Give it a whack

Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It’s more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.

        Dr. Seuss [Theodor Geisel], Los Angeles Times interview 1983

Ready or not

Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.

        Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter to Renate and Eberhard Bethge

 

 

 

 

 

Direction

I may not have gone where I intended to go,
     but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

            Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

 

 

 

 

 

Everything is holy

After one school shooting, my beloved rabbi friend Sydney Mintz told me a story from the Midrash (a collection of stories about what the Hebrew Bible teaches). When Moses smashed the original tablets with the Ten Commandments and stomped off back to Mount Sinai, someone swept up all the shards. They were eventually added to the ark alongside the replacement copy of the commandments. We drag around our brokenness in the same container as our holiness.

        Anne Lamott, NY Times editorial, September 1, 2025

 

 

Poem: we are running

         we are running

 running and

        time is clocking us

from the edge like an only

        daughter.

our mothers stream before us,

cradling their breasts in their

hands.

        oh pray that what we want

        is worth this running

        pray that what we’re running

toward

is what we want.

                     

                    Lucille Clifton

 

 

 

 

 

 

One and the same

There is not something or someone experiencing experience! You do not feel feelings, think thoughts, or sense sensations any more than you hear hearing, see sight, or smell smelling. “I feel fine” means that a fine feeling is present. It does not mean that there is one thing called an “I” and another separate thing called a feeling, so that when you bring them together this “I” feels the fine feeling. There are no feelings but present feelings, and whatever feeling is present is “I.” No one ever found an “I” apart from some present experience, or some experience apart from an “I”—which is only to say that the two are the same thing.

        Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

 

 

 

 

Good advice

One should always have one’s boots on, and be ready to leave.

            Michel de Montaigne. Essays

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What to do?

Too many people merely do what they are told to do.

        Ansel Adams, The Camera

 

 

' 

Acceptance

It’s rarely the truth itself that people can’t accept.
         It’s how they feel about it.

                Karen Russell, The Antidote

 

 

 

 

 

Find a way or make one

If you have the words, 

    there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

                Seamus Heaney, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Acts of faith

Love is an act of faith,
    and whoever is of little faith
        is also of little love.

                Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

 

 

 

 

Poem: At the Smithville Methodist Church

It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week,
but when she came home
with the "Jesus Saves" button, we knew what art
was up, what ancient craft.

She liked her little friends. She liked the songs
they sang when they weren't
twisting and folding paper into dolls.
What could be so bad?

Jesus had been a good man, and putting faith
in good men was what
we had to do to stay this side of cynicism,
that other sadness.

OK, we said, One week. But when she came home
singing "Jesus loves me,
the Bible tells me so," it was time to talk.
Could we say Jesus

doesn't love you? Could I tell her the Bible
is a great book certain people use
to make you feel bad? We sent her back
without a word.

It had been so long since we believed, so long
since we needed Jesus
as our nemesis and friend, that we thought he was
sufficiently dead,

that our children would think of him like Lincoln
or Thomas Jefferson.
Soon it became clear to us: you can't teach disbelief
to a child,

only wonderful stories, and we hadn't a story
nearly as good.
On parents' night there were the Arts & Crafts
all spread out

like appetizers. Then we took our seats
in the church
and the children sang a song about the Ark,
and Hallelujah

and one in which they had to jump up and down
for Jesus.
I can't remember ever feeling so uncertain
about what's comic, what's serious.

Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes.
You can't say to your child
"Evolution loves you." The story stinks
of extinction and nothing

exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have
a wonderful story for my child
and she was beaming. All the way home in the car
she sang the songs,

occasionally standing up for Jesus.
There was nothing to do
but drive, ride it out, sing along
in silence.

                    Stephen Dunn

 

 

 

 

 

The biggest regret

So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?

Those who were kindest to you, I bet.

It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.

     George Saunders, 2013 commencement speech 

 

 

 

 

 

Take up arms

To enter into your own mind
        you need to be armed to the teeth.

                Paul Valery, Oeuvres 

 

 

 

 

 

The play's the thing

Life is a moderately good play 

        with a badly written third act.

                    Truman Capote, Tru

 

 

 

 

 

Bribery

Trees know when we are close by.
The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes of their leaves
pump out change when we're near...
when you feel good after a walk in the woods,
it may be that certain species are bribing you.

        Richard Powers, The Overstory

 

 

 

 

 

Labor day

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future’s sakes.

     Robert Frost, from the poem Two Tramps in Mud Time 

God's friend

For prayer is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God.

        Teresa of Ávila, Life of Prayer

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Blackberry-Picking

for Philip Hobsbaum

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

                            Seamus Heaney

 

 

 

 

 

Sounds of silence

There is a wonderful stillness here. Especially I love the evenings, when I linger on my verandah and revel in the complete absence of all sound. That is strange, you will say; how can one enjoy sound that is absent, or indeed anything that does not exist! But if you were a musician perhaps you too would be permitted to hear, in the night stillness a sound, as though the earth in its flight through space intoned a deep bass note. 

Pyotr Illych Tchaikovsky,
To My Best Friend: Correspondence Between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck 

 

 

 

Preference

To know what you prefer,
    instead of humbly saying Amen
        to what the world tells you you ought to prefer,
            is to have kept your soul alive.

                         Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Uplifted

The effort to understand the universe
    is one of the very few things
        which lifts human life a little above the level of farce
            and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

                    Steve Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory

 

 

 

 

Metaphysical outlaws

If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.

Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

 

 

 

 

Great inventions

The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization.

        John Banville, Paris Review interview

 

 

 

 

An appreciation

The Biblical words about the genesis of heaven and earth are not words of information but words of appreciation. The story of creation is not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world's having come into being. 

Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Wisdom of Heschel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Poem: How Many, How Much

How many slams in an old screen door?
    Depends how loud you shut it.
How many slices in a bread?
    Depends how thin you cut it.
How much good inside a day?
    Depends how good you live 'em.
How much love inside a friend?
     Depends how much you give 'em.

            Shel Silverstein 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Making it up as you go along

Even non-human animals mostly follow the instincts and behaviours that characterize their species, Sarte believed. But as a human being, I have no predefined nature at all. I create that nature through what I choose to do. Of course I may be influenced by my biology, or by aspects of my culture and personal background, but none of this adds up to a complete blueprint for producing me. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along. 

Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café 

 

 

 

 

 

Eight million stories

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City.
    New York City is itself a detective story.

                Agatha Christie, Life magazine 1956

 

 

 

 

 

Redemption now

Past and future exist only in our memory.
The present moment, though, is outside of time, it’s Eternity.
In India, they use the word ‘karma,’ for lack of any better term.
It isn’t what you did in the past that will affect the present.
It’s what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.

Paulo Coelho, Aleph

 

 

 

 

 

 

Returning

In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance;
from the winter country and homely neighbours,
to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork
with unimaginable possibilities.

        Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart

 

 

 

One day at a time

One made a climate; one made the days —
    the complexion, the special flavor,
        the special happiness of every day as it passed;
            one made life.

                    Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock

 

 

 

 

 

Benediction

Go forth into the world in peace.
Be strong, and of good courage.
Hold fast to that which is good;
Render to no one evil for evil.
Strengthen the faint-hearted;
Support the weak.
Help the afflicted;
Show love to everyone.
Love and serve the Lord,
Rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit;
And the blessing of almighty God,
The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,
Be among you and remain with you always.  Amen

Book of Common Prayer

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: So This Is Nebraska

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of the redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting at every post.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like

waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

                     Ted Kooser

 

 

 

 

 

On first viewing the Great Plains

Whenever money and the weather allowed, I would cross the mountains and drive around on the plains. A friend came to visit in the spring, and the first thing I did was take her there. My friend is from the West Indies; she had never seen the American West, except for California. We followed U.S. Highway 2 to Glacier National Park, and then we went up the Going-to-the-Sun Highway, past the standing dead trees burned in the lightning fire of 1967, through tunnels in the rock, past precipitous drops on the passenger side, past cliffs dripping water, past old snowdrifts with graffiti scratched on them, past our own chilled breath blowing out the car windows, past mountains with white, sharp tops, and then across Logan Pass, on the Continental Divide. I kept telling my friend I wanted her to see the Great Plains. The road began to descend, and at the turn of each switchback another mountain range would disappear, like scenery withdrawn into the wings, while the sky that replaced it grew larger and larger. We left the park and turned onto U.S. Highway 89. A driver coming down this road gets the most dramatic first glimpse of the Great Plains I’ve ever seen. For some miles, pine trees and foothills are all around; then, suddenly, there is nothing across the road but sky, and a sign says HILL TRUCKS GEAR DOWN, and you come over a little rise, and the horizon jumps a hundred miles away in an instant. My friend’s jaw—her whole face, really—fell, and she said, “I had no idea!”

Ian Frazier, Great Plains

 

24-7

 The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska
        was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.

                        Willa Cather, My Antonia

 

 

 

Foreign lands

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land;
it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

        G. K. Chesterton, The Riddle of the Ivy

 

 

 

Question everything

All things are to be examined and called into question.
There are no limits set to thought.

        Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way 

 

 

Just make it up

Marty, the future isn't written.
It can be changed. You know that.
Anyone can make their future whatever they want it to be.

    Doc Emmett Brown, (played by Christopher Lloyd)
    Back to the Future Part III, screenplay by Bob Gale

The essence of beauty

What is the essence of “beauty”? For me, it keeps coming back to art.
I’ve always defined art as man’s reaction to the work of God.
In God’s work there is beauty and we want to replicate that somehow.
Whether it’s the photographer or a painter that sees the work of light
on something and they try to capture that – the filmmaker with light;
the designer in the theater, trying to craft and carve with light.
You try to capture the essence of that beauty which, like art,
connects us eventually back to God.
The things that allow us to recognize humanity in the world,
and God in our self, take us to an emotional place:
that’s what beauty is. 

    Aldo Billingslea, actor and professor of theater arts,
    quoted in Signs of Life, by Rick Fabian

 

 

 

 

Poem: What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark

After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.

                Brad Aaron Modlin

 

 

 

 

 

Make an effort

Why is it that we remember with effort but forget without effort?
That we learn with effort but stay ignorant without effort?
That we are active with effort, and lazy without effort?

        Augustine of Hippo, City of God

 

 

 

 

 

The Devil's definition

REALITY, n. The dream of a mad philosopher.

        Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Choose one

Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering:
    the kind that leads to more suffering and
    the kind that brings an end to suffering.

        Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

 

 

 

 

 

Happy endings

In the old movies, yes,
there always was the happy ending and order was restored.
As it is in Shakespeare's plays.
It's no disgrace to, in the end, restore order.
And punish the wicked and, in some way, reward the righteous.

        John Updike, Salon interview

 

 

 

 

 

Satisfaction

I have never killed any one,
but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

        Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Spiritual Exercise

To get some distance from this, you first need to get some perspective.

Walk outside on a clear night and just look up into the sky.

You are sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

Though you can only see a few thousand stars, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone. In fact, it is estimated that there are over a trillion stars in the Spiral Galaxy. And that galaxy would look like one star to us, if we could even see it.

You’re just standing on one little ball of dirt and spinning around one of the stars.

From that perspective, do you really care what people think about your clothes or your car? Do you really need to feel embarrassed if you forget someone’s name?

How can you let these meaningless things cause pain? If you want out, if you want a decent life, you had better not devote your life to avoiding psychological pain. You had better not spend your life worrying about whether people like you or whether your car impresses people. What kind of life is that? It is a life of pain.

You may not think that you feel pain that often, but you really do. To spend your life avoiding pain means it’s always right behind you.

    Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Stepping Lightly

We walk on air every day,
the weight of our bodies
pressing our luck, pressing
through time and space,
one single chance
to stomp our heavy foot upon
tender green fragility, or
with our wings of diplomacy
spread wide, float along
the line of life we’re given,
crushing nothing in our path.

            Marilyn Peretti

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hope for a rally

I haven’t gotten so that I’m much more of a person, a being than I am now. 

I haven’t gotten there. 

But what I have gotten was the opportunity, the knowledge, that there’s a way to do this, 

if only you had the guts or the inner resources to do it. 

If you were just tougher on yourself, 

if you were just more demanding, not so lazy, not so unconscious. 

But you can rally. 

The rallies are extraordinary. 

The rallies are great, and they give you hope, 

and it’s the hope for a rally that keeps me going. 

I really hope for a rally, all the time.


        Bill Murray, New York Times interview, April 2025

 

 

 

 

Friends

You can learn a lot from your lovers,
but - for the most part -
you get to keep your friends longer,
and you learn more from them.

        John Irving, In One Person: A Novel

 

 

 

 

Known unknown

Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not.
People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.

    Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

 

 

 

Bitter knowledge

Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this:
to know so much and to have control over nothing.

        Herodotus, The Histories

 

 

 

 

Reminder

We cannot all do everything.

        Virgil, Eclogues

Faith

Faith is not a certainty.
Faith is the courage to live with uncertainty.

        Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Case for God

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Waiting in Line

When you listen you reach
into dark corners and
pull out your wonders.
When you listen your
ideas come in and out
like they were waiting in line.
Your ears don’t always listen.
It can be your brain, your
fingers, your toes.
You can listen anywhere.
Your mind might not want to go.
If you can listen you can find
answers to questions you didn’t know.
If you have listened, truly
listened, you don’t find your
self alone.
 

    Nick Penna (who wrote this when he was nine years old)

 

 

 

 

The mysterious essence of life

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

    Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More than a feeling

Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.
If love were only a feeling,
there would be no basis for the promise
to love each other forever.

        Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

 

 

 

 

Temperatures rising

The moment people talk of "implementing" instead of "doing,"
and of "finalizing" instead of "finishing,"
the organization is already running a fever.

Peter F. Drucker, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World

 

 

 

The Shirky Principle

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

     Kevin Kelly, quoting Clay Shirky in an article in The Technium

 

 

 

 

Imagination

Love alone is not enough.
Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom.
Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving
but because we first stopped imagining.

        James Hillman, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life

 

 

 

 

Wrong way

Of course I doubt [the existence of God], I would distrust anybody who didn't doubt. But I'm a believer. I have an understanding and belief in the divinity of things. It seems to me that people look at God in the wrong way. They think that God is there to serve them, but it's the other way around. God isn't some kind of cosmic bell-boy to be called upon to sort things out for us. It's important for us to realise that God has given us the potential to sort things out on our own. 

        Nick Cave, Observer interview 1998

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

                        Muriel Rukeyser

 

 

 

 

 

              

No good reason

It's an amazing thing to think that ours is the first generation in history that really can end extreme poverty, the kind that means a child dies for lack of food in its belly. That should be seen as the most incredible, historic opportunity but instead it's become a millstone around our necks. We let our own pathetic excuses about how it's "difficult" justify our own inaction. Be honest. We have the science, the technology, and the wealth. What we don't have is the will, and that's not a reason that history will accept.

Bono, 2004 interview, World Association of Newspapers for World Press Freedom Day

 

 

 

 

Games

God may not play dice but he enjoys a good round
    of Trivial Pursuit every now and again.

            Federico Fellini, I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon

 

 

 

 

 

Ancestors

You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor.
A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways.
But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions,
that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.

                Richard Powers, The Overstory

 

 

 

 

 

Understanding

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

Rebecca Herold, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness Training Program