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the little things were everything

February 5, 2023 by 15 Comments


But after a couple of weeks of listing things I was grateful for, I came to see that the little things were everything. The little things were what I held on to at the end of the day. Single jokes that gave me the giggles. A beautiful flower arrangement, viewed through the window of a café. The fact that my cat came to cuddle me when she saw I was sad. These things gave me hope, pleasure, solace. Together, they added up to a fulfilling life. If a simple flower arrangement could make this world just a little more bearable, then perhaps my own small actions meant more than I was giving them credit for. Maybe when I made dinner, or listened to a friend rant, or complimented a woman on her incredible garden, I was helping make this world survivable for others. Perhaps that evening, when tallying up their own wins and losses for the day, someone would think of something I’d done and smile.

— Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (Ballantine Books, February 22, 2022)

Notes:

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Who put out the fire?

February 27, 2018 by 24 Comments

I’m 1/3 of the way through Tara Westover’s book “Educated: A Memoir” and it’s a Wow.

For book reviews, check out:

“For eighteen years I never thought of that day, not in any probing way. The few times my reminiscing carried me back to that torrid afternoon, what I remembered first…Now, at age twenty-nine, I sit down to write, to reconstruct the incident from the echoes and shouts of a tired memory. I scratch it out. When I get to the end, I pause. There’s an inconsistency, a ghost in this story. I read it. I read it again. And there it is. Who put out the fire?”

~ Tara Westover, “Educated: A Memoir”

Highly recommended.

 

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He is running, running, running

December 11, 2016 by 21 Comments

spill-simmer-falter-wither-book-jacket

He is running, running, running. And it’s like no kind of running he’s ever run before. He’s the surge that burst the dam and he’s pouring down the hillslope, channelling through the grass to the width of his widest part. He’s tripping into hoof-rucks. He’s slapping groundsel stems down dead. Dandelions and chickweed, nettles and dock. This time, there’s no chance for sniff and scavenge and scoff. There are no steel bars to end his lap, no chain to jerk at the limit of its extension, no bellowing to trick and bully him back. This time, he’s further than he’s ever seen before, past every marker along the horizon line, every hump and spork he learned by heart. […]

He is running, running, running. And there’s no course or current to deter him. There’s no impulse from the root of his brain to the roof of his skull which says other than RUN.

~ Sara Baume, from the Prologue of Spill Simmer Falter Wither (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015)

Ray, a 57-year-old loner on Britain’s southern coast, adopts a one-eyed terrier. You can guess what happens next: Ray falls head over heels in love and is soon organizing his life around One Eye’s walks and feedings…Ray falls deeper under the spell of the damaged but joy-filled dog who has transformed his “squat, vacant life” and renewed his interest in his surroundings…This lovely book seems destined to become a small classic of animal communion literature, fervently handed along among friends and family…Early on, Ray asks himself a question that anyone whose life has been changed by a pet will recognize: “What did I use to do all day without you? Already I can’t remember.”

~ Sam Sacks, from his book review of Spill Simmer Falter Wither

One of NPR’s Best Books of 2016.  See NPR book review: For A Young Irish Artist And Author, Words Are Anchored In Images

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Petty: Being a person is a challenge

April 16, 2016 by 31 Comments

tom-petty

Alexandra Wolfe, Tom Petty Won’t Back Down:

…On the afternoon we meet, he’s sitting on the couch with his dog, Ryder, a golden lab with a red bandana tied around his neck. Alternating between drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, he talks about how he’s gearing up for a reunion tour and new album with his first real band, Mudcrutch. The musician, known for hit songs such as “American Girl” (1976) and “Free Fallin’” (1989), hasn’t been on tour in two years, and it’s a departure from his usual band, the Heartbreakers. But for Mr. Petty, 65, reuniting with Mudcrutch is a kind of homecoming…

“I can’t stand to be bored,” he says. “I don’t cope with it—I’m not the best me I can be when I’m bored.” Over the years, he has immersed himself in his work to get through troubled times in his life.

Since childhood, he has listened to music as a way to escape. Mr. Petty says that his father, an Air Force veteran who worked as an insurance salesman, used to beat and verbally harass him. (His father died in 1999, and they never reconciled.) Going to therapy in the 1990s, he says, helped him to get through the anger and depression from his childhood. “I could really get mad easily, and it wasn’t attractive, and [after therapy] that went away for the most part, and I became somebody different.”

…He says that while the musical side of his life has gone well, “being a person is a challenge, but I think I’m a better one than I used to be.” He suffered through depression in the mid-1990s after divorcing his first wife and then again around 2001 when his close friend George Harrison died. [Read more…]

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Sunday Morning: Jonny + Xena. Moved.

September 21, 2014 by 35 Comments

There’s not much to say here except WATCH.

Thank you Julie.

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To breathe deep, to breathe hard

May 1, 2014 by 7 Comments

photography,black and white,

it may take years, Dr. Ming whispers,
      to wash them out,
telling me to breathe deep, to breathe
     hard,
the body is nothing but a map of the
     heart.

—Len Roberts, closing lines to “Acupuncture and Cleansing at Forty-Eight.”

“On his own at sixteen after being raised by an alcoholic father and an abusive mother, Len Roberts is best known for poems of stark imagery that concentrate on his progress in life and how he has come to an acceptance of life’s flux.”

Notes/Credits:

 

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I will affirm the good until it sinks in and feels real

June 4, 2013 by 24 Comments

melody-beattie

“…Help me let go of my need to stay immersed in negativity. I can change the energy in myself and my environment from nega­tive to positive. I will affirm the good until it sinks in and feels real. I will also strive to find one quality that I like about someone else who’s important to me, and I will take the risk of telling him or her that.”

  ~ Melody Beattie

I may be the only one on the planet who didn’t know about Melanie Beattie’s back story.  And what an incredible story she has.  Here’s more than a few excerpts from her bio on her blog page:

Melody Beattie, is the author of the international self help best seller titled Codependent No More where she introduced the psychological condition called “codependency.”  Over eight million copies of the book have been sold worldwide.  Millions of readers have trusted Melody’s words of wisdom and guidance because she knows firsthand what they’re going through. In her lifetime, she has survived abandonment, kidnapping, sexual abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, divorce, and the death of a child. “Beattie understands being overboard, which helps her throw bestselling lifelines to those still adrift,” said Time Magazine. [Read more…]

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Small miseries

December 31, 2012 by 51 Comments

Rudyard Kipling, Illustration

A post by Amanda Patterson on Rudyard Kipling triggered a stream of thoughts this morning.  Kipling was born yesterday in 1865.  I couldn’t recall ever reading anything by Kipling but I’ve certainly heard of him.  (DK. Mr. Contemporary. Always looking forward.  Never much for history.  Not much for looking back. What possibly could I learn from a life 100+ years ago? PAST IS PAST.)

Kipling, “born in India, was sent to England to live with a foster family and receive a formal British education at the age of 6.  These were hard years for Kipling.  His Foster mother was a brutal woman, who quickly grew to despise her young foster son. She beat and bullied Kipling, who also struggled to fit in at school. Kipling’s solace came in books and stories. With few friends, he devoted himself to reading. By the age of 11, Kipling was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A visitor to his home saw his condition and immediately contacted his mother, who rushed back to England and rescued her son from the Holloways.”

Yet, here’s a man who survived this childhood and flourished.  He said:

Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets.

And said:

I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble.

And said:

This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid moments, some meaningful adventures.

And a man, who produced this poem in 1895:

[Read more…]

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