Excerpted from Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success by John C. Maxwell, ©2000 (via)
People change in four different seasons:
When they hurt enough they have to.
When they see enough they are inspired to.
When they learn enough that they want to.
And when they receive enough that they are able to.
Joe Rogan used to be a very different human being. I don't know what happened to him.
"I fell in love with Tibet because their essential mission was to keep a continual stream of prayer. To me they kept the world from spinning out of control just by being a civilization on the roof of the world in that continuous state of prayer. The prayers are etched on wheels, they feel them with their hands like braille and turn them. It's spinning prayer like cloth. That was my perception as a young person. I didn't quite understand the whole thing but I felt protected. We grew up at a time when nuclear war seemed imminent with air raid drills and lying on the floor under your school desk. To counterbalance that destruction was this civilization of monks living high in the Himalayas who were continually praying for us, for the planet and for all of nature. That made me feel safe." ~Patti Smith in an interview with Thurston Moore for "Bomb Magazine," 1996 (via dzgrizzle)
"For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction." ~Cynthia Occelli
Excerpted from Broadsides from the other orders: a book of bugs by Sue Hubbell, ©1993:
These names that we use for orders-- Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, Diptera, and all the others-- do not stand for anything in the real world… The order names are sorting words, or taxa, that we humans use to group a dizzying array of individual bugs that otherwise we would find too many and too confusing to think about. Because of the way we have evolved, we have sorting kinds of brains and feel more comfortable if we we put what we see in the world into various piles and categories so that we can get a handle on them. But this says more about us and our brains that it does about the world outside our heads, and we shouldn't mix up these categories-- the taxa-- with reality.
"That's the trouble with working-class people throughout the world. They always try to spur their hatred onto what they see as being lower down the scale, rather than going for the fucking jugular of the upper- and middle-class bastards who are keeping them down in the first place." ~John Lydon, from his autobiography Rotten: no Irish, no Blacks, no dogs ©1994
Excerpt from The Turtle of Oman by Naomi Shihab Nye, ©2014:
And Sidi always had time for Aref, since he was retired now and never wore a watch. He didn't like watches. He said time felt heavy on his wrist. He hated rushing and thought the world was hurrying so much that people were missing all the good parts.
And that led to this:
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." ~Ferris Bueller (source)And, of course, this:
Full lyrics HERE.
“読書中に何か思いついたら、読むのを中断してでも書き留める。その思いつきはベランダに降りてきた雀のようなもので、不意に飛んでいって二度と戻ってこない。” - @shigotanon
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"If I come up with something while reading, I write it down even if I stop reading. That idea is like a sparrow that lands on the balcony, suddenly flies away, and never returns."
Vontae Davis retired from football unexpectedly, in the middle of a game (source):
"I went to the bench after that series and it just hit me: I don't belong on that field anymore.
"Leaving was therapeutic. I left everything the league wanted me to be-- playing for my teammates while injured, the gladiator mentality-- it all just popped. And when it popped, I just wanted to leave it all behind. So that's why I don't care what people say. That experience was personal and not meant for anyone else to understand. It was me cold turkey leaving behind an identity that I carried with me for so long."
It's rare to have an epiphany like that. Usually realizations creep in more slowly.
"I do not extend my fingers when I examine my nails. I, by God, double my hand like a man." ~James Thurber, From "The Case of Dimity Ann" in Thurber Country, ©1953
It hadn't occurred to me that there is a masculine and a feminine way to check your nails.
"In the Eastern tradition, the state of your consciousness at the last moment of life is so crucial that you spend your whole life preparing for that moment. We've had many assassinations in our culture recently and when we think what it was like for Bobby Kennedy or Jack Kennedy, if they had any thought, what it would have been. 'Oh, I've been shot!' or 'He did it,' or 'Goodbye,' or 'Get him,' or 'Forgive him.' Mahatama Gandhi walked out into a garden to give a press conference and gunman shot him three or four times, but as he was falling the only thing that came out of his mouth was, 'Ram…' The name of God. He was ready!
"At the moment of death you let go lightly, you go out into the light, toward the One, toward God. The only thing that died, after all, was another set of thoughts of who you were this time around." ~Ram Dass, from Grist for the Mill ©1981
"Nature and I have long felt that the hope of mankind is womankind, that the physically creative sex must eventually dominate the physically destructive sex if we are to survive on this planet." ~James Thurber
Thurber visited Paris at the end of World War I and again at the end of World War II.
"Once, in the Orient, I talked of suicide with a sage whose clear and gentle eyes seemed forever to be gazing at the never-ending sunset. 'Dying is no solution,' he affirmed. 'And living?' I asked. 'Not living either,' he conceded. 'But, who tells you there is a solution?'" ~Elie Wiesel
And that reminded me of this:
Full lyrics HERE.
Five years ago my mother was dying in a nursing home. I visited her every day.
It was hard. I felt like my role was to cheer her up and give her a happy break from the tedium, but all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball.
I would blast "Heroes" to give me energy, to remind myself that I didn't have to be heroic forever-- just for today. Then I did what I needed to do.
Inspiration doesn't always come from wise old men sitting serenely on mats under trees. Sometimes it comes from tall gravelly-voiced men covered with tattoos.
"As an editor I was always waiting for Richard (Brautigan) to grow up as a writer. It seems to me he was essentially a naïf, and I don't think he cultivated that childishness, I think it came naturally. It was like he was much more in tune with the trout in America than with people." ~Lawrence Ferlinghetti (source)
2 Kings 20:5: "I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears: behold, I will heal thee."
