[Illustration, by Julian Peters, of a passage from T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. You can read a guide to the poem here — which is where I found this illustration itself. The complete 24-page comic can be viewed at Peters’s own site, here — you can even order a print version of it.]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
This is it. This is my personality, this is my body, this is my life. Just this life is it. It’s hard to describe the feeling of accepting this a little more deeply. It’s a feeling of settling in a little more, or settling down, or opening up, of ceasing to fight against what is. This is not to say that I don’t keep working on my conduct, that I don’t intend to keep studying and practicing, but somehow my attitude shifted a little lately. A little away from trying to be someone else, a little more squarely on just being this person. “Just be yourself” our teachers tell us.
Letting go of trying to be someone else is liberation. You don’t need to apologize anymore. If you really accept that this is it you don’t need to strive anymore, you don’t need to fight what is. You make effort out of joy, out of curiosity, out of compassion for beings, out of the sheer pleasure of engagement with the world. And when things don’t work out you aren’t thrown, you understand that as part of what this is. You don’t think, “oh there is trouble so I’m going about things the wrong way” rather you understand trouble as part of what this is. You adjust and react to the feedback of the universe but just as adjusting, just as reacting not as someone who has failed.
(Nomon Tim Burnett [source])
…and:
You know, you could not see me unless you could also see my background, what stands behind me. If I, myself, the boundaries of my skin, were coterminous with your whole field of vision you would not see me at all… You would not see me because, in order to see me, not only would you have to see what is inside the boundary of my skin, but also what is outside it.
Now, that’s terribly important. Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery, the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets is this: that for every outside there is an inside, and for every inside there is an outside, and though they are different, they go together. There is, in other words, a secret conspiracy between all insides and all outsides, and the conspiracy is this: to look as different as possible and yet underneath to be identical, because you do not find one without the other.
(Alan Watts [source])
…and:
When you live your life at peace with every circumstance of your life, favorable or terrible, you situate yourself at the still point of the turning universe. Then you are the world of cause and effect itself, you become this. You become, with nothing between you and it, this precarious world. You are precariousness itself and so you are no longer subject to precariousness. When you live like this you are the master of precariousness, the master of cause and effect, and then everything is blessed, just as it is.
Interestingly, the root of the word precarious is “prayer,” or “imprecation.” When you fully enter precariousness, our ordinary human world of one mistake after another, you are “full of prayer,” open to connectedness. Then you can see how a life of human limitation is also a life of grace.
(Susan Murphy [source])
Not from whiskey river:
It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few names, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don’t know what tongues the people who erected the standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don’t know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don’t know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don’t know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don’t exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?
(Rebecca Solnit [source])
…and:
Dangerous Life
I quit med school when I found out the stiff they gave me
had book 9 of Paradise Lost and the lyrics
to “Louie Louie” tattooed on her thighs.That morning as the wind was mowing
little ladies on a street below, I touched a Bunsen burner
to the Girl Scout sash whose badges were the measure of my worth:Careers…
Cookery, Seamstress…
and Baby Maker… all gone up in smoke.But I kept the merit badge marked Dangerous Life,
for which, if you remember, the girls were taken to the woods
and taught the mechanics of fire,around which they had us dance with pointed sticks
lashed into crucifixes that we’d wrapped with yarn and wore
on lanyards round our necks, calling them our “Eyes of God.”Now my mother calls the pay phone outside my walk-up, raving
about what people think of a woman—thirty, unsettled,
living on food stamps, coin-op Laundromats & public clinics.Some nights I take my lanyards from their shoebox, practice baying
those old camp songs to the moon. And remember how they told us
that a smart girl could find her way out of anywhere, alive.
(Lucia Perillo [source])
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