Not sure what species exactly he is, but he was very excited to see me today!
We had a fun day at the San Diego Zoo with the new Rebel XSi — another 25th anniversary present!
Yeah, I’ve decided to keep the hubby. He buys me stuff and takes me places. Tomorrow — Glen Ivy Hot Springs!
Yes, even dead people on Facebook are more popular than I am. Sigh.
For users of the world’s most popular social media Web site, Facebook offers a way to leave the ultimate status update.
Already, Facebook has become a central hub for news that a person has died with their home page functioning as an ad hoc trading post for information about the funeral and gathering place for condolence notes.
After that initial phase, relatives can ask Facebook to place the dead person’s page into a “Memorial State” that limits use to only certain friends and family members. To trigger that process, family members typically must send Facebook a newspaper clipping about the person’s death, or an official death notice from a local government.
(Facebook launched the feature after the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech, when students flocked to each other’s pages to make comments.)
In the next few months, John McQueen expects his funeral home will add more ongoing digital features, including e-mail reminders that customers can set up for distribution on key dates.
“This would come after you visited a person’s online profile,” McQueen said. “It would auto-send you notification that this person’s birthday is coming up next week, so you might want to drop his wife a card or call. That could go on indefinitely.”
Funeral directors expect more baby boomers will create a vibrant online life after death.
“We’re all watching the Baby Boomers starting to ask what it’s going to be like when they die,” said Alan Creedy, a Raleigh, N.C. consultant to the funeral industry. “Boomers are looking at the funeral as a form of self expression.”
Or, how the hell did we ever stay together this long…
Happy Anniversary, Baby…
A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance and tenacity. The order varies for any given year. –Paul Sweeney
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
– Mark Twain
Dragon of anger
Calls for us to take action
Anger is the fire
Nurture the darkness of your soul
until you become whole.
Can you do this and not fail?
–Tao Te Ching, 10
Been feeling angry about a lot of little things lately. Part of it is politics, with all the torture memos coming out this week. Most of it is just small things annoying me. But it’s quite unusual for me to be feeling it so strongly. I’ve been doing a lot of shadow work, though, trying to get at some issues that still nibble at me from time to time and that have popped up more frequently lately. I suppose I should go see my shrink, but these are the things he’s never really been able to be helpful about, because of basic worldview differences (he’s Jewish, of course). I think I lost a bit of respect for him when he mentioned he stopped talking to his mother — I just thought that was a bit weird for a shrink to say, and shows a lot of avoidance of shadow issues. I guess they have their own problems too though, of course.
So anyway, I’m kind of looking for more of a Jungian approach rather than Freudian, and a good Jungian analyst seems to be hard to find. The do it yourself approach is tough with Jung, since I do understand it, but it takes a lot of time. And the shadow is a trickster, so it’s just tough to deal with in general anyway. And since I don’t want to inflict this on others, I’m staying more to myself, so I’m a bit lonely from that.
Ah well, this too shall pass…
“When you are feeling depreciated, angry and drained, it is a sign that other people are not open to your energy.” — Sanaya Roman
“There is nothing more galling to angry people than the coolness of those on whom they wish to vent their spleen.” — Alexandre Dumas
“The world needs anger. The world often continues to allow evil because it isn’t angry enough.” — Bede Jarrett
“In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.” — Mark Twain
“Do not teach your children never to be angry; teach them how to be angry.” — Lyman Abbott
“At the core of all anger is a need that is not being fulfilled.” — Marshall B. Rosenberg
“It is wise to direct your anger towards problems — not people; to focus your energies on answers — not excuses.” — William Arthur Ward
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” — Douglas Adams
“Anger is a great force. If you control it, it can be transmuted into a power which can move the whole world.” — William Shenstone
“Anger is not bad. Anger can be a very positive thing, the thing that moves us beyond the acceptance of evil.” — Joan Chittister
“Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
– William Saroyan
“I would not look upon anger as something foreign to me that I have to fight…I have to deal with my anger with care, with love, with tenderness, with nonviolence.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
Dr. Buddy Rydell: Dave, there are two kinds of angry people – explosive and implosive. Explosive is the type of individual you see screaming at the cashier for not taking his coupon. Implosive is the cashier who remains quiet day after day and then finally shoots everyone in the store. You’re the cashier.
Dave Buznik: No, no, no. I’m the guy in the frozen food section dialin’ 911. I swear.
– Anger Management
Let’s do our part for Earth Day by continuing to only impact the outside world via email, Facebook, and Twitter!
And blogs, of course!
“Sentiment without action…is the ruin of the soul” — Edward Abbey
“Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast, a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.
So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for awhile and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies — You will outlive the bastards.” — Edward Abbey
“Nature is self-organizing and resilient but, like any problem solver, needs options — lots and lots of players, from microbes to whales. The more potential options are available, the more likely new relationships can emerge to succeed or men those that have been disrupted and broken, and the more resilient a stressed ecosystem is likely to be.”
“Aldo Leopold…observed that the key to healing broken habitats was to save as many of the parts as possible. The processes that create and shape diversity — fires and floods, for example — are also important. An ecosystem that is shaped by occasional fires must be big enough to replace species that are lost to fires where they occur, or its diversity is vulnerable and temporary, perched on the edge of inevitable decline.” –Chip Ward, “Hope’s Horizon”
Peace is easily maintained;
Trouble is easily overcome before it starts.
The brittle is easily shattered;
The small is easily scattered.
Deal with it before it happens.
Set things in order before there is confusion.
A tree as great as a man’s embrace springs from a small shoot;
A terrace nine stories high begins with a pile of earth;
A journey of a thousand miles starts under one’s feet.
– Tao Te Ching, 64
To me, the true visionaries are not visionary because they see something that doesn’t exist, but because they see something that does exist and what could be made from it, even if at first it is only a small fragment of an idea. Perhaps that’s just the engineering point of view, but I think a lot of people get stuck because they can’t grasp that we have to go from where we are.
A lot of times when I am feeling stuck, I have to step back and realize how much of what I’ve wanted in my life I have already accomplished, and that it is simply now my ideas of what I can do have become larger, or perhaps taken a different focus. And yes, there are lots of days I wish I could go back and be younger or do something differently, but it is the choices I’ve made that brought me here. It may not be what I originally envisioned, it may not yet be what I envision for the future, but it is an accomplishment of many visions over the years. Some days my life seems to fall apart into bits and pieces, and I just have to work on that one small thing. When I was very very depressed, a day’s accomplishment might just be to get a shower and take care of myself, but I had to feel that it was enough, then. Now, I want to accomplish larger things, but they are all still in fragments in my head.
What I will make from here on I don’t yet know. I can envision many possibilities, but which ones will play out I can’t say. I keep thinking that I have time now, I have money, I should be accomplishing more than I am. But then again, I have learned how to simply be, and that is something I could not have accomplished in the past. Perhaps now I have the resources to learn to go and do in ways that are more appropriate to my being.
“They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.”
– Kahlil Gibran
“In the night we stumble over things and become acutely conscious of their separateness, but the day reveals the unity which embraces them. ” — Rabindranath Tagore
“Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.”
– Kahlil Gibran
“A vision is not just a picture of what could be; it is an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something more.” — Rosabeth Moss Kanter
“The life of a man consists not in seeing visions and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”
– Cecil Beaton
“The ultimate function of prophecy is not to tell the future, but to make it. Your successful past will block your visions of the future.” — Joel Barker
“Action and reaction, ebb and flow, trial and error, change – this is the rhythm of living. Out of our over-confidence, fear; out of our fear, clearer vision, fresh hope. And out of hope, progress.”
— Bruce Barton
“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” — Oscar Wilde
“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.” — Henri Matisse
“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.”
— Camille Pissarro
“A narrow vision is divisive, a broad vision expansive. But a divine vision is all-inclusive.”
— H. H. Swami Tejomayananda
“The books first turn up as fragmentary pictures in my head, usually, disconnected scenes that I then have to explain to myself, and eventually the reader. They don’t turn up all at once, of course, or my head would explode… If I knew how the books were going to end before embarking on them, there would be little reason to write them, after all. Dag says it best, in Passage: “The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.”” — Lois McMaster Bujold
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You’re all looking at my squid now, aren’t you?
One of my 25th anniversary presents, (hey, the 25th IS silver, after all!) from a lovely day at the Ren Faire… I guess I’ll keep him — the husband and the squid!
The jeweler, Da’oud Thompson, was very enthusiastic about my purchase, too!
I am, however, almost talked into Facebook. Still not sure it’s worth it, though. I mean, it’s not like I’m hard to find on the Internet, after all. And I really don’t give a rats ass about other people’s baby pictures. They all look all wrinkly and scrunchy and red anyway. And your vacation pictures only make me envious.
But wait – there’s more. Good grief, people — get lives.
And oh, yeah — facebook makes people dumb.
Oh yes. I could do that, too. My voice coach in college wanted me to try out for the San Francisco Opera, but I never did. I wish I had her courage.
Everyone has talents. Everyone can do things you can’t imagine. We are all extraordinary, really.
Go Susan.
There was a time when men were kind
When their voices were soft
And their words inviting
There was a time when love was blind
And the world was a song
And the song was exciting
There was a time
Then it all went wrong
I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted
But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
And they turn your dream to shame
He slept a summer by my side
He filled my days with endless wonder
He took my childhood in his stride
But he was gone when autumn came
And still I dream he’ll come to me
That we will live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather
I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.
“We are too cynical,” Amanda said, addressing Boyle after her performance. “Everyone was rooting against you.” It was as if Amanda expected this one moment where art conquered all, where the sincerity of song and execution softened every heart, to allow us to believe we had somehow been purged of all our cheap, superficial ways. Susan sang, and shrugged her shoulders and tossed her gray locks, and now we were changed, changed utterly by this transforming performance. Now Piers and Simon and Amanda and you and me, we were all going to move forward with openness and acceptance in our hearts for all kinds of people in all kind of packages. As if by approving of this one dorky but brilliant outsider, this world would be granted forgiveness for all the meanness, bullying and tawdry acceptance of the third rate that is its usual fare.
But instead of changing us, Susan Boyle’s explosion into fame is much more likely to change her. Already she has appeared on Scottish television with her hair seemingly darkened and somehow forced into submission. Please please please, Susan! The vintage women of the world beg you: Don’t lose a pound. Don’t buy a new wardrobe. No highlights! No Botox! Don’t touch chin one, or chin two.
Remember Ella Fitzgerald, and just keep singing.
“It is very important to know how to unleash people’s inborn creativity. My concept is that anybody has creative ability, but very few people know how to use it.” — Akio Morita
“A young person with the right talents needs to have infinite desire and never give up. I apply a simple test with young students: smash a teapot into pieces and then hand out the glue. Those who rebuild the teapot won’t make it, those who create phantasy animals and spaceships will. ” — Hartmut Esslinger (founder of frog design)
“Creativity is a lot like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope. You look at a set of elements, the same ones everyone else sees, but then reassemble those floating bits and pieces into an enticing new possibility. ” — Rosabeth Moss Kanter
“Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.” — Erich Fromm
“Creating one thing at a certain point in the river feeds those who come to the river, feeds creatures far downstream, yet others in the deep. Creativity is not a solitary movement. That is its power. Whatever is touched by it, whoever hears it, sees it, senses it, knows it, is fed. That is why beholding someone else’s creative word, image, idea, fills us up, inspires us to our own creative work. A single creative act has the potential to feed a continent. One creative act can cause a torrent to break through stone.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.”
– William Pollard
“One has reached the ultimate levels of creativity when one has mastered a skill so thoroughly that it can be forgotten. Look at heaven and earth. Do they think about creating the weather, the seasons, and the cycles of growing? They only go on revolving according to their nature, and the rest is generated without any thought or work on their part. This is truly effortless action and is considered the highest skill that a follower of Tao can attain.” — Deng Ming Dao
“The recognition and understanding of the need was the primary condition of the creative act. When people feel they had to express themselves for originality for its own sake, that tends not to be creativity. Only when you get into the problem and the problem becomes clear, can creativity take over.”
– Charles Eames
“Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.” — John Updike
“Living creatively is really important to maintain throughout your life. And living creatively doesn’t mean only artistic creativity, although that’s part of it. It means being yourself, not just complying with the wishes of other people.” — Matt Groening
“Most of what you will create is for your enrichment or is a stepping stone to other better, more insightful work. Maybe once or twice in a lifetime you will be recognized with the kudos of the public, so in the meantime, create for yourself.” –Don Hahn
“But, if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.” — Carl Gustav Jung
Most of my broken pots end up in the garden helping to mulch the plants. I keep wanting to do some mosaics, but never get to doing any. There’s a woman at the craft market who makes beautiful mosaic tables and things, really inspirational pieces.
I suppose I’ve actually been the most creative at putting the broken bits of myself back together again. It’s been years since then, and somehow I’m never depressed anymore, rarely down. It seems sometimes when you build something new from the broken pieces, it can become even stronger and more whole than before. Strange, but true. Sometimes all you need is some glue…
Darrell Brown is another one of those people I’m proud to say I went to high school with. Until recently I hadn’t realized how exceptional our high school actually was at inspiring and motivating us to do something with our lives, to be what we could be if we tried.
But I’m very glad that it was, and that so many of my friends have done well for themselves and made a difference in the world.
Darrell has a new book coming out he’s written with Leeann Rimes, “What I Cannot Change”, and co-wrote many of the songs on her album, “Family”.
The Get-Out-the-Song Effort
By Darrell Brown
In 1979, I moved into a one-bedroom apartment adjacent to the Hollywood Bowl with my rental piano in tow and began trying to write songs. I didn’t have a clue how to get started in the music business, or even where to get good advice. But I had the blind willingness to put myself out there and see where life, love and God would lead me. The first of many mysterious events unfolded when I met a guy in my building who co-owned a recording studio in downtown Hollywood. The technology anyone can use now to record music at home was then neither readily available nor affordable. This person was a miracle find in my book. A miracle.
Eventually I made him an offer: I would bring local clients to his studio and split the proceeds with him if he would let me use the studio for free for my own work. The pitched worked — he said yes. Not long after I had my first cuts hit the radio airwaves — in the form of jingles I produced — and I thought that maybe-kinda-sorta I was on my way.
It’s not that the jingles were great (they weren’t) or that anyone besides my family and friends knew that they were on the radio (they didn’t). Yet I felt I had broken through some invisible wall that the gatekeepers of the music world had put up. There I was, just a young mutt barely paddling upstream. I kept paddling. There was no shore in sight, but at least I was figuring out how to paddle. And I was happy.
My next step up the ladder of the music world came when some of my original songs were cut by extremely unknown artists on their own indie labels. The kind of cassettes — yes, I said cassettes — sold in night clubs or bars, usually set up on a card table down the hallway of a sticky-floored nightclub where people would pass by on the way to the toilet. But each night it felt so great that people were hearing, dancing and singing along to songs I had co-written with the band. It felt great to know that the band was selling some product and that I was getting my share of the sales as a songwriter.
I found it was important to keep getting myself out there, physically, to the clubs in town or the coffee shops where singer-songwriters would perform. The more I hung around these places, the more artists I met. That led to more co-writing, and eventually, more recorded songs. Of course, there was a non-monetary benefit to all that hustling to make a few bucks from my work — I got better. I was learning so much as songwriter from everyone I was working with. It was the best education I’d ever received. Since then I have been an enthusiastic student at the School of Getting Off Your Butt and Doing Something. Nothing ever happens if you just stay locked away in a room somewhere.
I also kept reading music magazine and trade papers. I memorized the names of producers, songwriters, musicians, engineers, record company executives — the gatekeepers who had the ability to open doors for me or slam them shut. If I came with the goods, I believed, the best work I could muster up at the time, things would continue to happen for me. I was right.
As I kept reading these trade papers I came to see that the music world wasn’t just here in the good ol’ U.S.A. but in practically every country on earth. So I started contacting publishers, producers and record executives in other parts of the world and — wouldn’t you know it? — I started getting a couple of cuts per year with foreign recording artists.
The way I looked at it, no opportunity was too small. I quickly found that no matter how unknown some of these foreign artists might have been in the States, each new cut I placed with them gave me a story to tell the next musician or producer. It gave me some hope to hold on to, and built up the confidence I needed to go to my room and write again and again. It made me feel that I was on the right path, and most of all, it brought me absolute joy to know I was becoming a working songwriter.
I loved, loved, loved hearing my songs being sung in choirs in schools and in churches for holiday services and special shows. I got my songs put into small local theater presentations and found vocal groups around town to perform them at special corporate shows and fundraisers. I had singers sing them at piano bars. I wasn’t restrictive or choosy — anyone who wanted to sing my songs was perfectly O.K. with me.I believe that this is the way it should be. I write songs. And to fearfully shelter a song, afraid that someone might ruin it or not record it correctly or sing the perfect “first” version of it — that seems wrong to me. Of course I have had those fears. Like everyone else, I’ve been afraid that I was not good enough or that someone might ridicule my work. But in my life, I have seen too many brilliant men and women turn down opportunities to have their songs heard — simple ones like the church choir gig or the jingle — and then years later put down their pen and paper in bitter disdain for a business that has proven to them that it doesn’t support art.
I’m not saying that if I have an unbelievable gift of a song come out of me that I won’t take it to the artist I think could make it a timeless smash — I’m not crazy. But I do know that one can never know or truly predict in the raw stages of a career who the next Madonna or Garth Brooks or Michael Jackson or Frank Sinatra is going to be. So I am open to all possibilities to be amazed, surprised by joy and hit records.
And so I keep traveling forward, hopeful for the willing ear.
via The Get-Out-the-Song Effort – Measure for Measure Blog – NYTimes.com.
The most articulated value in Greek culture is areté. Translated as “virtue,” the word actually means something closer to “being the best you can be,” or “reaching your highest human potential.” The term from Homeric times onwards is not gender specific. Homer applies the term of both the Greek and Trojan heroes as well as major female figures, such as Penelope, the wife of the Greek hero, Odysseus. In the Homeric poems, areté is frequently associated with bravery, but more often, with effectiveness. The man or woman of areté is a person of the highest effectiveness; they use all their faculties: strength, bravery, wit, and deceptiveness, to achieve real results. In the Homeric world, then, areté involves all of the abilities and potentialities available to humans.
[ since arete also means a sharp mountain ridge or peak, this also implies this is the origin of the idea of peak performance]
Nurture the darkness of your soul
until you become whole.
Can you do this and not fail?
Can you focus your life-breath until you become
supple as a newborn child?
While you cleanse your inner vision
will you be found without fault?
Can you love people and lead them
without forcing your will on them?
When Heaven gives and takes away
can you be content with the outcome?
When you understand all things
can you step back from your own understanding?
Giving birth and nourishing,
making without possessing,
expecting nothing in return.
To grow, yet not to control:
This is the mysterious virtue.
– Tao Te Ching: Chapter 10
translated by J. H. McDonald
“Always do the right thing. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
– Mark Twain
Embracing the Way, you become embraced;
Breathing gently, you become newborn;
Clearing your mind, you become clear;
Nurturing your children, you become impartial;
Opening your heart, you become accepted;
Accepting the world, you embrace the Way.
Bearing and nurturing,
Creating but not owning,
Giving without demanding,
This is harmony.
– Ta Te Ching 10,
translated by Peter Merel
Maude: “Vice, Virtue. It’s best not to be too moral. You cheat yourself out of too much life. Aim above morality. If you apply that to life, then you’re bound to live life fully.”
– “Harold and Maude”, Collin Higgins
Carrying body and soul and embracing the one,
Can you avoid separation?
Attending fully and becoming supple,
Can you be as a newborn baby?
Washing and cleansing the primal vision,
Can you be without stain?
Loving all men and ruling the country,
Can you be without cleverness?
Opening and closing the gates of heaven,
Can you play the role of woman?
Understanding and being open to all things,
Are you able to do nothing?
Giving birth and nourishing,
Bearing yet not possessing,
Working yet not taking credit,
Leading yet not dominating,
This is the Primal Virtue.
– Tao Te Ching 10,
translated by Gia-Fu Feng
“The Tao has no place for pettiness, and nor has Virtue. Pettiness is dangerous to Virtue; pettiness is dangerous to the Tao. It is said, rectify yourself and be done.”
– Chuang Tzu
“The Greeks invented the idea of nemesis to show how any single virtue, stubbornly maintained, gradually changes into a destructive vice. Our success, our industry, our habit of work have produced our economic nemesis. Work made modern men great, but now threatens to usurp our souls, to inundate the earth in things and trash, to destroy our capacity to love and wonder.”
– Sam Keen
“As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.”
– Albert Einstein
“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”
– Winston Churchill
“There is…an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents…. The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy.” — Thomas Jefferson
“I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.”
– Carl Jung
“Moral education… is not about inculcating obedience to law or cultivating self-virtue, it is rather about finding within us an ever-increasing sense of the worth of creation. It is about how we can develop and deepen our intuitive sense of beauty and creativity.
– Andrew Linzey
“Genuine honesty, assuming that this is our virtue and we cannot get rid of it, we free spirits – well then, we will want to work on it with all the love and malice at our disposal and not get tired of ‘perfecting’ ourselves in our virtue, the only one we have left: may its glory come to rest like a gilded, blue evening glow of mockery over this aging culture and its dull and dismal seriousness!” — Friedrich Nietzsche
“And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.”
- Ernest Hemingway
“Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.” — Voltaire
We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand… and melting like a snowflake. Let us use it before it is too late.- Marie Beynon Ray
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.” — Henry David Thoreau
“Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going” — Tennessee Williams
“We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery. — H. G. Wells
The other day a man asked me what I thought was the best time of life. “Why,” I answered without a thought, “now.” — David Grayson
Don’t worry, darlin’
No baby, don’t you fret
We’re livin’ in the future
And none of this has happened yet
– Bruce Springsteen
Sing for the day sing for the moment
Sing for the time of your life
Come for an hour stay for a moment
Stay for the rest of your life
– “Sing for the Day”, Styx, (Tommy Shaw)
It only takes a moment
For your eyes to meet and then
Your heart knows in a moment
You will never be alone again
I held her for an instant
But my arms felt sure and strong
It only takes a moment
To be loved a whole life long…
And that is all that love’s about
And we’ll recall when time runs out
That it only took a moment
To be loved a whole life long!
– “It Only Takes a Moment” from Hello Dolly, Jerry Herman
“When we must deal with problems, we instinctively resist trying the way that leads through obscurity and darkness. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness. But to penetrate the darkness we must summon all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer.” — Jung
“The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.”
–R.D. Laing
“Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.” — Carl Gustav Jung
“I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.” — Plutarch
“The brighter love’s radiance, the darker the shadows we encounter; the more we feel life stirring within us, the more we also feel our dead spots; the more conscious we become, the more clearly we see where we remain unconscious. None of this need dishearten us. For in facing our darkness, we bring to light forgotten parts of our being. In recognizing exactly where we have been unconscious, we become more conscious. And in seeing and feeling the ways we’ve gone dead, we start to revive and kindle our desire to live more expansively.”
– John Welwood
“Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”
– C.S. Lewis
“Where there is much light, the shadow is deep” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten” — Neil Gaiman
“Between the conception
and the creation
between the emotion
and the response
Falls the shadow”
— Joseph Conrad
“With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” — Jung
No matter how fast you run, your shadow keeps up.
Sometimes it’s in front!
Only full overhead sun diminishes your shadow.
But that shadow has been serving you.
What hurts you, blesses you.
Darkness is your candle.
Your boundaries are your quest.
I could explain this,
but it will break the glass cover on your heart,
and there’s no fixing that.
You must have shadow and light source both.
Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe.
When from that tree feathers and wings sprout on you,
be quieter than a dove.
Don’t even open your mouth for even a coo.
– Rumi
This explains so much… now if I could just understand facebook… although I know a lot of people’s pets are on facebook…
Ok, for anyone not on Twitter, it’s time to reevaluate: These days, even plants are doing it. And successfully, too—Pothos has 2,300 followers, and when it tweets, it almost always gets what it wants.
Granted, all it wants is water, but when plant owners are forgetful or just don’t have a green thumb, their green friends often go thirsty. The solution? Botanicalls, a device that sends wireless signals to Twitter. It’s made of soil moisture sensors that transmit information (too much moisture? too little?) through a circuit board to a microcontroller, just like a mini-computer.
The software has settings that allow you to program specifically for the type of plant and the unique qualities of the soil, and the language sent to Twitter can be customized—so the message can vary in tone from the polite “please” to the urgent “I’m desperately thirsty”—or, as Mr. Ikea Plant will tweet, “I’m wicked thirsty.”
Co-creator Kate Hartman now feels guilty when she doesn’t water her plants because everybody will know. It’s like the Little Shop of Horrors has gone high-tech. Not to mention more polite: The plant also sends “thank you” tweets once it’s been fed.
via Your Plants Have More Twitter Followers Than You—Literally | Discoblog | Discover Magazine.
Desire — Justin Simoni
That was no beast that stirred,
That was my heart you heard
Pacing to and fro
In the ambush of my desire.
To the music my flute let fall.
– “Neither Spirit Nor Bird” (Shoshone Love Song), trans. Mary Austin
The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.
Why is it infinite?
It has no desires for itself;
thus it is present for all beings.
The Master stays behind;
that is why she is ahead.
She is detached from all things;
that is why she is one with them.
Because she has let go of herself,
she is perfectly fulfilled.
– Tao Te Ching: Chapter 7
translated by Stephen Mitchell
Heaven and Earth last for ever.
Why do Heaven and Earth last for ever?
They are unborn,
So ever living.
The sage stays behind, thus he is ahead.
He is detached, thus at one with all.
Through selfless action, he attains fulfillment.
– translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English
Transcending the ego is equivalent to transcending suffering. Your ego, which is your false self, keeps you identified with your mind. The ego keeps you tied in thinking about your past and it also makes you think about the future. The ego wants you to be anywhere other than where you are at this moment. The ego makes you believe that something is lacking in this current moment that is keeping you from being at peace. Maybe you believe that you need a new car or a dog or a shirt in order to feel better. There is nothing wrong with purchasing any of these things or wanting any of these things but if you believe that they will make you feel better then the desire is probably ego-based. Unfortunately, under the rein of the ego you will never be at peace and you will never transcend suffering.
The ego is the source of desire. When you remove desire you can remove the ego. This is definitely easier said than done; however, just being aware of the impact your ego will help to remove its grip in your life.
The next two hindrances are raga (attachment, desire) and dvesha (aversion). Within these are the more specific hindrances of attachment to pleasure, or sukha, and aversion to pain, or duhkha. Sukha and duhkha in themselves are simply natural human reactions. Sukha and duhkha become raga and dvesha when attachment is present, for it is in the attachment to pleasure and the aversion to pain that we get into trouble. — Rolf Gates, Meditations from the Mat
“The man whom desires enter as rivers flow into the sea, filled yet always unmoving — that man finds lasting peace.” — Bhagavad Gita
So much desire in the world today
So much of everything you can’t give it away
You could be happy but you’re feeling so bad
About what you never have
Because you can’t look at nothing without wanting it
And you know that’s the truth
There’s always some scene you think you got to break into
Or a new sensation to intoxicate you
Ain’t it a drag
Staring through the glass at something doesn’t touch you really
Or bring you laughter or roses or stroke your hair so tenderly
Desire
Stealing you away from me
Desire
You’re living in a dream
Desire
Is getting the best of you…
Who was it told you
You have to have everything you see
Same one who sold you that last fantasy
Roll up your sleeves and use those hands for something
That’s gonna work for you baby
To fill your arms and your heart with joy
Changing Places is about the process of creating and opening up to change. The focus changes with my interests. My current interests include spiritual change, business change management, cultural change, artistic change, Tao Te Ching (The Way of Change), interpersonal and relationship change, and lifestyle change. It is also my personal blog, so my own life changes get top billing. I am an Internet archaeologist, so I am constantly digging things up.
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