13: Not Half Bad
1. Now THIS is a holy mackerel! Sunfish actually.
2. Sometimes it’s like writing in school detention / THE GREAT WAY HAS NO IMPEDEMENT / THE GREAT WAY HAS NO IMPEDMENT / 100 times over on the blackboard of my mind… Other times it’s the ultimate education / ONCE YOU PLANT DEEPLY THE LONGING FOR PEACE / ONCE YOU PLANT DEEPLY THE LONGING FOR PEACE / and a firsthand knowledge sinks in… Read The School of Passage Meditation in its entirety HERE.
3. Most interesting sign posted on Facebook from the Women’s March: Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi Potus.
4. Moss refers to caring for feral cats as a “chosen path” that has added new life to her experience of older age. She describes the experience as “difficult, but meaningful and helpful in my becoming more patient, open, curious, grateful and aware of how great the struggle for life and evolution is…” -Read the rest of my review of my friend Alwyn’s new book, Never Love a Feral Cat, HERE.
5. I finally found a use for our plastic spinner sled that has no brakes or steering. It’s great for transporting snowman body parts. See HERE.
6. I’m still impressed with how she seamlessly rhymes words like strangers and dangerous and how her songs paradoxically give me chills and get me dancing at the same time… – More on Morgan Wade’s CD release of, Puppets with My Heart, HERE.
7. Do you see a half moon as half empty or half full?
8. “We join spokes together in a wheel / But it is the center that makes the wagon move / We shape clay into a pot / But it is the emptiness inside that hold whatever we want / We hammer wood for a house / But it is the inner space that makes it livable / We work with being / But non-being is what we use.” – Lao Tzu
9. Somehow some of my wordplay that I’ve posted on this blog has ended up in someone’s book, the Third International Anthology on Paradoxism. See HERE.
10. According to the dictionary, paradoxism is an avant -garde movement in literature, art, and philosophy, based on the use of antitheses, antinomies, contradictions, oxymorons, and paradoxes.
11. So how can you get the most out of a glass-half-empty mind-set? Decades of research have found that positive thinking isn’t always so positive. In some cases, pessimists fare better than those with a sunnier disposition. Studies have found that by setting low expectations and envisioning worst-case scenarios, defensive pessimists optimized their performance on a variety of tasks, from darts and math problems to fulfilling real-life goals. Optimism can also beget disappointment. In one study, psychology students were surveyed immediately before and after receiving exam results. Students who had anticipated a higher grade than they received were upset after learning their score; students who had underestimated their grade (i.e., the pessimists) felt better afterward… – From – From The Power of Negative Thinking/ The Atlantic
12. I love the way paradox rhymes with pandora’s box.
13. I love the Sufism of Rumi, the Teaism of Lu Yu, and Emily Dickinson’s sign of the cross: in the name of the Bee – And of the Butterfly— And of the Breeze.
__________Thirteen Thursday
January 25th, 2018 1:33 am
You quoted Chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching (your #8), which is my favorite chapter. I don’t recognize your translation, though I have maybe a dozen translations and would hand them out to students to read aloud in my “Religions of the World” class at Chattanooga State. Probably my favorite was in Ursula K. Le Guin’s version of Lao Tzu’s book:
The uses of not
Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.
Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s useful.
Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn’t,
there’s room for you.
So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.
Le Guin added her comment: “One of the things I love about Lao Tzu is he is so funny. He’s explaining a profound and difficult truth here, one of those counter-intuitive truths that, when the mind can accept them, suddenly double the size of the universe. He goes about it with this deadpan simplicity, talking about pots.”
Ursula Le Guin died two days ago, on January 22, 2018. She was one of my favorite writers.
January 25th, 2018 1:35 am
Snowman body parts! What a great idea!
January 25th, 2018 3:59 am
Wonderful 13, as always CR> Esp love the rewrite in #3. I’ll be singing it all day now. Thanks for sharing!
January 25th, 2018 7:36 am
8 – a real favorite
January 25th, 2018 11:33 am
Lao Tzu is like Confucius meets Dr. Seuss!
January 25th, 2018 7:02 pm
7. Neither, I see it as the best time to look at the moon with a telescope. Shadows show up and give the moonscape greater definition. I am also fascinated with the line between the dark and the light of each half. I don’t know why but I love examining it up close.
January 26th, 2018 11:40 am
#3 is fantastic. I take it you didn’t get paid for your words that someone stole for a book? Bad person, bad!
I have Ursula Le Guin’s Lao Tzu translation and plan to make a study of it – as soon as I finish my taxes.
January 28th, 2018 10:50 pm
On #9: Are you to be congratulated because your interesting thoughts found a wider audience or commiserated with because someone stole your work? … how did you even find out about being included?
On #11: Maybe I need to start blogging about I can’t sleep because I worry about what BLOTUS and his cronies are doing to our country … or that half of our neighbors have the flu and we’ll probably be next … blah blah … maybe being Pollyanna and making the blog my happy place won’t work to keep me sane after all.
On every other number (and those two too): Thank you!!!!
January 29th, 2018 3:57 pm
#9 I sometimes google my name to find stuff like that and that’s how I found out. At least I was credited.
#11 I try to keep my humor but also keep a watch and pass on what I learn, good or bad.