Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you're in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.

Karl Marx

Because in the end, you won't 

remember the time you spent working

 in the office or mowing the lawn. 

Climb that goddamn mountain.

Jack Kerouac

nothing to protect, nothing to defend

Above all, don't let your ego stand in the way. Self-image is constructed by the ego. It gives you a facade that you can show the world, but it also turns into a shield behind which you hide. If you let your self-image stand in the way, you can't be open and receptive. Real change requires a relaxed, natural attitude. Sadly, most people expend untold energy in protecting their self-image, defending it from attacks both real and imagined. Instead, take the attitude that there's nothing to protect and nothing to defend. You want to be strong, but true strength comes from love that is certain and self-sufficient. False strength comes from building a wall of self-defensiveness.

Excerpted from Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul by Deepak Chopra

she was a phantom of delight

she was a phantom of delight

when first she gleam'd upon my sight

a lovely apparition, sent

to be a moment's ornament

her eyes as stars of twighlight fair

like twilight's, too, her dusky hair

but all things else about her drawn

from may-tine and the cheerful dawn

a dancing shape leading away

to haunt, to startle, and waylay

william wordsworth

excerpted from she was a phantom of delight

Is Sugar Toxic?

Gary Taubes wrote an extremely interesting article for The New York Times about how our bodies process and react to sugar and how sugar consumption ultimately affects our long-term health. Read it here.

{photo courtesy of NY Times}

Wild Geese

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good
you do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting,
you only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across landscapes
over prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clear blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

It was

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us...

excerpted from Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities

How striking it is that this passage, penned more than a century and a half ago, remains current.

watch with glittering eyes

and above all, watch
with glittering eyes
the whole world around
you because the greatest
secrets are always hidden
in the most unlikely places
those who don't believe in
magic will never find it

Roald Dahl

{via THAT KIND OF WOMAN}

Snow-bound

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow; and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight; the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, inclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

The Snow-Storm by Emerson

MN is having a blizzard, maybe the biggest since '91! This morning we went on a snow-hike. We stopped for coffee and rested in snow-recliners in a snow bank. We shoveled and shoveled and shoveled. We gazed through icy eyelashes at everything made beautiful with a fresh blanket of snow. Tonight we'll sit by the radiant fire.

28 Secrets to Happiness

1 live beneath your means and within your seams
2 return everything you borrow
3 donate blood
4 stop blaming other people
5 admit it when you make a mistake
6 give all the clothes you haven't worn in the last 3 years to charity
7 every day do something nice and try not to get caught
8 listen more; talk less
9 every day take a 30 minute walk around your neighborhood
10 skip 2 meals a week and donate the money to a good cause
11 strive for excellence, not perfection
12 be on time
13 don't make excuses
14 don't argue
15 get organized
16 be kind to people
17 be even kinder to unkind people
18 let someone cut ahead of you in line
19 take time to be alone
20 reread a favorite book
21 cultivate good manners
22 be humble
23 understand and accept that life isn't always fair
24 know when to say something
25 know when to keep your mouth shut
26 don't criticize anyone for 24 hours
27 learn from the past, plan for the future, and live in the present
28 don't sweat the small stuff

-excerpt from The Simple Living Guide

I am going to focus on one thing each day this month.

If You Forget Me

I want you to know one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

by Pablo Neruda

Griffin + Sabine

I was fortunate that a friend lent me Griffin and Sabine, an epistolary novel. The trilogy, by Nick Bantock, consists of a series of letters and postcards between Griffin Moss, a lonely artist in London, and Sabine Strohem, a postage stamp illustrator living in the South Pacific. Their artistic correspondence reveals their deep affection for one another an ocean apart. Will they spend their lives together or is Sabine just a figment of Griffin's imagination?

{Thanks, Catie!}

The Lacuna

lacuna
definition: empty space, opening in a solid object, pause, interruption, break, breach, interval

I recently finished reading The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver(loved The Poisonwood Bible). With her biology background, she not only offers up great novels, but interesting bits about nature.

"Kingsolver's ambitious new novel, her first in nine years (after the The Poisonwood Bible), focuses on Harrison William Shepherd, the product of a divorced American father and a Mexican mother. After getting kicked out of his American military academy, Harrison spends his formative years in Mexico in the 1930s in the household of Diego Rivera; his wife, Frida Kahlo; and their houseguest, Leon Trotsky, who is hiding from Soviet assassins. After Trotsky is assassinated, Harrison returns to the U.S., settling down in Asheville, N.C., where he becomes an author of historical potboilers (e.g., Vassals of Majesty) and is later investigated as a possible subversive. Narrated in the form of letters, diary entries and newspaper clippings, the novel takes a while to get going, but once it does, it achieves a rare dramatic power that reaches its emotional peak when Harrison wittily and eloquently defends himself before the House Un-American Activities Committee (on the panel is a young Dick Nixon). Employed by the American imagination, is how one character describes Harrison, a term that could apply equally to Kingsolver as she masterfully resurrects a dark period in American history with the assured hand of a true literary artist." {via Amazon}

Olivia

by Ian Falconer

Puff the Magic Dragon

Charming illustrations for a classic song that I can't stop singing.
by Peter Yarrow and Lenny Lipton, Illustrations by Eric Puybaret

This is London by M. Sasek

Miroslav Sasek's illustrations are delightfully charming. I would love to collect the series.

A New Earth

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind. When you recognize it for what it is, you no longer misperceive it as somebody's identity. Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You don't take it personally anymore. There is no complaining, blaming, accusing, or making wrong. Nobody is wrong. It is the ego in someone, that's all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others. You do not fuel the drama anymore that is part of all egoic relationships. What is its fuel? Reactivity. The ego thrives on it.

Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth

Into the Wild

We watched Into the Wild recently.

"Based on a true story and the bestselling book by Jon Krakauer. After graduating from Emory University in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless (Hirsch) abandons his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness. Along the way, Christopher encounters a series of characters that shape his life." {via}

It was a good movie. Not being familiar with the true story, we decided to read more. Outside features an interesting article- Death of an Innocent and there is a documentary- The Call of the Wild.

Now reading

I'm reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The movie is coming out soon. I get so entwined while reading this. McCarthy paints the post-apocalyptic setting of an ashy, baren land void of life clear as a bell for you. It makes me shiver.

Lolita

I just finished Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's most famous novel-a story of unrelenting, obsessive passion. Next up-Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi. I started reading that first, but learned that it would make much more sense to actually read Lolita first. Yep, the book is much more meaningful now.