Quote of the day

Another quote from a short story in Flash Fiction International that I liked!

Shattered by Shirani Rajapakse:

"...it all happened because she had dared to defy the terrorists and go to work that day. But what was so wrong with that?"

I was reading Elegant Simplicity by Satish Kumar and was reminded of this meme:

Dave Burton wrote:I was reading Elegant Simplicity by Satish Kumar and was reminded of this meme:

I am desperately trying to a3pplg this to certain family and friends over whom I am losing sleep and joy in my life.

I love this quote from Elegant Simplicity!

"We need to apply our own standards and our own vision in order to celebrate the fundamental dignity of human life."

And I like this quote, too:

"We don’t need to worry about the future either. Khalil Gibran said, “Yesterday is but today’s memory, tomorrow is today’s dream.” Only the present is real. That is why it is called “present” —  a gift. We need to respond to the situation in which we find ourselves. There is a formula for this: 10 percent of thinking can be concerned with the past, 15 percent with the future, and the remaining 75 percent with the present."

and...

" I dream of a society of artists who, above all, practice the art of living. By cultivating the arts of living, we can make our lives more simple, more harmonious, more joyful, and more contented."

and..

"A society founded on the idea of everyone being an artist requires us to become makers and producers so that we can achieve personal, social, and ecological well-being. The economy, in this ideal system, is the servant of humanity and not the master. In my worldview, a life of elegant simplicity would be built on a firm foundation of the arts and crafts. We need to move away from automation, industrialism, and robotic systems. We need to embrace the ideal of mindful making. "

and...

“You are teaching your students economics, which means how to manage your home, without teaching them ecology, which means knowing what comprises a home? How are you going to manage your home if you don’t know it?”

and...

"Every student should take at least one day a week to be in Nature and sit by the bank of a river or sit under a tree, walk in the mountains, and learn from Nature. Nature herself is the greatest teacher. If university students want to be ecoliterate, they need to read the book of Nature. That is the greatest book"

and...

"Rather than human rights, we should talk about human responsibility. Nature has rights and humans have a responsibility not to destroy, pollute, or denigrate planet Earth. That is ecoliteracy."

and...

"In order for us to integrate facts with feelings and to shift from information to knowledge, we need to introduce the idea of learning by doing —  of using our heads, our hearts, and our hands. Wisdom arises when knowledge and experience meet."

"What if our religion was each other. If our practice was our life. If prayer, our words. What if the temple was the Earth. If forests were our church. If holy water--the rivers, lakes, and ocean. What if meditation was our relationships. If the teacher was life. If wisdom was self-knowledge. If love was the center of our being."

~ Ganga White

Sorry Judith,  have run out of apples to give you. X

"Today I  train myself,that most people do not want,to do something tomorrow that most people can't"
Quote from unknown

From Elegant Simplicity:

"First of all we need to fall in love with ourselves. Often we want to fall in love with someone else without loving ourselves. Yet it is only when we fall in love with ourselves that we are ready to fall in love with someone else"

I find this to be so true, which is part of why I find it so hard to love others, especially some of the boyfriends I have tried dating. I find it so hard to see the beauty that they see in me, which is why I cry so much when I hear the words I love you from them. It hurts to feel the passion of someone else's love or someone's desire to be with and yet be unable to let them fully in, because I do not yet see everythign they see. This is hard, but slowly and surely, I am making my way towards being at peace with myself. It just takes awhile, and sunshine, my gosh, the sunshine has been helping me out a lot!

Ahhh, I love this quote, too:

"When two people come together, they do not merge with each other. Falling in love is not a merger. We come together to stand side by side. One plus one is not two, it is eleven: 1 + 1 = 11. When we are in a loving relationship we say, 'I am your support. I am here for you. Lean on me."

and...

"Then there are those who, on finding some small virtue in others, magnify it, praise it extravagantly, and shower them with appreciation. These are the people on the royal road to forgiveness."

These are a couple quotes from Renewal by Andres Edwards that I liked after I finished reading the Foreword.

"Our choices are based on our values. Renewal explores how we can nurture an ecocentric ethic, which encompasses a reciprocal relationship with nature where we use natural resources wisely and enhance the biodiversity of nonhuman species."

"...many of the solutions to our global problems lie in reacquainting ourselves with the natural world —  what I call “rewilding our hearts.” Understanding how animals build shelters and plants produce food and generate energy shows us how we can adapt to the global challenges we face. Learning about the behavior of other animals also gives us  valuable insights that can help us nurture our compassion and humility."

"There are numerous theoretical reasons why we humans have strayed so far from a benign symbiotic relationship with the planet, and have instead taken on the visage, if not the behavior, of planetary pathogens."  Joseph Jenkins

Ouch! I believe humans are capable of doing better. Now if we can just accomplish the "doing better".

From the story "The Guinea Pig Lady" by Russell Banks in the collection of short stories called Pow-Wow: Charting the Fault Lines of the American Experience- Short Stories from Then and Now edited by Ishmael Reed.

"She drove so as to endanger, but didn't know it. It was as if her relation to the physical act of driving was the same as her relation to poverty- abstract, wholly theoretical, and sentimental- which, from Merle's perspective, made her as dangerous a driver as she was a citizen."

I love how Wendell Berry looks at things.....

One of my favorite quotes recently is one that comes from the Radical Centrism Manifesto. I like its concept of humility:

Humility is Teachable
I believe everyone wants to believe they are good:
The Wise examine Character
     The Wicked shrink Community
        Fools deny Reality
           & All of them are me

There are so many good stories in Food from the Radical Center: Healing Our Land and Communities by Gary Paul Nabhan, and this is one of my favorite little scenes so far:

Listen up. A few minutes ago, you dismissed me on the basis of my dress and accent. But I'll tell you what: I will not have you dismiss the work that the fine men and my husband and I are recruited are doing in this region. They are healing the very streams and wildlife habitats that some of you in this room have worked very hard to protect! You need their work as much as they need yours. But to join forces on behalf of the fish and wildlife we all want to see survive, you first have to acknowledge the value of men and women who care about the same things you do but don't talk about them with the same words you do.

From The Green Burial Guidebook, I like the opening statement on the mission of the book, and I like how the story that follows in the introduction demonstrates how meaningful and right it feels to do a green burial.

While death can be a difficult subject, I hope that this book helps you plan for its eventuality. I hope it opens your eyes to all the choices that are available to you when it comes to funerals and burials. I hope it helps you see that it’s possible to lower costs and lower impacts while still creating a beautiful send-off for the person who has passed.

Wanda’s family and friends conducted her funeral in their own way, and I could see how much comfort it gave them to be able to stay with her and take care of her body themselves. They were with her the whole process: from the time she died until the time she was buried. It was like in the old days, but I felt as if I had discovered something new. For once I didn’t have the nagging feeling that the whole experience of burial was falling short for the mourners.

Paul Wells Jun 20, 2019 in Maclean's Magazine:

Anyone who was once an undergraduate humanities major cannot help but notice the feats of margin-stretching and creative font selection that have produced a 61-page document from a guy who was really hoping climate change wouldn’t be on the exam.

With a son who's always struggled with "exams", still struggling through the last University courses he needs to graduate, I couldn't help but laugh at the above description. The attitude of many North American politicians must baffle the people living on low-lying land, coping with record heat waves, learning the benefits of permaculture, or who have read the book, Drawdown.

"Laurie Reid (2005) studied the impact of two different gathering methods employed by traditional Native sweetgrass harvesters, comparing these to control plots where the plants were not harvested. Her study was designed to show which of the two methods was least destructive. Instead, it showed that both kinds of harvested plot thrived and expanded, while sweetgrass clumps in the unharvested control plots struggled and shrunk (Kimmerer 2012)" quoted by Samuel Thayer in Incredible Wild Edibles.

Wow - humans and nature really can work together for the benefit of both. Just like permaculture says we can!

I love this quote that Jon Steinman mentions in Grocery Story that someone told him:

Hope comes from having the courage to look calmly at problems and imagine a better world.

And I love this one by Jon Steinman:

Jon Steinman wrote:The goal of “deconstructing” big food and the grocery giants is not to lay blame or point fingers but to see the emperor without his clothes and, in his nakedness, to see that the emperor is us.

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically.
We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly.
We grow partially.
We are relative.
We are mature in one realm, childish in another.
The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present.
We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
― Anais Nin

This is a rehashing of the Golden Rule I came up with a number of years ago.
.
"How would the world be, if everyone was just like me?"

"If people are cheering against you, plug your ears and show them what you can do” 19 year old,  Bianca Andreescu, after winning the US Open Tennis Championship.

Seems like the attitude we need to be successful in permaculture!

It's been a rough year, and a good year. I was wallowing in some of the rough parts this past week when I ran across this. It helped.

Whether we and our politicians
know it or not,
Nature is party
to all our deals and decisions,
and she has more votes,
a longer memory,
and a sterner sense of justice
than we do.

~Wendell Berry

(1934 to pres., American novelist, poet, essayist,
environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer)

I love how Among Animals is introduced!

At Ashland Creek Press, we believe that literature has an important role to play in not only reflecting the world around us but in changing it for the better. This anthology grew out of a desire to publish writing that re-examines and re-imagines our relationship with nature—specifically, with animals. It’s a relationship in need of serious therapy. The stories you will read here are as diverse as t

From a thread about this artist's work, I'm copying over some lovely quotes accompanied by sweet little watercolors.





Art is happiness for me. <3 <3 <3

More of a doing from a recent retreat but still a saying- “The Highest in Me Bows to the Highest in You! May this Be the Happiest Day of Your Life!”

“Perfectionism is a slow death.
If everything were to turn out just like I would want it to, just like I would plan for it to, then I would never experience anything new; my life would be an endless repetition of stale successes.
When I make a mistake I experience something unexpected.... when I have listened to my mistakes I have grown.”
― hugh prather

...

“It is destroying my country. It is destroying the environment. It will destroy the world of tomorrow for our children,” 

Rodrigo Duterte on open pit mining in the Philippines.

"There was a farmer who grew excellent quality corn. Every year he won the award for the best grown corn. One year a newspaper reporter interviewed him and learned something interesting about how he grew it. The reporter discovered that the farmer shared his seed corn with his neighbors. “How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbors when they are entering corn in competition with yours each year?” the reporter asked.

“Why sir,” said the farmer, “Didn’t you know? The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbors grow inferior corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn. If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbors grow good corn.”

"So is with our lives... Those who want to live meaningfully and well must help enrich the lives of others, for the value of a life is measured by the lives it touches. And those who choose to be happy must help others find happiness, for the welfare of each is bound up with the welfare of all..."

I suppose there might be a better word to use than 'must' in the last paragraph...I like the thought and the analogy a lot though.

Lately I've been reading the odd book here and there that I missed back in the sixties and seventies...the Nearings, ram das's 'be here now', 'One Straw Revolution'.

This quote jumped off the page at me in Hugh Prather's 1970 'Notes to Myself'

"If you will tell me the way you see it rather than the way it "is", this helps me discover more fully the way I see it."

"We got a lot of things done with 4 kilowatt-hours a day," Agustin Irizarry-Rivera says of his own household. "We had lighting and our personal electronics working, we could wash our clothes, run our refrigerator. Everything else is just luxuries and conveniences."  (On using solar panels for months following Hurricane Maria's damage to Puerto Rico.) It shows what could be done with small-scale power production, but it's also a reminder of how many had to cope with far less than that. Let's build a more resilient future!

As Mark Twain once said, “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”

This was quoted by Elizabeth May, our local Green Member of Parliament. I thought it might apply to people practicing permaculture when surrounded by all sorts of people who aren't? Then I got to wondering how we could use the kernel of the quote to our advantage?

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way." ~Victor Frankl

Gratitude as a discipline
involves a conscious choice.
I can choose to be grateful
even when my emotions and feelings
are still steeped in hurt and resentment.
It is amazing
how many occasions present themselves
in which I can choose gratitude
instead of a complaint.

~Henri Nouwen

(1932-1996, Dutch Catholic priest,
writer, theologian, psychologist)

And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry.

~Wendell Berry

I just posted this to another thread on tree planting. I hope it's mine because I'm claiming it as such. I did a little Google search and turned up nothing.    Drum roll ...

Work with the seasons, or they will work against you.

or

Work with the seasons, or the seasons will work against you

Dale Hodgins

I was browsing the library yesterday in between business, and I thought this quote from the book Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe was pretty funny:

“The problem with my life is that it was someone else’s idea.”

W.B. is so absolutely succinct

“People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health,
and are treated by the health industry which pays no attention to food.”
— Wendell Berry