MY WRITERS SITE: Letting go

MY WRITERS SITE: Letting go: I grew up in foster care. It sucked.  As a young man I was drenched in near hopeless poverty. I suffered.  But I eventually let it, the se...

Some days

Some days everything I do is a mistake and then, at the end of the day, I remember that mistakes are proof that I’m trying.

and remember to laugh because life is short

Letting go

I grew up in foster care. It sucked.  As a young man I was drenched in near hopeless poverty. I suffered.  But I eventually let it, the self-induced suffering, go because it’s an oppressive way of thinking and as the saying goes “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” So I taught myself to think positive because we must let go of the negative but so many don’t. They have a hard time letting go of their suffering out of a fear of the unknown, out of feat that nothing will take its place so they prefer suffering that is familiar. Don’t be one of those guys. Remember that to be able to look back on your life in satisfaction is the greatest glory to God, to humanity, to your nation and to yourself.

Badly dressed woman letting go of her suffering 

Zen is a liberation from time

Several times a day I stop and concentrate on the here and now especially when I find myself worrying or wondering about the future or lamenting the past. By stopping all thoughts about the past and the future I instantly recognize that there is no other time than this instant, this very second and that what is past and what is before me are little more than perceptions, perceptions with any solid reality. 

Us and them

I work on having the will to allow those that I love be who and what they are and not try to twist and turn them into something that comes close to my own image and likeness. The reason I work on this aspect of my life is that I have learned that if we try to mold those we love into mini-versions of our self, reflections of us, we don’t really love the person rather we love, as Thomas Merton said  “Only their potential likeness to ourselves” which belittles and dehumanizes them and us.   

Dance happy and with grace and style because life is short!

Libraries raised me

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is. -Nadine Gordimer, novelist, Nobel laureate 

Ray Bradbury wrote “Libraries raised me” and they raised me as well. Here are some excerpts from my forthcoming autobiography due out this spring.

 #1

“She (A teacher) lit a fire in me and reading became my passion. I became a familiar figure around the children’s reading room at the wonderful old Ansonia library. It was built in 1891 as a gift of the fabulously rich Phelps family.

  A large building by Ansonia standards, the library was made of local granite and unglazed red Spanish tiles, with three towers, natural quartered oak, and stone mosaic floors with representations of Pegasus and Bellerophon, a Greek hero who specialized in killing monsters. It had a large fireplace with a chimneypiece of rubbed red Lake Superior freestone, ribbed barrel-vault ceilings and two tiers of leaded glass windows. Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and knowledge, rested in the gable end of the roof above the heavy oak doors of the entrance.

  I spent hours in the children’s reading room, perusing the titles, meticulously making my way through picture books meant for children five years younger than I. But there in the wonderful quiet security of the library, this place dedicated to learning and reason and knowledge, where Walter couldn’t lean over my shoulder and berate me, I could take ten or fifteen minutes to figure out what a word spelled by breaking it apart, sounding out the parts and putting it all back together again. It didn’t matter that I was reading baby books.

  When I was done dissecting a difficult word, I went back to the top of the paragraph and read the story, giving myself a great sense of victory. I was winning the war of words, and, to my joy and amazement, words weren’t my enemy. Words liked me and I liked them. They taught me things, and they were witnesses when I won those tiny victories.”

#2

“The world was mine for the reading. I traveled with my books. I was there on a tramp steamer in the North Atlantic with the Hardy Boys, piecing together an unsolvable crime. I rode into the Valley of Death with the six hundred and I stood at the graves of Uncas and Cora and listened to the mournful song of the Lenni Linape. Although I braved a frozen death at Valley Forge and felt the spin of a hundred bullets at Shiloh, I was never afraid. I was there as much as you are where you are, right this second. I smelled the gunsmoke and tasted the frost. And it was good to be there. No one could harm me there. No one could punch me, slap me, call me stupid, or pretend I wasn’t in the room. The other kids raced through books so they could get the completion stamp on their library card. I didn’t care about that stupid completion stamp. I didn’t want to race through books. I wanted books to walk slowly through me, stop, and touch my brain and my memory. If a book couldn’t do that, it probably wasn’t a very good book. Besides, it isn’t how much you read, it’s what you read.

  What I learned from books, from young Ben Franklin’s anger at his brother to Anne Frank’s longing for the way her life used to be, was that I wasn’t alone in my pain. All that caused me such anguish affected others, too, and that connected me to them and that connected me to my books. I loved everything about books. I loved that odd sensation of turning the final page, realizing the story had ended, and feeling that I was saying a last goodbye to a new friend.

  I read To Kill a Mockingbird outside the house, because  the story concerned race and took a generally sympathetic view toward blacks, and I knew it wouldn’t go over well. Walter was an avowed racist and Helen always followed his lead. Neither Helen nor Walter had lived much beyond their tiny universe, and they had no intention of broadening their learning. So when I wasn’t reading the book, I tucked it away in the inside pocket of my Sunday blazer, where, of course, Helen found it.

  And now Helen was treading carelessly into my private world, and I thought that the bad guys in the world had it all wrong: You don’t have to burn books to kill off new ideas and growth. No, all you have to do is to make sure people stop reading books; it has the same effect.

  She was waiting for me at the door, standing in the vestibule, when I got home from school, and when I walked in she knocked me a good one over the head with the book.

  “You bring this crazy Hollywood nigger trash into this house?” she hissed, waving the book in my face, and then slapped me with it. It was a paperback, it didn’t hurt, but I blew a fuse anyway.”

#3

  “Books and authors dated eras in my life and threw life-altering concepts at me that shattered virtually everything I knew to be true, although, on reflection, I suppose I had only guessed them to be true. I roamed the stacks of the Deep River library, which didn’t allow St. John’s boys to take out a library card, so I read what I could between the dimly lit, narrow shelves, always feeling that I had wasted much of my time by not being there more often. I made great friends in those books that I found there. I could trust my friends Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the others who were, and who remain, my most constant friends. They are always there, offering good counsel and sage advice, patiently waiting to teach more with every drop of ink. 

  My purpose in reading was to learn, so my preference was nonfiction. Books were my educators, so I tried to read only what I could use later. It was a good theory, but I scanned everything that interested me, and it seemed that everything in that library interested me. Discipline and  focus leaves me when I enter a library or a bookstore. It is one of my better bad habits.

  Unlike most teens, I didn’t read to find something to believe in, or to invalidate a societal truth, or to contradict common knowledge. I read books so I could weigh and consider what the author was proposing. You learn more that way.”

#4

“I wandered the streets that summer, looking for something to do when I found the city library, and that was where I escaped from hell into paradise.

  The Silas Bronson Library was a sleek, modern glass building settled into an expansive park, a popular cruising area for homosexuals on the prowl and teenage hustlers willing to help them out for a fee. One afternoon I was sitting on a park bench, reading, oddly enough, Moby-Dick, when I was approached by a very respectable-looking man in his late sixties.

  “I’m sixteen, under age,” I snapped. “Go away, or I will call the police.”

  He was outraged, and snapped back, “Then why are you here?”

  “To read,” I said, holding up my copy of Moby-Dick, although in retrospect that probably wasn’t a good idea.

  The library had a respectable book collection and I spent most of my days haunting its  aisles, scanning the shelves for titles by the great American novelists. I found most of them, and I usually devoured them in a day, lying on the bench in the park with my book and one of my mother’s massive brown-bag lunches.

  I dissolved into the books I found at the library, which could take me places, answer my questions, and leave me with more questions. I learned the great truths and common principles from those works, mostly because I had no one else to teach me those things. Books are great teachers and they teach with ease for those hungry to learn. And I was learning. I was learning to live with poverty, the toughest teacher of all because it gives you the test first and the lesson later. The ancient Greeks called it pathemata mathemata—to learn, eventually, by suffering.”

Defeated

I have been defeated a couple of hundred times in this life so far, and I suppose I will be defeated a couple of hundred times more before it’s over for me. And I count those defeats in not just big things, life altering events, but in tiny and seemingly insignificant events as well. A defeat is a defeat, the difference is the consequence. But in all of that I have never been finished off because I have never quit and that’s when your defeats win, when you quit. The old adage is true “A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.”  

Invest now and don't pay later

Frederick Douglas said “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” and if we keep cutting funds to social services that aid the poor and help to pull them out of poverty we are going to have a lot of broken, angry men in our nations future.   

and remember to laugh because life is so short............. 

Blessing

        Be a blessing to someone today - 

                                               Proverbs 11:25

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one.

“Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to his daughter Scottie (1936)

I complained I had no shoes until I saw a man who had no feet

Zola

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” Émile Zola

Logic

“Logic is an organized way to go wrong with confidence. We should all know by now that a logical course is not always the right one.”  Charles F. Kettering 

Insouciance

“Insouciance”  A French loanword, insouciance describes a tranquil mind at its most peaceful state. One is free from concern, worry, or anxiety; nonchalance is the key emotion displayed at this moment. Indifference and composure are signs of displaying insouciance, but the word’s most compelling attribute lie in its aesthetic and phonetic rhythm.. Insouciance is a regal and sophisticated word, it holds an undetectable attribute and the coolness of nonchalance by pronouncing it.

I don’t compare where I am with where everyone else in the world is

 I don’t compare where I am with where everyone else in the world is because it’s pointless. It does nothing to improve my life or advance my standing. In fact comparing where I am with where the world is usually leaves me feeling inadequate and that’s largely because I see the status of others and not the story behind the status. It’s just pointless to think that way.  

Here are two things I figured out.

Here are two things I figured out.  The meaning of life is to give life a meaning and if we believe that life is worth living that belief will help create the fact. 

Don't worry, be happy

“Be crazy. Be stupid. Be weird. Be whatever - because life is too short to be anything but happy.” Unknown

Love and creativity

“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.” ― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Advice for the creative class

“The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It’s useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.” —                                                                          Aaron Copland

Patience

Patience is also a form of action. 

Auguste Rodin, sculptor 

A Little Shakespeare

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

If music be the food of love, play on.

The wheel is come full circle.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.

Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.

Listen to many, speak to a few.

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

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

A peace is of the nature of a conquest; for then both parties nobly are subdued, and neither party loser.

And why not death rather than living torment? To die is to be banish'd from myself; And Silvia is myself: banish'd from her Is self from self: a deadly banishment!

Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness.

No legacy is so rich as honesty.

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes.

Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined. Lawless, winged, and unconfined, and breaks all chains from every mind.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.

Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

Women may fall when there's no strength in men.

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

Now, God be praised, that to believing souls gives light in darkness, comfort in despair.

How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

This above all; to thine own self be true.

Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known?

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Life is as tedious as twice-told tale, vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

Love sought is good, but given unsought, is better.

Talking isn't doing. It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.

Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.

 When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.

Give thy thoughts no tongue.

Speak low, if you speak love.

And oftentimes excusing of a fault doth make the fault the worse by the excuse.

Boldness be my friend.

Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.

Alas, I am a woman friendless, hopeless!

I say there is no darkness but ignorance.

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

I am not bound to please thee with my answer.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.

In time we hate that which we often fear.

Life every man holds dear; but the dear man holds honor far more precious dear than life.

Love is too young to know what conscience is.

No, I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing.

Go to you bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father.

 If we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

As he was valiant, I honour him. But as he was ambitious, I slew him.

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

What's done can't be undone.

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.

The golden age is before us, not behind us.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!

I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad and to travel for it too!

The most peaceable way for you, if you do take a thief, is, to let him show himself what he is and steal out of your company.

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

The love of heaven makes one heavenly.

'Tis not enough to help the feeble up, but to support them after.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

 Things done well and with a care, exempt themselves from fear.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

There's many a man has more hair than wit.

But men are men; the best sometimes forget.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

They do not love that do not show their love.

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.

Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent.

Poor and content is rich, and rich enough.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

There is no darkness but ignorance.

Maids want nothing but husbands, and when they have them, they want everything.

What is past is prologue.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

 Lawless are they that make their wills their law.

 Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise.

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

 My crown is called content, a crown that seldom kings enjoy.

Enjoy, Content, Crown

The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.

Faith, there hath been many great men that have flattered the people who ne'er loved them.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

If it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul.

 

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.

There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face.

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottage princes' palaces.

By that sin fell the angels.

Desire of having is the sin of covetousness.

         

Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.

Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

           

O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil.

 Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.

For I can raise no money by vile means.

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who ne'er loved them.

Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing.

We are time's subjects, and time bids be gone.

           

Neither a borrower nor a lender be.

Teach not thy lip such scorn, for it was made For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.

 

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

 

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

 

Now is the winter of our discontent.

The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, which hurts and is desired.

Time and the hour run through the roughest day.

I will praise any man that will praise me.

Death is a fearful thing.

He does it with better grace, but I do it more natural.

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

 

It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

'Tis one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall.

 

I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire.

Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.

Men's vows are women's traitors!

Nothing can come of nothing.

 

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge.

           

The fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it.

 

Most dangerous is that temptation that doth goad us on to sin in loving virtue.

What, man, defy the devil. Consider, he's an enemy to mankind.

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.

In a false quarrel there is no true valor.

There's place and means for every man alive.

Farewell, fair cruelty.

 

'Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.

I dote on his very absence.

Mind your speech a little lest you should mar your fortunes.

I shall the effect of this good lesson keeps as watchman to my heart.

I was adored once too.

O' What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

 

Our peace shall stand as firm as rocky mountains.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

'Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

Wisely, and slow. They stumble that run fast.

I like not fair terms and a villain's mind.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

Men shut their doors against a setting sun.

How well he's read, to reason against reading!

I see that the fashion wears out more apparel than the man.

My pride fell with my fortunes.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

For my part, it was Greek to me.

I bear a charmed life.

There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting.

He that loves to be flattered is worthy o' the flatterer.

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!

Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!

Praise us as we are tasted, allow us as we prove.

Truly, I would not hang a dog by my will, much more a man who hath any honesty in him.

He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.

Let no such man be trusted.

O, had I but followed the arts!

The attempt and not the deed confounds us.

Well, if Fortune be a woman, she's a good wench for this gear.

They say miracles are past.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Exceeds man's might: that dwells with the gods above.

It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?

Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes.

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

But if it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive.

There was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from... Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.