Currie's Gratitude 28 February 2014

So, we may not be able to explain the world. Not exactly. But we can accept it, and love it. We can turn our faces to the light and examine the minutest details simply for the sake of it. We can live lives of joy and purpose. We are all part of one whole. Take comfort in this. Almost every one of us is capable of holding a cup to another’s lips without our hands shaking.  [Jay Woodman, SPAN]

Acceptance is one of those things that, like Letting Go, I didn’t really grasp that I didn’t grasp. I thought it automatic, mayBE. But over time I have learned that Life is Life and the World is the World. I’ve learned to “keep my eyes on my own paper” you might say…

Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.  [John F. Kennedy]

This seems to BE one of those habits we accept without examining closely. Blame is far easier to fling than Responsibility is to take in hand.

The more I expect, the more unhappy I am going to be. The more I accept, the more serene I am.  [Michael J. Fox]

Chop wood, carry water.

Life is as simple as we can accept it BEing.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 27 February 2014

We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.  [George Eliot, Middlemarch]

Just yesterday I found out that I feel a certain way about something. And I told my truth about it. Out loud. And I was told I “shouldn’t feel that way.” And I persisted. NOT rudely. I just persisted. It feels clearer Now.

We can't be afraid of change. You may feel very secure in the pond that you are in, but if you never venture out of it, you will never know that there is such a thing as an ocean, a sea. Holding onto something that is good for you now, may be the very reason why you don't have something better. [C. JoyBell C.]

Some discoveries are painful. Some of them seem to BEgin as Very Bad Ideas. Ideas to which we, or others, have a visceral reaction.

Some discoveries need to bash you over the head til you see stars and sometimes that is just what it takes.

Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle. [Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland]

You’d think by Now I’d know the answer.

But really, I don’t.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 26 February 2014

Man is able to snatch everything except one thing, the last of human freedoms: the choice of an attitude under any given set of circumstances to determine his own path.  [Viktor E. Frankl]

I often forget that my thinking, my words, my entire BElief system can, at times, and perhaps ALL OF THE TIME, have consequences. Those, by the way, may NOT BE what I want. Or ever wanted. But I have these habits and ways of BEing that make things go as they go.

Your life is the sum result of all the choices you make, both consciously and unconsciously. If you can control the process of choosing, you can take control of all aspects of your life. You can find the freedom that comes from being in charge of yourself.  [Robert Bennett]

I have seen this to BE true. I have also found myself, mid-choice, recognising that I have lulled myself into a sort of complacency, BElieving I have removed Consequence from all equations. That is a dangerous way to play at Life.

People say that it's the big decisions that are important... no one ever explains how it's the little choices that send your life careening in another direction.  [Julie Gittus, Saltwater Moons]

I notice this peculiarness, too.

Over and over I learn its truths.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 25 February 2014

But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world.   [Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince]

Need has had a bad rap. We are NOT supposed to BE “needy” and the truly “needy” deserve our help. It gets convoluted when I think about it in reverse.

I have come to identify my needs in as simple a fashion as I can. I don’t want to BE “unique in all the World” to anyone. I just love people. That is enough.

Wherever you turn, you can find someone who needs you. Even if it is a little thing, do something for which there is no pay but the privilege of doing it. Remember, you don't live in a world all of your own.   [Albert Schweitzer]

I DO like living my simple little Life. Content with my means. DOing the things I DO without striving after goals.

And  when I can make someone a little happier?! Fulfill another’s need in a quiet way?! Exquisite!!

The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.  [Lao Tzu]

I like when things are kept simple. When I don’t NEED to think so much.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 24 February 2014

Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.  [Tony Schwartz]

Amazed though I am at how little I know about things I thought myself sure of, I continue to reach out to learn, discover, and uncover what is hidden from my view. I don’t join in or align myself with groups and causes, generally. I prefer the edge where I can take things in at my own pace. Or NOT.

Socrates told us, "the unexamined life is not worth living." I think he's calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge.  [Roger Ebert]

It does make sense, at least it seems to, that I remain ever more curious as my years pile up, one upon the last.

And yet I am never DONE. My thirst for discovering and learning is NOT quenchable.

I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.   [Eleanor Roosevelt]

I think that sounds divine. How about you?!

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 23 February 2014

I think certain types of processes don’t allow for any variation. If you have to be part of that process, all you can do is transform—or perhaps distort—yourself through that persistent repetition, and make that process a part of your own personality.   [Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running]

It is a funny thing how we build or deconstruct habits. If we jump right into a BIG Change in how we live Life or DO whatever it is we DO, oftener than NOT we will fail.

Perhaps failing repeatedly helps us to see that Change, BIG or small Change, is made by tiny repetitions building one upon the other into successes.

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.   [Ernest Dimnet]

Somedays it is the simplest insight that turns me round and starts me moving in a more Right-for-me direction. Whatever is done, day in and day out, is the key to why I call a thing Good or NOT.

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.   [Gertrude Stein]

The habits of a people are no different than the habits of a person. Perhaps we can BEcome what we most often envision and imagine for ourselves…

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 22 February 2014

Perseverance is not a passive submission to circumstances—it is a strong and active response to the difficult events of life.   [Elizabeth George]

Attitudes are really powerful, and checking mine when I respond to Life has BEcome empowering. I never got this BEfore. I was caught up in NOT reacting, which it turns out gave my responses an entirely different look and feel.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.   [Pierre Teilhard de Chardin]

So often I have heard variations on this theme. And oftener still I have gone back to WHY?! And yet WHY has never brought me to the answers I seek. NOT once. I sometimes consider WHY?! to BE my #1 colossal avoidance factor.

Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?   [Camille Paglia]

Sometimes  I wonder why we are always arguing and discussing and trying to figure out who is right or wrong. I think we are mostly missing the point. We need to come together and respond together.

Life requires that of us.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 21 February 2014

In creating, the only hard thing is to begin; a grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak.    [James Russel Lowell]

Often I hit a wall that seems invisible until, SURPRISE!! there it is smack-dab in my face. This is disconcerting ONLY WHEN I see it as a problem.

Creating is like breathing, we don’t think when we breathe, so why think so much when we’re creating?! That wall is thinking. [I think!!]

An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.    [Madeleine L'Engle]

It is never NOT a collaboration, DOing Life, how we live our Life. I hadn’t really thought that thought out loud, so I am glad to have come upon it this morning.

I did NOT used to think of my Life as a creative adventure. I DO Now. And I plan to continue letting it unfold and show me myself one little breath at a time.

There's a way of playing safe, there's a way of using tricks and there's the way I like to play which is dangerously where you're going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven't created before.  [Dave Brubeck]

It takes mistakes to get your heart out there.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 20 February 2014

You never know what's around the corner. It could be everything. Or it could be nothing. You keep putting one foot in front of the other, and then one day you look back and you've climbed a mountain.   [Tom Hiddleston]

Life is like this for me. I no longer look ahead and round the corners though. I just plod on. I DO the next things and, as much as I can, those things I BElieve to BE the “next right” things. I sometimes let something drop away and notice it hasn’t made that much difference. Then I consider whether to pick it up again or just go on without it. Sometimes I get it right. NOT always though.

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.   [James A. Michener]

Michener had a good point. It is so rare that anything gives way or doors burst open at the first go. Even the second. [I know this BEcause I have learnt it again and again in practise.]

I am NOT always the most graceful, but I DO persist in things I think are essential. And it’s working, so far.

The art of love is largely the art of persistence.   [Albert Ellis]

Is that harsh?! Does it NOT ring true?! It surely resonates with my experience.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 19 February 2014

It's very dramatic when two people come together to work something out. It's easy to take a gun and annihilate your opposition, but what is really exciting to me is to see people with differing views come together and finally respect each other.   [Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers]

Respect is sometimes tricky. There is that “respect” we’ve had drilled into us that we Must Have, and then there is the “respect” that canNOT help but grow and thrive in a World where people really, I mean REALLY listen and allow space for one another.

Even with all their differences and those places that don’t match up perfectly.

When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you.   [Lao Tzu]

I wonder if that is true or simply a really good idea?! I’m guessing here, but perhaps it is when we give up on the idea that we need BE more or less this or that that we finally come to a place of peace; and in that place lives and thrives Respect.

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.  [Bono]

It isn’t easy BEing green. Or the many things that others are NOT.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 18 February 2014

I'd always thought of myself as an open-minded person. I had no patience with anyone who put down other kids because of their race, religion, or sexuality. But that's just one kind of open-mindedness. There's another kind, too, the kind that's willing to see people for who they really are and admit when you were wrong about them. That's the part I still need to work on.   [Kelley Armstrong, The Calling]

Something I wish I’d had words for long ago. Been able to say. Out loud. Even Now this could ask me to BE far braver than I feel.

It's okay to disagree with the thoughts or opinions expressed by other people. That doesn't give you the right to deny any sense they might make. Nor does it give you a right to accuse someone of poorly expressing their beliefs just because you don't like what they are saying. Learn to recognize good writing when you read it, even if it means overcoming your pride and opening your mind beyond what is comfortable.     [Ashly Lorenzana]

Sometimes the hardest thing I DO is NOT DOing. NOT reacting. NOT judging.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.    [George Eliot, Middlemarch]

Wasn’t this the point of having our minds?! Keeping them open?!

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 17 February 2014

It's not too late to develop new friendships or reconnect with people.   [Morrie Schwartz]

Really?! I wonder… Last night, or early this morning, I had the most vivid dream about someone from my Past. It seemed urgent and important yet I canNOT figure out How or Why Now that I am awake and fully Present.

I suspect it is all part of a re-learning and reminding. I suppose I could BE right or wrong on that, too.

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.   [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]

I wonder if I ever come to mind for any of the others who seem to pop up on my brain. I wonder if it all happened just to teach me something. I wonder if, mayBE, it could BE that we both had things to learn in one another’s company. And if, when we had learned enough, our drifting apart was simply meant to BE...

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.    [Thomas Merton, Love and Living]

Quite possibly.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 16 February 2014

All my life they had made choices for me, and I had resented it. Now the choice was mine, and once it was made, I would have no right to blame anyone else for the consequences. Loss of that privilege, to blame others, unexpectedly stung.    [Megan Whalen Turner, A Conspiracy of Kings]

It never feels good to realise that I have been the one standing in my own LIGHT. Nor a proud and point-to-able thing when I discover I am my greatest problem as well its best possible solution.

Still, I like that I am the maker of choices in my Life. It lets me know myself. Trust myself with my own heart, mind, and Spirit. It gives me Hope.

But the past cannot be changed, and we carry our choices with us, forward, into the unknown. We can only move on.     [Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing]

Life seems all about the daily demonstrations of my willingness to Let Go and Move On. Living with the hand I’ve been dealt; playing it to the best of my ability. Celebrating that I have this challenge or that obstacle and Today I get to work on it a bit.

We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us.   [Ken Levine]

Hmmmmmmm… I suppose he is right.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 15 February 2014

It is necessary ... for a man to go away by himself ... to sit on a rock ... and ask, 'Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?   [Carl Sandburg]

And for a woman. As well all of God’s creatures…

BEing contemplative is both a luxury and a necessity. Something I’ve only learned through BEing forced, you might say, to spend these past 7 years sitting on the “rock” that is me living alone.

The happy man needs nothing and no one. Not that he holds himself aloof, for indeed he is in harmony with everything and everyone; everything is "in him"; nothing can happen to him. The same may also be said for the contemplative person; he needs himself alone; he lacks nothing.   [Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation]

Again with the man… Yet this is true. We love and we choose and we make certain of others in our lives day by day, but we need nothing and no one but ourselves. And that Self can BE made of so many pieces, like a quilt.

I live an extraordinarily rich contemplative Life. I am glad I get to DO this. I am gladder still that I can see it as such.

Muddy water, let stand, becomes clear.    [Laozi]

Ahhhhhhh… Now I understand.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 14 February 2014

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.   [Maya Angelou]

I’d likely NOT have said it this way, but this idea really resonates with my WHY I write. I write an awful lot of stuff that even I don’t read, but the act of writing itself is the gift. I don’t plan or outline or even always have a purpose or point, but writing works things through my brain setting them gently on my heart.

A fitting thing for Valentine’s Day, eh?!

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.   [Ray Bradbury]

For me, getting up early, well BEfore the sun, when the sky looks like the art I made today, writing and making a bit of art to share is exquisite. It is luxurious. It is ample and well more than Enough.

That I love it is whipped cream. If YOU enJOY it, well, that’s nuts and a cherry!!!

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.   [Gertrude Stein]

A little something to ponder…

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 13 February 2014

When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.     [Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist]

Expectations are a slippery slope. There is just no way, though, to get round them. It is one of the lovelinesses of BEing Human. I think the very best way to live with them is to KNOW them. Take the time to look at them straight in the eye.

And perhaps challenge them.

You are most powerful when you are most silent. People never expect silence. They expect words, motion, defense, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words hanging leaping from their mouths. Silence? No.    [Alison McGhee, All Rivers Flow To The Sea]

I have learned this to BE true Now. I didn’t BEfore. Now?! Now I definitely BElieve.

A wonderful gift may not be wrapped as you expect.   [Jonathan Lockwood Huie]

There are so many ways that this deLIGHTs me. Wherever would I BEgin?!

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 12 February 2014

I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow.  [David Hobson]

I make art and I write for similar reasons. It used to BE that I had so much “busy-busy” stuff going on, so many “have-to-DO” things, and whacked-out “priorities” that I was always wishing I had time to write or make art.

Now I BEgin my days with writing and making art. I DO this BEcause it pleases my soul. It gives me a sense of purpose. It lets me give it away, too. And that is the real reason I write and make art. To give them both away.

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.   [Muhammad Yunus]

My greatest challenge has been to change the way I look at Life. At my place in it. And my part. Or parts, since I realise there are many roles and ways of BEing Human in my Life’s Time.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.   [Nelson Mandela]

Wasn’t he brilliant?!

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 11 February 2014

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.   [Marcus Aurelius]

                  
It’s funny, but too often I think I am right. Or, put another way, YOU are wrong. Actually, it’s nothing but perspective. And perspective is one of the great gifts of BEing human.

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.   [Truman Capote]

I like this idea very much. How once you are aware of the rules or what Capote called “laws of perspective,” then you can rearrange and recreate, or, actually CREATE.

I think I stopped myself for a long time BEcause I holding fast to certain “laws” that were really, well, really excuses more than anything…

It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours. It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom.   [Dee Hock]

I was writing earlier about some recent learning about stages and levels and people and differences, all of them dancing round and round the dance floor called Life Right Now, and I was suddenly aware of how BEautimous it all CAN BE.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 10 February 2014

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.   [Camille Paglia]

When things are happening that have happened at other times in my Life, for example the Olympics, I BEcome exceptionally attuned to the change that is constant, that is happening breath by breath and blink by blink without my even realising it.

Sometimes I BElieve I am resisting change. Others that I am cheering it on and pushing it forward. I think, really, all I can ever DO is BE swept up in it.

Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.   [Lewis B. Smedes]

I really love this idea. It has been such a hard thing for me, forgiveness. Yet in these words I find the sort of Hope that can changes my struggle to an embrace. It is true that forgiveness is healing.

Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.   [Chuck Palahniuk]

I will.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 9 February 2014

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.   [Friedrich Nietzsche]

Imagine, just for a moment, a World in which things are put together in a way entirely what you might [or I might] consider weird. Wrong. Bizarre, even. Consider those possibilities that come into play. Just try. See what happens.

Man should not consider his material possession his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when others are in need.   [Thomas Aquinas]

Things are what often gets in the way. How many. Having enough. Taking care of. Bringing along. Leaving BEhind. Consider instead the intentional sharing of what all need with others. NOT having to have My Own Stuff. Knowing that what I have or another has can BE shared. Easily.

This is NOT such a new idea, just one which, for many reasons, has come to seem, well, unusual.

We never stop to consider that our beliefs are only a relative truth that's always going to be distorted by all the knowledge we have stored in our memory.   [Miguel Angel Ruiz]

And I never stop to consider my BEliefs as valid as another’s. They’re just my own.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 8 February 2014

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.   [Margaret Mead]

I don’t imagine curiosity, compassion, or leaps of faith DO either…

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I'm borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.   [Ray Bradbury]

I, too, get excited by ideas. Sometimes I have so many ideas running round my brain that I am dizzy and all out of breath. I think it can BE wonderful to have so many ideas, even if I don’t pursue but a fraction of them. Ideas are deLIGHTfully energising.

I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.   [Brené Brown]

It is essential for each person to understand what the meaning is of words. The meaning to them, I mean. The idea of things is often what we are running on and NOT actual definitions.

I find that when I run into trouble it is largely about different meanings. Thus different intention and expectation. I have to know what I mean to understand another.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 7 February 2014

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.   [Natalie Goldberg]

Although the image is NOT lovely, I love this. We are so lucky, BEing able to write, share in words what touches us, deepens our experience, and makes us live Life full-contact, full-out.

Life is a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.   [Charles Lindbergh]

It is the Past, its “culmination,” that trips me up. BEcause, you see, there is really no end or final result. As long as I am breathing there is Life and its culmination is NOT anything I’ll ever touch or contain.

Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.   [Lily Tomlin]

Sometimes simple silliness says it best.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 6 February 2014

It was the challenge of life too, was it not? People could never be fully understood. They were ever changing, different people at different times and under different circumstances and influences. And always growing, always creating themselves anew. How impossible it was to know another human being. How impossible to know even oneself.   [Mary Balogh, Slightly Tempted]

Earlier I was exploring my thoughtsandfeelings about the distance that has grown BEtween me and someone I love. I was so glad of BEing able to take things out and sort them through. To know how it is that I have come to feeling and thinking about it as I DO. Today. This is the gift my writing practise gives.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.   [Winston Churchill]

Sometimes I feel like a tree. MayBE this is what this year with the word, Branch, will deepen in me. The feeling that, while I have moved and changed my Life so many times, I still have roots, and that even in my solitariness I have strength and purpose and hope.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.   [Madeleine L'Engle]

Such truth here.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 5 February 2014

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?   [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

I am always a little astonished when I realise that one of my guiding principles is actually a wondrously old thought. I choose to have as few wants as possible, and each one gets to BE tested BEfore I will truly let it BE mine. And if one “passes” I’ll always look to myself first.

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.   [Thomas Merton]

Oftentime absolutes just bug me. They seem too something. But as I consider this I have to say I DO BElieve it. I have worn two faces, have been of two minds, and have been different enough in one moment to know that sometimes choosing is my only hope for BEcoming whole and complete.

If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.    [Confucius]

Unwittingly wise. And a “best practise” when BEing judgmental.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 4 February 2014

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.   [Aristotle]

I’ve heard this, I’ve KNOWN this to BE true, and yet I still find myself sticking and refusing to budge.

On the other hand, when I DO wonder WHO I am, the first place I look is at what I DO. And DO. Daily. What are my habits?! This is where I shall always find myself when I get lost.

Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.   [Thomas Merton]

Often I have resented that I am flying solo. But I remind myself that indeed I AM flying. Within this flight I have discovered Solitude. I have discovered a ME I had never imagined could BE. I continue to learn this ME unfolding herself. This is empowering action, then, flying solo.

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.  [Henry Miller]

We never DO know, any of us, how things will take place, what will happen, how anything will “turn out” in the ever-elusive “End” we are so sure exists. That is Life.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 3 February 2014

Be Impeccable With Your Word. Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.   [Miguel Angel Ruiz]

It occurs to me that “impeccability” is NOT an everyday word, nor is it a concept I’ve fully grasped. In fact, I am somewhat embarrassed that I would use this quote when large chunks of my recent words aren't above reproach.

Still, I love this one of the 4 Agreements BEcause it is clear and something I can always aim toward.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.   [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]

I think that while rules are often made to BE broken, they also give me a context. And without that context I often flounder and flop round like a fish out of water. This is why I write always, first thing, BEfore I fling myself out into the World. It helps me to find my center. It keeps me from feeling useless. It gives me a context.

Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.   [Rabindranath Tagore]

I like that image.

I love you, Currie