Stream of Consciousness

Welcome to My World Since, Like, 2001?

                                           

Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
                                                                —Rainer Maria Rilke

Be the Rain

                                                                                       

As rain falls on the just and unjust alike, let your heart be untroubled by judgments and let your kindness rain on all.

—The Buddha

That's something worth practicing today as I make my way, out and about in the world. Rain is falling here this April morning, gentle and it's warm out there, as you'd expect for April in the Pacific Northwest, the kind of rain that makes everything grow more abundant in a single day. It's dark in the house, the kind of day when you almost need to turn on a few lights for comfort and companionship. The day stretches ahead of me... 

Six-Word Memoir

I did one today, in response to a contest over at Powells.com. Sum up your life in six words by the deadline of April 15, 2009. They'll pick the top ten (I am entry #1926) and then submit those to Harper Collins for possible publication in a book of the best. After some looking at the other entries (most suck) then tinkering, fiddling, and looking up words in a thesaurus, I came up with this: 

Teetered on the precipice then jumped. 

Sunny December Friday Wisdom

From  Pablo Neruda as I haul pots of herbs into the basement to keep them from the frost predicted for this eve:

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, 

perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves 

and of threatening ourselves with death.

— Pablo Neruda

Indeed...

The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.

—John Berry

I am in a  wool sweater. It's gray today, and the sky is pale with gray-white clouds. More maple leaves have yellowed and fallen to the flagstones, into the bird bath over night. It's autumn. Time to take down garden art and put away the table and chairs. I have been in a tizzy for what feels like many months and now, finally, with these quieter, shorter days, I can feel a changing. Whatever's up next, I feel strangely ready. 

Commencement Address Wisdom, Indeed

Below's an excerpt from Jessica Lange's 2008 commencement address to the graduates of Sarah Lawrence College. I found this in the latest issue of Adbusters. It's eloquent and wise and timely. Some celebrities really know how to keep on going with their interesting lives. Seems so many of them hail from Minnesota...

"Be present. I would encourage you with all my heart—just to be present. 

Be present and open to the moment that is unfolding before you. Because, 

ultimately, your life is made up of moments. So don't miss them by being 

lost in the past or anticipating the future. 

Don't be absent from your own life. You will find that life is not governed

by will or intention. It is ultimately the collection of these sense memories 

stored in our nerves, built up in our cells. Simple things: A certain slant of 

light coming through a window on a winter's afternoon. The sound of spring 

peepers at twilight. The taste of a strawberry still warm from the sun. 

Your child's laughter. Your mother's voice."

Wise Words for Post-Move Living

From Albert Einstein, his three rules of work:

1. Out of clutter, find simplicity.
2. From discord, find harmony.
3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

Parlo Italiano?

I finally dived into our Rosetta Stone Italiano DVD, CD, whatever they are "immersion" modules tonight. So far, they mostly review what I already have learned, which wouldn't be hard given that I've taken Beginning Italian how many times now? at least four? But repetition is a good thing with language learning, n'est-ce pas? And the fact that I did know the conjugations of the verbs "to be" and "to have" did help me get my almost-100 score on the modules I've done so far. What is it with the way I say azzurro that a robot software program cannot understand?

La vita e bella.

La mela e rossa.

Le donne sono verdi.

Le donne leggono.

L'uomo beve. Vino rosso? Bianco?

And so on and so forth. How do you say I can't stop seeing the sights along Route 79 in central New York, the road to Ithaca, in my mind's eye tonight?

Three More Quotes to Keep Handy During NaNoWriMo

I found these while skimming old journals for ideas, fiction flotsam and jetsam collected over the years.

We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion. Our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. —Henry James

Artists are a lot like gangsters. They both know that the official version, the one everyone else believes in, is a lie. —Jocko to Russell Banks in the New York Times, Writers on Writing series, December 6, 1999.

All my life I have struggled to make one authentic gesture. —Isadora Duncan

This Summer's Mantra?

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
--Wendell Berry