—THE WORLD IS TOO SMALL, TILL IT AIN’T

 

 

…Happy Wednesday, Kitty Kats. How about I try very hard not to throw up and you try very hard to have a grand day?

 

…Today, alas, I am going to practice Ann Lamott’s advice and go “bird by bird” organizing all of my undocumented stories and poems. I’m thinking it will take three weeks tops, but I should feel awfully good whenever I’m finally finished, provided I don’t vomit on any pages…

 

…And here are some (new) things I like midweek:

 

 

“Christians can be very hard to love sometimes. I don’t know how Jesus does it.” Bono

  

“Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...” Yasunari Kawabata

 

 “You know, sometimes I think I was either born too early or too late for my life.” Guillermo del Toro

 

“Usually when you just try to do the little things, big things happen.” Rick Rizzs

 

“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.” Crazy Horse

 

“Karma has a lot of names.” Jimmy Dean

 

“And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life—not only over-riding people and circumstances but over-riding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

“I have a theory that the moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. 

I have tried this experiment a thousand times and I have never been disappointed. The more I look at a thing, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I want to see. It is like peeling an onion. There is always another layer, and another, and another. And each layer is more beautiful than the last.

This is the way I look at the world. I don't see it as a collection of objects, but as a vast and mysterious organism. I see the beauty in the smallest things, and I find wonder in the most ordinary events. I am always looking for the hidden meaning, the secret message. I am always trying to understand the mystery of life.

I know that I will never understand everything, but that doesn't stop me from trying. I am content to live in the mystery, to be surrounded by the unknown. I am content to be a seeker, a pilgrim, a traveler on the road to nowhere.” 

~Henry Miller

 

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. ~James Baldwin

 

"You'll miss the mundane walk from the post office to the store to the house--the dog greeting you; the neighbors waving; the breeze on your face. You'll miss the slow woman who disrupted your pace. You won't know this until the walk is difficult or impossible. There is something to loving the mundane. Be awake and alive and present, because this is your own great and gilded age, and it's going to slip away with brutal swiftness. People pay small fortunes to see a whale for three seconds or an eagle fly ahead, but they race through their one and only life. I'm fairly positive that I'll regret my stupidity the most in my final moment of awareness." James Grissom

 

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” - Jack Kerouac

 

“When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” – James Baldwin

 

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. ~Ernest Hemingway

 

"I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster. … The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius." -Sam Shepard