My time has come to a close on another trip to Japan. Over the past 15 years I’ve been blessed to visit 3 times, including a year in 2007. I’ve experienced a lot that I never dreamed I would do. I don’t know if I will ever be back, but I’m glad I’ve had this trip to soak in a beautiful culture once again.
Japan is a mind blowing country. I have never seen anything like it.
This place still enchants me. Florida is flat and Alaska is anything but. I wish I had more time to explore.
Hello there! I will be out traveling and away from my normal routine of posting. I’m going to schedule some posts, but don’t know how much time I will have to check in and read here.
I’ll do my best to check in and say hello. I hope everyone stays safe out there!
“I’m tired, people. I’m tired of everything. I’m tired of hate. I’m tired of politics.
I’m tired of living behind an eyepatch because I need to protect my family.
I’m tired of aggressive misappropriations. I’m tired of zealots. I’m tired of ignorance leading the day. I’m tired of stupid people having really stupid opinions.
This world is going to hell & I don’t want to go for that ride.
We’ve backed ourselves into a corner & now we can only choose evil. It’s heartbreaking & stressful.
Those who know me know that I haven’t been myself lately.
This is a dark period for our society. We will not look back on this time fondly. There is a lot of pain out there.
If you do not condemn the hate, then you are accepting it. Love is not enough. It is not us & them. This is agendas. This is the media choosing what they want to tell the public to support their own ideals.
Take a moment to decide how you want to live your life.
I choose to not be part of any group. I do not represent anyone outside of myself. I am me. Judge me for my own actions.
I will do my best to honor you in the same fashion.”
I wrote this in the fall of 2016. We have changed nothing since then. We still are choosing political parties and special interest groups over our children and neighbors. What will it take for us to learn?
“Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”
William Blake
“Spread love everywhere you go: first of all in your own house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor… Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.”
–Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta
“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” – Dorothy Parker
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” – William Butler Yeats
Image by Brin Weins from Pixabay
“Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.”
― Yogi Berra
“Having a low opinion of yourself is not ‘modesty.’ It’s self-destruction. Holding your uniqueness in high regard is not ‘egotism.’ It’s a necessary precondition to happiness and success.”
― Bobbe Sommer
“Eating the peach is a meditation. Your mind empties of all the must dos and should have dones. You are pure being. Your lover’s tongue is the key that turns the lock that opens the pleasure box. Life has few perfect moments; moments of cunnilingus score the highest on the sex blissometer.”
― Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
This makes me so thirsty! I hope y’all are having a wonderful St. Patrick’s Day!
Born and raised in Arizona. This speaks to me.
Be careful the energy you put out into the world.
But how can you be sure?
This is true love-you think this happens every day?
-The Princess Bride, William Goldman
No poem today. I’m going to take the day to grieve for Kristoff. I’ll be back tomorrow.
“…mercy’s a business, I wish it for you
More than just ashes when your dreams come true…”
-Fire On The Mountain- Grateful Dead, words by Robert Hunter
“Home is the nicest word there is.” – Laura Ingalls Wilder
“The world’s big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”
― John Muir
“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
Gautama Buddha
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” – Mark Twain
Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay
“One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
“After all, perhaps dirt isn’t really so unhealthy as one is brought up to believe.”
― Agatha Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia
“There’s nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
“Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, Be not afraid of my body.” -Walt Whitman
“I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the alter of language and purity and tolerance.” – Stephen Fry
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
“I may not be a cactus expert but I know a prick when I see one.”
– Dorothy Parker
Image by icondigital from Pixabay
I hope everyone has a happy and healthy new year. Much love to y’all!
A few scenes from my walk around Anchorage today. It’s a beautiful town. I wish I had more time to dig a little deeper.
“Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
“He didn’t mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn’t matter.”
― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”
― William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau
“The proof of love is in the works. Where love exists, it works great things. But when it ceases to act, it ceases to exist.”
–Pope St. Gregory the Great
“When you choose your friends, don’t be short-changed by choosing personality over character.”
― W. Somerset Maugham
This is amazing.
“Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn’t blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won’t cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset.”
― John D. MacDonald
“If you’re in the middle of the ocean, with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment.” – Tom Waits
“In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.”
(Frauds on the Fairies, 1853)”
― Charles Dickens, Works of Charles Dickens
“I don’t trust anything that popular. It borders on the levels of Nazism or the Macarena.”
“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
“Even his fucking was binary, a sorting process by which certain practices could be tried and found wanting or approved and accorded benchmark status.”
“Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.”
― Walt Whitman
“We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems
“I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversations.” – George Bernard Shaw
“All it takes is faith, trust, & a little pixie dust.”
– Peter Pan ✨
“I’ve always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you’re over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he’s not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he’s into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags.”
― Tana French, Faithful Place
“What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; th’unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield.
– Milton: Paradise Lost, 1667
“My honor is dearer to me than my life.”
– Cervantes: Don Quixote, 1604
“The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.”
– Leon Trotsky
“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.”
― Edith Sitwell
“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
― Albert Einstein
“I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.” – Frida Kahlo
“Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck.”
― Joss Whedon
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anaïs Nin
“By being natural and sincere, one often can create revolutions without having sought them.”
― Christian Dior
“To try to become a saint.”
– John Coltrane (when asked what he was going to do next)
“I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
There are few things better in this life than day baseball.
“You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
“Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.”
― Margaret Chittenden
“Every man’s life is a fairy tale written by God’s fingers.” – Hans Christian Andersen
Image by iris Vallejo from Pixabay
“With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”
― Aristotle
“If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“…Anxiety makes more heroes than history would care to repeat.” – Nikita Gill
I was fortunate enough to see Bob Weir & the Wolf Brothers last night. It was an amazing show. I definitely recommend seeing them or Dead & Company this summer.
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” – William Butler Yeats
Image by Brin Weins from Pixabay
I’ll just leave this here…
In honor of breast cancer awareness month…💝🎀
“Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Music gives color to the air of the moment.”
Karl Lagerfeld
“Don’t vote, it just encourages the bastards.”
-P.J. O’Rouke
“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
― James Baldwin
“Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.”
Ambrose Bierce
“The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.”
Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
“A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive
“True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
“Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.”
Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.”
― Jerry Garcia
“Show me a man who doesn’t go down on his wife and I’ll show you a man whose wife I can sleep with, tonight.”
– Leo Durocher
“The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.”
― Robert Frost
“A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous.”
― Coco Chanel
“Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.”
― Oscar Wilde
“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”
― Pablo Neruda
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard’s Egg
“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
― Oscar Wilde
“The time has come, my little friends, to talk of other things
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings
And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings
Calloo, Callay, come run away / With the cabbages and kings”
– The Walrus
Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.- John Quincy Adams
“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”
― Coco Chanel
“I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.”
― Rita Mae Brown
“It always seems impossible until its done.” – Nelson Mandela
“My second home is a third world cantina.” – Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers
“I am not young enough to know everything.” – Oscar Wilde
Rachel! It’s not exact, but here you go.
“Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.”
– It’s A Wonderful Life
P.S. I’m super excited that I can figure out how to insert links. An old dog CAN learn new tricks! Ta-da! (spirit fingers)
“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”
– W.H. Auden
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” – Mark Twain
Captain Q 