Quotes of the week
· Money is not power. I think that the real power is control over oneself. You can see people in power right now who have no control over themselves and that means they really have no power.~Roland Halle
· I don't have anything against work. I just figure, why deprive somebody who really loves it. ~Dobie Gillis
- "The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you." ~David Foster Wallace
· You have to stay in shape. My grandmother, she started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She's 97 today and we don't know where the hell she is. ~Ellen DeGeneres
- You’re not getting older; you’re getting better…medication~ Red Green
Meditation of the week
Aging is not easy, but what's our alternative?
- Helen Casey
The kind of attitude we developed over our lives determined how we saw every detail of each experience. Even now our attitude holds us hostage. The misunderstanding that many of us have is that we think we can't really change how we see our world. Nothing is further from the truth. We can make a large or small shift in our perceptions instantly. The outcome is that everything about our lives changes from that moment forward. Thus, how we perceive the aging process is controlled by our willingness to look at it again.
Helen has aged gracefully. At 86, she still finds time for making new friends, three bridge clubs a week, daily mass and frequent communication with her children and relatives. She carries a positive, hopeful attitude with her wherever she goes, which inspires others, young and old.
It wouldn't appear that aging has been hard on Helen. But the truth of the matter is that she has suffered many losses. What she has managed to hold onto, though, is her willingness to see every "glass as half full."
How lucky we are that we can "tinker" with our attitude for as long as we're alive, and if we aren't completely happy, we have work to do. As Helen says, there is no alternative to aging, except death. What happens now is up to us.
I am only as old as I decide to feel today.
Poem of the Week
6 by Gary Snyder
"In that year, 1914, we lived on the farm
And the relatives lived with us.
A banner year for wild blackberries
Dad was crazy about wild blackberries
No berries like that now.
You know Kitsap County was logged before
The turn of the century—it was easiest of all,
Close to water, virgin timber,
When I was a kid walking about in the
Stumpland, wherever you'd go a skidroad
Puncheon, all overgrown.
We went up one like that, fighting our way through
To its end near the top of a hill:
For some reason wild blackberries
Grew best there. We took off one morning
Right after milking: rode the horses
To a valley we'd been to once before
Hunting berries, and hitched the horses.
About a quarter mile up the old road
We found the full ripe of berrytime—
And with only two pails—so we
Went back home, got Mother and Ruth,
And filled lots of pails. Mother sent letters
To all the relatives in Seattle:
Effie, Aunt Lucy, Bill Moore,
Forrest, Edna, six or eight, they all came
Out to the farm, and we didn't take pails
Then: we took copper clothes-boilers,
Wash-tubs, buckets, and all went picking.
We were canning for three days."
Author of the week
It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer David Foster Wallace, (books by this author) born in Ithaca, New York (1962). He was a nationally ranked junior tennis player. He went to college at Amherst, where he majored in philosophy and English. For his senior thesis, he wrote a work of fiction. And when he was 24, that thesis was published as his first novel: The Broom of the System (1987).He decided to write a novel about a future America where everyone is addicted to something — sports, drugs, sex, or entertainment. It was 1,079 pages long, filled with footnotes, complicated sentences, literary and pop culture allusions, and philosophy. And that novel was Infinite Jest (1996), which became a best-seller despite being so long and so difficult.
David Foster Wallace suffered from depression for more than 20 years, and last year he committed suicide at the age of 46. He said: "The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
“You couldn’t make this stuff up, I dare you to even try” of the week
Pat Robertson, on Rush Limbaugh's hope that the new president fails:
"That was a terrible thing to say, I mean, he's the president of all the country. If he succeeds, the country succeeds. And if he doesn't, it hurts us all. Anybody who would pull against our president is not exactly thinking rationally."
Other examples of Pat Robertson’s rational thinking:
"Lord, give us righteous judges who will not try to legislate and dominate this society. Take control, Lord! We ask for additional vacancies on the court."
"I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period."
"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."
Video of the week
Websites of the week
http://www.randombuddha.com/
High Dynamic Range-technique (HDR) can create incredibly beautiful pictures which blur our sense of the difference between reality and illusion.
You’re not getting older; you’re getting better…medication~ Red Green
