"If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes"

Mark Twain

Acting is not about being famous, it's about exploring the human soul.

Annette Bening

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love. ~Henry Drummond


One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar. ~Helen Keller


There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as if everything is.~ Albert Einstein

“We clasp the hands of those that go before us, And the hands of those who come after us. We enter the little circle of each other's arms And the larger circle of lovers, Whose hands are joined in a dance, And the larger circle of all creatures, Passing in and out of life, Who move also in a dance, To a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it Except in fragments” ~Wendell Berr

Never, never, never, never give up.- Winston Churchil

Champions are not measured or remembered by how much they succeded, but rather on how much they tried.- Carli Baca

In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.- Martin Luther King Jr.

"In life, you always get what you ask for and it rarely comes in the package you think it’s supposed to come in." -Kurek Ashley

"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
~ Marcel Proust

Ceez - 10 Ways of Looking at a Raindrop
 

"Clouds are the best story tellers.
They spill makeshift metaphors in the wind.
We call them raindrops."


[B]

People who drink to drown their sorrow should be told that sorrow knows how to swim.- Ann Landers

Truth can only be known through silence.- Ryan Martinie


I want friends, not admirers. People who respect me for my character and my deeds, not my flattering smile. The circle around me would be much smaller, but what does that matter as long as they're sincere?- The Diary of Anne Frank

POEMA 18

Aquí te amo.
En los oscuros pinos se desenreda el viento.
Fosforece la luna sobre las aguas errantes.
Andan días iguales persiguiéndose.

Se desciñe la niebla en danzantes figuras.
Una gaviota de plata se descuelga del ocaso.
A veces una vela. Altas, altas estrellas.

O la cruz negra de un barco.
Solo.
A veces amanezco, y hasta mi alma está húmeda.
Suena, resuena el mar lejano.
Este es un puerto.
Aquí te amo.

Aquí te amo y en vano te oculta el horizonte.
Te estoy amando aún entre estas frías cosas.
A veces van mis besos en esos barcos graves,
que corren por el mar hacia donde no llegan.

Ya me veo olvidado como estas viejas anclas.
Son más tristes los muelles cuando atraca la tarde.
Se fatiga mi vida inútilmente hambrienta.
Amo lo que no tengo. Estás tú tan distante.

Mi hastío forcejea con los lentos crepúsculos.
Pero la noche llega y comienza a cantarme.
La luna hace girar su rodaje de sueño.

Me miran con tus ojos las estrellas más grandes.
Y como yo te amo, los pinos en el viento, quieren cantar tu nombre con sus hojas de alambre. ~

http://www.poesi.as/firma0pn.gif Pablo Neruda, 1924

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
~Norman Cousins

THIS is why Pablo Neruda continues to be my favorite poet. It was because of him I learned Spanish 30 years ago. I wanted to be able to read his incredible words in HIS language. Not mine.

:blueheels:


“All little girls should be told they are pretty, even if they aren't.”
― Marilyn Monroe

Empowering
 

"We're all in prison. All of us are in prison, but some of us have a key." - Iyanla Vanzant

Until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. -Iyanla Vanzant

A good relationship should have 3 things:
1- eyes that won't cry
2- lips that won't lie
3- love that won't die

Peace has a great deal to do with warm-hardheartedness and respect for the lives of others, avoiding doing them harm and regarding their lives as being as precious as our own. If, on that basis, we can also be of help to others, so much the better ~Dalai Lama

That was my mother.

Maturity is not measured by age but by the way you handle yourself in adverse situations.- Drew Szabo

The people you care about the most have the potential to hurt you the worse.- Unknown

The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking places. - Unknown

One of my biggest inspirational icons when it comes to my writing...
Oh and he only lives about a mile from my apartment :)

"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."
--Stephen King

It’s easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them... Their present and their past... But you’d be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides... Never judge... Learn to respect and acknowledge the feelings of another...

“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.”

Anais Nin

RIP Adrienne Rich
 

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.


~Adrienne Rich

Feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich dies
 

http://img1-cdn.newser.com/square-im...ead-at-82.jpeg

In this Nov. 15, 2006 file photo, poet Adrienne Rich addresses dinner guests after receiving the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 2006 National Book Awards sponsored by The National Book Foundation in New York. Rich, whose socially conscious verse influenced a generation of feminist, gay rights and anti-war activists, has died. She was 82. Rich, who had lived in Santa Cruz since the 1980s, died Tuesday, March 27, 2012 at her home. Her son, Pablo Conrad, says she died of complications from rheumatoid arthritis.
http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/hY9...706700afdf.jpg
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SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (AP) — Adrienne Rich, a fiercely gifted, award-winning poet whose socially conscious verse influenced a generation of feminist, gay rights and anti-war activists, has died. She was 82.

Rich died Tuesday at her Santa Cruz home from complications from rheumatoid arthritis, said her son, Pablo Conrad. She had lived in Santa Cruz since the 1980s.

Through her writing, Rich explored topics such as women's rights, racism, sexuality, economic justice and love between women.

Rich published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and five collections of nonfiction. She won a National Book Award for her collection of poems "Diving into the Wreck" in 1974, when she read a statement written by herself and fellow nominees Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, "refusing the terms of patriarchal competition and declaring that we will share this prize among us, to be used as best we can for women."

In 2004, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection "The School Among the Ruins." According to her publisher, W.W. Norton, her books have sold between 750,000 and 800,000 copies, a high amount for a poet.

She gained national prominence with her third poetry collection, "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," in 1963. Citing the title poem, University of Maryland professor Rudd Fleming wrote in The Washington Post that Rich "proves poetically how hard it is to be a woman — a member of the second sex."

She was, like so many, profoundly changed by the 1960s. Rich married Harvard University economist Alfred Conrad in 1953 and they had three sons. But she left him in 1970 and eventually lived with her partner, writer and editor Michelle Cliff. She used her experiences as a mother to write "Of Woman Born," her groundbreaking feminist critique of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, published in 1976.

"Rich is one of the few poets who can deal with political issues in her poems without letting them degenerate into social realism," Erica Jong once wrote.

Unlike most American writers, Rich believed art and politics not only could co-exist, but must co-exist. She considered herself a socialist because "socialism represents moral value — the dignity and human rights of all citizens," she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. "That is, the resources of a society should be shared and the wealth redistributed as widely as possible."

"She was very courageous and very outspoken and very clear," said her longtime friend W.S. Merwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. "She was a real original, and whatever she said came straight out of herself."

As Merwin noted, Rich was a hard poet to define because she went through so many phases. Or, as Rich wrote in "Delta," ''If you think you can grasp me, think again."

Her political poems included "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children," an indictment of the Vietnam War and the damage done and a cry for language itself: "The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning. I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor's language."

One of her best-known poems, "Living in Sin," tells of a woman's disappointment between what she imagined love would be — "no dust upon the furniture of love" — and the dull reality, the man "with a yawn/sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard/declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror/rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes."

Rich taught at many colleges and universities, including Brandeis, Rutgers, Cornell, San Jose State and Stanford.

She won a MacArthur "genius" fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships and many top literary awards including the Bollingen Prize, Brandeis Creative Arts Medal, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award.

But when then-President Clinton awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1997, Rich refused to accept it, citing the administration's "cynical politics."

"The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate," she wrote to the administration. "A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored."

In 2003, Rich and other poets refused to attend a White House symposium on poetry to protest to U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Born in Baltimore in 1929, Rich was the elder of two daughters of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother — a mixed heritage that she recalled in her autobiographical poem "Sources." Her father, a doctor and medical professor at Johns Hopkins University, encouraged her to write poetry at an early age.

Rich graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 and was chosen for the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first book of poetry, "A Change of World."

Living in Cambridge, Mass., she befriended Merwin, Donald Hall and other poets. In 1966, her family moved to New York City when her husband accepted a teaching position at City College. Soon after she left Conrad, he committed suicide.

Rich taught remedial English to poor students entering college before teaching writing at Swarthmore College, Columbia University School of the Art and City University of New York.

To find perfection in the imperfectness of life;
to give our best in the worst situations;
to learn to let fear be our protector, not our jailer;
to exercise patience with ourselves and others:
These are challenges we all face. And how we deal with them plays a role in our fate.
So may we face them with our best intentions. Our greatest determination.
And may we find our joy. ~ Sandra Kring