There would never be enough butter for me in my mother's house...

I had to find it elsewhere in the world.

I’ll never be someone who had a mother who didn’t fuck with her. I’ll always be a person who had to escape from a crap pile to make her whole amazing self up. There’s a lot of sorrow and ugliness in that. But there’s a lot of beauty too.

But we can’t erase our lives. We can’t change what our mothers or fathers or step parents were like or what demons or gods ruled them or when they died or how. We can only change who we are in relation to them. We can revise how we narrate those stories of our lives.

Source: http://therumpus.net/2012/05/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-98-monsters-and-ghosts/

Gaps

Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. 

I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have "not gone up into the gaps." The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. 

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock - more than a maple - a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

by Annie Dillard

© Jennifer Phillips

Second chances

Dear Sugar,

I am thankful for second chances. Deserved or undeserved, but truly given without reservation. Given to me and to others, but most importantly, the one I gave to myself.

JC

Source: http://therumpus.net/2011/11/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-90-94-ways-of-saying-thank-you/

You don't need a reason to leave

"You are not a terrible person for wanting to break up with someone you love. You don't need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn't mean you are incapable of real love or that you'll never love anyone else again. It doesn't mean you're morally bankrupt or psychologically demented or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That's all. Be brave enough to break your own heart."

- Cheryl Strayed: "Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar"

Loneliness

"I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives - those fountains of inconvenient feeling - and towards the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbours and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick."

- Steve Almond

Small wins

"The whole process of becoming an astronaut helped me understand that what really matters is not the value someone else assigns to a task but how I personally feel while performing it. That's why, during the 11 years I was grounded, I loved my life. Of course I wanted to go back to space - who wouldn't? - but I got real fulfilment and pleasure from small victories, like doing something well in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab or figuring out how to fix a problem with my car. If I'd defined success very narrowly, limiting it to peak, high visibility experiences, I would have felt very unsuccessful and unhappy during those years. Life is just a lot better if you feel you're having 10 wins a day rather than a win every 10 years or so."

 - Chris Hadfield in "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: Life Lessons from Space"

Fucking things up...

"The difference between men and women is that men can really fuck things up, but women can really fuck you up."

 - Louis C.K.

Live like you drive

"I think that people live their lives like they drive. Some people can be fluid and see the gaps and instinctively know where to go. Other people stay in the same lane; they stop and start, they're hesitant. They don't have a clear direction."

 - Danielle Cormack

If you're a man, take your 40th year off

"...Every man should be forced to take his 40th year off. The vast majority of men don't have a life - they pretend to have one. In reality they are lonely, emotionally timid, and miserably, compulsively competitive. One of the main reasons they never get out of this tragic state is that they are enslaved by soulless jobs and careers that lead them to put their lives on hold until retirement. Of course, when this arrives it is too late. While they work they are too busy to think and therefore they have empty lives where they never develop a rich and sustaining inner life....'Our marriages fail, our kids hate us, we die of stress and on the way we destroy the world.' "

Nigel Marsh in "Fat, 40 & Fired"

The importance of touch

"His inability to touch me the way I needed to be touched sent our marriage into a downward spiral. I became bitter, I was alone on top of a mountain, completely isolated. Life is too short to feel unfulfilled. My need for touch is the foundation of how I experience acceptance."

 - Samantha Hess

I wish to take a look around another corner

"When you stop doing something,

it doesn't mean you're rejecting it.

You're saying, 'I wish to take a look

around another corner.'"

David Hockney

Best car bumper sticker I've seen in a long time...

"If you think this car is dirty, try a night with the driver."

Five terms used by a woman (and their true meaning)...

© Jennifer Phillips

What if I forgave myself?

“What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done? What if I'd actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?” 

by Cheryl Strayed, "Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail"

Luck

Luck is like the Tour de France.

You wait, and it flashes past you.

You have to catch it while you can.

From the movie Amélie: Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain

Swiss cheese

"What young people didn't know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn't choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered.

And so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter? He most likely wouldn't have chosen her either. But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union - what pieces life took out of you.

Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude - and regret. She pictured the sunny room; the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet."

From "Olive Kitteridge" by Elizabeth Strout

Field of Canola © Jennifer Phillips

Loyalty and fidelity

"My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failure. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up..."

From "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde

In love that I can see

"...I inhale the scent of the stranger, which rises from his shirt. I love this smell. 'I love Fernando,' I tell myself and the fire. I am bewildered by this fresh new fact of my life, more from the swiftness of its coming than by its truth. I search for some sense of folie a deux. I find none. Rather than being love-blinded, it is in love that I can see, really see.
Never was there even a flickering sense of my having been beckoned up onto a white horse by a curly-haired swain, by the man-who-would-be-king, my one-and-only-meant-to-be-mine. I never felt the earth crack open. Never. What I felt, what I feel, is quiet. Except for those first hours together in Venice, there has been no confusion, no confounding, none of the measuring and considering one might think to be natural for a woman up to her knees in middle age who thinks to jump the moat. Now all the doors are open, and there is warm yellow light behind them. This does not feel like a new perspective but the first and only perspective that has ever belonged only to me, the first perspective that has been neither compromised or redrawn. Fernando is a first choice. I never had to talk myself into loving him, to balance out his merits and defects on a yellow pad. Nor did I have to, once again, remind myself that I wasn't getting any younger, that I should be grateful for the attentions of yet another 'very nice man'."

by Marlena de Blasi in "A Thousand Days in Venice"

No man is an island

"No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes: forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique.

Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, 'casualties may rise to a million'. With individual stories, the statistics become people - but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, does it not do a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended, caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

A life, which is, like any other, unlike any other."

by Neil Gaiman in "American Gods"

On frustration and reality

Seneca was a philosopher of the Roman Empire. He noticed that at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality. We attain wisdom by learning not to aggravate the world’s obstinacy through spasms of rage, self-pity, anxiety, bitterness, self-righteousness and paranoia.

What makes us angry are dangerously optimistic notions about what the world and other people are like. How badly we react to frustration is critically determined by what we think of as normal. We will cease to be so angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

Reality comprises two cruelly confusing characteristics. We are invited to assume that tomorrow will be much like today. Yet there is a possibility that we will meet an appalling event after which nothing will ever be the same again.

When one suffers disaster, one is unable to fit the event into a scheme of justice. One alternates between a feeling that one may after all have been bad, and the feeling that one has fallen victim to a failure in the administration of justice. The belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice. It is based on a picture of a moral universe where external circumstances reflected internal qualities.

Frustration, anger, shock, and the sense of injustice are caused by an incorrect paradigm of the world. Wisdom lies in correct discerning where we are free to mould reality according to our wishes, and where we must accept the unalterable with tranquillity. Reason allows us to determine when our wishes are in irrevocable conflict with reality, and then bids us to submit ourselves willingly, rather than angrily or bitterly, to necessities. We may be powerless to alter certain events, but we remain free to choose our attitude towards them. It is in our spontaneous acceptance of necessity that we find our distinctive freedom.

Seneca recommended this formula:

[The wise] will start each day with the thought…

Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own. Nothing, whether public or private, is stable; the destinies of men, no less than those of cities are in a whirl. Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed in a single day.

No, he who has said “a day” has granted too long a postponement to swift misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires. How often have cities in Asia, how often in Achaia, been laid low by a single shock of earthquake? How many towns in Syria, how many in Macedonia, have been swallowed up? How often has this kind of devastation laid Cyprus in ruins?
We live in the middle of things which have been destined to die. Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth. Reckon on everything, expect everything.

From "The Consolations of Philosophy" by Alain de Botton (Adapted by Alex Fung Ho-San)