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Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
"The new circumstances under which we are placed call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects." - Thomas Jefferson
"Men without hope, resigned to despair and oppression, do not make revolutions. It is when expectation replaces submission, when despair is touched with the awareness of possibility, that the force of human desire and the passion for justice are unloosed." - Robert F. Kennedy
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Monday, February 21, 2005
"'The true nature of anything,' Aristotle says, 'is what it becomes at its highest.' Not the embryo, but the full-grown man; not any man, but man at his greatest." - Edith Hamilton, one of America's greatest classicists
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Sunday, February 20, 2005
"We are built to conquer environment, solve problems, achieve goals, and we find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve." - Maxwell maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics"
The photo is of Mike Melville, 62 years old, standing atop Spaceship One, which he had just piloted into space and back on the first of two successful attempts to win the X PRIZE.
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Saturday, February 19, 2005
"The poor man's conscience is clear; yet he is ashamed...He feels himself out of the sight of others, groping in the dark. Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles and wanders unheeded. In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market. . . he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar. He is not disapproved, censured or reproached; he is only not seen. . .To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, is intolerable. If Crusoe on his island had the library of Alexandria, and a certainty that he should never again see the face of man, would he ever open a volume?" John Adams, as quoted by Robert F. Kennedy in his campaign treatise, "To Seek a Newer World"
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Friday, February 18, 2005
Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
- Robert Frost
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Thursday, February 17, 2005
"For hunger is a curious thing: at first it is with you all the time, waking and sleeping and in your dreams, and your belly cries out insistently, and there is a gnawing and a pain as if your very vitals were being devoured, and you must stop it at any cost, and you buy a moment's respite even while you know and fear the sequel. Then the pain is no longer sharp but dull, and this too is with you always, so that you think of food many times a day and each time a terrible sickness assails you, and because you know this you try to avoid the thought, but you cannot, it is with you. Then that too is gone, all pain, all desire, only a great emptiness is left, like the sky, like a well in a drought, and it is now that the strength drains from your limbs, and you try to rise and find you cannot, or to swallow and your throat is powerless, and both the swallow and the effort of retaining the liquid tax you to the uttermost." - Kamala Markandaya, the Indian writer, as quoted in The Hunger Project's "ENDING HUNGER - An idea whose time has come."
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Wednesday, February 16, 2005
A friend of mine gave me this wonderful little book a few years back called, "Dare to Believe." It has some real gems in it that I hope will brighten up your day:
"When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap!" - Cynthia Heimel
"Take your lifer in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame." - Erica Jong
"Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed." - Michael Pritchard
"Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself." - Katherine Mansfield
"Good timber does not grow with ease; the stronger the wind, the stronger the trees." - J. Willard Marriottt
"Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else." - Judy Garland
Oh, and the picture today - it's a stack of red plates. Have a great day.
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Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
James Hilman, in his book, "The Soul's Code," writes about the need to protect the imaginative genius that lives inside of each of us: "To protect the genius we must protect the story in which the genius can live, else it might take its invisibility literally, grow silent, and disappear for fear of being reduced to mediocrity." He goes on to talk about the "fears of slavery to a normalizing system," that "might take over and walk away with my soul."
This is the great danger of the current political climate. It goes way beyond fiscal and moral conservativism. This is what people don't see. The current political climate seeks a normalization to the way things are - an annihilation of all real possibility - a slow death of the genius inside each of us that imagines the most marvelous world. Ultimately this is a slow death for God - by the very people with God on their lips all the time.
Don't let the mediocrity they have put on a pedestal and to which they are trying to seduce you to aspire ever let your genius feel that it has been abandoned by you. You are its protector. Your genius is real. Everything they use to tell you that it isn't is what is unreal. Don't ever forget this.
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Sunday, February 13, 2005
Monday, February 14, 2005
Happy Valentine's day everyone.
"One world at a time..." This is a quote from Thoreau - something he said when asked about the hereafter. "One world at a time." How brilliant. I have always thought it a heresy that people wait for the next world when God has given us such a beautiful one to enjoy right here and now. It is an insult to God's creation. What could possibly be more heavenly than the hummingbirds and the tulips and the wind and the water and the wood God created for us on the earth? How does one decribe the arrogance it takes to impose upon God the assignment of creating yet a second masterpiece, and to believe that we are entitled to such a commission?
Moments before I came across the Thoreau quotation I was reading a disturbing article by Bill Moyers in which he writes, "In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index. That's right -- the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the twelve volumes of the "Left Behind" series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans... Once Israel has occupied the rest of its "biblical lands," legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow."
What kind of a Christianity is it that finds its satisfaction in the knowledge that there will be box seats set aside for the chosen ones to watch the rest of humanity perish?
Herein lies the fundamental difference between the fundamentalists and the rest of us. If they were lifted up to heaven they would watch us burn in the tribulation on earth. If the shoe were on the other foot, and we were lifted up to heaven instead, while the fundamentalists burned in the tribulation on earth, we would ask God if he would let us go back down to help them.
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Saturday/Sunday, February 12th & 13th, 2005
"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind is bearing me across the sky." Ojibwa Saying
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