January 2011
“Love life. Engage in it, give it all you’ve got. Love it with a passion because life truly does give back, many times over, what you put into it.”
—Maya Angelou
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower
streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–
or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?
Mary Oliver, “The Sun”
It was funny how the fact of death kept coming at you from different sides and different angles. You tried to jig and jog, you tried to protect yourself on one side, and the truth of it bored right in on another side. Death is a football player and it keeps throwing you down on your ass right there at the line of scrimmage.
The best offense is a good defense and dammit, I got this!
“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. … The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.”
—
This makes me feel better about having gotten those people so wrong. And, about having been gotten wrong by others.
Philip Roth, American Pastoral
This makes me feel better about having gotten those people so wrong. And, about having been gotten wrong by others.
“Most people don’t find their deepest joy in life when it’s easy and they’re winning all the time. They find it when they’re in the dark.”
—
Maureen Neville
When they’ve had the rug pulled out from under them.
When they’ve had the other shoe drop.
When they’ve been forced to make the difficult decisions…
It’s only then that we have to actively seek the light.
The joy.
The love.
“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.”
—Black Elk, Oglala Sioux
Something Good Can Work
Two Door Cinema Club
Two Door Cinema Club - “Something Good Can Work”
We’re gonna show the world that something
Good can happen here for you,
And you know that it will.
“There must be something unique about you that God gave you the privilege to exist.”
—
Gil Fausto
Indeed. You’re unique.
Just like everybody else.
