Albert Einstein’s three rules for work:
1. Out of clutter, find simplicity
2. From discord, find harmony
3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity
Category: quotes
More Zen
What Elizabeth Bishop Thinks
“We write for the same reason we read or look at paintings…for the total immersion of the experience, the narrowing and intensification of focus to the right here, right now, the deep joy of bringing the entire soul to bear upon a single act of concentration.”
Is This Why Hippies Are Mellow?
This is the latest quote I’m trying to adopt during the Summer of Uncertainty, via Mystic Mamma (of course).
“…the search for security and certainty is actually an attachment to the known. And what’s the known? The known is our past. The known is nothing other than the prison of past conditioning. There’s no evolution in that.When you experience uncertainty, you are on the right path – so don’t give it up. You don’t need to have a complete and rigid idea of what you’ll be doing next week or next year, because if you have a very clear idea of what’s going to happen and you get rigidly attached to it, then you shut out the whole range of possibilities.”
That Time of Year
The light in June leading up to the solstice is so lovely in the foothills. Predictably, I think of this part in Out of Africa:
The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has a blue vigor to it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue. […] Up in this high air, you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.
Two Quotes
I found the first quote on Mystic Mamma and thought, “What a nice and reassuring thought to re-post, wild horse picture and all.” So here it is:
“Make a pact with yourself today to not be defined by your past. Sometimes the greatest thing to come out of all your hard work isn’t what you get for it, but what you become for it.”
Meanwhile, my brother sent me today’s second quote, from American Beauty:
Lester Burnham: “Brad, for 14 years I’ve been a whore for the advertising industry. The only way I could save myself now is if I start firebombing. ”
I guess the moral of these two quotes is that sometimes it’s nice to give your inner hippie options (quotation-wise, that is; don’t firebomb things).
Living With Ideas
My favorite singer Neko Case is working on a new album, and NPR is tracking the progress of it through some interviews. In the first interview (that you can read here), she talks about living with unfinished songs and what it’s like:
“Because when they’re not done, the songs, they’re like little nuclear reactors that are throbbing in your suitcase. And you’re like, ‘When’s that thing gonna go off? Is it just gonna die out? Is it just gonna poison the groundwater? What is that thing doing in there?'”
I think that description’s pretty right on for living with anything creative/life-shaping that isn’t ready to become something yet.
Still Hiking
“As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”
John Muir from Journal, 1871.
(The view from as far up Thaynes Canyon as I got yesterday. I still sometimes sing this song to myself when I have to turn around.)
Re-Reading The Dharma Bums
I’m not doing so well on my goal to read a new book a month, but I’m hoping to catch up by the pool when it’s full summer. In the meantime, there’s The Dharma Bums to re-read. This is from their backpacking trip to the Sierra Nevadas:
Now the mountains were getting that pink tinge, I mean the rocks, they were just solid rock covered with the atoms of dust accumulated there since beginningless time. In fact I was afraid of those jagged monstrosities all around and over our heads.
“They’re so silent!” I said.
“Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin.”
Mary Frances On Going To Restaurants
From “D is for Dining Out,” in An Alphabet for Gourmets, by my BFF Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher:
I had a happy beginning in [the] neglected art and much abused privilege [of dining out], one that has sheathed it in unfading pleasure for me when it is done well. When I was no more than five or so my father and mother would begin to prepare my spirits for Easter, or Christmas, or a birthday, and when the festival rolled around, there I would be, waiting to greet it…on the pink velvet seat of the region’s best restaurant.
I admit I am prejudiced about it. I seldom dine out, and because of my early conditioning to the sweet illusion of permanent celebration, of “party” and festivity on every such occasion, I feel automatically that any invitation means sure excitement, that it will be an event, whether it brings me a rained-on hamburger in a drive-in or Chicken Jerusalem at Perino’s. The trouble is, I’m afraid, that I expect people I dine with to feel the same muted but omnipresent delight that I feel.