Category Archives: Quotes

Time To Grow Up

This is brilliant.

If you have reached the age of 25, I have a bit of bad news for you, to wit: it is time, if you have not already done so, for you to emerge from your cocoon of post-adolescent dithering and self-absorption and join the rest of us in the world. Past the quarter-century mark, you see, certain actions, attitudes, and behaviors will simply no longer do, and while it might seem unpleasant to feign a maturity and solicitousness towards others that you may not genuinely feel, it is not only appreciated by others but necessary for your continued survival. Continuing to insist past that point that good manners, thoughtfulness, and grooming oppress you in some way is inappropriate and irritating.

Grow up.

And when I instruct you to grow up, I do not mean that you must read up on mortgage rates, put aside candy necklaces, or desist from substituting the word “poo” for crucial syllables of movie titles. Silliness is not only still permitted but actively encouraged. You must, however, stop viewing carelessness, tardiness, helplessness, or any other quality better suited to a child as either charming or somehow beyond your control. A certain grace period for the development of basic consideration and self-sufficiency is assumed, but once you have turned 25, the grace period is over, and starring in a film in your head in which you walk the earth alone is no longer considered a valid lifestyle choice, but rather grounds for exclusion from social occasions.

–Sars, at TomatoNation

To read the 20 suggestions (all of which I endorse), go here.

[Thanks to Jen for leading me to this treasure trove.]

The Divine Erotic

The following excerpt is from Heart & Soul: Living The Joy, Truth & Beauty Of Your Intimate Relationship, by Daphne Rose Kingma.

Integrate The Divine Erotic

Your erotic life, the expression of your sensuality in every dimension, is the mysteriously lovely vehicle for the integration of all that you are as a personality and a spirit. It is the sacred playground of physical passion, the point in our experience more than any other at which the material and spiritual intersect. Here the physical body becomes a temple of joy, of deeply rooted connections, of solace, of coming home.

Through sensuality, emotions are expressed in physical form. The body knows, feels, and teaches, eloquently and directly. When we are touched in exactly the right way, when making love is graceful and ecstatic, we are moved without words to a level of integration of body, mind, and spirit that can be instantly healing.

Because of the power of sexuality to heal the rift between our bodies and our souls, we all have a yearning toward it that is far stronger than what we can attribute to the physical sex drive alone. That is because deep inside we know that the erotic life can lead us to integration. And it is only people who are healed physically, emotionally, and sexually from the great raft of wounds we have all endured (if in no other form than our culture’s repression and perverted exaggeration of the erotic) who can be true vessels of compassion and approach the whole world with generosity.

Unfortunately, many of us have been unable to welcome our bodies, our innate sensuality, and the power of the erotic itself into the ken of the spiritual. We’re not even sure that we should, and yet like our sense of the spirit inside us, we do somehow vaguely understand that our erotic life, too, is divine.

If sexual energy and the joy it creates weren’t so awesome a power, no one would bother with it. Instead of being so focused on it, in so many forms, good and awful, we would have gone off to live quite comfortably without it. The truth is that sexuality is a light of such incredible brilliance that it draws the moths of darkness to it; and for this reason, if for no other, it is a spiritual responsibility that we integrate the divine and erotic in our lives.

In your grand quest for love, therefore, for the finest and most beautifully integrated becoming that your heart can entertain, do not overlook — indeed consciously seek — the sexual healing that will bring your personality and spirit into alignment with your body. For when we integrate our sexuality, claim it as the amazing gift it is, we not only heal ourselves and our partners, we help to restore the divine erotic to the entire world.

Two Ways

Now there are two ways to approach a subject that frightens you and makes you feel stupid: you can embrace it with humility and an open mind, or you can ridicule it mercilessly.

–Judith Stone, Light Elements: Essays in Science From Gravity to Levity (1991)

What Did I Know?

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

–Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

A Certain Fierceness

Another gem unearthed from Michael Ventura’s excavations.

It takes fierceness to grow old well. It takes a fierce devotion to the word good-bye — learning how to say it in many ways — fiercely, yes, but also gently, with laughter, with tears, but, no matter how, to say it every time so that there’s no doubt you mean it.

–Michael Ventura, “Across the Great Divide”; Psychotherapy Networker, Jan/Feb 2005

In Search of Its Dreams

“My heart is afraid it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

–Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

A Gift of Getting Older

A great gift of getting older, of becoming old, is to realize that I, too, am a precious vessel — quite apart from any idea of self-worth I might have, quite apart from anything I may have accomplished. I’m a precious vessel because of all that I’ve seen, all the stories I know, all the images and memories that will die with me. In this way, we’re all precious vessels. And it isn’t that we must get frantic about preserving all we’ve seen and all we know. Preserving all the stories isn’t a human possibility, for all will be forgotten one day. But to know that I’m such a vessel, as you are, makes me more attentive, makes me more available to anyone who asks for what I know, makes me speak more carefully, with less of the judgmental and more attention to nuance — makes me try to speak more slowly and reflectively, and to be like… an older man, the kind of older man I once admired: tolerant, receptive, at ease in his age, not trying to be anything he isn’t, not trying to be younger.

–Michael Ventura, “Across the Great Divide”; Psychotherapy Networker, Jan/Feb 2005

I love this guy; I’m grateful he pours out his words for the rest of us to soak up.

Democracy Is

I always love these nuggets I find over at Fatshadow:

Democracy is about finding a way to get all the voices in the room so that the conversation can be both expansive and inclusive. Democracy acknowledges the tension and seeks to govern not through the domination of a particular ideology but through the awareness that our institutions need to serve us all. Our institutions need to hold the tension and manage the more mundane process of how we spend our collective dollar.

—Tish Parmely

She was reflecting on the amount of money spent on inaugural festivities, and how unseemly it is at any time for such amounts of money be spent when we are a country supposedly striving for egalitarian ideals.