Category: Calligraphy

I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.

…markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

You cannot reconcile creativeness with technical achievement. You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter…having lost the song, we pursue the singer. We learn from the singer the technique of song, but there is no song; and I say the song is essential, the joy of singing is essential. When the joy is there, the technique can be built up from nothing; you will invent your own technique, you won’t have to study elocution or style. When you have, you see, and the very seeing of beauty is an art.

No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

An AWAD subscriber wrote in:

The late Joan Didion wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

I have found this to be true throughout my life. I first discovered the real alchemy of writing one day at the age of 12 when my tears were not enough to soothe my pain and so I picked up a pen and wrote a poem. Since then I have been a graphomaniac and writing for me is like breathing. There have only been a couple of days in the last 40 years when I have not at least written in my journal and on those days I felt unmoored, unbalanced, and chaotic within. Writing is the anchor that helps me sustain my sanity in a very insane world and a place of soul communion. I am in love with the act of it and I thank God every day that I am simply capable of writing anything at all.

..it is healthy and necessary to associate *a piece* of our identity with our work.

For the entire history of our species, we have attached meaning to our role within our group. Hunter. Gatherer. Cook. Child protector. Warrior.

These roles have meaning because they signify our contributions. They represent how we spend our time and how we create value for one another. We would not survive as a species without playing a role in creating progress and opportunity for one another. Our roles represent the reciprocity principle.

Saying that we should not attach identity to our work is merely a way of protecting ourselves from the psychological impact of being stripped of that aspect of our identity. It is painful to quit a job precisely because our identity is tied to our role in the group. It is even more painful to be fired for the exact same reason. I have done both and I cannot honestly say that one is easier than the other.

Source

The individual has to wake up to the fact that violence cannot end violence; that only understanding and compassion can neutralize violence, because with the practice of loving speech and compassionate listening we can begin to understand people and help people to remove the wrong perceptions in them, because these wrong perceptions are at the foundation of their anger, their fear, their violence, their hate.

We have to remain human in order to be able to understand and to be compassionate. You have the right to be angry, but you don’t have the right not to practice in order to transform your anger… When you notice that anger is coming up in you, you have to practice mindful breathing in order to generate the energy of mindfulness, in order to recognize your anger and embrace it tenderly so that you can bring relief into you and not to act and to say things… that can be destructive. And doing so, you can look deeply into the nature of your anger and know where it has come from.

Marginalian

But when I began researching Robert Moses’ expressway-building, and kept reading, in textbook after textbook, some version of the phrase “the human cost of highways” with never a detailed examination of what the “human cost” truly consisted of or of how it stacked up against the benefits of highways, I found myself simply unable to go forward to the next chapter. I felt I just had to try to show—to make readers not only see but understand and feel—what “human cost” meant.