Things Time has Taught me

 another quotable from a Facebook post:

 THINGS TIME HAS TAUGHT ME.
1. Most of our life is spent chasing false goals and worshipping false ideals. The day you realise that is the day you really start to live.

2. You really, truly cannot please all of the people all of the time. Please yourself first and your loved ones second, everyone else is busy pleasing themselves anyway, trust me.

3. Fighting the ageing process is like trying to catch the wind. Go with it, enjoy it. Your body is changing, but it always has been. Don’t waste time trying to reverse that, instead change your mindset to see the beauty in the new.

4. Nobody is perfect and nobody is truly happy with their lot. When that sinks in you are free of comparison and free of judgement. It’s truly liberating.

5. No one really sees what you do right, everyone sees what you do wrong. When that becomes clear to you, you will start doing things for the right reason and you will start having so much more fun.

6. You will regret the years you spent berating your looks, the sooner you can make peace with the vessel your soul lives in, the better. Your body is amazing and important but it does not define you.

7. Your health is obviously important but stress, fear and worry are far more damaging than any delicious food or drink you may deny yourself. Happiness and peace are the best medicine.

8. Who will remember you and for what, become important factors as you age. Your love and your wisdom will live on far longer than any material thing you can pass down. Tell your stories, they can travel farther than you can imagine.

9. We are not here for long but if you are living against the wind it can feel like a life-sentence. Life should not feel like a chore, it should feel like an adventure.

10. Always, always, drink the good champagne and use the things you keep for ‘best’. Tomorrow is guaranteed to no one. Today is a gift that’s why we call it the present. Eat, Drink & Be Merry.

Donna Ashworth

 

Art by Grace Slick -  White Rabbit

Artist: Vicki Sawyer

I don't get old, I get wise

 This came to me today on Facebook:

AGING....

You grow old, they told me, you are no longer you, you become distant, sad and lonely.

I didn't answer...

I don't get old, I get wise.

I stopped being what others like me to become, but what I like to be.

I stopped seeking the acceptance of others and accepted myself.

I have left behind the lying mirrors that deceive mercilessly.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I just become more selective with places, people, customs and ideologies.

I have let go of attachments, unnecessary pain, toxic people, sick souls and rotten hearts... bitterness and unhappiness are not for me, I release them for my health.

I'm ditching party nights for learning and embracing insomnia.

I stopped living stories and started writing them, I threw aside the imposed stereotypes.

I no longer carry eyeshadow in my bag, now I have a book that beautifies my mind.

I exchanged wine glasses for coffee cups, forgot to idealize life and started living it.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I carry freshness in my soul, innocence in my heart, and it discovers me daily.

I have in my hands the tenderness of a cocoon that, when opened, will spread its wings to other places unreachable for those who seek only the frivolity of the material.

I have that charming smile on my face when I observe the simplicity of nature.

I carry in my ears the chirping of the birds that delight me and accompany the walk.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I become selective, betting my time on the intangible, rewriting the story I've been told, rediscovering worlds, saving those old books I've forgotten half open.

I'm becoming more cautious, I've stopped the outbursts that teach me nothing, I'm learning to talk about transcendent things, I'm learning to cultivate knowledge, plant ideals and falsify my destiny.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I begin to live who I really am........

Bianka Luz

artist"  Catrine Weitz-Stein

artist:  Jen Norton

Didi and Gogo -   I each "Waiting for Godot"  in my Modernity class.  

 

We're never alone

 Here's a passage from an essay by Tobias Wolff:

"The Irish painter John Yeats, the poet’s father, described the making of art as the social act of a solitary person. Actually, he said “a solitary man.” They talked like that then. Anyway, I nodded in recognition when I came across that line. Maybe Hemingway could write in a crowded café, but I and the other artists and writers I’ve known have had to be shut away somewhere, out of the human stream, to get our work done. Yet as the years have frosted and mowed this head of mine, I have come to a different understanding of the situation. You may have retreated to your attic studio, you may even have pulled up the ladder behind you, but you were not alone. Never.

" Each of us here tonight has known something like what I describe. We are all the beneficiaries of others’ gifts of knowledge and talent, patience and time. And those gifts never stop coming, not as long as we can read a book—for a book is made of just those gifts.

As I said, we’re never alone."

Wolf Woman    Luci Campbell

And another thought from another poem,  related:

Poem by Mário Raul de Morais Andrade

(Oct 9, 1893 – Feb 25, 1945)

Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, photographer

I counted my years and found that I have less time to live from here on than I have lived up to now.

I feel like that child who won a packet of sweets: he ate the first with pleasure, but when he realized that there were few left, he began to enjoy them intensely.

I no longer have time for endless meetings where statutes, rules, procedures and internal regulations are discussed, knowing that nothing will be achieved.

I no longer have time to support the absurd people who, despite their chronological age, haven't grown up.

My time is too short:

I want the essence,

my soul is in a hurry.

I don't have many sweets

in the package anymore.

I want to live next to human people,

very human,

who know how to laugh at their mistakes,

and who are not inflated by their triumphs,

and who take on their responsibilities.

Thus human dignity is defended and we move towards truth and honesty.

It is the essential that makes life worth living.

I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch hearts, people who have been taught by the hard blows of life to grow with gentle touches of the soul.

Yes, I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry to live with the intensity that only maturity can give.

I don't intend to waste any of the leftover sweets.

I am sure they will be delicious, much more than what I have eaten so far.

My goal is to reach the end satisfied

and at peace with my loved ones

and my conscience.

We have two lives.

And the second begins when you realize you only have one.

Spring Comes on the World

 

art by Lizzie Speights

Spring comes on the World
By Emily Dickinson

Spring comes on the World –
I sight the Aprils –
Hueless to me until thou come
As, till the Bee
Blossoms stand negative,
Touched to Conditions
By a Hum.

We had a lovely Easter Sunday, followed by days of endless rain and cold -- until today.

So happy to see my little plants beginning to emerge!

Pearly Everlasting!

Woodland Phlox

Golden Alexander

Each day they get a little bigger.

Here's another Easter/ Spring poem:

Holy Spring
By Dylan Thomas

O
Out of a bed of love
When that immortal hospital made one more move to soothe
The curless counted body,
And ruin and his causes
Over the barbed and shooting sea assumed an army
And swept into our wounds and houses,
I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only
That one dark I owe my light,
Call for confessor and wiser mirror but there is none
To glow after the god stoning night
And I am struck as lonely as a holy marker by the sun

No
Praise that the spring time is all
Gabriel and radiant shrubbery as the morning grows joyful
Out of the woebegone pyre
And the multitude’s sultry tear turns cool on the weeping wall,
My arising prodgidal
Sun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire,
But blessed be hail and upheaval
That uncalm still it is sure alone to stand and sing
Alone in the husk of man’s home
And the mother and toppling house of the holy spring,
If only for a last time.

 

 

Art by Anna Baartz