2023.08.15
As a person, he told me, your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people, and reliant upon them. But imagine instead that you are a twenty-first-century river, or desert, or polar bear. Your biggest problem *is still people*. You are still vulnerable to them, and reliant upon them.
For anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. That's pretty much all the info u need.... John Green talks about her a lot. I'm glad I got to meet her and correspond a little before she died. Am always surprised when I re-learn she went to Tufts.
At the end of his life, the great picture book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak said on the NPR show Fresh Air, "I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die, and I can't stop them. They leave me, and I love them more."
He said, "I'm finding out as I'm aging that I'm in love with the world."
It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world, but I've started to feel it the last couple of years. To fall in love with the world isn't to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens, and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony, or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.
Sendak ended that interview with the last words he ever said in public: "Live your life. Live your life. Live your life."
Here is my attempt to do so.
Never predict the end of the world. You're almost certain to be wrong, and if you're right, no one will be around to congratulate you.
Diet Dr Pepper is god's perfect softdrinkJohn Green has a similar feeling for the drink.
[Home is] not a place, but a moment.
But I think it is also hard for us to confront human-caused climate change because the most privileged among us, the people who consume the most energy, can separate ourselves from the weather. I am certainly one such person. I am insulated from the weather by my house and its conditioned air. I eat strawberries in January. When it is raining, I can go inside. When it is dark, I can turn on lights. It is easy for me to feel like climate is mostly an outside phenomenon, whereas I am mostly an inside phenomenon.
I remember as a child hearing phrases like "Only the strong survive" and "survival of the fittest" and feeling terrified, because I knew I was neither strong nor fit. I didn't yet understand that when humanity protects the frail among us, and works to ensure their survival, the human project as a whole gets stronger.
A few years ago, I ran into an old friend, who said of our high school, "It saved my life. But it also did a lot of other things." So, too, with the internet.
who are you,little i
(five or six years old)
peering from some high
window;at the gold
of november sunset
(and feeling:that if day
has to become night
this is a beautiful way)
But I want to be earnest, even if it's embarrassing. The photographer Alec Soth has said, "To me, the most beautiful thing is vulnerability." I would go a step further and argue that you cannot see the beauty which is enough unless you make yourself vulnerable to it.That's a thing that still gets me. A lot of people conflate openness and vulnerability. But that vulnerability mostly comes from attachment, hitching our wagons to what we want to be rather than what is.
When we are young, we drink our coffee with milk and sugar. And as we age, we drink it with milk only, then we drink it black, then we drink it decaf, then we die. Our next eater is at decaf.
Depression is melancholy minus its charms.
Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say . . . 'In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.' Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.
[Courage is] when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway.For me "licked" isn't always being defeated per se, but at risk for having my delicate ego ending up a bruised mess.
Don't just do something. Stand there.
a photograph can't help taming what it shows
After the death of the poet Jane Kenyon, her husband Donald Hall wrote, "We did not spend our days gazing into each other's eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention." Hall goes on to note that third things might be John Keats or the Boston Symphony Orchestra or Dutch interiors or children.
The pleasure isn't owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.
Looking up toward the looming mountain ranges in the distance, I was reminded of what nature is always telling me: Humans are not the protagonists of this planet's story. If there is a main character, it is life itself, which makes of earth and starlight something more than earth and starlight.
A 2009 study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology found that people given license to doodle recalled more information than non-doodlers, perhaps because doodling requires just enough brainpower to keep the mind from wandering.
When people say, 'we have made it through worse before' / all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones / of those who did not make it.
Driving alone at night is heartbreak without the agony.
You're going to be okay, you know. Not in the short run . . . And also not in the long run, I guess. But in the medium run.