Sunday, April 16, 2017
James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption,quotes
"I really don’t like words like “artist” or “integrity” or “courage” or “nobility.” I have a kind of distrust of all those words because I don’t really know what they mean, any more than I really know what such words as “democracy” or “peace” or “peace-loving” or “warlike” or “integration” mean. And yet one is compelled to recognize that all these imprecise words are attempts made by us all to get to something which is real and which lives behind the words. Whether I like it or not, for example, and no matter what I call myself, I suppose the only word for me, when the chips are down, is that I am an artist. There is such a thing. There is such a thing as integrity. Some people are noble. There is such a thing as courage. The terrible thing is that the reality behind these words depends ultimately on what the human being (meaning every single one of us) believes to be real. The terrible thing is that the reality behind all these words depends on choices one has got to make, for ever and ever and ever, every day."
.....................................................................................................................
"The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not. You’re bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face.".............................................................................................................
"Well, one survives that, no matter how… You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less. Then, you make — oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind or another — some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are."
The artist's struggle for integrity
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"The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not. You’re bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face.".............................................................................................................
"Well, one survives that, no matter how… You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less. Then, you make — oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind or another — some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are."
The artist's struggle for integrity
Kindness, Naomi Shihab Nye, Words under the Words
KINDNESS
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Kindness, reading
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Kindness, reading
Rediscovering Mercy, Hallelujah Anyway, Anne Lamott, quotes
"When we manage a flash of mercy for someone we don’t like,
especially a truly awful person, including ourselves,
we experience a great spiritual moment, a new point of view that can make us gasp.
It gives us the chance to rediscover something both old and original,
the sweet child in us who, all evidence to the contrary, was not killed off,
but just put in the drawer.
I realize now how desperately, how grievously, I have needed the necessary mercy to experience self-respect.
It is what a lot of us were so frantic for all along, and we never knew it.
We’ve tried almost suicidally for our whole lives to shake it from the boughs of the material world’s trees.
But it comes from within, from love, from the flow of the universe; from inside the cluttered drawer."
Rediscovering Mercy
especially a truly awful person, including ourselves,
we experience a great spiritual moment, a new point of view that can make us gasp.
It gives us the chance to rediscover something both old and original,
the sweet child in us who, all evidence to the contrary, was not killed off,
but just put in the drawer.
I realize now how desperately, how grievously, I have needed the necessary mercy to experience self-respect.
It is what a lot of us were so frantic for all along, and we never knew it.
We’ve tried almost suicidally for our whole lives to shake it from the boughs of the material world’s trees.
But it comes from within, from love, from the flow of the universe; from inside the cluttered drawer."
Rediscovering Mercy
love
all love is one
through which we
breathe in our pain
and the widening
where joy flows,
where life finds meaning.
all love is one,
but sometimes we
can get nearer
with our awareness,
feeling, touching,
understanding
and giving.
what does a stone
need, a caress,
a tree an embrace?
does the river
feel our tears
and birds our
longing to fly?
what do you need
or you or me?
how do we learn
to let love be
neither hungry nor
running in circles:
it is always present
and we cannot
take the gift like
children who are
too busy playing,
building towers,
and crying for more
as life is so rich
that nothing is
enough in one day
our games,
playing alone,
how to leave,
how to go home
when the time
comes, the crows
call each other,
and sleep and death
take us away.
take us apart.
take us.
Bjoerk ,Prayer of the heart HQ
stunningly beautiful-
didn't know..see composer..
well, it is another big time for churches.
"Take, eat, this is my body... Take, drink, this is my blood... Do this in remembrance of me."
'Jesus'
i do have a problem with this.
i do not believe that through one man's death
the gate to heaven has opened nor do i believe
in any cannibalistic transmission of any force
other than nutritional energy
or I'd run around tearing out your heart and eat it,
maybe...would I?
All teachings in the New Testament
are on love and not on glory through suffering and submission.
All in this ritual reminds me of blood sacrifices.
And this is what happens each day
as we are all in our own way crucified,
and we can only break out through love
and not by eating Christ's body nor by drinking his blood.
I am entitled to my view and i share it.
Charles Bukowski, Crappy Life
crappy or not, with grapefruit juice, vodka and a cigarette
and nothing much to worry about it could be worse,
so it must be good as it is.
my smoker's cough disturbs the present a bit.
small things, i forget them.
what is past, is past. i see no use in digging there.
on the future: i will die.
so far, so clear.
why not live now and stretch my legs and my mind?
Jay Leeming, Two Months After
Two Months After
A clutch of rain against the windows.
All day this beaten house has been bearing up
under the March wind, a wind that aches
down the thick beams the carpenter cut
to take its weight. A mud-covered truck
drones up the hill, under a stone sky.
Spring will come only after the hard work
of the water is done, after the high
green leaves have shouldered their sparks
through the winter's ancient test.
Perhaps then the hard ice of your death
will have rotted away. In Schubert's songs
I listen for your listening, for the arc
of smoking notes your night-heart sang.
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