“Gratitude is a vaccine, an antitoxin, and an antiseptic,” — John Henry Jowett


“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude,” — Denis Waitley


”The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.” — Richard Bach


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

Rebecca West
 

Rebecca West (1892 - 1983) was the pen name of Cicely Isabel Fairfield. A feminist, social critic and public intellectual, her range of topics and genres was wide. Her son, Anthony West, was a product of her long affair with H. G. Wells.

---------------

• I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

a different perspective on an age-old story...
 

Lot's Wife

They say I looked back out of curiosity.
But I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.
So I wouldn't have to keep staring at the righteous nape
of my husband Lot's neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead
he wouldn't so much as hesitate.
From the disobedience of the meek.
Checking for pursuers.
Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.
Our two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.
I felt age within me. Distance.
The futility of wandering. Torpor.
I looked back setting my bundle down.
I looked back not knowing where to set my foot.
Serpents appeared on my path,
spiders, field mice, baby vultures.
They were neither good nor evil now--every living thing
was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic.
I looked back in desolation.
In shame because we had stolen away.
Wanting to cry out, to go home.
Or only when a sudden gust of wind
unbound my hair and lifted up my robe.
It seemed to me that they were watching from the walls of Sodom
and bursting into thunderous laughter again and again.
I looked back in anger.
To savor their terrible fate.
I looked back for all the reasons given above.
I looked back involuntarily.
It was only a rock that turned underfoot, growling at me.
It was a sudden crack that stopped me in my tracks.
A hamster on its hind paws tottered on the edge.
It was then we both glanced back.
No, no. I ran on,
I crept, I flew upward
until darkness fell from the heavens
and with it scorching gravel and dead birds.
I couldn't breathe and spun around and around.
Anyone who saw me must have thought I was dancing.
It's not inconceivable that my eyes were open.
It's possible I fell facing the city.


Wislawa Szymbor


Katniss

“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself.”
Galileo Galilei quotes

A clear purpose is the starting point of
ALL ACHIEVEMENT..

This poem changed my life...
 

Sunflower Sutra
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--
--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,
memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
past--
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man's grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--
modern--all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown--
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
& sphincters of dynamos--all these
entangled in your mummied roots--and you there
standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
grime, while you cursed the heavens of the
railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul
too, and anyone who'll listen,
--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.
Allen Ginsberg

Berkeley, 1955

Let Us Not Forget Plato...
 

Oh, and this is the quote I used in my HS yearbook...

"We can forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." ~ Plato

It would be a couple of decades before I would understand how true this is...

Anna Quindlen (July 8, 1952 - )
 

Journalist, novelist, writer.

A syndicated columnist for the New York Times and later a contributing editor and columnist for Newsweek, Anna Quindlen began her career in more traditional reporting assignments, moving to a column about New York daily life, and then writing her long-running bi-weekly column while spending more time at home raising three children. Anna Quindlen has also written novels, non-fiction books, and children's books. She is notable for her ruminations on life from the perspective of a woman.

--------------------------------

• Just as we fooled ourselves that the end of discriminatory laws would soon lead to racial harmony, so we thought that increased access to education, advancement and male-only arenas would erase the attitudes that have led some men to treat women like children, fools and punching bags.

• This sense of otherness is the single most pernicious force in American discourse. The not-like-us ethos makes so much bigotry possible: Racism, sexism, homophobia. It divides the country as surely as the Mason-Dixon line once did. And it makes for mean-spirited and punitive politics and social policy.

• But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.

• We want things to be easy for our children, and we know from sad experience that the world can be unkind to girls who do not please, who speak out, who go their own way. But we know from experience, too, that the role of the good girl can be a hollow one, with nothing at the center except other people's expectations where your character might have been.

It is better to have men ask why you have no statue, than why you have one. -Unknown

What we do not understand we do not possess. -Goethe


It is double the pleasure to cheat a cheater. -Jean de la Fontaine

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

~William Shakespeare

It is difficult to know at what moment love begins...
It is less difficult to know that it has begun.


~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Nizar Qabbani....
 

I Remember You As You Were
I remember you as you were in the last autumn.
You were the grey beret and the still heart.
In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on.
And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.
Clasping my arms like a climbing plant
The leaves garnered your voice, that was slow and at peace.
Bonfire of awe in which my thirst was burning.
Sweet blue hyacinth twisted over my soul.
I feel your eyes travelling, and the autumn is far off:
Grey beret, voice of a bird, heart like a house
Towards which my deep longing migrated
And my kisses fell, happy as embers.
Sky from a ship. Field from the hills:
Your memory is made of light, of smoke, of a still pond!
Beyond your eyes, farther on, the evenings were blazing.
Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul.



Katniss

Grammar; the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you're shit.

I want the butch, the whole butch, and nothing but the butch so help me God! lol!

oh one more good one: Don't hate me because you ain't me!!!! lmao!!!

Adrienne Rich (1929 - )
 

Adrienne Rich was first published as a poet in 1951, when she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Her poetry has reflected her own life changes and many roles.

Adrienne Rich's feminism emerged in mid-career, and many of her later poems express a political rage and search for sisterhood and creative language.

----------------------

• Women have been the truly active people in all cultures, without whom human society would long ago have perished, though our activity has most often been on the behalf of men and children.

• I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included.

• Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism -- the longing to remain the mother's son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.

• How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

You are only what you are , when no one is looking. -Robert C. Edwards


To accept a benefit is to sell one's freedom. - Latin proverb


Better to wear out, than to rust out.- Unknown

The Dream of a Common Language...
 

VIII
I can see myself years back at Sunion,
hurting with an infected foot, Philoctetes
in woman’s form, limping the long path,
lying on a headland over the dark sea,
looking down the red rocks to where a soundless curl
of white told me a wave had struck,
imagining the pull of that water from that height,
knowing deliberate suicide wasn’t my métier,
yet all the time nursing, measuring that wound.
Well, that’s finished. The woman who cherished
her suffering is dead. I am her descendant.
I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,
but I want to go on from here with you
fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.

Adrienne Rich

Katniss

Love is more than words. It is demonstrated through actions.
Love is manifested in the day-to-day occurrences of small kindnesses and spoken words.
Love is lending a patient ear and taking the time to care. (w)

gentleness
 

“Strong men can always afford to be gentle. Only the weak are intent on giving as good as they get.”--Elbert Hubbard

“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.”--Mahatma Gandhi

“No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.”--G. K. Chesterton

“The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed- It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.”--William Shakespeare

“The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.”--Henry David Thoreau

bell hooks (1952 - )
 

Feminist, writer, and educator bell hooks (she prefers the lower case spelling) is a social critic concerned with issues of sexism and racism.

-------------------------------

• If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.

• In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable.

• As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.

• Since our society continues to be primarily a "Christian" culture masses of people continue to believe that god has ordained that women be subordinate to men in the domestic household.

• I still think it's important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society -- because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not.

• The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance.

Adventure is worthwhile in itself.

Amelia Earhart

Neruda.....still
 

Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning. ”
― Pablo Neruda


Katniss---

So many people
Advised me against you;
How glad I am
We could not resist.


(found on a poetry banner while riding the Train)

"You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you,"

-- Mary Tyler Moore

Diving Into The Wreck

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
....
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

-- Adrienne Rich (1972)

"cosmic oceans

raise your head to the sky

you know we are alive

one burst, and we are breathing, breathing...

drop down your anchor dear

you know we are not lost

the sea it makes us free, free..."

-- Lyrics from Sun Glitters
by Cosmic Oceans (Ft. Steffaloo).

The Brave

Fear can defeat love only if the love lacks faith.
Love, accompanied by faith, is insurmountable.
It is inevitable, most irresistible and certainly not for the faint of heart.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
Steve Jobs

Marilyn French (1929 - )
 

Marilyn French is the author of The Women's Room (), a 1970s feminist landmark novel that drew much criticism for giving women little hope of achieving happiness in relationships with men; Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals, a book of essays; The War against Women, amd a three-volume women's history overview, From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women.

-------------------------------------------------

• Feminism isn't a question of what kind of genitals you possess, it's a kind of moral view. It's what you think with your head and feel with your heart.

• (Feminism defined): the belief that women matter as much as men do.

• My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world.

• Women are afraid in a world in which almost half the population bears the guise of the predator, in which no factor -- age, dress, or color-distinguishes a man who will harm a woman from one who will not.

Serenade
Written by Pablo Neruda

With my hand I gather in this emptiness,
the bewildering night, the starry families
a chorus still more silent than the silence,
a moon sound, something secret, a triangle,
a chalked geometry.
It is the night of the ocean, a third solitude,
a quivering which opens doors and wings.
The mysterious and intangible population
trembles and washes over the names of the estuary.

Night, the sea’s name, homeland, roots, rose!




Katniss