September 24, 2025
Gleanings
- “You don’t get the wisdom before you’ve lived it, you don’t get to jump ahead and think you can know all there is to know!”
- But is there a “there” there? Isn’t that old saying true, that the grass really IS greener? Wherever you go, whatever mountain you summit, you get a new view—a new destination, even if it’s not a higher mountain. Just, you know, more road. Someplace you’d rather be.
- In spite of everything or because of it, to be splendid, to not squander our gifts, to keep our joy, to use our imagination, to live urgently enchanted, to share poetic excellence, to practice our practice, to love and be wholehearted and divinely blissfully stupidly human — this is our task.
- What we really need to do, instead of switching off, is to find ways to care and stay tuned in. We need to manage this tuned-in newsy flow sensibly, while still hanging onto our health and (general) happiness and warding off overwhelm. I think we’re all grappling with this.
- The key, it seems to me, is to focus on shaping a life that you love and feel is a good-faith effort towards responding with urgency and congruency to the times we are living in, but not getting lost in the details or a sort of brittle perfectionism that ultimately alienates you from others, and even you from yourself.
- I know, I know. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Look around, use logic. I know. But I went straight to zebras; I always go straight to zebras. I thought, THERE IS A GHOST IN HERE AND IT THREW MY GUITAR ON THE FLOOR.
- I happily left almost ten years ago and did the (hardest) work to entrench myself in a new place, in the same ways because I always had the feeling I needed to keep moving forward. It’s a hard thing to explain, but I had the sense I wasn’t finished growing and I needed a bigger pot, so each opportunity that came to move to one, I took it.
- Looking “away” from “news” on social media does not mean you’re “burying your head in the sand.” It means you’re engaging with human beings instead of road-raging avatars.
- There are four of us in this relationship, a kind of wild alchemy with no one in total control. And the outcome can be glorious and disastrous.
- This wasn’t community service. It was me getting high off the rush of being the useful expert, of being helpful to strangers on the internet, like the service writer/editor I once was. The very overfunctioning “I can help” behaviour that landed me on leave in the first place, now dressed up as “community care.”
- Time to pull out the winter blankets, the warm coats, though the sun is shining. How cold the water was as I swam my lengths, arms reaching forward, then back, my torso not quite straight. One of my last.
- Today, I’m distracted and very very tired. I hate this predictive text — in very faint letters, if I’m not typing at max speed or if the word is long, some AI program embedded in this app will add in the letters that it believes should finish my word or thought. And mostly it’s wrong! Even when it’s right, I perversely (personally, it just wrote!!!) want to write something different, original. I need to turn this feature off. It is not serving me or my imagination.
Thanks for including me this in this, Kerry — even with my typo! Just saw it now: “arms reading” instead of “arms reaching”. But maybe they were reading too?
I would have fixed it if I’d noticed it. (I am NOT the most detail oriented…)