“The less you talk, the more you're listened to.”
Abigail Van Buren

"Grape" Expectations

"Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."

~Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

The Hundred Acre Memory

Sometimes I miss the Hundred Acre Woods. The simplicity. The wonder. The innocence of it all.

“Promise me you'll never forget me because if I thought you would I'd never leave.”

Christopher Robin to Winnie the Pooh

Take him by the tail

...hope arrives in a simple sound when we least expect it. I heard a bird calling from outside the window when I woke this morning. Like a little messenger of joyfulness, it stirred hope and shot little tendrils of anticipation through my heart. I love that feeling.

I chose my quote today from Josh Billings. He wrote under the name: Henry Wheeler Shaw. He was a humorist in the late 1800's--who couldn't spell worth a damn, but is still worth quoting.

"If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."

The following is also attributed to him:

"Don't take the bull by the horns, take him by the tail; then you can let go when you want to."

I like that sort of common sense.

Late and soon

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

~William Wordsworth

God

I am convinced that Neil Young was onto something...

We went lookin' for faith
on the forest floor,
And it showed up everywhere,
In the sun and the water
and the falling leaves,
The falling leaves of time.

I am equally convinced that God hates Powerpoint.

Pile it high, please

"Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit." ~~Aristotle

In some more scholarly incarnation of myself, I fancied the work of Aristotle. I have a notebook scribbled full of quotes and notes from a class I took many moons ago. I pulled some of it out to write here because:

1. I need to get sleepy.
2. It reminded me of some recent conversations about friendship and the limited capacity we have for taking on new "intimates" in our lives.

It was always interesting to me that more than anything else Aristotle considered human relationships vital to universal knowledge. He devoted much of his teaching to understanding friendship and the soul.

In Ethics he defined three kinds of friendship:

• Friendship for pleasure
• Friendship for utility
• Friendship for good

Friendship for pleasure occurs when two people are drawn together not really because of who they are but because they have a common interest in an activity that they can pursue together. Their mutual participation in that activity enhances their individual pleasure in life.

These kinds of friendships might be the most frequent and easiest for me to establish. The "crush," if you will. For me, crushes have never been gender limited and are seldom sexual. They last only as long as they can hold my interest. They may be intense, but they are never
deep or connected.

Friendships for utility focus on what use the two can derive from each other--"What is in it for me?" Each party supplies something to the other on some very basic level. Someone might know something you need to know. Someone might have access to something you need to have.

I think we all have these types of friendships to some degree and they last as long as each has the ability to continue to meet the need of the other person or until the driving need shifts and becomes obsolete.

Friendships for good, however, are the most stable and perfect of the three types of friendship. These friendships come into being when two people engage in common activities for the sake of developing that which is good in the other. Pleasure and utility can reside in a friendship for good--they just don't sit in the front seat or get to hold the road map.

By the nature of our human selves, we can and do outgrow friendship types one and two many times in the course of a lifetime, but the soul takes root and grows forever in the soil of friendship type three.

Aristotle said, "Friendship is one soul living in two bodies." I suppose it requires attention, time and intimacy to develop one soul. And, such connections, as they should be, are precious and rare.

Success

“I find that that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”

~Thomas Jefferson~

Tibetan Wisdom

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters

Chapter I

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in
I am lost . . . I am helpless
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter II

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter III

I walk down the same street
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in . . . it’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

Chapter IV

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

Chapter V

I walk down another street.

~~By Portia Nelson, The Book of Tibetan of Living and Dying

If it sounds like it...

"You are the call, and I am the answer. You are the wish, and I the fulfillment. You are the night, and I the day. What else? It is perfect enough. It is perfectly complete. You and I." D.H. Lawrence.

I went through an infatuation period with D.H. Lawerence at some point in my past life. His style rested just on the edge of forbidden with a brooding sexuality that made me believe. He wrote of "blood knowledge" and finding it better to "...die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions."

Sometimes I think I expect too much from my intimates. A soul perfection. Yet, if asked, I scoff at the notion of soulmateship.

If you read that fast enough, out loud, it sounds like "soulmate sh*t."

'Nuff said

More

All that was sacred and little bit that was wicked
Mixed with sunshine to fill the hollows of my heart.
A brimming chalice calling:
More. More. More.

Now pull me to your lips.
And, drink, oh Thirsty One, drink;
Swallow what you feel.
More. More. More.

Don't melt like cotton candy.
Really let me taste your soul.
And hold me. Breathe with me.
More. More. More.

Be large enough to keep me.
Be strong enough to tell me no.
But always give me:
More. More. More.

Be. Just BE.
More. More. More.

What the Dickens?

“The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far we are pursued by nothing else.”

Take a look at the moon as it rises.

The Ways We Touch

"Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it. What appears bad manners, an ill temper or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone."

Miller Williams

Find a good thing

"English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over the head, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."

(I wish I could attribute this quote, but I can't seem to find a reliable source.)

So, I was thinking about words...

Mark Twain once said, "When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear."

With all the words available in the English language, it is a sad lack of imagination that relies on common four-letter words to spank the offending party. There is nothing like the overused F word to reveal a withered IQ.

The other day my children, who are angels, were in a heated dispute. The best they could come up with was "you are such a bitch." It pained me, but not in the usual way. How could my offspring, conceived on a bed of lexicons, have become so atrophied that they couldn't rain all the demons of the English language upon each others heads?

I remember when Jayna could take someone off at the knees with "subbarena" and "sandbagger." These were her word daggers. The only swear word she knew was "shut up." Jared was slow in language acquisition, but I knew he caught up when he likened someone to "a worm without any eyes." He was four. (I personally haven't seen a worm WITH eyes, but that is beside the point.)

When we were growing up, Charlie and I would tell our younger sister that we found her in a frog swamp. I think we heard a shtick like that and applied it to Janelle with glee. We would chant, "adopted, adopted" whenever we felt she needed to be put in her place. That one word, selected with intent...

The power of life and death are in the tongue (or pen.) The words we choose choke the spirit or set it free. He who finds a word, finds a good thing.

What is real?

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."

The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called Real happened to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him.

From The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

Frosting for Divagators

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

Robert Frost

Razor's Edge

"At different stages in our lives, the signs of love may vary: dependence, attraction, contentment, worry, loyalty, grief, but at heart the source is always the same. Human beings have the rare capacity to connect with each other, against all odds."

This quote is from Michael Dorris, an author best known for "A Yellow Raft in Blue Water" and " The Broken Cord." Of course, you must pay no attention to the fact that he committed suicide.

It is a curious thing to me that good writers and poets are so often victims of mental illness and depression. They end up taking their own lives when their passion runs cold. It seems that sanity dances the razor's edge wherever one finds a burning source of brilliance.

I have been reading a biography of Anne Sexton. (I recently reread some of her poetry in Transformations and her life in letters which was a book of her correspondence published after her she took her own life.)

She had many writing relationships--male and female. Words and the exchange of words were her saving grace for years. She was self-taught for the most part, but won a Radcliffe scholarship for women re-entering the workplace/literary world after being mothers/housewives. Her favorite mode of operation was to apprentice herself to someone until she learned everything they knew. She loved the messy work of words and spent hours debating with friends and colleagues over the exact placement of a phrase. She went far before she finally crashed and burned.

She said it best in "Her Kind."

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

Imps in Eager Caucus

I can wade Grief
Whole Pools of it
I'm used to that
But the least push of Joy
Breaks up my feet
And I tip -- drunken

Emily Dickinson

Something about her words hits me like a shot of whiskey. The toss. The swallow. The bite. The warmth. Who can not love this?

"A wounded deer leaps the highest."

"God gave a Loaf to every Bird, but just a Crumb to Me."

"Imps in eager Caucus raffle for my soul."

I suppose I am most drawn to what she didn't say. And, I have always wondered if she reconciled her restless struggle in a way that gave her peace.

The Pilgrim Soul in You

When You are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

W.B. Yeats