- "There is no way to repress pleasure and expect liberation, satisfaction, or joy."
- "My mother, who has not always been keen on praise, has, these days, for some reason, been praising my discipline. Maybe it's because I have a kettleball practice, or I never eat bacon. But since she said it, and she's my mom, I tend to think it must be true."
- SINCE SHE SAID IT AND SINCE SHE'S MY MOM I TEND TO THINK IT MUST BE TRUE !!! :(
- "Today I have smuggled three fig cuttings onto a flight from Philadelphia to Detroit. Truth be told, no smuggling has occurred, given as I was carrying the things open and notorious, their roots tucked into some moist compost in a plastic bag. But smuggling makes it sound more thrilling than what it appears - carrying a few sticks in a bag - and therefore more like what it is: carrying living creatures for replanting about seven hundred miles away. Which, you might have already gone there, given as I've told you already they're figs, is another way of saying I'm carrying joy around in my bag."
- It doesn't have to be figs obviously, but think of ways to carry joy around with you like this
- "I know that I rarely call the people I love by their names. I call them, if it's okay with them, by the name I have given them."
- "I dreamed a few years back that I was in a supermarket checking out when I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization - in that clear way, not that 'oh yeah' way - that my life would end. I wept in line watching people go by with their carts, watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life. And the mundane fact of buying groceries with other people whom I do not know, like all the banalities, would be no more so soon, or now. Good as now."
- This is actually one of my most favorite things I think I've ever read. It's so heartbreaking.
- "It astonishes me sometimes - no, often - how every person I get to know - everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean EVERYTHING, lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything."
- "What if we joined our sorrows, I'm saying. I'm saying, what is that is joy?"
- "It also requires faith that delight will be with you daily, that you needn't hoard it. No scarcity of delight."
- NO SCARCITY OF DELIGHT !! NO SCARCITY OF DELIGHT !! NO SCARCITY !!!!!
- "I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that's really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what's too high, or what's been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it's always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always."
- "(T-shirt idea: INCITE DELIGHT! Or, INSIGHT DELIGHT!)"
- "But somehow, no one ever dies of these things, or is even hurt, aside from my sad little annoyance monster, who, for the record, never smiles and always wears a crooked bow tie."
- "Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things - the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this - joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy."
- "(T-shirt: DALLIANCE WITH DELIGHT)"
may 9 2023 ∞
may 9 2023 +
