Summer house

I want one of these...if you can't tell, it's a Russian Summer house with mosaic walls and beautiful stained glass! I'm not sure what other people would use them for, but I'd put plants and a comfy reading chair in it :)

original photo here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/russianjohn/4667122268/

empty.

We must empty ourselves, therefore, of the immoderately high faith we have in ourselves. Often it is so deeply rooted in us that we do not see how it rules over our heart. It is precisely our egoism, our self-centeredness and self-love that cause all our difficulties, our lack of freedom in suffering, our disappointments and our anguish of soul and body.

-Tito Colliander, Way of the Ascetics

Traveling...

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.


-G.K. Chesterton


El viajero ve lo que ve, la turista ve lo que vino a ver.

El propósito del viaje no es pisar tierras ajenas, sino pisar la tierra natal como tierra ajena.


-G.K. Chesterton

Work Rant.

Dear John Smith,

I know you are the only one with your name in your office, department, building, etc. BUT you are not unique or special, I assure you. When you fill out a form with a request for information and then put your email down as "John Smith" instead of johnsmith98@abcxyz.com I cannot send you an email. I CAN look in my outlook contacts for Smith, John and see approximately 368 people. The "advanced find" in outlook yielded no results when I tried to narrow the search by City, Office, or Company. Just thought I'd let you know what took so long getting your information back to you!!

Best Regards,
Jen

Beautiful Paper Sculptures

Check it out here...


http://community.thisiscentralstation.com/_Mysterious-paper-sculptures/blog/4991767/126249.html

(These have been given to libraries and have literary themes...)

Dedication/Vocation

"If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's." In his youth he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat...[Artists] possessed, I believe, powerful hearts, not poweful wills. They loved the range of materials they used. The work's possibilities excited them; the field's complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and kowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure. Then, and only then, the world flapped at them some sort of hat, which, if they were still living, they ignored as well as they could, to keep at their tasks."

Annie Dillard, "The Writing Life"

careful...

[The writer] is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.

Annie Dillard, "The Writing Life"

Schedules. Super important.

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order--willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterwards as a blurred and powerful pattern...There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading-that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur's life a good one, or Thomas Mann's?


Annie Dillard, "The Writing Life"

more Adam Bede...

Get out of bed!
"He had been awake an hour, and could rest in bed no longer. In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories."

On assessing beautiful women:"Oh, that is one of the matters in which old bachelors are wiser than married men, because they have time for more general contemplation. Your fine critic of women must never shackle his judgment by calling one woman his own;..."

On enjoying bad habits:"it was the last weakness he meant to indulge in; and a man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion, than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it tomorrow."

George Eliot, Adam Bede

some Adam Bede...

Blind Love:
People who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it. -George Eliot

Education:
But I'll not throw away good knowledge on people who think they can get it by the sixpenn'orth, and carry it away with 'em as they would an ounce of snuff. So never come to me again, if you can't show that you've been working with your own heads, instead of thinking you can pay for mine to work for you. That's the last word I've got to say to you. -George Eliot, Adam Bede

Social Events cause stress, but working all day is better!:
"I'd sooner ha' brewin' day and washin' day together than one o' these pleasurin' days. There's no work so tirin' as danglin' about an' starin' an' not rightly knowin' what you're goin' to do next; an' keepin' your face i' smilin' order like a grocer o' market-day, for fear people shouldna think you civil enough. An' you've nothing to show for't when it's done, if it isn't a yallow face wi' eatin' things as disagree." -George Eliot, Adam Bede

Even George Eliot thought spelling was terrible...

"It had cost Adam a great deal of trouble, ... — to get the mastery of his pen, and write a plain hand, to spell without any other mistakes than must in fairness be attributed to the unreasonable character of orthography rather than to any deficiency in the speller..." -Adam Bede

Joy.

The life you are meant to find will wring your heart to the point of breaking and then douse you with buckets of joy when you're not looking. --- Linford Detweiler

Annie Dillard's For The Time Being

"Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth." Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as read in Dillard's book.

"[The Labor and Delivery Unit of the hospital is] the wildest deep sea vent on earth…where the people come out"

“The very least likely things for which God might be responsible are what insurers call ‘acts of God.'" (of course this quote depends on your theology, but it's funny nonetheless.)

On writing letters. ha.

...the image of paul bent over his page, filling it with inky letters, illuminated by a flickering oil lamp, is a judgement on anyone who has ever claimed to have "no time to write,"... Cahill page 130 "Desire of the Everlasting Hills"

Beautiful quotes about Gardens and Plants

"Plants embody everything that I like to have around me: presence, personality, character. They are supple and therefore strong, yet softly-spoken and gentle; they are fragrant and delicate; they have movement, colour, structure, scale and proportion. Plants are large in form, tiny in detail and always a single whole. Plants are beautiful in sun and rain, in tropical heat, fighting immortal cold, dancing in the wind, buffeted by storms.
Plants have long been part of the earth’s history. They come from afar. Their beauty is deep and beyond question. It can be overwhelming; their fragrance beguiling. I look at my garden and I see vibrancy, opulence, serenity; I see dignity, playfulness, infinite tenderness, the nodding kindness of Herb Roberti, and in the larger, beautiful picture, I discover small, modest dots of colour that enhance the luxuriant whole."


"A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. It is close to us. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.

Enclosed gardens fascinate me. A forerunner of this fascination is my love of the fenced vegetable gardens on farms in the Alps, where farmers’ wives often planted flowers as well. I love the image of these small rectangles cut out of vast alpine meadows, the fence keeping the animals out. There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big."

(to see the whole article, go here- http://archidose.blogspot.com/2011/07/half-dose-89-serpentine-gallery.html )

Quote about hearts

All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one. But, as in their reading and arithmetic and drawing, different children proceed at different speeds. (It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.)

-Catherynne Valente "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her own Making"

Xenocide quotes

"Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.
...Humans mate with beings who challenge their supremacy. They have conflict between mates, not because thier communication is inferior to ours, but because they commune with each other at all."


Xenocide, Orson Scott Card