Milan Kundera

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace.”
― Milan Kundera

Audrey Hepburn

“I'm an introvert... I love being by myself, love being outdoors, love taking a long walk with my dogs and looking at the trees, flowers, the sky.”
― Audrey Hepburn

Charles Olson

“Whatever you have to say, leave
The roots on, let them
Dangle

And the dirt

Just to make clear
Where they come from.”
― Charles Olson

Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“What we know matters but who we are matters more.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Numb the dark and you numb the light.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“The willingness to show up changes us, It makes us a little braver each time.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Connection is why we're here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The power that connection holds in our lives was confirmed when the main concern about connection emerged as the fear of disconnection; the fear that something we have done or failed to do, something about who we are or where we come from, has made us unlovable and unworthy of connection.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Even to me the issue of "stay small, sweet, quiet, and modest" sounds like an outdated problem, but the truth is that women still run into those demands whenever we find and use our voices.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Shame derives its power from being unspeakable.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“I only share when I have no unmet needs that I'm trying to fill. I firmly believe that being vulnerable with a larger audience is only a good idea if the healing is tied to the sharing, not to the expectations I might have for the response I get.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“The real questions for parents should be: "Are you engaged? Are you paying attention?" If so, plan to make lots of mistakes and bad decisions. Imperfect parenting moments turn into gifts as our children watch us try to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better next time. The mandate is not to be perfect and raise happy children. Perfection doesn't exist, and I've found what makes children happy doesn't always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“I've found what makes children happy doesn't always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Wholeheartedness. There are many tenets of Wholeheartedness, but at its very core is vulnerability and worthiness; facing uncertainty, exposure, and emotional risks, and knowing that I am enough.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“I define vulnerability as uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. With that definition in mind, let’s think about love. Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can’t ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment’s notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow—that’s vulnerability.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Vulnerability is not weakness, and the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure we face every day are not optional. Our only choice is a question of engagement. Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose; the level to which we protect ourselves from being vulnerable is a measure of our fear and disconnection.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Worrying about scarcity is our culture's version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we've been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we're angry and scared and at each other's throats.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Hope is a function of struggle.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“We live in a world where most people still subscribe to the belief that shame is a good tool for keeping people in line. Not only is this wrong, but it’s dangerous. Shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Nothing has transformed my life more than realizing that it’s a waste of time to evaluate my worthiness by weighing the reaction of the people in the stands.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“To love ourselves and support each other in the process of becoming real is perhaps the greatest single act of daring greatly.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. Perhaps embracing vulnerability and overcoming numbing is ultimately about the care and feeding of our spirits.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Those who feel lovable, who love, and who experience belonging simply believe they are worthy of love and belonging. I often say that Wholeheartedness is like the North Star: We never really arrive, but we certainly know if we're headed in the right direction.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Spirituality emerged as a fundamental guidepost in Wholeheartedness. Not religiosity but the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to one another by a force greater than ourselves--a force grounded in love and compassion. For some of us that's God, for others it's nature, art, or even human soulfulness. I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. Perhaps embracing vulnerability and overcoming numbing is ultimately about the care and feeding of our spirits.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Everyone wants to know why customer service has gone to hell in a handbasket. I want to know why customer behavior has gone to hell in a handbasket.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

“Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

Geneen Roth

“You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won't discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself. (p. 84)”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“When you believe without knowing you believe that you are damaged at your core, you also believe that you need to hide that damage for anyone to love you. You walk around ashamed of being yourself. You try hard to make up for the way you look, walk, feel. Decisions are agonizing because if you, the person who makes the decision, is damaged, then how can you trust what you decide? You doubt your own impulses so you become masterful at looking outside yourself for comfort. You become an expert at finding experts and programs, at striving and trying hard and then harder to change yourself, but this process only reaffirms what you already believe about yourself -- that your needs and choices cannot be trusted, and left to your own devices you are out of control (p.82-83)”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“. . . hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else . . . . Wanting life to be different from what it is. That's also called leaving without leaving. Dying before you die. It's as if there is a part of you that so rails against being shattered by love that you shatter yourself first. (p. 44)”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it's about knowing who you are. It's about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can't have it. (p. 163)”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“...compulsive eating is basically a refusal to be fully alive. No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can't stand it any longer, we binge. The way we are able to accomplish all of this is by the simple act of bolting -- of leaving ourselves -- hundreds of times a day.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“It's never been true, not anywhere at any time, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale. We are unrepeatable beings of light and space and water who need these physical vehicles to get around. When we start defining ourselves by that which can be measured or weighed, something deep within us rebels.

We don't want to EAT hot fudge sundaes as much as we want our lives to BE hot fudge sundaes. We want to come home to ourselves. (p. 174-5)”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“I believe in love. And beauty. I believe that every single person has something they find beautiful and that they truly love. The smell of their child's hair, the silence of a forest, their lover's crooked grin. Their country, their religion, their family. And I believe that if you follow this love all the way to its end, if you start with the thing you find most beautiful and trace it's perfume back to its essence, you will perceive an intangible presence, a swath of stillness that allows the thing you love to be visible like the openness of the sky reveals the presence of the moon.”
― Geneen Roth, Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life. Even with aching joints, it's not about food. Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure. It's about your desire to flatten your life. It's about the fact that you've given up without saying so. It's about your belief that it's not possible to live any other way -- and you're using food to act that out without ever having to admit it. (p. 53)”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“Imagine not being frightened by any feeling. Imagine knowing that nothing will destroy you. That you are beyond any feeling, an state. Bigger than. Vaster than. That there is no reason to use drugs because anything a drug could do would pale in comparison to knowing who you are. To what you can understand, live, be, just by being with that presents itself to you in the form of the feelings you have...”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“The Eating Guidelines
1. Eat when you are hungry.
2. Eat sitting down in a calm environment. This does not include the car.
3. Eat without distractions. Distractions include radio, television, newspapers, books, intense or anxiety-producing conversations or music.
4. Eat what your body wants.
5. Eat until you are satisfied.
6. Eat (with the intention of being) in full view of others.
7. Eat with enjoyment, gusto, and pleasure.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“Our work is not to change what you do, but to witness what you do with enough awareness, enough curiosity, enough tenderness that the lies and old decisions upon which the compulsion is based become apparent and fall away. When you no longer believe that eating will save your life when you feel exhausted or overwhelmed or lonely, you will stop. When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart. When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of your beliefs, the weight disappears. (p. 80-81)”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“When you ignore your belly, you become homeless. You spend your life trying to erase your own existence. Apologizing for yourself. Feeling like a ghost. Eating to take up space, eating to give yourself the feeling that you have weight here, you belong here, you are allowed to be yourself -- but never quite believing it because you don't sense yourself directly.

. . . I started teaching a simple belly meditation in which I asked people to become aware of sensations in their belly (numbness and emptiness count as sensations). Every time their mind wandered . . . I asked them to begin counting their breaths so they could anchor their concentration. Starting with the number one and saying it on the out breath, they'd count to seven and begin again. If they were able to stay concentrated on the sensations in their belly centers, they didn't need to use counting as a concentration anchor.

. . . you begin the process of bringing yourself back to your body, to your belly, to your breath because they -- not the mind medleys -- are here now. And it is only here, only now that you can make a decision to eat or not eat. To occupy your own body or to vacate your arms and your legs while still breathing and go through your days as a walking head.

. . . Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“Treat yourself as if you already are enough. Walk as if you are enough. Eat as if you are enough. See, look, listen as if you are enough. Because it's true.”
― Geneen Roth

“Most of us spend our lives protecting ourselves from losses that have already happened.”
― Geneen Roth

“What you pay attention to grows. Pay attention to your loveliness, your magnificent self. Begin now.”
― Geneen Roth

“And if you worry that not finishing the food on your plate is a slap in the face of all the hungry people everywhere, you are not living in reality. The truth is that you either throw the food out or you throw it in, but either way it turns to waste. World hunger will not be solved by finishing the garlic mashed potatoes on your plate.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“Most of our suffering comes from resisting what is already here, particularly our feelings. All any feeling wants is to be welcomed, touched, allowed. It wants attention. It wants kindness. If you treated your feelings with as much love as you treated your dog or your cat or your child, you'd feel as if you were living in heaven every day of your sweet life.”
― Geneen Roth

“For some reason, we are truly convinced that if we criticize ourselves, the criticism will lead to change. If we are harsh, we believe we will end up being kind. If we shame ourselves, we believe we end up loving ourselves. It has never been true, not for a moment, that shame leads to love. Only love leads to love.”
― Geneen Roth

“We eat the way we eat because we are afraid to feel what we feel.”
― Geneen Roth

“When we give up dieting, we take back something we were often too young to know we had given away: our own voice. Our ability to make decisions about what to eat and when. Our belief in ourselves. Our right to decide what goes into our mouths. Unlike the diets that appear monthly in magazines or the thermal pants that sweat off pounds, unlike a lover or a friend or a car, your body is reliable. It doesn't go away, get lost, stolen. If you will listen, it will speak.”
― Geneen Roth, Breaking Free from Emotional Eating

“Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic…The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. If you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful, relaxed human being.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“Awareness is learning to keep yourself company”
― Geneen Roth

“If we think our job here on earth is to fix ourselves, we will keep looking for the broken places. If we believe our job is to be kind, we will keep lavishing love on ourselves.”
― Geneen Roth

“Weight loss does not make people happy. Or peaceful. Being thin does not address the emptiness that has no shape or weight or name. Even a wildly successful diet is a colossal failure because inside the new body is the same sinking heart.”
― Geneen Roth

“Staying requires being curious about who you actually are when you don't take yourself to be a collection of memories.When you don't infer your existence form replaying what happened to you, when you don't take yourself to be the girl your mother/father/brother/teacher/lover didn't see or adore. When you sense yourself directly, immediately, right now, without preconception, who are you?”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

Natalie Goldberg

“If you're having difficulty coming up with new ideas, then slow down. For me, slowing down has been a tremendous source of creativity. It has allowed me to open up -- to know that there's life under the earth and that I have to let it come through me in a new way. Creativity exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them. Writing is still the wildest thing I know.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

“This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

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

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless...”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say — snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola — something fertile, with a hidden danger or shame, thick like the humidity, unspoken yet ever-present.

Often when a southerner reads, the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can't write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet.

I tease the class, "Pay no mind. It's the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“My goal is to write every day. I say it is my ideal. I am careful not to pass judgment or create anxiety if I do not do it. No one lives up to his ideal.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it”
― Natalie Goldberg

“I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

“Anything you do fully is an alone journey.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

“Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

“After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind

“Keep your hand moving.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

“The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners...”
― Natalie Goldberg, Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir

“I remember a friend many years ago who had taped a sign to his refrigerator: There's a dream dreaming us. If you try to think about what that means it makes your mind silly, but that silliness is good.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind

“Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Writing is the act of discovery.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

“Every moment is enormous and it is all we have.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America

“I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

“Finally, you just do it because you happen to like it.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

Natalie Goldberg

Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important.

Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.

Never underestimate people. They do desire the cut of truth.

Galway Kinnell

“To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment”
― Galway Kinnell

“Prose is walking; poetry is flying”
― Galway Kinnell

“Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love”
― Galway Kinnell

G.K. Chesterton

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

e.e. Cummings

A POET'S ADVICE by e.e. Cummings

A real human is somebody who feels and who expresses his or her feelings. This may sound easy. It isn't.

A lot of people think or believe or know what they feel---but that's thinking or believing or knowing: not feeling. And being real is feeling---not just knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but it's very difficult to learn to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody - but - yourself.

To be nobody - but -yourself-- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else--means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for communicating nobody-but-yourself to others, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't real can possibly imagine. Why?

Because nothing is quite as easy as just being just like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time--and whenever we do it, we are not real.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've loved just once with a nobody-but-yourself heart, you''ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become real is: do something easy, like dreaming of freedom--unless you're ready to commit yourself to feel and work and fight till you die.
― e.e. Cummings

Plato

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
― Plato

Natalie Goldberg

“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.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

Cocoa Mocha

Sometimes after a walk in the cold I like hot cocoa. I make it with a tablespoon of cocoa powder a scant tablespoon of sugar (or dark brown sugar) heated in a 1/4 cup of hot water to dissolve and a weensy pinch of salt. Then I add the two percent milk. Sometimes I even add a few ounces of coffee and warm it all up together. It's delicious!

Vertigo Christmas Lights

The vertigo Christmas lights are all the rage. The moving dots also look like bugs.

Late Night Doorbell

Late last night I was lounging and watching bad TV when the doorbell rang. I asked my husband to go see who it was. He came back and said it was our neighbors Aly & Val. They do not speak much English but he gathered they were trying to help a friend and asked for my help. Rather than wait in the cold he told them I'd be right over. I have told them many times please call on me if you ever have a problem and I will try to help. They are the best neighbors I've ever had. I put on my heavy gray sweatshirt over my plaid flannel pajama pants and left. We had a visit at Aly's dining room table. They explained that they have a friend who is separated from her husband. She also has a three year old child. She has been receiving threats from her husband and their mutual friends and needs to know how to get a restraining order. She's on her way over right now with her child, they said. I told them I will be right back. I went home and put on jeans and called the local police dispatch. Officer Boisclair answered and she was extremely helpful. She gave me five phone numbers of places for them to call. One of the phone numbers was for a domestic violence advocate named Ingrid who is bilingual and works for the local police. I wrote everything down and went back over with the list. They said they couldn't go on Monday at 9AM to meet Ingrid because they can't miss work or even stop to call. One of the numbers was an 800 number for a domestic violence help line and I called it and asked if they were able to speak Spanish. The woman said yes and I gave the phone to Aly because she speaks Spanish. She was told to get her friend to file a report at the police station tomorrow (Sunday) and then they could take that to Providence for obtaining a restraining order. Aly and Val assured me that their friend was safe for the moment but this was the next step. We were all relieved.

City Paws

Last night Romeo nibbled at his irritated paw-pad. He nibbled it raw. "That's just like me when I have a mosquito bite," I said. My husband and I realized that playing rounds of fetch in our yard which has areas of pavement must have caused this, and then walking on city salt-treated sidewalks further irritated it. We will change our ball playing routine so this does not happen again, and for now keep the wound clean and dry so it heals. Yesterday we bought him two big white Nylabones, the indestructible kind, which he works through in short order.

Romeo

Just as we were walking home from our morning walk three uniformed military men ceremoniously fired rifles in front of All Saints Church as part of a veteran's funeral. Romeo was frightened out of his mind. Luckily I had a firm hold on his leash and I ducked down a driveway to hook his leash on the chain link fence post for a moment. Slowly we worked our way home with stops for him to sit every few feet. I think that helped stop the pulling out of fear. What a relief to finally get home. Now he is happily chewing his Nylabone.

Poet Yannis Ritsos

The Meaning of Simplicity

by Yannis Ritsos
translated by Rae Dalven

I hide myself behind simple objects so you may find me,
if you do not find me, you will find the objects,
you will touch those objects my hand has touched
the traces of our hands will mingle

The August moon gleams like a tin kitchen kettle
(what I am telling you becomes like that),
it lights the empty table and silence kneeling in the house
silence is always kneeling.

Every single word is an exodus
for a meeting, cancelled many times,
it is a true word when it insists on the meeting

source

Congratulate Librarians

“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.”

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

Insanity and the Death of Democray

Article on the new forbidden words.