It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that I need to leave the familiar, but I don’t want to do it entirely alone-I want to seek others who can offer perspective into my predicament, who can help guide my passage.”
-Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
Invent reality?
Is there a minimum of thought
One has to do everyday?
She is playing a guitar
and humming then singing
about ideas and consequences
then stops and starts writing furiously
“Examine your own courage
if you can get up every morning
with a better will than the day before?”
A cat comes, nozzles in her arms
She touches her with equal affection
then she looks at me and exclaims:
“Is it sad or meaningful or ostentatious to say—
I hiked Switzerland the whole summer?
Or I hug cows to relieve my stress?”
The cat jumps, goes to the window, sits purring.
Time folds, distorts harmony of living
Why bemoans the loss during the pandemic
Thousands are dying, millions lost their jobs,
thousands are lining up for food.
Time has changed unlike any other time:
A call for one another to stay together.
We are sheltered in for more than 2 months now. There are changes that everyone has noticed before: air is cleaner, less cars driving in the neighborhood, in the highways, the hills and mountains can be seen clearly. The world is new again.
But uncertainties remain. Vulnerability exposed. Maybe the same “vulnerability that songbirds feel every single day of their lives” as noted by Robin Wall Kimmerer., author of Braiding Sweetgarss.
Time is time. Not timeless.The pandemic reminds us of our impermanence.
There are now easings of restrictions. Our yearning for open space is more urgent. Will human touch be a strange feeling?
Tomorrow we hope to be curious again. Or maybe for the first time.
Tomorrow when I go out of the door I will be seeing a new world. One says, “ every beginning is monumental.” I will try to believe it.
note: 2 weeks ago I was hospitalized for 4 days. I was very sick with an infection. Not cobid-19. I was negative.
I am home now and recovering favorably. I hope to resume walking to the river again everyday.
The book currently I’m reading or should I say I am listening at is Brading Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Forgiveness
I plant a tree
I help an old man cross the street
I walk with others
who walk in the park
heads down, heads up
smiling, withdrawn
a day in the world
to gather love in the basket
and give away
“universal forgiveness” of what we have
and what we are.
My moment of the day is listening and reading the story of two climbers: Brian Mann & Emily Russell. Listen:here
Winter Joy: Breaking Tail in 15 Degrees
by Brian Mann & Emily Russell
“It might sound strange, but there’s something cool about being tested. We’re both tempted to turn back, but we’re also thrilled by the idea that we’re the only humans here. It’s a kind of love-hate thing.
“The thing I like is when a mountain surprises you and the mountain comes out on top,” Emily says. “That’s what happened today.”
“What does being ‘true to yourself’ really mean? To Aristotle, it means realizing your potential, and so it is never too late to start to become’true to yourself.’ The English word ‘realize’ has two meanings—becoming conscious of, and turning into reality —and Aristotle’s idea involves both.”
-Edith Hall
Aristotle’s Way
How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life
note: One of my moments of the day. I start reading the book, Aristotle Way, How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life by Edith Hall.
“We often struggle with the question of our own life:does it have a purpose? Is there meaning to it? All through our life Christ is calling us. God works through our natural faculties and circumstances of life. If our course of life is to be changed, it must be from within.”-John Henry Newman
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.
-Czeslaw Milosz
note: A poem by Czeslaw Milosz quoted by Parker J. Palmer in his book On the Brink of Everything, the book I’m currently reading.
“In Japan there is a kind of reverence for the art of mending. In the context of the tea ceremony there is no such thing as failure or success in the way we are accustomed to using those words. A broken bowl would be valued precisely because of the exquisite nature of how it was repaired, a distinctly Japanese tradition of kintsugi, meaning to “to patch with gold”. Often, we try to repair broken things in such a way as to conceal the repair and make it “good as new.” But the tea masters understood that by repairing the broken bowl with the distinct beauty of radiant gold, they could create an alternative to “good as new” and instead employ a “better than new” aesthetic. They understood that a conspicuous, artful repair actually adds value. Because after mending, the bowl’s unique fault lines were transformed into little rivers of gold that post repair were even more special because the bowl could then resemble nothing but itself. Here lies that radical physical transformation from useless to priceless, from failure to success. All of the fumbling and awkward moments you will go through, all of the failed attempts, all of the near misses, all of the spontaneous curiosity will eventually start to steer you in exactly the right direction.”
-Teresita Fernández, sculptor
quoted by Maria Popova in Brain Pickings
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