This is now bone of my bones
And flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman’,
for she was taken out of man.That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.
The Bible, Genesis 2:23, 24.
Here‘s a very cool thing! you can check out museums and art works, online! right from your comfy space, from thousand miles away. Yes, it’s not quite the same as visiting a museum in person BUT, it makes art much more accessible and reachable :)
If you would stop analyzing everything and just look for things to appreciate, you would live happily ever after.
I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky, he thought. (…) But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.
Ernest Hemingway, “The Old Man and The Sea”, 1965 edition. Jonathan Cape, The Chaucer Press, Ltd., Suffolk, Great Britain.
Love is not only something you feel. It is something you do.
David Wilkerson
Central Park, New York. July, 2008.
…Or change whatever else makes you feel sad, old, lonely or just plain angry. Do something about it. NOW.
There’s no better time, now that the year goes fully round and the cold-dark is setting its own boundaries, “to plant the seeds and watch them grow”… Start small but go big! be kind, make more eye-contact with the people around you, recycle, fall in love, exercise, wake up early, ride a bike, eat veggies, whatever! Just start doing something.
Sometimes I feel we’re all, more or less, brainwashed in our small cubicles we call homes by all the media and the advertisements around us. Telling us how and what to think, see, wear, what’s right or wrong…giving us the impression that we are free to choose when in fact, they just make us feel inadequate and lonely. There’s so much we need to do! I am not even going to start telling you about the world-wide crisis, the lack of resources, the 7 billion people living on earth at this instant, the constant wars going on and how all of this can make us feel helpless and hopeless!
But I am asking: how could we NOT make changes, knowing everything that we know already? with every little nature-loving, eco-friendly habit or community oriented act, we ARE making a change! it might seem or feel small, but it has its value nonetheless.
If everyone would do their own little part, in a long run, we would ALL live a little better, longer, protecting everything and everyone around us: nature, Earth, animals, our kids, next door neighbor but most of all, ourselves.
There is no whole truth, just as there is no heart of the onion; there are only the dreams of individual minds.
Rose Tremain “Sacred country”, 1992, Sinclair-Stevenson.
“Well, what I don’t get is why do we exist? I don’t mean how, but why”. I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, “We exist because we exist”. “What the?” “We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.”
Jonathan Safran Foer “Extremely loud and incredibly close”. Penguin Books, 2005.
Asked to explain why Job has made to suffer even though he has been good, God draws Job’s attention to the mighty phenomena of nature. Do not be surprised that things have not gone your way, he declares: the universe is greater than you. Do not be surprised that you do not understand why they have not gone your way, for you cannot fathom the logic of the universe. See how small you are next to the mountains. Accept what is bigger than you and what you do not understand. The world may appear illogical to you, but it does not follow that it is illogical per se. Our lives are not the measure of all things: consider sublime places for a reminder of human insignificance and frailty. (…)
If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiseled the mountains. Sublime places gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is overwhelming. But it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time in them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
Alain de Botton “The Art of Travel”, 2002.
