Category Archives: Quotes

Can It?

In an article from the UK publication, The Guardian, a report:

The New Yorker reported this week that the Pentagon has already sent special operations teams into Iran to locate possible nuclear weapons sites. The report by Seymour Hersh, a veteran investigative journalist, was played down by the White House and the Pentagon, with comments that stopped short of an outright denial.

However, there are denials coming from the Pentagon, as reported in Express India:

Pentagon’s spokesman Lawrence Dirita said in a statement that the article “is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his (Hersh) entire piece is destroyed”. …However, the spokesman did not confirm or deny Hersh’s claim that the administration had authorised covert operations against the countries, located in West Asia and South Asia.

Considering all this, I have a question.

Don’t weep for the dead; weep for the brightness in the eyes which is dimmed, for the feeling of love which has withered before its time and for the weeds of hate and revenge which have inherited their place. Can a plant grow on salty soil? Can a nation grow on the soil of fire and sulphur, hate and revenge?

—Natan Hofshi

Surprise!

Remember:

There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved.

–Charles Morgan

When you look into a child’s eyes, think of this. And when you look into an adult’s eyes, imagine the child within. Now go to a mirror and look at yourself. That quote applies to you, too. Who loves you? Take a moment to ponder this. Somebody loves you and cares about your well-being and success. Somebody finds you endearing, notices your talents, accepts your quirks. Even if that somebody has died, the love they carried and gave lives yet. When you feel impoverished of love, try to remember this. Then turn around and remember this of all the people you meet — somebody loves them too. Look for the reasons why this might be. You’d be amazed at what you find, and how this affects your perspective of the human race.

The Nature Of Goodness

Writers would have it that heroes and good characters are less interesting than villains and pests because virtue is boring. I’ll agree that that’s often true in stories, or if you’re Dickens, and it may be that this chapter is doomed to fall short of rousing your passionate interest. But in real life, I have to say, I have found authentic goodness magnificent, muscular, tonic, as rare and grand as Yosemite’s El Capitan, a mountain whose magnitude stuns you further when you realize that it is a monolith, one whole, seamless rock. I find absolutely nothing boring about true goodness.

–June Sprigg, Simple Gifts: Lessons in Living from a Shaker Village

More Than Flinging A Coin

We are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside. But one day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

–Martin Luther King Jr.

Hey, You. Yes, You!

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shinging floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life–

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

–William Stafford

Who?

who is this existence
who puts sadness
in your heart

who is this soul
who sweetens your grief
as soon as you crawl

the one who first frightens you
with deadly snakes
before opening the treasure vault

who changes a monster
to an angel
a sorrow to happiness

who gives the blind
wisdom and
inner sight

who changes darkness
to light
thistles to flowers

who sheds the sins
of the sinful like
autumn leaves

and puts guilt
in the heart of
its own enemies

who makes them
repent and in silence
says amen and
whose amen brings
inner happiness
and soulful delight

who changes bitter thoughts
to lightness and
joyous zeal

bestows fire
and makes you leap
with unknown joy

the fire that can
make a hero
from a desperate heart

who is this existence
who is this
tell me who

— Translation by Nader Khalili
Ghazal (Ode) number 528, from Rumi’s Diwan-e Shams,
“Rumi, Fountain of Fire” Burning Gate Press, Los Angeles, 1994

I Laughed My Derriere Off

Ah, Bill Bryson. He knows how to tickle the funny bone.

I drove on to Grand Teton National Park. And there’s another arresting name for you. Tetons means tits in French. That’s an interesting fact — a topographical tit-bit, so to speak — that Miss Mucous, my junior-high-school geography teacher, failed to share with us in eight grade. Why do they always keep the most interesting stuff from you in school? If I’d known in high school that Thomas Jefferson kept a black slave to help him deal with sexual tension or that Ulysses S. Grant was a hopeless drunk who couldn’t button his own fly without falling over, I would have shown a livelier interest in my lessons, I can assure you.

At any rate, the first French explorers who passed through northwestern Wyoming took one look at the mountains and said, “Zut alors! Hey, Jacques, clock those mountains. They look just like my wife’s tetons.” Isn’t it typical of the French to reduce everything to a level of sexual vulgarity? Thank goodness they didn’t discover the Grand Canyon, that’s all I can say. And the remarkable thing is that the Tetons look about as much like tits as… well, as a frying pan or a pair of hiking boots. In a word, they don’t look like tits at all, excpet perhaps to desperately lonely men who have been away from home for a very long time. They looked a little bit like tits to me.

—The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

Just Some Thoughts

I’ve been thinking…

We live in time
bound by history
confined by illusion
hampered by ignorance
and arrogance.

We seek meaning
in knowledge or dogma
forgetting that meaning
is ours to create
or change or destroy.

We encounter life
through our senses
dealing with what is
just in front of us
since nothing else is real.

Lately I have been struggling with sadness, a pervasive heaviness weighing down my spirit and my body. In particular I am struggling with compromised wishes and dreams, and the grief arising from the fact that the life I would like is not to be had in the current circumstances. Additionally I feel a tinge of shame, or guilt, for being sad over things as ephemeral as ritual (my wedding, and how circumstances are forcing its occurrence) while half a world away, people are grieving the loss of life, of loved ones, of the world they knew. At the same time, I try to create within myself a safe place to allow and accept myself in all my humanity. Because while some of my concerns and feelings arise from ego-driven, petty ideas, they are part of my life, my experience. This is what is real to me at the moment. Bill Bryson captured this in his book about America. He was driving through Toiyabe National Forest, which at the time of his journey was a wasteland of ash and charred stumps. He wrote:

I had never seen such devastation — miles and miles of it — and yet I had no recollection of having read about it. That’s the thing about America. It’s so big that it just absorbs disasters, muffles them with its vastness. Time and again on this trip I had seen news stories that would elsewhere have been treated as colossal tragedies — a dozen people killed by floods in the South, ten crushed when a store roof collapsed in Texas, twenty-two dead in a snowstorm in the East — and each of them treated as a brief and not terribly consequential diversion between ads for hemorrhoid unguents and cottage cheese. Partly it is a consequence of that inane breeziness common to local TV newscasters in America, but mostly it is just the scale of the country. A disaster in Florida is regarded in California in the same way that a disaster in Italy is regarded in Britain — as something briefly and morbidly diverting, but too far away to be tragic in any personal sense.

If you’re feeling blue, remember we are in the darkest days of the year, and we have just come off a holiday season. You may be experiencing sadness because you had a wonderful time and now it’s “back to the grind,” or you might be sad because you had a terrible holiday season. Either way, you feel what you feel. Something I learned at the Centre is how much “comparison grief shopping” we do, and how destructive it is. Just because someone else’s pain may seem more tragic does not mean yours is unjustified. Grief is its own experience. Each person experiences it uniquely; comparison and the subsequent judgments we make (of ourselves or others) is useless. Even destructive.

So, I permit myself to feel sad that I cannot have life as I want. I feel sad that my future father-in-law is terminally ill — the implications of this are multi-faceted. I feel grief for those in Asia who have suffered horrendously. Even if my grief is abstract — not deeply, personally, rivetingly felt — it is genuine.

I realize that I touched on this in the post from the other day. Obviously I am working through something. Themes ebb and flow in our lives.

Wholeheartedness

Wholeheartedness is a precious gift, but no one can actually give it to you. You have to find the path that has heart and then walk it impeccably….It’s like someone laughing in your ear, challenging you to figure out what to do when you don’t know what to do. It humbles you. It opens your heart.

–Pema Chödrön

Already There

Creativeness often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?

–Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

Using One’s Energy

There is another most excellent blogger, also named Kat (all these wonderful Kat-people!), who wrote the following reflection:

The images of the people and animals whose lives have been tossed around by the tsunami and its aftershocks continues to drift through my heart and mind. I know that feeling of utter hopelessness when everything you know is suddenly gone, but not in any degree comparable to what hundreds of thousands are going through right now. Nothing that I can do but send money and well wishes through the energy lines.

You can do that, too. When the situation arises in your mind, rather than go to the horror of it, the fear, opt out of sending out those emotions and instead send them good will and messages of: hang in there, help is on the way, you’ll make it through this, you are not alone.

We are all connected by these cords of energy that link everything and everyone. You can use those cords to help those in crisis to move away from the fear and into that place of quiet joy that is always with us, no matter what is occurring.

It’s so easy to get caught up in how we all want more, how so many of the things we want elude us. But we all live lives of unbelievable luxury, where a hot shower is a faucet turn away, and a dry night’s sleep is right there under the covers.

Tonight is a good night to feel the gratefulness for all that Life brings, to send out: thank you Life for always taking such good care of us, for always bringing us exactly what we need, and thank you for the things that you take away, even as we usually don’t understand the whys and what fors, and especially, thank you for our lives . . . thank you for our lives . . .

—Dating God

Indeed.

Its Own Light

As the eyes cannot see themselves, so it is with the soul;
it is sight itself, and therefore it sees all. The moment
it closes its eyes to all it sees, its own light makes it
manifest to its own view. It is for this reason that
people take the path of meditation.

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

Simply For The Love Of It

The thinking iterated in this excerpt demonstrates the travesty of elevating “arts” as something that only “special, creative” people do.

Despite the maxim about old dogs and new tricks, I don’t think age alone creates such fears. Our society values professionalism and disdains amateurism. Why should I try Irish dancing when I can see “Riverdance”? Why should I attempt to play piano when I can pop Count Basie into the CD player? Why should I expose my clumsiness in sports when I can watch the Ice Capades on the telly? Such emphasis on professionalism makes us consumers rather than dancers, musicians, skaters — or painters. We stop doing things just for love and start spending money instead.

My clearest memory of being discouraged from artistic amateurism came when I entered high school. Like most children, I had always loved art: building pudgy clay pots, painting flowers for mommy, coloring everything colorable. But high school changed all that. My first day, the art teacher — a woman, I regret to say — informed us that the world is divided into artists and non-artists. Artists, as she told it, were different than ordinary folk. They saw things more clearly, felt things more deeply, suffered torments as the crass world grated against their sensitive souls. Such people, she said, were rare and precious. They were geniuses. She had never seen more than one per class. One genius, all the rest clods. Our work would reveal the truth. She would be the judge.

Then she gave us our first assignment.

You can imagine the anxiety as we drew silently, each hoping not to be revealed as an insensitive clod. Appallingly, I can still remember my piece, a little landscape. It seemed very sensitive indeed to me, seemed to reveal my inner torment and depth of soul. I shook as I handed it in.

I shook even harder when the teacher picked up my little drawing. My heart stopped in anticipation. I felt like I was choking. Was it true? Could it be I was an artist? A genius?

But no. The teacher picked my drawing to show how plodding some work could be, how derivative, how lacking in insight. Another student — I do not remember who, I was in a blur of pain — was pronounced the class genius.

I vowed, at that moment, never to paint again.

–Patricia Monaghan, Just For the Love of It, Matrifocus

I had a similar experience in my night grade English class. I wrote a short story that earned a lower grade that I’d expected, and I was crushed. I never wrote fiction again until my late twenties, when due to the paucity of available classes I had to sign up for a fiction writing class for my degree. I managed to do well in that class, but I found writing a torture. I believe that my resistance to writing fiction is rooted in that original experience. Fortunately for Monaghan, she decided to plunge through her fear and made a happy discovery, which you can enjoy by clicking on the Matrifocus link above.