The essential meaning of silence is
the giving up of intention.
Silence is not acoustic.
It is a change of mind.
A turning around.
~ John Cage, The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life by David Revill
Credits: Photo Source: mennyfox55. Quote: Memory’s Landscape
I am as culpable as the rest,
my veneer spit shined and shallow,
my intentions on the level of a Sufi master’s.
Pill and pearl.
Twee of divine.
Look how my articles of faith
are disheveled, disorderly, squalling,
nailed to no door, unrecitable, in bloody flux, forgettable.
Light from Light
Yet I believe them, my faith’s restless articles.
~ Melissa Pritchard, Decomposing Articles of Faith. A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, And Write
Notes:
Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own. To say ‘going through the motions’—this isn’t reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort—the labor, the motions, the dance—of getting inside another person’s state of heart or mind.
This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always arise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.
~ Leslie Jamison, “The Empathy Exams”
Credits: Photo: Angelhead. Quote: Invisiblestories
6:17am: I’m up and out the door. It’s a beautiful morning for running. Wisps of cool air cutting through the early September humidity. Streaks of clouds cover the sunrise. A splash of color on a few trees getting a head start on autumn. It’s September 3rd. And a great day to be alive. (Hello September. Where did the year go? Love, LOVE, the fall season. The pulsating picture above feels like my heart does now. Ba Boom. Ba Boom. Ba Boom. Ba Boom. Keep tickin’ baby. Keep tickin’.)
6:23am: Pace is good. Both jets feel good. No one is out and about. Pesky squirrels are sleeping. Even the birds are quiet. (Yep, it’s just me and my head. And that can get crowded. Managed to contain the food intake yesterday. Miracle. Determined to get this weight down before the hibernation period. As Brenna would say, Thanksgiving is the time of the year “when I feel like I’ve eaten a gallon of mashed potatoes and a gravy-injected turkey and washed it down with six or seven espressos.”)
“He wanted to drift on the river not so much to see where it went as to be one with it, to go with it as virtually a part of it. He wished perhaps to live out a kind of parable. One cannot drift by intention – or at least, in intending to drift and in drifting, one must accept a severe limitation upon one’s intentions. But in giving oneself to the currents, in thus subordinating one’s intentions, one becomes eligible for unintended goods, unwished – for gifts – and often these goods and gifts surpass those that one has intended or wished for. And so a drifter subscribes necessarily to a kind of faith that is identical both to the absolute trust of migrating birds and to the scripture that bids us to lose our lives in order to find them. Harlan stated it in 1932 with characteristic simplicity:
‘I believe that whatever we need is at hand.’”
~ Wendell Berry
Quote Source: dhammanovice. Wendell Berry from “Harlan Hubbard – Life and Work” via the beauty we love: He wanted to drift
Live & Learn 