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"Ho nel coure tre sentimenti con i quali non ci si annoia mai: la tristezza, l'amore e la reconoscenza."  ~Alexandre Dumas 

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"I have in my heart three feelings with which one is never bored: sadness, love and gratitude."  ~Alexandre Dumas

Go Away

 

I listen to Tony Mowod's jazz show on the local NPR station, KVUT.  It's a bit odd, since he died two years ago, but I think he'd be happy knowing that new fans are finding him and enjoying the music he played.

Liminal

Excerpted from "The Psychology Behind Liminal Space" by Theodora Blanchfield, at VeryWellMind.com:

Liminal space is the uncertain transition between where you've been and where you're going physically, emotionally, or metaphorically. To be in a liminal space means to be on the precipice of something new but not quite there yet.

Being in a liminal space can be incredibly uncomfortable for most people. Brains crave homeostasis and predictability, and the liminal space is everything but.

Moby released an interesting project a few years back.  "Destroyed" was an album of liminal photographs coupled with music intended to invoke the feeling of being in a liminal space.

This was one of the tracks:

The Way They Drive

"I'm no preacher but can tell you this:  the lives that people lead are driving them crazy and their insanity comes out in the way they drive."  ~Charles Bukowski, Factotum ©1971

Mistake

"When a family is broken by death, there is no clear way forward out of despair.  It is easy to mistake grief for proof of love, and so refuse to relinquish it."  ~Galadrielle Allman, in Please Be With Me © 2014

It's Perfect

 

(clicking imbiggens / (via) )

And that reminded me of this:

“We're like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.”  ~Jerry Garcia

Intel One Mono

(clicking imbiggens)

I suppose it's a weird thing to be a fan of monotpype fonts.  Maybe it's an offshoot of my love of typewriters.

But I do love them, and I wanted to let you all know that Intel has released a really nice new one.  It's free and open-source, and you can download it HERE.
 

It really wasn't.

 

(clicking imbiggens)

Zippy the Pinhead by Bill Griffith is online at (naturally) ZippyThePinhead.com.

Life in Pink

 

The video really compliments the song.

Full lyrics HERE.

Everything

 

(clicking Imbiggens)

And that reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE.

Problems

"You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions."  ~Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Perfect

 

(clicking imbiggens)

Charles Schulz definitely took some chances!

I really don't know clouds at all

“Clouds come floating into my life from other days no longer to shed rain or usher storm but to give colour to my sunset sky.”  ~Rabindranath Tagore

Tina Modotti

 Tina Modotti is one of those people who had such an active life that you wonder how she fit it all in:  revolutionary, photographer, actress, model, world traveler.    Her energy levels must have been through the roof!

By way of contrast, I mowed the lawn this morning, and decided that's enough for today and likely tomorrow, too.

You can read more about Ms. Modotti at Wikipedia, HERE.

Unpleasant

"One of those big days when you feel alternately very grown-up and boy in the corner of a room full of adults."  ~Alan Rickman, journal entry for 30 January 1997

I enjoyed Alan Rickman's recently published journals, Madly, Deeply: the diaries of Alan Rickman, ©2023,for a while.  There are some nice  little gems scattered about, but I was starting to not like him very much, so I sat it aside.

He was very shallow, far too impressed with celebrities, and just generally grumpy all the time.

I gave up on the book when he described going to decorate his mother's grave and used it as an opportunity to criticize the way other people had decorated their loved one's graves.

It was just too much.

 

I'm Begging Of You Please

I first became aware of this cover when Dolly Parton tweeted how much she liked it:

 

Full lyrics HERE.

Things I Know

Life After Death
by Laura Gilpin

The things I know:
how the living go on living
and how the dead go on living with them

So that in a forest
even a dead tree casts a shadow
and the leaves fall one by one
and the branches break in the wind
and the bark peels off slowly
and the trunk cracks
and the rain seeps in through the cracks
and the trunk falls to the ground
and the moss covers it

and in the spring the rabbits find it
and build their nest inside
and have their young
and their young will live safely
inside the dead tree

So that nothing is wasted in nature
or in love.

Wherever

"The people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else… learn it doesn't work that way.  Wherever you go, you take yourself with you."  ~Neil Gaiman

•

"Wherever you go, there you are."  ~Buckaroo Banzai

Home

 

And that reminded me of this:

 

Full lyrics HERE.

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