Quotes of the week

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.~Julius Caesar
Whether it be friend or foe, talk not of other men's lives. ~The Apocrypha
The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace. ~Kate Chopin
Brevity is the soul of wit. ~Proverb, (Latin)

Meditation of the week

Condemn the fault and not the actor of it.

William Shakespeare

How many times do we beat ourselves up because we have failed to attain the goals we have set? We are human and suffer from a disease that renders us helpless and out of control. Is it any wonder that we fail in trying to dominate such an unforgiving beast?

It is not ourselves we should be angry with, but the disease and how it affects our actions and reactions. Often our only failing is to realize that we cannot achieve recovery alone. We need help. Without it we are weak and defenseless. This disease would have us believe we are failures, but in reality all we have done is open the doors to our enemy. These doors can be closed again; the disease not only manifests itself in the form of uncontrollable eating, but negative thoughts and actions against ourselves and those around us.

It takes no more time to think positively than it does to think negatively. Our only job is to remember that we have a disease. We can choose to forget it, we can choose to beat ourselves up when we left the door ajar or we can choose to forgive ourselves and begin again.

One day at a time ...
I will work on forgiving myself.
I am worth forgiving.
You are too.

Poem of the Week

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all."

Emily Dickinson

Author of the week

It's the birthday of Nobel Prize-winning author Hermann Hesse, (books by this author) born in Calw, a village in the Black Forest of Germany (1877). He's the author of the novels Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1929), and The Glass Bead Game (1943), as well as a large body of poetry.

His family moved to Switzerland, and then back to Germany, and Hesse enrolled in a Protestant seminary there. But he was miserable and would run away from school and hide out overnight in nearby fields. He tried to commit suicide, and was transferred from one psychiatric ward to another. Eventually, he got a job at a bookshop, where he spent 12 hours a day sorting through volumes of philosophy and theology, shipping some out and putting others in archives. At night, he went home and wrote poetry. He got his first collection of poems, Romantic Songs, published in 1898, but it was a dismal failure, selling only 54 copies over two years. But the publisher saw potential in the 22-year-old Hesse and encouraged him to keep writing.

At 27, he published his first novel, Peter Camenzind, and from then on, he was able to earn a living entirely from writing. He took a trip to India and started studying Eastern religions, and ancient Hindu and Chinese cultures. This knowledge and interest are evident in his novel Siddhartha (1922), a story about Buddha's rebellion against tradition and his quest for enlightenment. The novel was translated into English and published in the United States in 1951, and it soon was incredibly popular among beatniks and others who subscribed to the American counterculture of the decades that followed. In Siddhartha, Hesse writes:

And he found: "It was the self, the purpose and essence of which I sought to learn. It was the self, I wanted to free myself from, which I sought to overcome. But I was not able to overcome it, could only deceive it, could only flee from it, only hide from it. Truly, no thing in this world has kept my thoughts thus busy, as this my very own self, this mystery of me being alive, of me being one and being separated and isolated from all others, of me being Siddhartha! And there is no thing in this world I know less about than about me, about Siddhartha!"

During World War I, Hesse's life was in constant turmoil. He had written an essay urging German intellectuals to not succumb to the propaganda of patriotism, and now found himself the target of hate mail. Friends denounced him, his wife became schizophrenic, his father died, his son became seriously ill, and his marriage dissolved, all within the span of a few years. Hesse started going to psychotherapy sessions with one of Carl Jung's assistants, and Hesse became acquainted with Carl Jung himself.

After the War, Hesse remarried and wrote Steppenwolf (1927). The current pope once listed Steppenwolf as one of his favorite books, saying it "exposes the problem of modernity's isolated and self-isolating man." Hesse became a Swiss citizen, and in 1931 he got married to a woman who had first written him a letter 20 years before, when she was only 14. They'd kept in touch and met by coincidence several years later. She was an art historian, and 23 years younger than he, and after they married and moved in together, he led a peaceful and happy life, although he was placed on the Nazi blacklist for helping political refugees during World War II. He won the Nobel Prize in 1946 and quit writing novels. But he did continue to write poems and newspaper articles until he died in his sleep at the age of 85 from leukemia, which he did not know he had.

Hesse said: "There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself."