MsTiara’s Thoughts

From Jonathan Carroll’s Blog -http://www.jonathancarroll.com/blog/index.php

Most people like to imagine themselves as big novels– 800 page doorstops that include forty fascinating characters buzzing around each other, major crisis and triumphs, perhaps even a world scale event like a war or a natural disaster in the background. All of this preferably described with the panache and poetry of a Russian master like Tolstoy or a French wordsmith like Proust. But the truth is most of us live 243 page lives, if that. There are only a few major characters in our individual stories, maybe a mid-level crisis or two, certainly some triumph or tragedy sprinkled throughout. But none of it is profound or interesting enough to demand more pages, more explication, more background. Thoreau famously said most people live lives of quiet desperation. He could just as easily have said most lives can be summed up effectively in 200 page novels written by adequate midlist authors.

As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make believe continues into adult hood. Certainly I’ve lived my whole life through my imagination. But the world of imagination is there for all of us in a sense of play, of pretending, of wonder. It’s there with us as we live.

Jim Henson

There are no rules. And those are the rules.

Cantus Fraggle

I guess I was wrong when I said I never promised anyone. I promised me.

Kermit

Joy, real joy, comes so rarely in life that we mourn the death of it a long time.

Jonathan Carroll

The Ghost in Love

What can one do? Go home, love your children, try not to bicker, eat well, walk in the rain, feel the sun on your face and laugh loud and often, as much as possible, and especially at yourself. Because the only antidote to death is not poetry, or drama, or miracle drugs, or a roomful of technical expertise and good intentions. The antidote to death is life.

-Theresa Brown, from her article “Perhaps Death Is Proud; More Reason to Savor Life” in the New York Times, September 9th, 2008.

“Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”

And now, some gratuitous pictures of penises to annoy the censors”.

- Monty Python, The Meaning of Life

42

Dislocation
by Marge Piercy

It happens in an instant.
My grandma used to say
’someone is walking on your grave.’

It’s that moment when your life
is suddenly strange to you
as someone else’s coat

you have slipped on at a party
by accident, and it is far
too big or too tight for you.

Your life feels awkward, ill
fitting. You remember why you
came into this kitchen, but you

feel you don’t belong here.
It scares you in a remote
numb way. You fear that you–

whatever you means, this mind,
this entity stuck into a name
like mercury dropped into water–

have lost the ability to enter your
self, a key that no longer works.
Perhaps you will be locked

out here forever peering in
at your body, if that self is really
what you are. If you are at all.

I did someone a favor and they said thanks, I’ll worship you till the end of the week.

from Jonathan Carroll

http://www.yeondoojung.com/artworks_view_wonderland.php?no=88

I ran across this amazing photographer who took kids drawings and made them into photos (Wonderland). also check out Bewitched…

Hope you enjoy.

Which reminds me of the mother who tells her child, “When you’re walking through the graveyard at night and you see a boogeyman, run AT it, and it will go away.”

“But what,” replies the child, “if the boogeyman’s mother has told it to do the same thing? Boogeyman have mothers too.”

While much in this life is beyond our control, all of us hold the power to choose our friends. We can each be a Nobel prize winner at friendship. None of us are perfect friends always, but one way to think about friendship is in terms of carefulness. Be careful with those you love. And surround yourself with people who are careful with you. A good friend of mine devised a rather taxing standard for love and friendship - and a grim one too - “who would you want to become a refugee with?” If your neighborhood were hit by Hurricane Katrina, or Cyclone Nargis, who would have your back? Look around you today. Your parents have your back, your siblings have your back, your closest friends have your back. Keep it that way. And be sure they know you have theirs.”

Samantha Power, from her commencement speech at Pitzer College

There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chroniclers mind.

So Long and Thanks for all the Fish

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