibility.

Fran Leibowitz 

A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It’s supposed to be a door.

 Fran Leibowitz

As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.

 Fran Leibowitz

In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.

 Fran Leibowitz

In the Soviet Union, Capitalism triumphed over Communism. In this country, Capitalism triumphed over Democracy.

 Fran Lebowitz

 It’s always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see.

— Patricia Hampl

We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something – make something – with it. A story, we sense is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.

  — Patricia Hampl

Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow—or kneel or get knocked down—to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.

Patricia Hampl

To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom. Jiddu Krishnamurti

There’s a cost to the choice of loving work — and there’s honesty in admitting it can be worth it.

Joan Vennochi 

The zombies stagger up the driveway looking for their fix. Their dealer is holding office hours in a white Toyota Avalon in the neighborhood parking lot. The front fender is on the ground. Over the past three weeks a few emaciated women take turns sleeping in the car overnight pinning up a white sheet to block the morning sun. 

Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning

Article

Choosing it Changes Everything

I play and keep playing because I choose to play. Even if it's not your ideal life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything. Andre Agassi, Open, an autobiography (p359)

you can feel completely despairing and hopeless and in over your head and lost and incompetent in the course of writing a book, but that doesn’t mean all those things are true.

 “I don’t think I could have worked on Fountain City for five years and generated as much material as I did if I didn’t have steady work habits. I think that if I learned anything, it’s that you can feel completely despairing and hopeless and in over your head and lost and incompetent in the course of writing a book, but that doesn’t mean all those things are true. You can fight your way through those periods to a new appreciation of what you’re doing and to a firmer grip on the material. If I had known that with Fountain City, I might have fought just a little longer to try to pull it together.” Michael Chabon

One who believes in himself has no need to convince others. Lao Tzu

Miss Manners, the master of tactful behavior, put it best. “An invitation is not a subpoena.”

article

 Smart Pencils

by Ron Lauderbach

I keep hundreds of pencils I picked up off the ground during my teaching career in a PF Flyer shoebox, under my bed. They wait for a colorful slip-on eraser I attach when I bring one back to life.   My found pencils are not rookies from a yellow Ticonderoga box, but seasoned veterans, bearing bite-marks and other scars—proof of lives lived. Many are surprised by my electric   sharpener, a device that did not exist when they were dropped. Some have art class paint on them and others grease from auto-shop. I have one that says Oscar loves written on its roundness, but the name of Oscar’s lover   has been sharpened away. I like to write with my found pencils. I believe they impart wisdom from their past lives. A lot of pencils advertise businesses and institutions, many of which are   gone forever. I have one pencil with a student’s name I remember on it, in my car, in case I ever see him around town. I have some ink pens too, but dry—unable to reveal secrets.

__________

From Snapshots, Kelsay Books, 2022, RON LAUDERBACH.

“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

A field of conscious presence or You cannot lose something that you are

“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

All you really need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at ease with yourself. Eckhart Tolle

We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world. Gabor Maté

 “A therapist once said to me, “If you face the choice between feeling guilt and resentment, choose the guilt every time.” It is wisdom I have passed on to many others since. If a refusal saddles you with guilt, while consent leaves resentment in its wake, opt for the guilt. Resentment is soul suicide. Negative thinking allows us to gaze unflinchingly on our own behalf at what does not work.

We have seen in study after study that compulsive positive thinkers are more likely to develop disease and less likely to survive. Genuine positive thinking — or, more deeply, positive being — empowers us to know that we have nothing to fear from truth. “Health is not just a matter of thinking happy thoughts,” writes the molecular researcher Candace Pert. “Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-suppressed anger.” Anger, or the healthy experience of it, is one of the seven A’s of healing. Each of the seven A’s addresses one of the embedded visceral beliefs that predispose to illness and undermine healing.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours.

 “Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.”
― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.”
― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“When I am sharply judgmental of any other person, it's because I sense or see reflected in them some aspect of myself that I don't want to acknowledge.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past...Mindful awareness can bring into consciousness those hidden, past-based perspectives so that they no longer frame our worldview.’Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present…Until you reach that point, you are unconscious.’ …In present awareness we are liberated from the past.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction  

Protect a Deep Work Block Every Day

Before you open email, before you check messages, before you respond to anything: protect a block of time — ideally 90 minutes to two hours — for your most cognitively demanding work. Schedule it as you would an important meeting, at the same time each day. Research on circadian rhythms and prefrontal cortex function suggests that for most people, the first two to four hours after waking represent peak executive capacity. This is the window to protect most aggressively. Everything else — email, meetings, administrative tasks — should be pushed to the afternoon wherever possible.

Your Attention Isn't Broken

It's being harvested. Here's the neuroscience of what's actually happening — and the architecture that fixes it.

Dr. Judy Ho

May 20, 2026

 

If you want to travel the Way of Buddhas and Zen masters, then expect nothing, seek nothing, and grasp nothing. ―Dōgen

Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.

― Dōgen

No matter how bad a state of mind you may get into, if you keep strong and hold out, eventually the floating clouds must vanish and the withering wind must cease. ―Dōgen

Do not be concerned with the faults of other persons. Do not see others' faults with a hateful mind. There is an old saying that if you stop seeing others' faults, then naturally seniors and venerated and juniors are revered. Do not imitate others' faults; just cultivate virtue. Buddha prohibited unwholesome actions, but did not tell us to hate those who practice unwholesome actions.

― Zen Master Dōgen 

If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it? ― Dogen

To be in harmony with the wholeness of things is not to have anxiety over imperfections. ―Dōgen

 

“That sadness—the sadness of loss—is a different flavor than the sadness of reckoning. The sadness of reckoning feels visceral and angry and tinged with violence. It feels healable, somehow, with revenge or justice. 

But the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger. 

I’d spent my life telling myself I didn’t need a mommy or a daddy. But now I was beginning to realize that this hunger isn’t childish—it is a universal, primal need. We all want to be taken care of, and that’s okay. The woman who appears to me when I meditate, in her soft, baggy clothes—she isn’t quite the same as a parent, and she never will be. But she takes me into her arms and whispers, “I want to love you.” I lean in and let her.”

― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma page 231

The drug dealers are back and they are attracting a parade of addicted misfits. Mother's Day was a demented circus, a steady stream of drug addled humans teetering in the parking lot, terrifying everyone. The neighbors have been complaining to me over the fence, There's a woman living in the car! She was nodding off at 5AM! Yesterday when we came out with the dogs at 4:45AM, my husband was looking up at the Mars and Saturn. The dealer hidden in his car thought we were looking at him and he jumped out to identify himself. It's creepy and unsettling. We are all rattled. Every day we don't know what we're going to see when we pull into the shared parking lot. The daily zombie apocalypse. As long as the landlords get their rent money, they do not care.

It's not a waste if you are learning

Stephanie Foo's Memoir: What My Bones Know

I learned two critical things that day. First: Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed. If it looks good and it feels good, it should be all good, right? But over the years I’d smoothed perfect white layers of spackle over gaping structural holes. 

And the second thing I learned was: My parents didn’t love me. It's not as if I hadn't suspected this. There was that whole childhood abandonment thing, after all. But in my head, there were reasons and excuses for this. And now, for the first time, I saw the truth—the real reason they could not love me, had never loved me. I believe that they hated themselves too much to love me; their sadness made them to selfish to see me at all. The reason I hadn't been loved had nothing at all to do with me or my behavior It had everything to do with them.

There are people who love me. I will be cared for And I have my capable self. Everything is going to be fine. 

My parents didn't love me, and it's okay.

― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma page 111.

“You don’t know what people are going through,” he said. “You don’t know what private battles they’re waging, either inside their own body or at home or out in the world. And so at the very least, you can simply be kind.”

 https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/19/metro/former-student-kidney-donation/

I was given talent, and if you are given it, it is your obligation to use it. Dennis Potter

You just don't know writers. They'll use anything, anybody. They'll eat their young. Dennis Potter

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in. ― Dennis Potter

Dennis Potter: “The nowness of everything is absolutely wonderful. [...] If you see the present tense, boy do you see it, and boy can you celebrate it.”

Nirvana is where you are, provided you don’t object to it. Alan Watts

George Bilgere Poem

A Nice Place to Live

This summer, as the missiles went back and forth
between the one sobbing angry country and the other,
I went from the shallow end to the deep end,
my evening laps at the public pool,

wondering if there was something wrong with me
for not hating anyone that much.

Not the guy in the Hummer
who cut me off at the exit yesterday,
then gave me the finger.

Not my father, even in my worst moments.
Not even my ex-wife.
I’m a hater from the bush leagues, a small-time hater,

although I have, it’s true, gotten myself
through some long patches of self-pity
more or less on hatred alone.

Then I forget. Lose interest.
It’s called being white
and well-off in America,
where it’s all just handed to you
by a nice brown server with no English,
or a white person with bad teeth
and no dental plan.

And the gravy train is just so smooth
that when the big ideas—the ones
you would have died for, or even killed for,
the ones that take root and flower
only in the harshest desert climes,

wither inside you and die and turn to little figs
at the edge of your plate,
and you don’t even like figs—

then it’s time for a stroll down to Murphy’s
and a couple of beers with Roger
under the evening news.

And tonight it’s a weeping bearded man
holding the tailfin of a rocket
that killed his son,

a rocket made by all of us
sitting here at the bar tonight,
waiting to turn it to the Indians game.

Nice people, basically.
We don’t even bother to hate him.

https://www.georgebilgere.com/a-nice-place-to-live

 Monkey Mind

by Steve Orlen

When I was a child I had what is called an inner life. For example, I looked at that girl over there In the second aisle of seats and wondered what it was like To have buck teeth pushing out your upper lip And how it felt to have those little florets the breasts Swelling her pajama top before she went to sleep. Walking home, I asked her both questions And instead of answering she told her mother Who told the teacher who told my father. After all these years, I can almost feel his hand Rising in the room, the moment in the air of his decision, Then coming down so hard it took my breath away, And up again in that small arc To smack his open palm against my butt. I’m a slow learner And still sometimes I’m sitting here wondering what my father Is thinking, blind and frail and eighty-five, Plunged down into his easy chair half the night Listening to Bach cantatas. I know he knows At every minute of every hour that he’s going to die Because he told my mother and my mother told me. I didn’t cry or cry out or say I’m sorry. I lay across his lap and wondered what He could be thinking to hit a kid like that.

__________

From The Elephant’s Child: New and Selected Poems, 1978–2005, Ausable Press, 2006, by STEVE ORLEN.

Gabriel Barsawme: True freedom is the quiet, radical act of slowing down —

We do not need to fix our brokenness. We need to hear it. 

https://gabrielbarsawme.substack.com/p/the-freedom-to-fall-apart 

Gabriel Barsawme is a Licensed Social Worker, researcher, and ordained minister working at the intersection of psychology, theology, and philosophy.  

Loved this book

Not My Father's Son: A Memoir Book by Alan Cumming Not My Father's Son is a memoir by actor Alan Cumming that explores his difficult childhood in Scotland, marked by an abusive father, and his journey to uncover family secrets, prompted by a genealogy show. The book intertwines his past with his present, revealing shocking truths about his father and his maternal grandfather, leading to a profound re-evaluation of his identity and family history. It's known for its honest, witty, and moving account of overcoming trauma and finding peace. 

Once in a while it’s good to challenge yourself in a way that’s really daunting.  – Alan Cumming 

I like working on things that are very different and that involve different disguises.  – Alan Cumming  

I like the tragedies way more than the comedies because they’re so universal.  – Alan Cumming

I think you can be as big as you like as long as you mean it. I really do.  – Alan Cumming  

Kids are more genuine. When they come up and want to talk to you, they don’t have an agenda. It’s more endearing and less piercing to your aura.  – Alan Cumming

It’s about how you exist as a person in the world, and the idea that your work is more important than you as a person is a horrible, horrible message. I always think about a little gay boy in Wisconsin or a little lesbian in Arkansas seeing someone like me, and if I cannot be open in my life, how on earth can they?

  – Alan Cumming

I had to be a grown-up when I should have been a little boy, and now that I’m a grown-up my little-boyness has exploded out of me. I’ve lived my life backwards.  – Alan Cumming   

My mum always told me I was precious, while my dad always told me I was worthless. I think that’s a good grounding for a balanced life.  – Alan Cumming 

"The devil you know" is an English proverb that implies it is often safer and more predictable to stick with a familiar, difficult situation or person rather than risk an unknown alternative that could be worse.

 When it comes to neighbors moving out and new ones moving in. I can only hope for the best.

I would often take my students to the Hungarian Pastry Shop on the Upper West Side. I would ask them to bring a notebook and to surreptitiously document, word for word, all the conversations they overheard. When we came back to the classroom we read these aloud. What we heard was fascinating.

Annie DeWitt

Though my family landed in the Midwest, we lived in urban or suburban environments. It was only after my husband and I built our house in Lake County, Illinois, near Libertyville, that my consciousness changed. On the first morning in our new home I woke up to the mooing of cows. Cows under my window, 35 miles northwest of Chicago! But there they were, rubbing against the fence that separated our one-acre lot from our neighbor’s 200-acre estate, and they were Holsteins, the only cows I knew from vacations in the flat North German countryside of my childhood. That was my initiation, and after 40 years in this house I know what time of day it is by the way the light slants. I am intimately familiar with the names and habits of the wildflowers and the birds that live in our hawthorns and aspens. We all live together, in the world and in my poems. Lisel Mueller

My family went through terrible times. In Europe no one has had a private life not affected by history. I’m constantly aware of how privileged we (Americans) are. Lisel Mueller

Lisel Mueller

 Monet Refuses the Operation 

 

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen Cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent. The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases. Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

“Monet Refuses the Operation” by LISEL MUELLER.