Any Day Now

 

Full lyrics available at BobDylan.com.

Isabella

 

Excerpted from Madly Deeply:  The Diaries of Alan Rickman ©2023:

Isabella Rossellini.  Great to meat Ms R. finally…  Her beauty is the kind that stops you concentrating on what she's saying sometimes because you are fixated by the shape of her mouth.

Which reminded me of this:

“Sometimes you have to show a little skin. This reminds boys of being naked, and then they think of sex. And anything you can do to draw attention to your mouth is good.” — Cher on flirting,  from the movie Clueless ©1995

Fadge

 Alan Rickman uses the word "fadge" in his recently published journals, and it's not a word I was familiar with so I had to look it up.

It's interesting that there are so many different meanings for one word.  It's almost like "smurf"; it has little intrinsic meaning of its own, so it must be inferred from context.

It's a big entry, but if you enjoy words it's worth a click:  Wiktionary

Every Moment

"Every moment and every way we treat, act toward, and recognize others is a religious experience and one potentially filled with great meaning."  ~Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, from The Final Exam ©2023

Unified and Whole

Excerpted from The Final Exam by Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, ©2023:

Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner was once asked for advice by a student who felt he was living a dual life, one at home in the religious world and one at work in a secular society.  He could not live with the dichotomy.  Rabbi Hutner answered that someone who has two houses with two wives and two families is living a double life, while one who has multiple rooms in the same house is not leading a double life, but a unified life with multiple facets.  The point that Rabbi Hutner was making is that one muse contextualize one's entire life as avodat hashem, heavenly service in all of its aspects.  One's whole life should be viewed in the context of Torah, so that it should appear unified and whole.

Ear Worm

This is a terrible song to get stuck in your head, because you can't successfully search YouTube for "Uh uh uh, uh uh uh uh uh."  Then you'll remember a few of the words, "They just don't write 'em like that anymore," but that's not title, either.

 

Full lyrics of "The Breakup Song" available HERE.

Control, Depression, or Exhaustion?

 

In this excerpt from Madly, Deeply: the diaries of Alan Rickman, ©2023, he discusses putting his mother in a nursing home:

7 September 1994

Taking my mother from a house stuffed with collected bits of furniture, pieces of paper, magazines, old biros (ballpoint pens) neatly lined up with emery boards and a teaspoon-- off to Chartwell House; purpose built for the elderly genteel. It's all on one level and the staff are terrific. It keeps me reassured and guilty-- a rare combination. We'll see.

8 September 1994

Most of the day spent at Chartwell House. My life is in such clear-cut strands at the moment. Career, Architect, Subsidence, Other People's Careers, Relationships. Seemingly in that order. Today was almost exclusively about my mother. Just spending time in this new environment, calling the doctor, testing her hearing, wrapping her up and taking her and her wheelchair for a walk to get the prescription, looking on helplessly at today's pain and her fury at it. I don't know what I become under these circumstances-- a kind of amorphous bundle of past and present. I have to kick myself towards the phone to attend to some of the other members of the above list. The strands. Later Eileen [A.R.'s cousin] and boyfriend and 2 daughters come by. Some of my childhood, cousins, aunts & uncles, swim before me. Then Rima arrives and reduces me to silence for the rest of the evening. Is this control, depression or exhaustion?

Blue

 

(Clicking Imbiggens)

By Luiz Sacilotto, 1987.  I love the colors and the simple geometry.  

Not long after I saw this painting for the first time, someone posted this (sadly, uncredited) photograph:

(clicking Imbiggens)

Consumption

"Never before have we been faced with more choices, but never before have the great society-shaping institutions offered less guidance on why we should choose this way rather than that.  The great metaphors of our time-- the supermarket, cable, and satellite television and the Internet-- put before us a seemingly endless range of options, each offering the great deal, the best buy, the highest specification, the lowest price.  But consumption is a poor candidate for salvation."  ~Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, in The Dignity of Difference:  How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations ©2002

Slow

 

(Clicking Imbiggens)

And that, of course, reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE.

Unshakeable

"We know that people can maintain an unshakeable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers."  ~Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow ©2011

Fairy Tales

"We are in the beginning of mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth." ~Greta Thunberg

The One Amazing

Excerpted from The Final Exam:  Letters to Our Students by Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman:

That is what Hashem is asking us to do with this one amazing life we have, with our tree of life-- to nourish and to be nourished, to grow and help others grow, to bring gifts out into the world with kindness, and to use all of this to advance and improve the world.

The image of a tree provides a framework from which to understand our values, both individually and collectively.  No one core value exists without the other.  Each is interconnected and balanced by the others.

Tree

When Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman wrote The Final Exam:  Letters to Our Students, his target audience was young conservative Jews.  However, a lot of the principles he espouses can apply to anyone seeking a spiritual life:

(clicking imbiggens)

Go Beyond

"Don't rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether. ~Nisargadatta Maharaj