Dream job

Is there such a thing as a professional watcher of sunrises and sunsets?  I think that would be a dream job.  (Sunrise on Thursday.)

Scientists are now affirming what many indigenous peoples and mystics have known for a long time: the world is made of sound. Everything around and within us is comprised of vibrating stuff. As a songwriter, I am always listening for the songs that are already here. My job is to catch these whispered suggestions and bring them into form.

~ Barbara McAfee

I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.

~ Haruki Murakami

You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that—if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it.

~ George Eliot, Middlemarch

Feeling loved

Izzy relaxing on my lap.  Because she trusts me enough to do so.

This I now know for certain: I do all of my growing during the times in my life when I am offering compassion to the parts of myself that have not yet grown. I never once managed to shame myself into a version of me I loved more (and trust me, I spent decades trying). As Meg says, “shame is never fertile soil for growth”. A better world is not created from a planet of people hating themselves, but hate’s opposite. Sweet community, I hope as you read this today, you can scan yourself, look deep within, and decide every part of you is good news. And I would love to hear about a time where loving a part of you that felt harder-to-love was the seed of some incredible shift.

~ Andrea Gibson, beautiful poet, from her recent newsletter

I know you’re out there somewhere

A communication from the spirits of the fortune cookie.

Everything in life is speaking in spite of its apparent silence.

— Hazrat Inayat Khan

All the love I have received—
its wordlessness
I hear in the sky, in the wind.

Rabindranath Tagore, from “Sickbed #27,” trans. Wendy Barker & Saranindranath Tagore, Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 1999)

How to diet without really trying

At the Warhol Museum, long ago.  (2006, I think?)

Time is just the thing that happens between snacks.

― Jennie Egerdie, Frog and Toad are Doing Their Best [A Parody]: Bedtime Stories for Trying Times

Security blankets and stuffies

Sitting in church. (Antioch Church in Princess Anne, MD. They have a bear in each pew as comfort for those who need them.  If someone feels the need to take the bear home with them, someone else comes along with a new bear.)

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home–they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

This tape will self destruct in five seconds

This morning just before sunrise.

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive.

~Maya Angelou

A Sunday twofer

A sign at the Point.

“Do billboard salesmen record their sales on charts? If so, who’s at the top of the billboard charts for billboard sales?”
― Ryan Lilly