The Greatest Victory

For all that we speak

as a culture and a people,

of victory and defeat,

of good and evil,

of hero and coward, 

it is none of it quite true.

The truth is that the greatest

victory is to endure with grace

and humor, to stay in the game,

to achieve humility.

- Brian Doyle, 

One Long River of Song:

Notes on Wonder

(tip of the hat to Brendan Leonard's most recent post on his always excellent website)

One Great Thing

There's only one great thing

And that one great thing

Is just to live

To open our eyes

To the great light of dawn

Moving across the land

And the beginning of the day

-Inuit saying, per the creators of
"Return to Noatak"

Time

Time is the substance from which I am made. 

Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; 

it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; 

it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.


- Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

The Risk

One runs the risk
of weeping a
little

if one lets
oneself be
tamed.

--Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince
(arranged quote)

The Cure

The cure for 
anything 

is salt water: 

sweat, 

tears 

or the sea.

 - Isak Dinesen

A Good Love

They say 
a good love 
is one that sits you down,

gives you a drink of water, and
pats you on top of the head.

But I say 
a good love
is one that casts you into the wind,
sets you ablaze,
makes you burn through the skies
and ignite the night
like a phoenix;

the kind that cuts you loose like a wildfire
and you can't stop running simply because
you keep on burning everything 
that you touch!

I say
that's a good love; 
one that burns and flies, 
and you run with it!

― C. JoyBell C.
(arranged quote)

Farewell Robert Pirsig

The truth knocks on the door 
and you say, 

“Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” 

and so it goes away. 
Puzzling.

 – Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Chapter 1

The only Zen you 
find 
on the tops of 
mountains 

is the Zen you 
bring 
up there.

 – Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Chapter 20

Running

In the beginning

yes, death
or pausing
is a question.

Now
each step
tells
of the work I've 
done
or
work I need to 
do.

Of course,
the action itself,
repetitive,

is both
liberating and
cleansing.

- Daniel Nelson
(arranged quote)

The Heart of Solitude

When you inhabit

your solitude

fully

you will find that at its heart

there is neither

loneliness

nor emptiness

but intimacy

and

shelter.

There is a lantern

in the soul,

which makes your solitude

luminous.

- John O’Donohue

(arranged quote)

The Devil is in the Details

Books being written

Are strewn with pitfalls

For those who write them

A tendency to sermonize

A veering into allegory

A lack of plausibility.

If one creates an imaginary garden,

The toads in it should be real.

Only tell of events which have already happened

In Joyce's "nightmare" of history

Only describe technology

Already available.

No made-up gizmos

No made-up laws

No made-up atrocities.

God is in the details,

They say.

So is the

Devil.

Margaret Atwood

(arranged quote,

derived from her NYT article,

on "What the Handmaids Tale Means")

Nature Teaches Us How to Be

The scenery, when it is 

truly seen, reacts on the life 
of the seer, 

how to live, 

how to get the most 

of life, 

how to extract its honey 
from the 

flower of the world.  

Nature spontaneously keeps us well. 

Do not resist her!

~ Henry David Thoreau
(arranged quote)

New Eyes

One's destination
is never a
place,

but a new way
of seeing
things.

- Henry Miller
(arranged quote)

The Canyon's Majesty

When you look across
this vast landscape
now, it’s hard to believe

that it could possibly
be damaged or lost
due to acts of man.

But each threat alone
is capable of eroding
a piece of the canyon’s majesty,

and together these threats will strip
the landscape of its ability
to do the thing that makes it unique:

to instill humility
by demonstrating that human beings
are tiny in relation to the forces
that have shaped this planet,

and that we are not the center of the world.

-- Roger Clark, Grand Canyon Trust program director
(arranged quote, from recent article on development in Grand Canyon)

I Think I Could Turn and Live With Animals

I think I could turn
and live with animals,

they are so placid
and self-contained.

They do not sweat and whine
about their condition,

they do not lie awake
in the dark and
weep for their sins,

they do not make me sick
discussing their duty to God,

not one is dissatisfied,
not one is demented with
the mania of owning things,

not one kneels to another
nor to his kind that lived
thousands of years ago,

not one is respectable
or unhappy
over the whole earth.

- Walt Whitman

Speech of the Rain

What a thing it is to sit 
absolutely alone, 

in the forest, at night, cherished 
by this wonderful, unintelligible, 
perfectly innocent speech, the most 
comforting speech in the world,

the talk that rain makes by itself 
all over the ridges, 
and the talk of the watercourses 
everywhere in the hollows!

Nobody started it, 
nobody is going to stop it. 

It will talk 
as long as it wants, this rain. 

As long as it talks 
I am going to listen.

-- Thomas Merton
“Rain and the Rhinoceros” in Raids on The Unspeakable
(arranged quote)

Facing the Flux

Your willingness 
to look at 
your darkness 
is what 
empowers you 
to change.

- Iyanla Vanzant

Loneliness' Golden Lining

When you wake up in the morning and 
out of nowhere 
comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, 

could you use that as a golden opportunity? 

Rather than 
persecuting yourself 
or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, 

right there in the moment 
of sadness and longing, 

could you relax and touch the 
limitless space of the human heart?

-- Pema Chödrön
(arranged quote, from article on Six Kinds of Loneliness)

Cartography of Community

We die containing a richness 
of lovers and tribes, 
tastes we have swallowed, 
bodies we have plunged into 
and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, 
characters we have climbed into as if trees, 
fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this 
to be marked on my body
when I am dead.

I believe in such cartography - 
to be marked by nature, 
not just to label
ourselves on a map
like the names of rich men and women 
on buildings.

We are communal histories, communal books. 
We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.

― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
(arranged quote)

The Repeated Refrains of Nature

Those who contemplate
the beauty of the earth find
reserves of strength that will endure
as long as life lasts.

There is symbolic as well as
actual beauty in the migration
of the birds, the ebb and flow of the
tides, the folded bud ready
for spring.

There is something infinitely healing
in the repeated refrains of nature —
the assurance that
dawn comes after night, and
spring after the winter.

- Rachel Carson
(arranged quote)

Winter Exposure

In the spring and summer 
I watched my plants flower, but 
it was, perhaps, in winter 
that I loved them best, 

when their skeletons were exposed. 

Then I felt they had more 
to say to me, were not 
simply dressing themselves 
for the crowds.

Stripped of their leaves, their 
identities showed forth 
stark, essential.

-- Pamela Erens, The Understory
(arranged quote)