Be a reader

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies...
The man who never reads lives only one.

    George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire

 

 

 

 

 

Nothing neat about it

The moment God is figured out
    with nice neat lines and definitions,
        we are no longer dealing with God.

                Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

 

 

 

 

 

Great Spirit Prayer

Oh, Great Spirit,
Whose voice I hear in the winds
and whose breath gives life to all the world.
Hear me! I need your strength and wisdom.
Let me walk in beauty, and make my eyes
ever hold the red and purple sunset.
Make my hands respect the things you have made
and my ears sharp to hear your voice.
Make me wise so that I may understand
the things you have taught my people.
Let me learn the lessons you have hidden
in every leaf and rock.

Help me remain calm and strong in the
face of all that comes towards me.
Help me find compassion without
empathy overwhelming me.
I seek strength, not to be greater than my brother,
but to fight my greatest enemy: myself.
Make me always ready to come to you
with clean hands and straight eyes.
So when life fades, as the fading sunset,
my spirit may come to you without shame.
 

        Translated by Lakota Sioux Chief Yellow Lark in 1887

Poem: The City by the Sea -- San Francisco

At the end of our streets is sunrise;
At the end of our streets are spars;
At the end of our streets is sunset;
At the end of our streets the stars.

Ever the winds of morning
Are cool from the flashing sea—
Flowing swift from our ocean,
Till the fog-dunes crumble and flee.

Slender spars in the offing,
Mast and yard in the slips—
How they tell on the azure
Of the sea-contending ships!

Homeward into the sunset
Still unwearied we go,
Till the northern hills are misty
With the amber of afterglow.

Stars that sink to our ocean,
Winds that visit our strand,
The heavens are your pathway,
Where is a gladder land!

At the end of our streets is sunrise;
At the end of our streets are spars;
At the end of our streets is sunset;
At the end of our streets the stars.

                         George Sterling

 

Expect miracles

Hence it is not in the least superstitious, it is even a counsel of realism,
to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable,
to be prepared for and to expect “miracles” in the political realm.
And the more heavily the scales are weighted in favor of disaster,
the more miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear.

        Hannah Arendt, What is Freedom?

 

 

 

Everybody

Everybody is special. Everybody.
Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain.
Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.

            Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

 

 

 

 

Spacious

My heart has more rooms in it than a whore house.

        Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

 

 

 

Who counts

It’s not the voting that’s democracy,

                it’s the counting.

                            Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

 

 

 

 

 

Vote!

I have spoken of votes.
Living in a community where political power is lodged with the people,
and each citizen is an elector, the vote is an important expression of opinion.
The vote is the cutting edge.
It is well to have correct opinions, but the vote must follow.
The vote is the seed planted; without it there can be no sure fruit.
The winds of heaven, in their beneficence, may scatter the seed in the furrow;
but it is not from such accidents that our fields wave with the golden harvest.
He is a foolish husbandman who neglects to sow his seed;
and he is an unwise citizen, who, desiring the spread of good principles,
neglects to deposit his vote for the candidate who is the representative of those principles.

        Charles Sumner, Charles Sumner; His Complete Works, Volume III 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All Saints' Day

In his holy flirtation with the world,
    God occasionally drops a handkerchief.
        These handkerchiefs are called saints.

                    Frederick Buechner, Wishful thinking: a theological ABC

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Halloween

The butcher knife goes in, first, at the top
And carves out the round stemmed lid,
The hole of which allows the hand to go
In to pull the gooey mess inside, out—
The walls scooped clean with a spoon.
A grim design decided on, that afternoon,
The eyes are the first to go,
Isosceles or trapezoid, the square nose,
The down-turned mouth with three
Hideous teeth and, sometimes,
Round ears. At dusk it's
Lighted, the room behind it dark.
Outside, looking in, it looks like a
Pumpkin, it looks like ripeness
Is all. Kids come, beckoned by
Fingers of shadows on leaf-strewn lawns
To trick or treat. Standing at the open
Door, the sculptor, a warlock, drops
Penny candies into their bags, knowing
The message of winter: only the children,
Pretending to be ghosts, are real.

                Mac Hammond 

 

 

 

 

 

Lucky

Statistically the probability of any one of us being here is so small
that you would think the mere fact of existence
would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.
We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics,
infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.

        Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell

 

 

 

 

 

Telling

The truth is always something that is told,
not something that is known.
If there were no speaking or writing,
there would be no truth about anything.
There would only be what is.

        Susan Sontag, The Benefactor

 

 

 

 

Wisdom

Wisdom comes not from reason but from love.

        Andre Gide, Fruits of the Earth

 

 

 

 

 

Take the sunny side

Every street has two sides, the shady side and the sunny.
When two men shake hands and part,
mark which of the two takes the sunny side;
he will be the younger man of the two.

        Edward Bulwer-Lytton, What Will He Do With It? 

 

 

 

 

 

Think about this

We are not thinking machines that feel,
        we are feeling machines that think.

                António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error

 

 

 

 

Whatever gets you through the night

I'm not unmindful of man's seeming need for faith;
I'm for anything that gets you through the night,
be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniel's.
But to me religion is a deeply personal thing
in which man and God go it alone together,
without the witch doctor in the middle.

        Frank Sinatra, Playboy interview 1963

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: I Laugh And Cry With The Same Eyes

I laugh and cry with the same eyes,
Love and hate with the same heart.
I feel my rage and my gentleness,
My sanity and suicide.
When I hide my anger, my joy doesn't seem real.
When I hide my fear, my strength is a fraud.
If I only laugh, I leave no place for your pain.
If I only shout, I leave no place for your tenderness.
I want to be all of myself,
So you can be all of yourself,
And together we can be whole.

                James Kavanaugh

 

 

 

 

 

 

Autumn Leaves

I asked the leaf whether it was frightened because it was autumn and the other leaves were falling.

The leaf told me, No. During the whole spring and summer I was completely alive. I worked hard to help nourish the tree, and now much of me is in the tree. I am not limited by this form. I am also the whole tree, and when I go back to the soil, I will continue to nourish the tree. So I don’t worry at all. As I leave this branch and float to the ground, I will wave to the tree and tell her, I will see you again very soon.

That day there was a wind blowing and, after a while, I saw the leaf leave the branch and float down to the soil, dancing joyfully, because as it floated it saw itself already there in the tree. It was so happy. I bowed my head, knowing that I have a lot to learn from the leaf. . . .

So please continue to look back and you will see that you have always been here. Let us look together and penetrate into the life of a leaf, so we may be one with the leaf. Let us penetrate and be one with the cloud or with the wave, to realize our own nature as water and be free from our fear. If we look very deeply, we will transcend birth and death.

Tomorrow, I will continue to be. But you will have to be very attentive to see me. I will be a flower, or a leaf. I will be in these forms and I will say hello to you. If you are attentive enough, you will recognize me, and you may greet me. I will be very happy.

        Thich Nhat Hanh, The Other Shore

Education

Learning is finding out what you already know.
Doing is demonstrating that you know it.
Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you.
You are all learners, doers, and teachers.

        Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

 

 

 

 

 

Belief and change

If you believe in peace, act peacefully;
if you believe in love, acting lovingly;
if you believe every which way, then act every which way,
that's perfectly valid —
but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system.
You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in,
and you set a bum example.
If you want to change the world, change yourself.

            Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Size matters

In a small room one does not say what one would in a large room.

            Louis Kahn, The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn

 

 

 

 

Successful education

For successful education there must always be
a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with.
It must be either new in itself or invested with
some novelty of application to the new world of new times.
Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.
You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth;
but somehow it must come to the students, as it were,
just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance.

            Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education

 

 

 

 

What's present in the silence

Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.

        Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons

 

 

 

Poem: An Instructor's Dream

Many decades after graduation
the students sneak back onto
the school-grounds at night
and within the pane-lit windows
catch me their teacher at the desk
or blackboard cradling a chalk:
someone has erased their youth,
and as they crouch closer to see
more it grows darker and quieter
than they have known in their lives,
the lesson never learned surrounds
them: why have they come? Is
there any more to memorize now
at the end than there was then—
What is it they peer at through shades
of time to hear, X times X repeated,
my vain efforts to corner a room’s
snickers? Do they mock me? Forever?
Out there my past has risen in
the eyes of all my former pupils but
I wonder if behind them others
younger and younger stretch away
to a day whose dawn will never
ring its end, its commencement bell.

                 Bill Knott

 

 

 

 

 

Resistance = Persistence

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary.
It is self created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life....
The pain that you create now is always some form of non acceptance,
some form of unconscious resistance to what is.
On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment.
On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

 

 

 

Remembering the 1989 San Francisco earthquake

Civilization exists by geological consent,
            subject to change without notice.

    Will Durant, What is Civilization? 1946 Ladies' Home Journal

 

 

 

 

 

Don't just sit there...

There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still.
You've only got one life, one youth,
and you can let it slip through your fingers
if you want to; nothing easier.
Most people do that.

        Willa Cather, The Bohemian Girl

 

 

 

 

 

Ignorance

Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. Creeds, articles, and institutes of religious faith ossify our brains and make change impossible. As such they are nuisances, and in practice have to be mostly ignored.

        George Bernard Shaw, Everybody's Political What's What?

Discovery

The only real voyage of discovery, the only Fountain of Youth,
consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes,
in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of a hundred others,
in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees.

            Marcel Proust, The Maxims of Marcel Proust 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That magic moment

You have to take risks … We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen. Every day, God gives us the sun — and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Every day, we try to pretend that we haven't perceived that moment, that it doesn't exist — that today is the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention to their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment. It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us. But that moment exists — a moment when all the power of the stars becomes a part of us and enables us to perform miracles.

Paul Coelho, By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Poem: Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

                Seamus Heaney 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The fluidity of life

Of all the different things that I believe we can learn from music, and each and every one of us obviously learns different things, the most clearly definable is the fact that music teaches us as human beings that everything, without an exception, has a past, a present, and a future. Very simple to say, but we all know how difficult it is to live. When we have a pleasant present, we want it to last, we think it will last forever, but in fact the fluidity of life is for me best expressed in music.

Coming out of nothing, the past, the present of the first note, which is nothing but a transition. And what I have learned from music, and have of course not been able to apply to my daily life, is accepting the fluidity of life and the fact that nothing, absolutely nothing, is completely independent and solid, but everything that I think and feel is dependent on this fluidity of life.

Daniel Barenboim, Reith Lectures 2006: In the Beginning was Sound

Start a fire

The mind is not a vessel to be filled,
        but a fire to be kindled.

                Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures

 

 

 

 

 

Sacred words

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect.
If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little
or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

            Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing