Fear Fences

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt  

"Vulnerability is the birthplace of courage. And courage is not doing something because you're fearless. Courage is doing something because you may be afraid and you do it anyway."

Col. Dede Halfhill

A BIG Thank You to all those in the Arena right now, risking your physical and mental health, and then being judged and slammed by the very people you are trying to help. I may not always agree with what you are doing, that is okay. There seems to be no circumstance and resulting action that everyone will ever agree on and if we all waited to find the perfect answer before taking any action this world would be unfit to live in so thank you for doing what you can for all of us in spite of all the criticism from the sidelines, What you are doing counts and I admire and appreciate your courage. 

There is no scale to heroic action... anything we do to face a fear and help someone else is heroic and has a ripple effect that cannot be measured. No act is too small to count!!

May those ripples inspire more of us to recognize that hiding from our fear gives fear the power and give us the strength to face and break through the cages fear puts us in. 

Today's paradox: in not standing up to our fears we end up a bully to ourselves trying to hide it. 

(yes I've used the Theodore Roosevelt quote before, I intend to make a copy for my wall framed in barbed wire to remind me everyday of how want to live and the exhilaration of breaking past fear's restraints)

https://ideas.ted.com/why-barbed-wire-yes-barbed-wire-was-as-transformative-as-the-telephone/

Acknowledgement: both of today's quotes were sourced from Brene Brown from this link:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brene-brown-cope-coronavirus-pandemic-covid-19-60-minutes-2020-03-29/  

Cheers

Jeanne

Oaks and Turtles

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. 

Greek proverb  

Everyday we are planting seeds that will grow well beyond our lifetime. We can choose the seeds we want to plant... lots of people are planting trees and by their actions our children may end up with a forest remaining here and there. 

It would be nice to have some people planting mighty oaks ... an acorn takes a very long time to grow and is subject to many perils, yet it can provide shade for centuries if it is allowed to mature.

We all have acorns inside us, its those darn perils that seem so daunting our hard shells never even crack let alone germinate. 

Great opportunity now - the times they are a changing - some are sprouting. For the sake of the future I hope they are prolific enough that a few survive the minefields, the plastic wastelands and toxic air to grow strong and free. 

(reminds me of turtle hatch-lings trying to cross the beach to the relative safety of water through the gantlet of  predators that scoop them up and gulp them down for an instant's gratification -  the few that pass this hurdle have a chance to swim into a new world and face new predators - and the few that make it there have a chance to grow and face new predators.... it's a miracle there are any grown turtles.

Yet everyone one of these turtles could not do it any other way... hiding in the bushes or under a stone is not an option nor is attacking back or growing a harder more encompassing shell  to protect their vulnerability)

Anishinaabe artist designs Twitter Turtle Island emoji for Indigenous History Month

A special edition Turtle Island emoji can be activated on Twitter by using certain hashtags during the month of June.

The emoji, designed by Anishinaabe artist Nancy King who goes by the name Chief Lady Bird, was created in honour of Indigenous History Month. (June 2018)

Cheers

Jeanne

Who wants Easier?

“There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier?”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One  

“Have I lived enough?
Have I loved enough?
Have I considered Right Action enough, have I
come to any conclusion?
Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?
Have I endured loneliness with grace? 

- A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver

What does it mean to be alive? How do we awake to a life that fills us in the way we long for?

I think that the world is telling us to Wake Up and find the courage to be who we need to be to break away from the chains of being a superior human and thinking the world was created for us. It is calling for us to take our humble place in this world; we are no more and no less important than the tiniest and simplest of creatures, and when we cherish all we cherish ourselves. 

Go forth and cherish

Jeanne

About Mary Oliver

https://maryoliver.beacon.org/aboutmary/index.html  

Summer, 1964. Photo by Molly Malone Cook, from Our World (Beacon Press, 2007).

A private person by nature, Mary Oliver has given very few interviews over the years. Instead, she prefers to let her work speak for itself. And speak it has, for the past five decades, to countless readers. The New York Times recently acknowledged Mary Oliver as “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet.” Born in a small town in Ohio, Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28; No Voyage and Other Poems, originally printed in the UK by Dent Press, was reissued in the United States in 1965 by Houghton Mifflin. Oliver has since published many works of poetry and prose (the complete list appears below).

As a young woman, Oliver studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College, but took no degree. She lived for several years at the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay in upper New York state, companion to the poet’s sister Norma Millay. It was there, in the late ’50s, that she met photographer Molly Malone Cook. For more than forty years, Cook and Oliver made their home together, largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived until Cook’s death in 2005.

Over the course of her long and illustrious career, Oliver has received numerous awards. Her fourth book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She has also received the Shelley Memorial Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award; the Christopher Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light; the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems; a Lannan Foundation Literary Award; and the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence.

Oliver’s essays have appeared in Best American Essays 1996, 1998, 2001; the Anchor Essay Annual 1998, as well as Orion, Onearth and other periodicals. Oliver was editor of Best American Essays 2009.

Oliver’s books on the craft of poetry, A Poetry Handbook and Rules for the Dance, are used widely in writing programs. She is an acclaimed reader and has read in practically every state as well as other countries. She has led workshops at various colleges and universities, and held residencies at Case Western Reserve University, Bucknell University, University of Cincinnati, and Sweet Briar College. From 1995, for five years, she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College. She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from The Art Institute of Boston (1998), Dartmouth College (2007) and Tufts University (2008). Oliver currently lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the inspiration for much of her work. (Mary Oliver died January 17th, 2019)

"Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver

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.

Cheers

Jeanne