One of [Peter] Altenberg’s many young loves had tearfully protested that his interest in her was based only (nur) on sexual attraction. Altenberg asked, “Was ist so nur?” (What’s so only?)

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 8:54 AM
(44) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink

That’s what history is: the story of everything that needn’t have been like that. We also have to grasp that art proves its value by still mattering to people who have been deprived of every other freedom: indeed instead of mattering less, it matters more.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 6:51 AM
(0) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink

Running through the village
embracing everyone she meets,
she laughs in ecstasy.
People call her mad.

“New eyes!” she cries.
“I have been given new eyes!”
And it is true.
For the scales which had previously blinded her
are gone now, erased
revealing such utter glory
that her mind took flight,
leaving only a rapturous heart
in an old, weathered body
racing through the streets
on fire with love.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Thursday, July 12, 2007 at 3:08 AM
(1) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink

As you work, don’t fear the God of Authenticity, for he is a weak god, a fraud, a fake, and—for all his posturing—completely irrelevant. Do your job, and your goddess will protect you and bless you. She is your mashooq, this One who is always absent. You know who she is, this One you follow always, the One who is untidy, elegant, blowsy, impossibly glamorous. She is the goddess Beauty, who has been frozen in liquid oxygen by the party bosses on Mount Restoration of the Righties, who has been declared dead in the Lost Valley of the Lefties. But you know your mashooq, and you can feel her power and her grace, how alive she is. She will always elude you, but you must risk everything for her. At the end of each day of work, the only question she will ask you is, did you write well today? And if you can honestly say, yes, I wrote well today, she will come a little closer to you, and you will sense her presence, and as you caress your mashooq, as she ravishes you with pleasure, you will know how absolutely real she is, this shape-shifting phantom. Then she will flee again. This absence is the only true grace you will ever know, or need. Believe in your mashooq, lose yourself in the dream of Her, and you will be Indian, a good artist or an adequate one, local and global, soft as a rose petal, and as hard as thunder, not this, not that, and everything you need to be. You will be free.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 11:27 AM
(0) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink

Spirituality is the intentional attention we give to our journey of becoming more of who we really are, of connecting more deeply with others, with God, and with our world. So seeing ourselves as an intimate part of the human family, recognizing our solidarity with people’s lives which includes their suffering, is a deeply spiritual experience.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Saturday, March 3, 2007 at 7:16 AM
(1) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink

The game had been to keep from knowing what you knew—and certainly never to say what might be true. If you let even a trickle in, it might wash you away. The game was to hope that everyone else would agree not to know what they knew too.

Anne Lamott, Blue Shoe, page 194

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Sunday, January 7, 2007 at 9:41 AM
(1) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink

A crisis can force us from a starring role in “Let’s Pretend” to spontaneously playing a God-directed part in “Being Real”.

Brenda Waggoner, The Velveteen Woman: Becoming Real Through God's Transforming Love, page 49

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Sunday, October 15, 2006 at 11:01 AM
(3) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink

God doesn’t condone our sin, nor does he compromise his standard. He doesn’t ignore our rebellion, nor does he relax his demands. Rather than dismiss our sin, he assumes our sin and, incredibly, incredibly sentences himself. God is still holy. Sin is still sin. And we are redeemed.

Max Lucado, In the Grip of Grace, book jacket

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Sunday, October 15, 2006 at 10:44 AM
(0) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink

Kinnoch: With respect, Mr. Gandhi, without British administration, this country will be reduced to chaos.

Gandhi: Mr. Kinnoch, I beg you to accept that there is no people on earth who would not prefer their own bad government to the good government of an alien power.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Sunday, September 10, 2006 at 7:00 AM
(0) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink

“You are reinventing what happened. Reinventing who you are. We all do it all the time. Sort out the past, rearrange it, make it a little better, give it a bit of plot.” Mary shrugged. “Psychologists have done studies on the human memory, and it turns out that people rewrite their memories all the time. You’re always at the center of your own story—so you might as well make yourself the hero.”

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Friday, September 8, 2006 at 2:52 PM
(1) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink

If you are not careful, station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo. Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn’t do well, of all the mistakes one had made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything that one touches turns to shit, that one doesn’t do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one has no talent or insight, and on and on and on. You might as well have heavy-metal music piped in through headphones while you’re trying to get your work done. You have to get things quiet in your head so you can hear your characters and let them guide your story.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Friday, September 8, 2006 at 2:43 PM
(2) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Friday, September 8, 2006 at 2:42 PM
(1) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Friday, September 8, 2006 at 2:41 PM
(0) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink

E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Friday, September 8, 2006 at 2:40 PM
(0) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Friday, September 8, 2006 at 2:36 PM
(2) Comments and Trackbacks • Permalink