“デザインの専門学生の頃に『空白』と『余白』には違いがあり、余白には意図があるから埋めてはいけないって聞いた。それが別にデザインに限った事ではなくて、時間や荷物、会話にも言える事だと知ったのはそれからずいぶん後の事だった。” ~ステトスさんのイート
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“When I was a design student, I heard that there was a difference between a ``blank'' and a ``margin,'' and that you shouldn't fill in the blank space because it has a purpose. It wasn't until much later that I realized that the same thing could be said about baggage, luggage, and conversations." ~Stetos' tweet
"Muore lentamente chi non si permette almeno una volta nella vita di fuggire ai consigli sensati." ~Pablo Neruda
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"Those who do not allow themselves to escape from sensible advice at least once in their life die slowly." ~Pablo Neruda
When I first saw this posted to XKCD I thought it was hilarious, and sent it to everyone I knew.
They all said the same thing: "I guess I'm not very good at geography."
They didn't realize it was a joke.
"Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when human beings contending with them are relegated to cages." ~Angela Davis
Mona in college. That's a typewriter in front of her, a phone attached to the wall, and several photographs she took of Earl Thomas Conley in concert.
There are artists who spend a fortune on brushes and canvases and paints, and there are artists who create with coffee cups.
I like it when artists put an extraordinary twist on something ordinary.
Where Everything Is Music
by Rumi
Don’t worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.
We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.
The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world’s harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.
So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.
This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!
They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can’t see.
Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.
Memory
By Thomas Bailey Aldrich
My mind lets go a thousand things
Like dates of wars and deaths of kings,
And yet recalls the very hour--
'T was noon by yonder village tower,
And on the last blue noon in May--
The wind came briskly up this way,
Crisping the brook beside the road;
Then, pausing here, set down its load
Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly
Two petals from that wild-rose tree.
I'm not doing it.
It wasn't that long ago that when you took your cart to the cashier, you were done. The cashier took the items from your cart and rang them up, then passed it down the line to the bagger who sacked your groceries, took them to your car for you, and helped load them into your trunk.
Now Walmart is trying to brainwash us into believing that if we don't do their work for them, for free, then somehow we're the problem.
They want you to believe that this is somehow a test of your character.
It is not.
I'm not falling for it.
Failing and Flying
by Jack Gilbert
from Open Field-Poems from Group 18
Open Field Press, Northampton Ma. 2011
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stoney field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage had failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
Mona took me to see Gene Watson at Liberty Hall last night, and he was really, really good.
He's now the oldest performer we've gone to see. He's 80 years-old, which makes him three years older than Ringo the last time we saw him, but his voice is still strong and clear. I'm not grading on a curve, here-- close your eyes, and he sounds the same as he did forty years ago.
It was an energetic performance and an appreciative audience, and just a really good time.
Cada persona que pasa por nuestra
vida es única.
Siempre deja un poco de si y se lleva
un poco de nosotros,
Habra los que se llevan mucho,
Pero no habrá de los que no nos dejaran nada…
~Jorge Luis Borges
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Every person who passes through our
life is unique.
He always leaves a little of himself and takes
a little of us,
There will be those who take a lot,
But there won't be those who won't leave us anything…
~Jorge Luis Borges
From the blog MSPaint Adventures:
i just pointed out in my judaism class that it’s interesting to me that when asked God’s name, God did respond with the ineffable name (the tetragrammaton) but put a much greater emphasis on who they are the God OF (I’m the God of Abraham, the God of Moses, etc.).
and my teacher said she feels a kinship with that because she remembers the joy that came with the first time she was called “(son’s name)’s mom”, and how beautiful it feels be named for who you love. and i almost burst into tears
I have doubts whether this is really something Japanese folks go around saying.
It sounds more like someone reworded a line from Cats.
Acceptance
by Robert Frost
When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in her breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from his nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be.'
There is an internet trope that every atom in your body is replaced every seven years, and I looked it up to see if it is true.
The short answers is, as I expected, "No," but they are rotated fairly frequently. Atoms in your skin and hair are replaced fairly quickly, atoms in your muscle and organs can sit there for a decade or so, atoms in your brain and teeth remain stagnant for your whole life. (source)(source)
What made me think of that was the recent death of my father. We took his body and put it in a box with his name on it, but that was really only his final form. Seven-year-old Lloyd, forty-year-old Lloyd, even eighty-year-old Lloyd, had mostly already moved on.
If you think about it, your body changes with every breath. Atoms that had been a part of you-- carbon, water vapor, perhaps alcohol if you had a fun night-- are all swapped out for something new with each inhale and exhale.
And this is a bit of a tangent here, but since the human body is mostly water, when a body is cremated most of it is released upwards into the clouds, where it then it rains down everywhere. My parents are now part of the grass, part of the trees, part of the rivers and streams, and part of all the life within them.
That comforts me.
Terry Pratchett, in Carpe Jugulum ©1998:
“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’
‘It’s a lot more complicated than that -’
‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
Terry Pratchett, in Jingo ©1997:
“It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, then what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.”
The Widow's Lament in Springtime
William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963)
Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turn away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.
Blogger SoberScientistLife shares her favorite Winnie-the-Pooh story:
“Hello Eeyore,” said Pooh.
“Hello Pooh. Hello Piglet” said Eeyore, in a Glum sounding voice.
“We just thought we’d check on you,” said Piglet, “because we hadn’t heard from you, and so we wanted to know if you were okay.”
Eeyore was silent for a moment. “Am I okay?” he asked, eventually. “Well, I don’t know, to be honest. Are any of us really okay? That’s what I ask myself. All I can tell you, Pooh and Piglet, is that right now I feel really rather Sad, and Alone, and Not Much Fun To Be Around At All.
Which is why I haven’t bothered you. Because you wouldn’t want to waste your time hanging out with someone who is Sad, and Alone, and Not Much Fun To Be Around At All, would you now.”
Pooh looked at Piglet, and Piglet looked at Pooh, and they both sat down, one on either side of Eeyore in his stick house.
Eeyore looked at them in surprise. “What are you doing?”
“We’re sitting here with you,” said Pooh, “because we are your friends. And true friends don’t care if someone is feeling Sad, or Alone, or Not Much Fun To Be Around At All. True friends are there for you anyway. And so here we are.”
“Oh,” said Eeyore. “Oh.” And the three of them sat
there in silence, and while Pooh and Piglet said nothing at all;
somehow, almost imperceptibly, Eeyore started to feel a very tiny little
bit better.
Because Pooh and Piglet were There.
No more; no less.
Author - AA Milne
Illustration - EH Shepard
"Give people what they need: food, medicine, clear air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don't ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it." ~Howard Zinn
"We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams." ~Jimmy Carter
"The problem isn't a lack of money, food, water or land… The problem is that you've given control of these things to a group of greedy psychopaths who care more about maintaining their own power than helping mankind." ~Bill Hicks
"The illusion of sin and guilt, the madness of our species, is that act of cursing the world under the misapprehension that one is cursing only one part of it. To curse the fig tree, as in the funniest and most misunderstood parable of Jesus, is to curse the soil in which it grew, the seed, the rains, the sun; the whole world, eventually-- because no part is truly separate from the whole. The fallacy that one can judge the part in isolation from the whole is 'the lie that all men believe.'" ~Robert Anton Wilson
Alice Cooper put out a wonderful concept album, The Last Temptation, back in 1994. It’s all about sin, fall, and redemption, and I highly recommend it. Block out a little time to listen to it in its entirety.
In once scene Satan offers a boy anything his heart desires, and the boy says, “I want to be free.” After Satan removes his school, his friends, and his family, the boy cries out in shock, “I’m all alone!”
“But you’re free,” Satan answers. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
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I was my father’s caretaker the last five years of his life. He was somewhere on the autism spectrum, and was obsessive compulsive. Everything he did had to be done the same day, the same time, the same way, or there was a meltdown.
I would get frustrated and whine that I wanted my life back, that it wasn’t fair that I had to shoulder all of this responsibility.
Now he’s gone, and I’m free.
Isn’t that what I wanted?
