Category: Quotes

Lightly child, lightly.

Live & Learn16 Comments

eric-rose-light-portrait-sun

I stop and close my eyes in order to feel rather than see. I allow the bright sunlight to shine on my face, warming it just enough to make my skin tingle. Then I start to listen. I detect the faint chirping of cardinals outside, barely audible above the clamor of hungry children and cats underfoot. The wind chimes hanging from the redbud tree in front of the house ring out from a gust of wind. They were a wedding gift, one that always touches a tender spot deep within me. It’s as if each note of the pentatonic scale connects with an invisible chamber of my heart, bringing me back to center. Then I start to hear new sounds. They are my own inner whispers, reminding me of what I want in this life. When I open my eyes, the present comes rushing back at me. I’m acutely aware of the sights, sounds, and scents swirling about at that moment yet I don’t feel defeated by them anymore. I was only gone a few seconds, but that brief amount of time gave me just enough pause to view my surroundings from a slightly different perspective. This time, I’m able to detect a blessing behind each of the messes.

~Jennifer DeVille Catalano

Notes:

  • Photo: Eric Rose. Quote: Thank you Make Believe Boutique
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

 

The Blogging Team: You, me, us…

Live & Learn27 Comments

laptop-computer-halo-shadow-back

Blogging is not only a new technology of writing; it’s also a new way of reading. In Christian antiquity, reading was a social activity, not a wholly private one. The earliest recorded incident of silent reading is found in Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine relates with astonishment Ambrose’s habit of reading in silence, a practice he had never seen before: “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.”…

In the world of Web 2.0, the ideal of the solitary reader is waning fast. Blogging is a kind of reading-together. It is the formation of a new kind of community of reading. No longer is reading an activity reserved for the private study, that carefully crafted space where thought is cultivated under conditions of silence, leisure, economic privilege. To read a blog is to participate in a collective reading process: on any given day, we all read the same post, the same thread of comments and responses. Such reading is far removed from solitude: the reading is understood primarily as a stimulus to conversation, criticism, discussion. Here, reading is not so much an end in itself as the means to a particular form of community. The very act of reading thus becomes a collective project…

~ Ben Myers, Blogging as a Technology of the Self

Notes:

 

Unfairly Demonised. That’s Right.

Live & Learn48 Comments

pasta-macaroni-and-cheese

1980’s: Replace butter with margarine. Overturned.

1990’s: Eliminate salt. Debunked.

2000’s: Eliminate/reduce carbs.

And today, the big news:

  • “Eating pasta is not fattening and actually decreases the chances of becoming obese”
  • “A new survey of more than 23,000 people, however, has linked pasta consumption to both lower body mass and waist-to-hip ratio.”
  • “…also found that the correlation between pasta intake and lower obesity rates occurred independently of overall diet”
  • “evidence that carbohydrates have been “unfairly demonised”.”=
  • “the current trend of people cutting out pasta from their diets in an effort to lose weight was unjustified”
  • “a fundamental component of Italian Mediterranean tradition, and there is no reason to do without it”
  • results clearly show that it is wrong to demonise carbohydrates as the data clearly show that consumption of a carbohydrate-rich food such as pasta does not have an adverse effect on body weight.

Read more at The Telegraph: Eating pasta helps you lose weight, says Italian study

Moral of the story:

1) Wait long enough and it all comes home.

2) Back up the Pasta Truck.

3) Next up: Ice Cream.

Notes: (1) Thank you Rich for sharing the research.  (2) Photo: Credit

Tuesday Morning Wake-Up Call: A dream can weigh more than iron

Live & Learn17 Comments

train-passenger

And then there were the poets, those unbelievable people so different from other men, who told anyone who would listen that a wish is more important than a fortune, and that a dream can weigh more than iron or steel. What nerve they had, those poets, but how right they were! Everything, they said, comes from inside us, passes through things outside and then goes back in. And that to them is the meaning of life, feeling, understanding, love.

~ Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II

Notes: Photograph: philippe conquet with Pas 5.  Related Posts: Jacques Lusseyran