Tag Archives: quotation

beginner (a quote from Shunryu Suzuki)

13 Saturday May 2017

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writing_child

“The most difficult thing is, always keep your beginner’s mind. There’s no need to have a deep understanding of zen. Even though you read much zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, ‘I know what zen is,” or “I have attained enlightenment.” This is also the real secret of the arts. Always be a beginner.” –Shunryu Suzuki

 

all in the waiting (T. S. Eliot–from “Four Quartets”)

08 Friday Jul 2016

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“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing”

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broken (a quote from Anne Lamott)

01 Wednesday Jun 2016

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“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.” ― Anne Lamott

rain-dancing woman

 

15 Things (a Mother’s Day encomium)

11 Wednesday May 2016

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 15 things I’m glad my mom taught me

take chances frizzle
1.That I don’t have to constantly run around, trying to accomplish things. Lying in bed staring at the ceiling is a valuable part of life too.
2. To eat when I’m hungry, and that eating when I’m not hungry isn’t going to help starving children.
3. That there are so many more important things to do than keep the house clean.
4. That I can love people with all their flaws and contradictions, but I can’t change them.
5. To love myself as much as I love other people.
6. That it’s okay to say no.
7. That wherever I go in life, I can always come home.
8. That no matter the gender, race, or religion of the person I fall in love with, my family will love them as long as they treat me well.
9. That people are their best selves when they have no other choice.
10. That my spiritual beliefs will probably change and fluctuate all my life, and that’s fine.
11. That the media bombards me with messages that I’ll never be pretty enough or thin enough, but I shouldn’t believe them.
12. That normal is boring. All the best people in the world are weird.
13. That I probably haven’t reached the best time of my life yet, and thank God for that.
14. To stop worrying about making a fool of yourself.
15. To take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

(written by Rebecca Gonshak)

meditation for a lazy day (from “Walden”)

10 Sunday Apr 2016

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lazy meerkat

“I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that “for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day.” This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.”   –Henry David Thoreau (from Walden)

re-entry (a quote and a synopsis)

13 Sunday Mar 2016

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“Right after I landed, I could feel the weight of my lips and tongue, and I had to change how I was talking. I hadn’t realized that I’d learned to talk with a weightless tongue.” –Astronaut Chris Hadfield

icarus falling

I haven’t written since January. I’ve spent my time, instead, on family missions. I’ve been sleeping in hotels and guest bedrooms, living for weeks in exactly two pairs of jeans, six t-shirts, one bra (I wasn’t thinking), bedroom slippers passing for shoes, and a big blue cardigan/invisibility cloak. I built makeshift nests in airports, nursing homes, hospital rooms; and feathered them with cell phone, laptop, kindle, extension cord, chargers, journal, kleenex, water, coffee, nonfat yogurt, pretzels with hummus, wint-o-green lifesavers, bubblegum. I came to know the most comfortable chairs, the quietest alcoves, the most convenient electrical outlets, the closest bathrooms. (I also learned to hold out between bathroom visits, because they entailed the complete disassembly of my nests, every time. Even as it was, five or six times every day I found myself rewinding my extension cord, re-stowing my cell phone, laptop, kindle, etc., into my Mary Poppins carpetbag and hauling it with me thither and yon. For otherwise, who knew? My whole life might get hauled away by mistake.)

I’m back now, pulled home again by love and gravity. Like Chris Hadfield (who was the first Canadian in outer space, I’ll have you know), I feel a sudden new weight in my lips and tongue. I hope you’ll forgive me, for a while, as I re-learn to talk.

As ever,

NJC

 

 

 

 

suspicious (a quote from Louis CK)

07 Monday Mar 2016

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“I don’t have any political opinions, I just am very curious. And it’s very interesting to listen to what people say. What’s the best way to run a country and the world? Those are really profound questions. I don’t have the confidence to say that I know one way or another. Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I’m very suspicious. It doesn’t make sense to me that you’d have the same solution to every issue.”  –Louis CK 

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effort (a quote from Samuel Johnson)

09 Tuesday Feb 2016

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nabakov draft

(a rough draft from Vladimir Nabokov)

“What is written without effort is generally read without pleasure.”              Samuel Johnson

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If only this quote worked the other way too: “If you work really hard on a book, it’s just bound to be terrific!”

My memoir, The Myth of Solid Ground (tip: if you want to be seen as “in the know,” casually refer to it as MSG, for short), is “finished” only in the usual sense–i.e., that if I died tomorrow, I guess I wouldn’t spend all of eternity wincing in the knowledge that the last thing I ever wrote was a monstrosity. But I know there’s still an awful lot of editing to do. My most reasonable hope is that this will happen soon. (My least reasonable hope is that somehow it will happen when I’m not in the room.) In the meantime, though, I have a lot of neglected family business to attend to. (Suddenly, I have to live life instead of writing about it, and the transition’s been shaky–some days I even have to wear shoes.) I’ll keep you posted. Thanks. NJC

patternicity (a random thought)

23 Monday Nov 2015

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Perfect-Geometric-Patterns-In-Nature7__880

More and more I think of the all-importance of pattern in this world. Finding the pattern, recognizing the pattern, comparing one pattern with another, finding their common sub-patterns, ur-patterns. (Wow, I’ve never used the prefix “ur” before!) Temple Grandin talks of pattern thinkers—got a quote about it somewhere.*

Metaphor and pattern—the same thing, really, just like fable and myth and archetype. It’s all about the comparison/contrast—the only way we can “understand” anything is, first, by contrasting it with what it isn’t like, then comparing it with what it is like. The contrast must automatically come first? I think so. We have an instinct to see everything as “other” until proven otherwise (and even after that). To the extent that we feel “at home” in the world, the world has ceased to be “other” and, whether we recognize it or not, has become an integral expansion of who we already believe ourselves to be—not just where we belong, but who we are, inside our skins but also outside.

Maybe this is why we fret so much about change? All these new “othernesses” to convert into “me-nesses,” “us-nesses,” over and over again. You have to become so nimble, as if you’re crossing a river by leaping from stone to stone. You have to trust life with your life, if only because you have no other choice. (You have to trust that life knows more than you do, because–geez–how could it not?)

I keep coming back to this: the purpose of dualism. It’s a construction–yes?—only that, a pattern we ourselves—with our yes-or-no minds–impose on the universe, to give us a vocabulary, a yardstick to describe things with. This is how we can imagine opposites even to things that don’t exist, or whose existence is beyond our ability to know—things like life vs death, all vs nothing, containment vs limitlessness. (We can imagine heaven, perhaps, to the exact degree we’ve known hell?)  And on and on.

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*Here’s the Temple Grandin quote:

“I’ve given a great deal of thought to the topic of different ways of thinking. In fact, my pursuit of this topic has led me to propose a new category of thinker in addition to the traditional visual and verbal: pattern thinkers.”

And then there’s this that I just found:

temple grandin pattern thinker

And while I’m at it, why not:

temple grandin quote