Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
It’s been a while since we’ve had a hippie thought, so here’s something good to keep in mind from The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo:
I have a soft spot for “writers of the West” because that’s what I want to be someday, too. Here he is talking about being just that:
“If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me.”
1. I finally watched The Grand Budapest Hotel last month and have been meaning to recommend it. The concierge character, M. Gustave, reminded me so much of my best friend trying to be gracious in his own store, giving us quotes like this:
“Rudeness is merely the expression of fear. People fear they won’t get what they want. The most dreadful and unattractive person only needs to be loved, and they will open up like a flower.
2. This article about the origins of the phrase “having it all” (title of Helen Gurley Brown’s 1982 memoir, early feminist demand, currently unpopular for being unrealistic) is fascinating. Short version: Brown never wanted that phrase to be the title in the first place.
Prepare to be proselytized to, because I’m reading a book that is changing my life–and I think I will change yours, too. It’s called The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and based on the day, it’s the Amazon number-one best seller in either Home Organization or Self Help. It’s by Japanese organization expert Marie Kondo, and it presents her “KonMari” system for making and keeping your house clutter-free. In a nutshell, you’re supposed to sort through your items by category, touching each one and asking yourself, “Does this spark joy?” If it does, you keep it. If it doesn’t, you thank it for the joy it did bring you, and let it go.
I am still reading and won’t try any of this life-changing magic until the weekend, but the simple phrasing of “let it go” versus “get rid of it” totally got me–along with talking to inanimate objects, acknowledging the “energy” in objects and houses, and the admonishment to let your own heart be your guide.
Really, it’s organizing for hippies. And here are some passages that have really struck me so far:
Here’s more John Muir giving his hippie opinion to accompany some Sunday hike (excuse me, saunter) photos:
[When asked about the word “hike”:] I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains — not hike! Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.
Quote from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1964.
Some advice via prose poem from Mary Oliver:
Don’t Hesitate
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
“We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun–a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal”
-John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierras
(Pictures from a snowshoe hike to Day’s Fork up Big Cottonwood Canyon; quote from the first installment of the Ken Burns’ National Parks series, which we started and watching and which the first installment thereof might as well be called “John Muir Quotes and Pretty Landscapes.”)
Christmas is a week from today. I am trying very hard to not leave the house this coming weekend so that means epic list-making–although if we’re honest, I’ve been in crazy planning mode since early November. I just found this Elizabeth David quote, though, and I feel a little better about my organizing going overboard:
“Christmas does tend to unbalance people, particularly those people responsible for the catering, the coking, the presents, the tree, the decorations.”
Time to make handmade Christmas gifts, that is. Everyone’s getting a Laura Ingalls Wilder Christmas this year:
In the morning they all woke up almost at the same moment. They looked at their stockings, and something was in there. Santa Claus had been there. Alice and Ella and Laura in their red flannel nightgowns and Peter in his red flannel nightshirt, all ran shouting to see what he had brought. In each stocking there was a pair of bright red mittens, and there was a long, flat stick of red-and-white striped peppermint candy, all beautifully notched along one side.
They were all so happy they could hardly speak at first.
In other words, everyone’s getting the modern equivalent of mittens and peppermint.
(Read the whole chapter from Little House In The Big Woods here.)