brain farts.

Art rhymes with fart.

[markruffalo]

With 2018 climate data now in, Earth's 5 warmest years have all occurred since 2014

There's no sign that the planet's warming trend is slowing.

This is a battle for the fate of all the living systems of Earth. We can meet this challenge with imagination, creativity, and equity amongst peoples, but it’s moving fast. Now’s the time to act.

[ugnav]

It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don’t let me catch you doing it! Now— look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do it — not your mother.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

[ugnav]

You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

[ugnav]

Again and again we mis-see and misunderstand, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll pointed out. We smuggle our petty everyday worries into the lives of those we watch. Our world imposed on their world. We don’t really see them at all.

Sarah Sentilles, Draw your weapons

[ugnav]

The summer day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

- Mary Oliver

[ugnav]

That’s a thing a man will never forget, Howard said. To me it was just “The Peddler [a Russian folk song],” but to them it was home.

Sarah Sentilles, Draw your weapons

[ugnav]

And did I pass?" The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, "You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.

Neil Gaiman, The ocean at the end of the lane

[ugnav]

Food has powers. It picks us up from our lonely corners and sits us back down, together. It pulls us out of ourselves, to the kitchen, to the table, to the diner down the block. At the same time, it draws us inward. Food is the keeper of our memories, connecting us with our pasts and with our people.

Jessica Fechtor, Stir: My broken brain and the meals that brought me home

[ugnav]

Measure the days you have left. Do just that labour which marries your heart to your right hand: simplify your life to one emblem, a sail leaving harbour and a sail coming in. …

Derek Walcott, Omeros

[ugnav]

I begun to realise that Francoise’s kindness, her compunction, the sum of her total virtues concealed many of these back-kitchen tragedies, just as history reveals to us that the reigns of the kinds and queens who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed.

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

[ugnav]

Truth telling

Telling the truth is a difficult thing to do.

I’m not talking about the basic human decency of being honest, and well, just simply not lying. If one struggles with that, one needs to take a long hard look in the mirror — maybe you’re just an asshole. I’m talking about truth telling in terms of hurts, trauma, brokenness, secret failings, unrequited love, joy, falling in love, getting a promotion at work, getting married. And the list goes on.

Wait a minute, why are the good things in life included in this truth-telling fiasco too? It may not be the same for everyone, but I do remember the times I trimmed my happiness at someone’s confession of affection, or in recounting a happy tale to a sad friend. These, in the name of not wanting to seem too arrogant, or in the name of protecting someone else’s feelings. So when I think about it this way, it isn’t really truth telling.

Of the bad things in the list. It’s a no-brainer. It’s difficult to tell the truth because it comes with measures of guilt and shame, and not least the potential disappointments from those whom you love, and judgements from the passers-by in your life.

Yet, there exists a rapturous release / relief when you do choose to tell the whole truth — the ugly, the good, the vulnerable, the unadulterated Joy, the pleasure, the emptiness, the sad. And the list also goes on. I think in withholding nothing, we fulfill the deepest human need to know and be known. It is also an act in trusting another with you as you are; trusting that what you say will never be used against you. It is also an act of faith, in knowing that regardless of the response, you are fully assured of who you are.

And if the truth involves hurting another, there’s a courage in speaking the truth anyway. Because you realise that while you may never go back to where things were, it will be impossible to move on without telling the truth. It is an act loving what you may very well lose.

Surely, telling the truth is not compulsory. I’d be the first to admit I do a bad job of it; preferring instead to tell the version of me which I want others to see. And maybe, just maybe, I’d start believing in that version myself.

But then I remember — what is fully displayed in light cannot return to haunt me in the darkness.

[ugnav]

Lock up your libraries If you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Virginia Woolf, A room of one’s own

[ugnav]

He found himself yearning for days of grocery lists and difficult clients, things you could complain about because you knew they would eventually go away

Erica Bauermeister, The school of essential ingredients

[ugnav]

We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it tremble again in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realise that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude.

Isak Dinesan, Babette’s Feast

[ugnav]

Thoughts and emotions that create bonds of attachment between us have no difficulty in crossing seas and decades, sometimes even centuries, tied to thin sheets of paper or dancing between the microchips of a computer. We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives...

Carlo Rovelli, The order of time

[ugnav]

This is time for us. Memory and nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn’t absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is, in the end, something good and even beautiful, because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.

Carlo Rovelli, The order of time

[ugnav]

But she was not listening to his words, she was reading his thoughts from the expression of his face.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina