Quote of the day

Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don't want it.
What appears bad manners,
an ill temper or cynicism
is always a sign of things no ears have heard,
no eyes have seen.
You do not know
what wars are going on down there
where the spirit meets the bone.

~Miller Williams

(1930-2015, American Poet, editor,
and translator)

Michael Cox wrote:"Nobility is not being better than some other person. True nobility is being better than your former self."

This is Soooo True!!!
Think about it! And thank you for this post…

An old Indian proverb;

“The sheep is taught his whole life to fear the wolf only to be eaten by the shepherd.”

1. Smooth seas do not make skilled sailors. (Don't know by who)

2. Speak only if you improve silence. (Don't know by who)

3. :-)
Better have your mouth shut and appear stupid, than open it and release all doubt :-). - by Mark Twain

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Gems are not polished without friction, nor men perfected without trials.

Heraclitus, 4 B.C.E.

Dead fish swim with the current.

(Don't be a dead fish, be a permie.)

Words do have power.

Names have power.

Words are events,

they do things, change things.

They transform both speaker and hearer;

they feed energy back and forth

and amplify it.

~Ursula Le Guin

(1929-2018, American Author)

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou

To be alive in this beautiful,

self-organizing universe —

to participate in the dance of life

with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it,

organs that draw nourishment from it —

is a wonder beyond words.

~Joanna Macy

(1929-pres., environmental activist, author,

scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory,

and deep ecology)

“I'd come to realize that if a man is ever going to grasp anything it won't be by learning. His being has to change. You are what you do, not what you know. A man never learns; he becomes. To become, you must find ways and means to change your entire state of mind. This in turn will lead to a change of being.”
― Richard Rose

not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted

Albert Einstein

"I think tea goes rather well with Armageddon. Tea goes rather well with anything, truth be told..."

-Giles Sweetwater (Fallout 76)

"Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal."

-Woland, The Master And Margarita

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The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. (...) as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, but I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the State had in mind for me.

-Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

The greatness of a community

is most accurately measured

by the compassionate actions of its members,

a heart of grace,

and a soul generated by love.

~Coretta Scott King

(1927 -2006, American author,

activist, civil rights leader)

"Moving through the stages of life and meeting each on its own terms is the supreme art of living — the ultimate test of self-respect and self-love. Often, what most blunts our vitality is the tendency for the momentum of a past stage to steer the present one, even though our priorities and passions have changed beyond recognition."
-Maria Popova

"One of the major problems we face in life is determining how to make decisions in the face of uncertain information, especially since the funding we rely upon to create our scientific knowledge tends to be biased to arrive at conclusions that make money, not ones that promote health."

A Midwestern Doctor

I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful-
an endless prospect of magic and wonder.

~Ansel Adams

Unexpected intrusions of beauty.
This is what life is.

~Saul Bellow

The only good night lights, are billions of miles away.

source

“Always make room for the unexpected in yourself.”  Steve Martin

~John Wesley

(1703-1791, English cleric,
theologian, founder of Methodism)

1. Reduce the gap between rich and poor

2. Seek to ensure full employment

3. Introduce measures to help the poorest, including a living wage

4. Offer the best possible education

5. Empower individuals to feel they can make a difference

6. Promote tolerance

7. Promote equal treatment for women

8. Create a society based on values and not on profits and consumerism  

9. End all forms of enslavement

10. Avoid engaging in wars

11. Avoid narrow self-interest and promote a world view

12. Care for the environment

(Attributed to Wesley although the language has clearly been modernized.)

EDIT to add original text...

1. Be ye ready to distribute to every one, according to his necessity. (Sermon 28: Eighth Discourse on the Sermon on the Mount, 1747/8)

2. Wickedly, devilishly false is that common objection, ‘They are poor only because they are idle…. Find thems work…. They will then earn and eat their own bread.’ (First sentence: 8 Feb 1753 Journal; second sentence is from Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions 1773)

3. How many are there in this Christian country that toil, and labour, and sweat… but struggle with weariness and hunger together? Is it not worse for one, after a hard days labour, to come back to a poor, cold, dirty, uncomfortable lodging, and to find there not even the food which is needful to repair his wasted strength? (Sermon 47: Heaviness Through Temptation 1754/1760)

4. Beware of that common, but accursed, way of making children parrots …. Regard not how much, but how well, to what good purpose, they read…. The end of education….[is to] help us discover every false judgement of our minds, and to subdue every wrong passion in our hearts… [and] to understand as much as we are able .’ (Lessons for Children 1746)

5. ‘Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as you ever can.’ (Attributed to Wesley but source unknown.  Possibly written after his death as a summary of his teaching).

6. Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion? (Sermon 39: On a Catholic Spirit 1749/50)

7. May not women as well as men bear an honourable part….…..yield not to the vile bondage any longer. You, as well as men, are rational creatures. You, like them, were made in the image of God.’ (Sermon 98: On Visiting the Sick 1786)

8. In seeking happiness from riches, you are only striving to drink out of empty cups. And let them be painted and gilded ever so finely, they are empty still’ (Sermon 126: Danger of Increasing Riches 1790)

9. Let  none serve you but by his own act and deed, by his own voluntary action.  Away with all whips, all chains, all compulsion!…. Do with everyone else as you would he should do to you.. (Thoughts on Slavery 1774)

10.War: What farther proof of do we need of the utter degeneracy of all nations from the plainest principles of reason and virtue? Of the absolute want, both of common sense and common humanity, which runs through the whole race of mankind? (The Doctrine of Original Sin according to Scripture, Reason and Experience 1757)

11.I look upon the whole world as my parish (Letter written to John Clayton March 1739)

12.Lead us beyond an exclusive concern for the well-being of other human beings to the broader concern for the well-being of the birds in our backyards, the fish in our rivers, and every living creature on the face of the earth. (Sermon 60: The General Deliverance 1781)

Wendell Berry always bears repeating...
this is one of my favorites


So, friends, every day do something

that won't compute...

Give your approval

to all you cannot understand...

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Put your faith in two inches of humus

that will build under the trees every thousand years...

Expect the end of the world.

Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable.

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts...

Practice resurrection.

~Wendell Berry

(1934 to pres., American farmer and poet)

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

-Cory Doctorow, explaining his newly-coined term  “enshittification”

Imagine a country whose citizens—

maybe even its leaders—

are brave, calm, and open

towards each other;

a country whose people realize

that all human beings belong together

as one family

and must act accordingly.

~Br. David Steindl-Rast

(1926 to pres., Benedictine Monk)

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments.

Janet Kilburn Phillips:

"Nothing is better than Organic"
 - Mike Haasl

(Nothing --> adding nothing to your plants)

The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.
~ Joel Salatin

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

Alfred Austin

"But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that." ~ Edna Ferber

"A weed is but an unloved flower." -  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

(My kids keep trying to understand how anyone can think of dandelions as weeds, when they're such fantastic plants. They have only ever known them as beloved flowers for munching, glorious seeds for blowing, and medicinal leaves for tea making)