Category Archives: Quotes

Fur and Purr

A reader, Pat, asked if the phrase “love comes from years/of breathing/skin to skin” (from the poem in the last post) might also apply to cats. I told him I thought so. And then this SARK quote sprang to mind.

Cats Are Angels with Fur

Surrender, You are now entering the tunnel of Cat love.
It’s soft, it’s Warm, it’s Cat-A-Tonic.
Some little known Cat Secrets:
Cats are polka dotted under their fur.
Cats love lemonade on a warm day.
Cat refuse to play scrabble.
Cats will pay rent if you let them.
Cats have not nine lives, but two: Theirs, then Yours.
Some cats make payoffs to flea gangs.
C.A.T. stands for Clever Anatomical Tricks.
Cats know how to cozy up.
Cats sleep circular.
Cats invented naps.
Kiss your cat.
A fur ball is not a toy.
ADOPT A CAT. It will take over your life.

–Written by SARK

We all need protection from Things That Go Bump In The Night, or In Our Dreams. Cats, for me, are IT.

In the Bud

The Kama Sutra of Kindness: Position No. 2

should I greet you
as if
we had merely eaten
together one night
when the white birches
dripped wet
and lightning etched
black trees on your walls?

it is not love
I am asking

love comes from years
of breathing
skin to skin
tangled in each other’s dreams
until each night
weaves another thread
in the same web
of blood and sleep

     and I have only
     passed through you quickly
     like light

     and you have only
     surrounded me suddenly
     like flame

the lake is cold
the snows are sudden
the wild cherry bends
and winter’s a burden

     in your hand I feel
     spring burn in the bud.

–Mary Mackey

The Holiness of Tending the Dead

I found this moving, and oddly comforting.

We placed a linen cloth over her face, and tied the bonnet on, and then she was a bundled white human-shaped figure: no features, no distinguishing marks, only legs and arms, a torso and a head, a small still white figure. A little awkwardly we lifted her and placed her atop the white sheet we had laid over the plain pine box, and wrapped the sheet over her, and then, suddenly, out of the blue, I was shaking with silent tears. I leaned on the edge of the coffin of a woman I had never known, and understood what we had done for her, and wept and wept.

–Rachel Barenblat

Do read the entire, tender story of her first experience with taharah at her blog, Velveteen Rabbi.

Where Is the Dwelling of God?

“Where is the dwelling of God?” This was the question with which the Rabbi of Kotzk surprised a number of learned men who happened to be visiting him. They laughed at him: “What a thing to ask! Is not the whole world full of his glory?” Then he answered his own question: “God dwells wherever people let him in.”

–Martin Buber

Dancing With a Banged-Up Heart

Ooo, I want to read this! Must restrain myself from rushing out to purchase it, though.

Rubble is the ground on which our deepest friendships are built. If you haven’t already, you will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and you never completely get over the loss of a deeply beloved person. But this is also good news. The person lives forever, in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through, and you learn to dance with the banged-up heart. You dance to the absurdities of life; you dance to the minuet of old friendships.

–Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

[via Shirl, a friend with whom I dance]

The Right Words

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitment of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.

–Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

How Amazing It Was

I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.

–Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

If I Die

If I die, survive me with such sheer force
that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold,
from south to south lift your indelible eyes,
from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.
I don’t want your laughter or your steps to waver,
I don’t want my heritage of joy to die.
Don’t call up my person. I am absent.
Live in my absence as if in a house.
Absence is a house so vast
that inside you will pass through its walls
and hang pictures on the air
Absence is a house so transparent
that I, lifeless, will see you, living,
and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.

– Pablo Neruda

[via whiskeyriver]

What’s Up With America?

And when people ask why they should give their money, even in taxes, to help those who have less and cannot afford to care for themselves, I want to shake them and say, “Because you can and they canÂ’t. Your wealth creates in you a responsibility to your people and to your culture. It helps insure that your culture remains healthy.”

–Kenneth W. Collier, “What’s Up With America?”

[via Good Morning Sunshine]

All Writing

All writing contains memoir and of course the more you strive to hide it inside of fictional constructs, the more apparent it often becomes. Writers are like shoppers. We go through life putting things in the basket. How jasmine smells in the rain, how a lover’s face looks upon us when we first awake, what a child’s hand feels like in ours, how humans part from each other and how pain feels. We notate the odd philosophies we hear, remember the phrases that identify people from this or that sphere of life and connect the stray dots with fanciful lines we make from all the things in the basket. Unless we’re writing science fiction or fantasy, we’re not making up anything new, we’re just ordering it all differently for you. We can’t do anything else. What most writers do, I presume, is to take bits and pieces of the reality they’ve lived and seen and read about and observed in others and weave a new set of circumstances around it.

—Catherine Jamieson

[via Fatshadow]

Both The Living And The Dead

“In the other world” means in a world which is veiled from our eyes, our physical eyes; but it does not mean a world far away from us, beyond our reach. Both the living and the dead inhabit the same space; we all live together. Only a veil separates us, the veil of this physical body. Separation means being unable to see one another. There is no other separation.

–Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid `Inayat Khan
From: A Meditation Theme for Each Day
Selected and arranged by Hazrat Pir Vilayat `Inayat Khan

What Do You Think Will Happen?

if you can’t go to sleep
my dear soul
for tonight
what do you think will happen

if you pass your night
and merge it with dawn
for the sake of heart
what do you think will happen

if the entire world
is covered with the blossoms
you have labored to plant
what do you think will happen

if the elixir of life
that has been hidden in the dark
fills the desert and towns
what do you think will happen

if because of
your generosity and love
a few humans find their lives
what do you think will happen

if you pour an entire jar
filled with joyous wine
on the head of those already drunk
what do you think will happen

go my friend
bestow your love
even on your enemies
if you touch their hearts
what do you think will happen

— Rumi, Ghazal 838
Translation by Nader Khalili
“Rumi, Fountain of Fire” Burning Gate Press, 1992

God’s Presence

God’s presence is there in front of me – a fire on the left,
a lovely stream on the right.
One group walks toward the fire, into the fire, another
toward the sweet flowing water.
No one knows which are blessed and which not.
Whoever walks into the fire appears suddenly in the stream.

And then a head goes under on the water surface, that head
pokes out of the fire.
Most people guard against going into the fire,
and so end up in it.
Those who love the water of pleasure and make it their devotion
are cheated with this reversal.
The trickery goes further.
The voice of the fire tells the truth saying, “I am not fire.
I am fountainhead. Come into me and don’t mind the sparks.”

–Rumi

Wow, You’re Pronoid!

No, that’s not a misspelling. I suspect (ha!) that we all may have some experience with the sensation of paranoia — the feeling of being under seige and scrutinized which leads one to be wary about the motives of others. At its extreme, it can result in — or at least be indicative of — psychosis.

So I got to wondering if there was an opposite concept. Lo and behold, there is! According to Turns of Phrase:

Pronoia is the suspicion that the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf, the opposite of the popular sense of paranoia. It seems to have been invented by the sociologist Fred Goldner in an article in Social Problems in 1994, in which he defined it as “the delusion that others think well of one”, the unreasoning belief that your superiors think you are indispensable, that your colleagues adore you, and that you are doing brilliantly in your work. He was warning against the dangers of the rose-tinted view, in which an over-positive view of oneself and the world around one can lead to fatal mistakes. It was soon taken up by the short-lived group called the ZIPPies (the Zen Inspired Pronoia Pagans) invented by a London club promoter named Fraser Clark. The word has a small continuing niche, though its adjective pronoid is less common.

The Pronoia site contests this perspective with:

It was brought to our attention several years ago, via e-mail by Mr. Fred H. Golder, that he believes HE in fact deserves credit for the revival of the word Pronoia in 1982. To his point, Pronoia.net offers a taste of his serious academic paper here. Writing at Queens College in October 1982 (in SOCIAL PROBLEMS,V.30,N.1:82-91), Mr. Golder summarizes:

Pronoia is the positive counterpart of paranoia. It is the delusion that others think well of one. Actions and the products of one’s efforts are thought to be well received and praised by others. Mere acquaintances are thought to be close friends; politeness and the exchange of pleasantries are taken as expressions of deep attachment and the promise of future support. Pronoia appears rooted in the social complexity and cultural ambiguity of our lives: we have become increasingly dependent on the opinions of others based on uncertain criteria.

Our response: Well, maybe feelings of pronoia are always just a ‘delusion’… or maybe Mr. Golder just hasn’t gotten the vibe? 🙂 Seriously, it seems to us as if this pop-psych definition of the word Pronoia holds up a dysfunctional and delusional minority to a scientific zoom lense, and reports the view as if it were an accurate representation of the larger youth phenomenon. Pronoia.net disagrees with this basic premise.

Any way you look at it, the concept is interesting. In the coming week, explore the Pronoia site and consider whether or not you agree with its premise. You might also want to pop in at the Creativity Cafe. Are there times in your life when you have experienced a sense of flow, of “things falling into place” for you? If you want inspiration as you ponder, try out Pronoia Therapy: The First 13 Steps.

Why We Have Heroes

One of my nocturnal meanderings a while back started, as they often do with some ponderance about race. This quickly morphed itself into a question of the function & validity of archetypes, then settled in, at last, to an issue of heroes.

The societal pathology of the frequently undeserved elevation of a person into an icon based on some achievement only remarkable by the standards of a spiritually bankrupt culture’s pop-mentality.

It finally hit though. We need heroes, we need icons. Because we need a guiding light to motivate ourselves toward our ideal “I.”

Toward being in love with our reflection every time we see it.

This is the function of Buddha, or Yeshua, or Abraxas; a Godhead to illuminate. A Godhead to Illuminate us.

…Life is a complicated matter. We can run propaganda wars over the introduction of Ebonics as an accepted dialect. We can shoot one another over shoes. We can bomb one another over the dinosaur remains which run our cars. We can invent theories over the demise of a celebrity who brought some joy or perspective to us through their violent, unstable lives.

Or we can recognize that the light shining from the words and thoughts of our heroes is nothing more than a well articulated expression of our own light.

We can remember that we’ve spent far too long mistaking the reflection for something separate from us.

—His Holiness

[via Nomen Est Numen]

With Good Grace

A friend recently wrote to me and one thing she said struck me as true:

It was my mother’s belief that if you cared about someone, really loved them, then you didn’t ask unreasonable things of them, and you accepted their lives with good grace. Meaning that if you invited them to a party and they said no, you didn’t ask why, and you didn’t demand, and you didn’t hold a grudge. You didn’t make someone prove they cared about you too. That’s what trust is, isn’t it? I think that if you have to ask these questions, then you don’t have faith in that person, and if you have faith, you know that they have their reasons and they can still care about you too. That make any sense?

Yes, it does make sense. I only wish more people could understand this.

Everything It’s Cracked Up To Be

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it …. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk everything, you risk even more. Life doesn’t leave that many choices.”

–Erica Jong

[via Fatshadow]