All I want to be is by your side. 

 Do not use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe, to create, to learn, to think and to grow. 

—Professor Richard Feynman

 

If all a man does is to watch from the shore,

Then he doesn't have to worry about the current.

But if affection has put us into the stream,

Then we have to agree to where the water goes.

--Robert Bly

 

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 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 the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean 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 Wild Geese

"One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too

 is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. 

A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel 

affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to."

  Solzhenitsyn

*Mariah Fee (excerpt, or 'quote')

"We are paper thin. We exist on luck amid the percentages, temporarily. And that’s the best part and the worst part, the temporal factor. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You can sit on top of a mountain and meditate for decades and it’s not going to alter. You can alter yourself into acceptability but maybe that’s wrong too. Maybe we think too much. Feel more, think less.”

~ Bukowski

Nothing you wear is more important than your smile.  Be well dressed but by all means tend to that smiling.

The Fish Meets the Water Bearer

Linda Goodman

We searched for each other

in the most unlikely places,

among the most unlikely people,

and when our paths finally crossed,

it was for reasons so entangled

in our daily bread,

and the usual trespasses

that we might not even have noticed,

except for that faint quiver of wonder

like a passing chill from the night air.

We loved

and the closest we’ve come to explaining why,

is because it was you,

and because it was I.

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” - Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“No permanence is ours, we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.” - Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game 

“And it is also the only reward for my work: to feel what I have written is like the back of a cat as it is being petted, with sparks and an arching in cadence.” - Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch


“Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it.” - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

  

“We like lists because we don't want to die.”     ~ Umberto Eco

 Advice from the ex-con writer Gregory David Roberts, author of Shantaram, to all of us in our daily prison of our own making or of COVID-19

10) NEVER GIVE UP

We have no reason or right to give up.

The generations that came before us, that we carry within us, won’t let us give up.

The generations to come are relying on us never to give up.

Our human family has a sublime capacity to endure for one another and survive, and so far, we have carried the treasures of tenderness, caring and sharing through every terrible crisis that has ever confronted us.

We human beings are empathetic cooperators: when we stand together, nothing can stand against us; we are high-functioning adaptors: we can adapt to the arctic, the desert, below the sea and outer space; and we never give up.

In the church of my heart the choir is on fire.