Category: Quote

  • When strength eludes

    By Anne Lamott, via Pam Slim.

    Nearly twenty years ago, I arrived at a fancy writer’s conference, in what were some of America’s most majestic mountains, where I was looking forward to meeting a great (and sexy) American director, who’d given a lecture the day before. But he had already left.

    There was, however, a letter from him, to me: to not-all-that-well-known me. It began well enough, with praise for Bird by Bird, and gratitude for how many times it had inspired him when he got stuck while writing screenplays. He singled out my insistence on trying to seek and tell the truth, whether in memoir or fiction, and my belief that experiencing grief and fear were the way home. The way to an awakening. That God is the Really Real, as the ancient Greeks believed. And God is Love. That tears were not to be suppressed, but would, if expressed, heal us, cleanse up, baptize us, help us water the seeds of new life that were in the ground at our feet.

    Coming from a world famous director, it felt like the New York Glitterati was stamping it’s FDA seal of approval on me, and my work.

    Unfortunately, the letter continued.

    He wrote that while he had looked forward to meeting me, he’d gathered from reading my work that many of my closest friends and family members seemed to have met with traumatic life situations, and sometimes early deaths. So basically, he was getting out of Dodge before I got my tragedy juju all over him, too.

    I felt mortified, exposed. He made it seem like I was a sorrow-mongerer, that instead of being present for family and friends who had cancer or sick kids or great losses, I was chasing them down.

    And I flushed in that full body Niacin-flush way of toxic shame, at being put down by a man of power, that had been both the earliest, and now most recent, experiences of soul-death throughout my life.

    My clingy child was drawing beside me, What did I do? You can’t use your child as a fix, like a junkie. That’s abuse; plus it won’t work.

    Well, duh–I fell apart, on the inside, like a two dollar watch.

    I had stopped drinking nearly 15 years before, stopped the bulimia 14 years earlier, and so did not have many reliable ways to stuff feelings back down. Also, horribly, my young child, two thousand miles from home, upon noticing my pain, clung even more tightly. I wanted to shout at him, “Don’t you have any other friends?”

    What I did was the only thing that has ever worked. After finding a safe and stable person to draw with my son, I called someone and told her all my terrible fears and feelings and projections and secrets.

    It was my mentor, Horrible Bonnie.

    She listens.

    She believes that we are here to become profoundly real, and therefore, free. But horribly–hence her name–she insists that if we want to be free, we have to let every body be free. I hate and resent this so much. It means we have to let the people in our families and galaxies be free to be asshats, if that is how they choose to live.

    This however, does not mean we have to have lunch with them. Or go on vacation with them again. But we do have to let them be free.

    She also knows, and said that day, that Real can be a nightmare in this world that is so false. The pain and exhaustion of becoming real can land you in the an abyss. And abysses are definitely abysmal; dark nights of the soul; the bottom an addict hits.

    And this, she said, was just a new bottom, around people-pleasing, and the craving for powerful fancy people to approve of me. It was a bottom around my psycho doing-ness, my achieving-ness.

    She said that because I felt traumatized, and that there had been so much trauma in my childhood, and so many losses in the ensuing years, that the future looked like trauma to me.

    But it wasn’t the truth!

    There was a long silence. (Again: she listens.)

    Finally, I said in this tiny child’s voice, “It isn’t?”

    Oh, no, she said. The future, as with every bottom I have landed at, and been walked through, would bring great spiritual increase.

    She said I had as much joy and laughter and presence as anyone she knew and some of this had to do with the bottoms I’d experienced, the dark nights of the soul that god and my pit crew had accompanied me through. The alcoholism, scary men, etc.

    She said that what I thought the director had revealed was that I am kind of pathetic, but actually what I was getting to see, with her, and later, when I picked up my luscious clingy child, in the most gorgeous mountains on earth, was that I was a ral person of huge heart, laughter, feelings and truth. And his was the greatest gift of all.

    The blessing was that again and again, over the years, we got to completely change the script. Thank God. We got to re-invent ourselves, again.

    But where do we even start with such terrible days and revelations? She said I’d started when I picked up the 300-pound phone, told someone the truth, felt my terrible feelings. Now, time for radical self care. A shower, some food, the blouse I felt prettiest in. Then I could go get my boy and we could explore the mountain streams.

    Wow. We think when we finally get our ducks in a row, we’ve arrived. Now we’ll be happy! That’s what they taught us, and what we’ve sought. But the ducks are bad ducks, and do not agree to stay in a row, and they waddle off quacking, and one keels over, two males get in a fight, and babies are born. Where does that leave your nice row?

    I got about five books out of the insights I gleaned from our talk. I still have a sort-of heart shaped rock my son fished out of a stream later. Sadly, this director’s movies have not done well in the last twenty years. Not a one. And all of his hair has since fallen out. Now, as a Christian, my first response to this is, “Hah hah hah.”

    But Horrible Bonnie would say, Now you get to tell it, because then it will become medicine. Tell it, girl– that we evolve; that life is stunning, wild, gorgeous, weird, brutal, hilarious and full of grace. That our parents were a bit insane, and that healing from this is taking a little bit longer than we had hoped. Tell it. Well…okay. Yes.

  • Quote by Sam Harris

    One need not come to the end of a path to experience the benefits of walking it.

  • The dark side of success

    They will tell you to go after your dreams and the work you were born to do. They’ll tell you that you’ll have to sacrifice and that you’ll need to relentlessly focus on the goal.

    What they won’t tell you is that it will cost you everything.

  • Last words

    These make we weep.

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    (via)

  • Fear is not real

    Fear is not real.

    The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future.

    It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity Kitai.

    Do not misunderstand me, danger is very real, but fear is a choice.

    We are all telling ourselves a story and that day mine changed.

    Cypher Raige, After Earth (2013)

    (via)

  • Quote by Plato

    “The first and best victory is to conquer self. To be conquered by self is, of all things, the most shameful and vile.”

  • Quote by Henry Sidgwick

    “One has to kill a few of one’s natural selves to let the rest grow — a very painful slaughter of innocents.”

  • The Lunch Pail Manifesto

    1. We must find the work that brings our lives meaning.
    2. We must strive to make our work purposeful, truthful, and authentic, a pure offering to our Muse and fellow human beings.
    3. We must wage a lifelong war with Resistance and accept that instant gratification is an oxymoron.
    4. We must not speak of our work with false modesty or braggadocio.
    5. We must not debase our work for short term gain nor elevate it above its rightful station to inflate our ego.
    6. We must not covet the fruits of our work, or the fruits of others’ work.
    7. We must respect others’ work and offer aid to fellow professional laborers.
    8. We must accept that our work will never be perfect.
    9. We must accept that our work will never be without merit.
    10. We must accept that our work will never cease.

    (via)

  • Healing Stations

    Spotted on Facebook.

    Yesterday I got a call from my sister Cheeraz Gormon in St. Louis who was standing with poet Elizabeth Vega. They wanted me to know that a few women had created, on lawns, in the streets, healing stations, a place where the youth could come and scream and cry and be held and heard in love. Mighty work.

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  • Some perspective on Ferguson

    This was posted on Facebook by one of my friends and intellectual heroes. We disagree on a great number of things, but this is not one of them.

    I’m going to offer this very long comment as my last viewpoint on the Ferguson shooting and all of the rhetoric surrounding it. I understand it’s long but I think it’s something to consider. Have a great day.

    What you and everybody is failing to realize while you’re all trying to place the blame within the black community and not toward the racism outside of it, is that the treatment of black people in this country happened long before 106 and Park and articles about sagging were on CNN news pages.

    If, for a second, we can consider the history of the negro in this country, the pretenses that brought us here, our subsequent enslavement, jim crow, civil rights assassinations, drug wars, the merciless jailing and murder of black men, women, and children that has far reaching effects until this day in 2014 and God knows how long in the future, the propaganda written in newspapers and drawn on posters depicting negros as monkeys, having smaller brains and also being considered 3/5s human, having our land stolen, zoning laws that make sure our schools are underfunded, living situations being neglected, children under educated, glass ceilings at work based on skin color and all the psychological effects that came with those decisions, there is a very real reason why the negro is in the position he’s in, today.

    With that said, 90% of crime for black folks is committed by other black folks. By comparison, 84% of white crime is committed against other white people in violent situations. Suffice it to say, if one simply looked at the numbers, white people have more to fear from other white people than they do of negros. It doesn’t make sense to compare black on black crime to police brutality for the simple fact that one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. Explaining that black folks are somehow implicitly responsible for being shot down, while unarmed, by the police is absolutely and unequivocally stupid rhetoric. And that’s putting it mildly.

    Do black people need to treat other better? Yes. Still, that has nothing to do with the fact that black men in america are hunted, feared, and executed by police officers who can somehow manage to arrest a white person who randomly shot 70 people in a movie theatre and had his apt booby-trapped with explosives, or manage to arrest someone who planted a bomb at a race in Boston who later ended up on the cover of the Rolling Stone (or Time Magazine, I forget which one) but seems to have trouble arresting unarmed negroes who were simply walking on the street and minding their business.

    (via)