donald

tender positivity

fortunes continued

From an old world 25 cent mechanical woman-in-a-box fortune teller. I'm not sure "something for the world to talk about" is a good thing, but I'll take it (she didn't give me a choice).

fortunes

In a time filled with thoughts of New Year's resolutions, of which I am a HUGE fan, I have eaten fortune cookies on 2 occasions. And on both occasions, I received essentially the same message. Now I am not a believer of the fortune cookie nonsense, but I think I am hearing something I need to seriously consider:

A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not why ships are built.

The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one.

Which risks have I been avoiding? Are there opportunities I have unknowingly rejected? Am I so risk averse I've lost sight of where I fit on the spectrum? 

OK, universe - eyes wide, heart tender, arms open. Ready. 

twins and lovers

From The Childhood of Jesus by Coetzee:

... Twins are naturally fond of each other, like the star twins. If they were not, then they might go wandering off separately and be lost in the sky. But their love for each other holds them together. It will go on holding them together until the end of time. 

But they are not together, the star twins, not really together.

No, that is true, they are not tight up against each other in the sky, there is a tiny gap between them. That is the way of nature. Think of lovers. If lovers were tight up against each other all the time they would no longer need to love each other. They would be one. There would be nothing for them to want. That is why nature has gaps. If everything were packed tightly together, everything in the universe, then there would be no you or me or Ines. You and I would not be talking to each other right now, there would just be silence - oneness and silence. So, on the whole, it is good that there should be gaps between things, that you and I should be two instead of one. 

snow day!

childhood of jesus

It just so happens that I finished reading this book on Christmas - a mere coincidence. 

I rarely pay attention to reviews because I can come to an opinion on my own, thank you very much. But these seem to be more than reviews - on the back cover they are called 'praise' and are words of reverence from others who share my respect for this man. 

He is 'a novelist of ideas' whose books 'explore what it means to be human'. 'Exceptionally intelligent'. 'Master of his medium'. One cannot write so sparely and yet so powerfully without having mastered his trade. He whittles it down so you read only what is needed to understand, without excess to distract you from the most important point he wants you to see. You come out with your world expanded. Not the physical world, but the more difficult to reach inner world - the psychology and emotions of humanity. He captures all of humanity in seemingly simple novellas. Again and again. And hopefully again some more.  

out west

... where everything is ginormous. 

(there's a person in that one)

(and that one)

reflections

I know - so many beautiful angles you feel a little discombobulated. 

And magic mirrors. 

And...

What?! Are you kidding me? You've gotta zoom in. 

let the artist lead

In Living Beautifully Pema Chodron opens by quoting Agnes de Mille:

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark. 

It captures the Alice in Wonderland method. It captures the scientific method. It captures the Buddhist method. 

It's the answer to why you may not be where you were supposed to end up. It's not that you made a mistake. It's that you followed a different process. Because that's what you consider the point of it all to be. 

haven't we moved past this?

This article angers me. An outsider redrawing borders still in this day and age?! Believing you understand it? Clearly you don't when you can write "Arabs are abuzz..." ALL ARABS agree? 

Idiot. 

so long, see you tomorrow

From Maxwell's book, a perfect line that captures that feeling of intimacy in the middle of the crowds (see 2 posts back):

New York City is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy. 

lahiri schmiri

Did anyone read this? She's such a pain in the ass. She couldn't simply answer the question but had to point out the faults in each and every question (and then sometimes answer it even though she had just finished arguing it wasn't a legitimate question). She had to be above it all. When I heard her read years ago she did this with the audience - she was condescending and dismissive. And she has no basis - genius she is not! 

AND the second line of her answer was her saying she read the English translation then the Italian original. I don't think anyone asked. So full of herself. At least there's some justice in the portrait drawing that makes her look crappy. 

hello

Hello Empire State Building, hello Chrysler, hello intimate moments in the midst of the masses. I'm home now, and I've never used that word lightly. 

good-bye

Good-bye Park Ave, good-bye Elysian Cafe, good-bye Garden of Eden, good-bye Malaysian waitresses who knew me like a friend, good-bye waterfront.

Good-bye, Bwe Cafe. It was so brief, but yet so true.

And, finally, good-bye to this space. You kept me dry and warm and held up even through Sandy. Silent grace.

badasses and smartasses

My little almost five year old niece gets into a bumper car with her mom and says - let's do this.

She put on a play and started off with - please turn off all of your electricities...

My almost 9 year old niece says to her dad - no, YOU'RE the sloppy copy. I'm an American original. Ah first generationers. 

latinas

Innocently (and desperately) waiting for my nails to dry, I noticed the caption:

What You Should Never Say in a Fight

What?! Then I noticed it was Cosmo for Latinas. Como?! Is this ok? Is this insulting? Fierce?

ahhh....

... summer.

from the other side

Not as clean a view, but love is love from any angle.

zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

I don't know how to put this in any other words or to summarize or highlight. In a sense, it is staying true to the book to not define it further. And so I share some excerpts.


In each case there's a beautiful way of doing it and an ugly way of doing it, and in arriving at the high-quality, beautiful way of doing it, both an ability to see what 'looks good' and an ability to understand the underlying methods to arrive at that 'good' are needed. Both classic and romantic understandings of Quality must be combined.

... people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.

Now it's time to further an understanding of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part.

What really counts in the end is their peace of mind, nothing else. The reason for this is that peace of mind is a prerequisite for a perception of that Quality which is beyond romantic Quality and classic Quality and which unites the two, and which must accompany the work as it proceeds. The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.

This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness... Mental quietness... But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of life without desire, that seems the hardest.

That which turns its back on this inner calm and the Quality it reveals is bad maintenance. That which turns toward it is good. The forms of turning away and toward are infinite but the goal is always the same.

Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.

... Someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption... A person filled with gumption doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes. That's gumption.

The gumption-filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one's own stale opinions about it. But it's nothing exotic. That's why I like the word.

These false images are deflated so rapidly and completely you're bound to be very discouraged very soon if you've derived your gumption from ego rather than Quality.

Aretê implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency - or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.

The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.

Along the streets that lead away from the apartment he can never see anything through the concrete and brick and neon but he knows that buried within it are grotesque, twisted souls forever trying the manners that will convince themselves they possess Quality, learning strange poses of style and glamour vended by dream magazines and other mass media, and paid for by the vendors of substance. He thinks of them at night along with their advertised glamorous shoes and stockings and underclothes off, staring through the sooty windows at the grotesque shells revealed beyond them, when the poses weaken and the truth creeps in, the only truth that exists here, crying to heaven, God, there is nothing here but dead neon and cement and brick.