All the colors of Life - Lisa Aisato

 

All the colors of Life - Lisa Aisato

Our lives are full of color. We learn and change and grow, but on the inside, we are still ourselves. And in the end, what truly matters is that we felt we were loved. 

Many stages of life, for more or less everyone is:

A CHILD'S LIFE:

Remember playing in the summer rain?

Remember bring summer evenings and the scent of dandelions on your fingertips?

Remember how summer was greener,

Winter was whiter,

and Christmas was simply magical?

Remember being curious?

And how we discovered new worlds....

with forests filled with knights and elves?

We were ladybugs who didn't want to come in for dinner,

birds high up in the trees,

and guardians of the ocean floor. 

Some days we felt strong and invincible.

Other days we got scrapes and scars. 

Sometimes the world was unfair, 

and you had to fight.

But I hope you felt that you were loved.

A TEENAGER'S LIFE:

We stopped playing.

We got our first crushes and tried deodorant. 

Maybe you loved school.

Maybe you struggled through it.

Maybe you had a teacher you've never forgotten.

We changed,

and the grown-ups grew uneasy.

Some days we wanted to rebel. 

Other days we needed a dad.

One day, a grown-up asked if you wanted coffee too.

Sometimes the world got messy.

Other times it lay at your feet. 

I hope your wings will carry you. 

A LIFE OF ONE'S OWN:

You feel like you don't know the words to the song the grown-ups are singing,

You're unsure of the path.

May be being a student is overrated.

Maybe it's the best time of your life. 

We seek,

and maybe we find.

Such bliss!

To find....

the one...

to love.

But then everyday life comes along, 

and you need to keep pace. 

Maybe it all falls apart. 

Or maybe it's the tow of you.

A NEW LIFE

You wish there were a user manual

for difficult mornings,

days,

and nights.

It takes a toll.

You discover new sides of yourself,

you understand what it really means to be pressed for time, 

and a moment alone is simply golden. 

But now and then time stands still.

You see the whole world through new eyes, 

and you've never been filled with so much love,

A GROWN-UP'S LIFE

It used to be you playing in the summer rain

Maybe you've finally figured our who you are.

Or maybe you're still searching. 

some days we're strong and immortal. 

Other days we're just plain run-down.

The kids say good bye and move out. 

It's never been so quiet. 

Maybe you grow closer, 

or maybe it all falls apart. 

You can seek and find again

or carry on alone. 

Now we are the ones who have to take care of Mom and Dad. 

Suddenly we are the oldest.

A LONG LIFE

We have to start learning the song the retirees are singing.

But it's strange. On the inside you're twenty-two.

Maybe you'll have grandchildren, 

and Christmas will be magical once again. 

We finally have the time to do what we want

during the day

and at night. 

Maybe you're an optimist. 

Maybe you're scared and the world seems unfamiliar. 

But I hope she still makes you feel safe. 

I hope he still sees you. 

Then it's like your body is failing you. 

Maybe you forget what has passed. 

You will feel lonely, 

you will suffer loss, 

but you carry your whole life within you. 

I hope you felt that you were loved. 

Tejas

Written and Directed by Debutant Sarvesh Mewara,  but coming from the producers of 'Uri: The Surgical Strike', well known Ronnie Screwvala, 'Tejas' with a run time of 116 minutes has so much in it including Kangana; may be therefore  it not only failed to ignite interest but is made a laughing stock by some now? May be an overload of activity by a female individual who speak too much? Nevertheless, I enjoyed it and there indeed was so much to reflect on. 

Or is it the divided mindset of today that is stopping people from watching this as the lead character is Kangana? Two women, single handedly doing so much? Was that the issue? Though I was not in Mumbai on 28th Nov 2008, that evening is still fresh in my mind like 6th December 1991. Am sure the impact would be deeper on those who were truly effected. One group's terrorist is another group's freedom fighter, depending on which side we are, the perspective change. People giving life for their country are considered soldiers by their country residents/supporters and terrorists by others. When the war effect civilians the impact is altogether different.  May be those are the people who have given high rating for this movie? 

I have watched Jawan and Patan for entertainment, could not digest and sit through Jailer and slept off in the theater, but found this better than the  three. 

Tejas revolves around the extraordinary journey of Tejas the aircraft and the person, from the Indian Air Force, who is the all-in-one hero of Tejas who conflates women empowerment with nationalism, politics with patriotism, revenge with justice, and of course Pakistan with global terrorism. Two Indian women, a Sikh and a Muslim is involved in to so much of action/projects. Soo much of diversity.  A little too difficult to digest, may be,  for the audience?

The Women I Think About at Night - Mia Kankimaki

After her first book 'Things That Make One's Heart Beat Faster' on Sei Shonagon, a writer and court lady who lived a thousand yers ago in Kyoto, Japan; Mia writes again, about women, she thought about on sleepless nights when her life, her love or her attitude is skewed and it seems there is no end to the dark night of her soul. On those nights, she has gathered her invisible honor guard of historica women, guardian angels to lead the way. 

What can a forty-something childless woman do? Bored with her life and feeling stuck, Mia Kankimäki leaves her job, sells her apartment, and decides to travel the world, following the paths of the female explorers and artists from history who have long inspired her. She flies to Tanzania and then to Kenya to see where Karen Blixen—of Out of Africa fame—lived in the 1920s. In Japan, Mia attempts to cure her depression while researching Yayoi Kusama, the contemporary artist who has voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital for decades. In Italy, Mia spends her days looking for the works of forgotten Renaissance women painters of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and finally finds her heroines in the portraits of Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Atremisia Gentileschi. If these women could make it in the world hundreds of years ago, why can’t Mia? "(Missing In Action?) as Tony who had written his autobiography 'Born Wild' called her. 

The Women I Think About at Night is “an astute, entertaining…and insightful”  exploration of the lost women adventurers of history who defied expectations in order to see—and change—the world.

In this “thought-provoking blend of history, biography, women’s studies, and travelogue” (Library Journal) Mia Kankimäki recounts her enchanting travels in Japan, Kenya, and Italy while retracing the steps of ten remarkable female pioneers from history.

Karen Blixen - famous for  'Out of Africa', the book and the subsequent movie of the same name starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, occupies one third of the book.  After her divorce in January 1922 she wrote "These are difficult times for me, far, far, more difficult than, for instance, when I was ill," It is difficult to leave even a bad relationship. Even a difficult person becomes so close, your lives are so intimately and intricately woven together like the root systems of trees, that it feels as if you are tearing your own self out of your life.

January 1923 she writes to her mother "I should like to give all young women two pieces of advice: to have her hair cut short and to learn to drive a car. These two things completely transform one's life. .....can be tidied....you can really move as a man's equal. "

In August 1923 she wrote "I thing that there is a really fine time ahead for women and that the next hundred years will bring many glorious revelations to them -- I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open before them."

On the death of her "Love of parallels" Denys Finch Hatton at the age of 46, she returns home to Denmark after the coffee plantation that she had built up facing much difficulty goes under. Flying with him, she had seen the entire vastness of the East African plane. She then starts her writing life and becomes so successful, that she was even shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1962. 

There are beautiful letter exchanges through out the book. Karen saw her own life as an exhausting attempt to climb a steep mountain, as if she were constantly striving to attain some potential greatness in herself something that could be - and she envied her siblings their contentment with ordinary everyday life. 

Do we really have to be constantly striving for something difficult and scary? Why can't we just lie in bed in our parent's attic and watch the nature channel?

Writing of the books mean, actually writing, and you don't always need lawyers protecting against publishers. 

To be forced to silence....feels as if one is buried alive, lying in the darkness with the weight of the earth on breast, screaming....

"Ordinary "happiness" was clearly not for her. "

Writing, traveling, reflecting on how we want to live the few remaining moments in our lives. 

"Go and risk the entirely worthless life". You had to choose, those planning to marry had to be very clear on whether they are choosing lions or married life. Why a woman's childlessness is always considered a tragedy, and why her actions are so often interpreted as compensation for a lack of children. It's not necessarily a tragedy. It's just that if you take one road, you don't take another. If childlessness closes some doors, it also opens others. And why aren't men's action interpreted along the same line? 

Snowcapped Kilimanjaro, framed in clouds; in black, Mount Meru, bathing in the sunset; down below, the Momella lakes - breathtaking view. The refreshing thought that I am just a minuscule detail in the landscape. 

12 days into Savanna is quite a substantial journey into yourself. At first you'r afraid; then at somepoint you relax; and finally you inevitably come face-to-face with your own deepest essence. 

Karen Writes, I think I could be myself without a leg, but it seems to me to be so extraordinarily difficult to be myself without money.----Is it worse to admit that one suffers thorough poverty than that one suffers through loneliness or fear?

There were two sides to her personality, a strong one and not so very strong one. She had mood swings, she wanted to hide her weaknesses in every way she could. But wouldn't we all? This Karen has survived her losses and surveys her life calmly, as if from the air - like Denys from his airplane, from enough of a distance that even suffering looks beautiful. Her exemplary self, was the ideal towards which she strove her whole life, without ever reaching it. 

Night Women's Advise 1:

• Visit Africa. You experience all your feelings more powerfully in Africa, for good and bad. Everything is extreme: stunning nature, abject poverty and the insanity of the whites. 
• There is nothing to be afraid of.
• Be Brave, 
• Play the cards you're dealt.
• Even if you're sick, you can still live full-tilt.
• If you lose everything, start writing. 

Part II: Explorers:

After every travel, our head throb with pain, and we are torn up, constantly feel like crying, lie in bed for days on end, wiped out. Everything rubs the wrong way - nights, newspaper headlines, shopping. We no longer know how to live here. Our voyage might be fading like a dream. We wonder, how can something we lived so passionately disappear so quickly? 

I thought this was the problem only with me. I have seen this pattern time and again. Tired when home, Energetic and living, when out on a travel. Thanks to Mia for confirming that it is the same with her and her explorer night women too. They are a group pf perfectly ordinary middle-aged women who, having seen their familial duties through to their natural conclusion, decided to defy propriety and follow their dreams by traveling around the world alone, decked out in corsets and long dresses. Their attire was an issue. 

Cause most important right for women was Respectability and its key component, concern for one's reputation and the second shouldering ones responsibility - which was plenty. 

 Isabella Bird - Mia's doppelganger, a fortyish, depressed spinster, born in 1831 in UK, suffered from a spinal complaints, headaches, and insomnia from childhood. Doctors finally suggested open air and a sea voyage and so started her adventures. And her progression to being a  world traveller and 10 or so travel books. Her first voyage was to the United States. Her first book, The Englishwoman in America was based on her letters to her family. Her next trip was to Australia, from there to Hawaii and further to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado where she had some adventures with a one-eyed outlaw. Back at home in UK, her illness returned, and the antidote was another round of travel, the cycle kept repeating. In the process, she travels to Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaya, India, Persia, Kurdistan, Turkey, Persia Armenia. She was the first woman to be awarded Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. Two years later, she became the first woman allowed to join the Royal Geographical Society. She died in 1904. 

"I feel energy for anything except conventionality and civilization. Her umbilical cord was her sister Hennie. She voted civilization a nuisance, society a humbug and all conventionality a crime. She explored the American West and briefly fell in love with a mountain man named Jim Nugent. Though later she married John Bishop.  Though initially she disliked Japan, she later said Koyoto is the best arranged and best managed city in Japan. Apparently she had set up two hospitals in India. 

Become hire of may blessed memories making life useful and interesting. 

Night women's Advice 2: If you suffer from depression, frustration, or headache, set off on a journey. 

• Travel alone, preferably in the roughest conditions possible.
• Travel even if you're sick. Travel especially if you're depressed, frustrated or tired of your life.
• You can take your toughest trips in your sixties, irrespective of your situation
• Don't be afraid. Be tough. Be industrious. Write ten books.
• Learn to take photographs and use scientific instruments if you need to.
• Write about whatever you have to - never mind what: botany say or ethnography - even if you have no training in it
• Be Buoyant as hell. 

Ida Pfeiffer, the Austrian explorerborn in 1797 brought up like a boy by her father, she was forced into being a conventional girl after her father’s death. She was married off to a doctor 24 years her senior and had two sons by him. She secretly studied terrestrial globe. She decides to leave her husband after the kids grew up. Her first travel was at the age of 44 in 1840s, left Vienna, when Isabella was only 10 years old. First to Istanbul. She continued from there to Jerusalem, stopped at various places in between and then to Cairo, Rome and so on. An anonymous account of her travel that was published was an instant success and financed her next journey. She has travelled around the world twice, India being on her itinerary too. Apparently, she travelled in a bullock cart from Delhi to Bombay and ended up writing wildly popular travel books translated into seven languages.  

Setting off was easier the second time, as she had "already proved that a determined woman can get along in the world just as well as a man, and that there are good people everywhere." - and she did indeed need to rely on the help of those good people .

Night women's Advice 3: You don't need a reason to travel. Travel on a shoestring budget. Bum lodgings, if you can. 

• Avoid African interior, in extremity, if you can't make 'em laugh, run. 
• If you want to travel, go. You don't need a reason
• It doesn't matter if you're broke.
• Bum everything: trips, lodging, meals.
• Skimp. (Money. You can skimp on other things as well, if you like.)
• Write books, collect rocks, sleep under a table, if need be - do whatever you must in order to be able to do what you want. 
• If you find yourself in a place where the food customs differ from your own - say eating unusual animals, or other humans - don't panic. Eat whatever's offered. 
• Don't give a damn what other people think. 
• Be buoyant as hell. 

Mary Kingsley, the British woman  (1862 - 1900) having had a grim and lonely childhood, she first took care of her parents until they died, and in an age where the only women to travel to Africa were the wives - of missionaries, government officials and explorers - Mary decides to travel alone. She then goes on to live with the locals and travels alone to dangerous areas, among cannibals. She has published two books based on her experiences there, both of them were best sellers, she pokes fun at herself in both of them. One was called 'West African Studies'.

Back home, Mary fell quickly into her old routines as her brother's housekeeper and soon it began to seem as if the whole trip had been just a wonderful hallucination. 

Night Women's Advice 4: If you're all alone and no one needs you, you might as well go to West Africa to die and laugh all the way. 

• Don't blame your childhood or your mother. Just go. 
• While travelling in Africa laugh all the time. 
• Having no spouse or kids is not a threat but an opportunity. It's no inconvenience to anyone if you die. 
• Even if you only have eight years of game time, you can still experience more than many people do in a full lifetime.
• If you have a passion, study it. You don't need formal educaiton. 
• Always wear a long black skirt. 
• Be Buoyant as hell. 

Alexandra David-Neel, born Louise Eugenie Alexandrine Marie David (24 October 1868 – 8 September 1969) a Belgian-French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist, opera singer, and writer, she was the first white woman to have travelled to Lhasa disguised as beggar and completed the 'promenade'.  Her first comment was Lhasa is stupid place. She wrote over 30 books about Eastern religion, philosophy, and her travels, including Magic and Mystery in Tibet which was published in 1929. She began as a feminist and anarchist, and apparently, Iin 1891, she visited India for the first time, and met her spiritual preceptor, Swami Bhaskarananda Saraswati of Varanasi

She was an adept of many years study in Tibetan Buddhism, spent time as a disciple to powerful lamas, mastered many of the more esoteric practices of Buddhism, and managed to document many everyday rituals of the various tribes in Tibet whose cultures are rapidly disappearing. 

Some claim that David-Neel never made it to Tibet and all of her later writings chronicling her 14 years in the Orient were entirely fictitious. 

On 4 August 1904, at age 36, she married Philippe Neel de Saint-Sauveur. Their life together was sometimes turbulent but characterized by mutual respect. It was interrupted by her departure, alone, for her third trip to India in 1911(the second one was carried out for a singing tour) on 9 August 1911. She did not want children, aware that motherhood was incompatible with her need of independence and her inclination to education. She promised to return to Philippe in nineteen months, but it was fourteen years later, in May 1925, when they met again, separating after some days. David-Neel had come back with her exploration partner, the young Lama Aphur Yongden, whom she would make her adopted son in 1929. Legend has it that her husband was also her patron, while some say she had, at her marriage, her own personal fortune. Her marriage started to unravel, as her travels kept her apart from her husband.

During the 'promenade' through tough situation, after fasting for three days, ended up boiling and eating leather intended for soles of shoes. 

Night Women's Advice 5: Follow the path that opens before you, don't use your return ticket.

• In an emergency eat your shoes. 
• If you want to do something, do it.
• Seize the day. Follow your passion, even if it means stretching a one-year project into fourteen. Only the results matter-and the trip.
• If you want to be enlightened, move into a cave. 
• Proceed intuitively. Get by on little. Disguise yourself if need be. 
• If at times things are a little tough or cold, or you're a little hungry, you'll survive. 
• Don't fret: go. "As a rule things appear much more difficult and terrifying in the course of such discussions than when the moment of action has arrived." (Alexandra on the customs bridge leading to Lhasa.)

Nellie Bly:  Elizabeth Jane Cochran from America went around the world in 72 days emulating Jules Vernes fictional character Phileas Fogg who travelled around the world in 80 days. Her journalistic career began in 1885 at the age of 21 by writing an anonymous response to a column in the Pittsburg Dispatch titled ‘What Girls Are Good For.’ The editor was so impressed that he asked the author to identify herself and offered her a job. Her writings were considered controversial for those times - not all women would marry, what was needed was better jobs for women, how divorce affected women, the need for better divorce laws etc. She was shunted out to write about fashion, society, gardening, and the like. She moves on to the offices of Joseph Pulitzer from where she did an undercover story on the brutality and neglect at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York, which was later published as the book ‘Ten Days in a Mad-House.’ In her later life she became an industrialist and even an inventor in her own right. She was a phenomenal packer. 

To date, phenomenal journalist are nick named Nellie Bly. In 1895, Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman. Bly was 31 and Seaman was 73 when they married. Due to her husband's failing health, she left journalism and succeeded her husband as head of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co.

She ran her company as a model of social welfare, replete with health benefits and recreational facilities. But Bly was hopeless at understanding the financial aspects of her business and ultimately lost everything. Unscrupulous employees bilked the firm of hundreds of thousands of dollars, troubles compounded by protracted and costly bankruptcy litigation.[26]

Back in reporting, she covered the Woman Suffrage Procession of 1913 for the New York Evening Journal.

Bly wrote stories on Europe's Eastern Front during World War I.[39] Bly was the first woman and one of the first foreigners to visit the war zone between Serbia and Austria. She was arrested when she was mistaken for a British spy.

On January 27, 1922, Bly died of pneumonia at St. Mark's Hospital, New York City, aged 57. 

Night Women's Advice 6: Invest in coming up with good ideas, Travel with the single-handbag gambit. 

"If you want to do it, you can do it. The question is, do you want to do it?' - Nellie in 1889, having received the assignment to travel around the world with a day's notice. 

Part 3: Artists: Italian female painters 

The book covers three of them, who had barely any presence on the walls of the multitude of museums across Europe, yet had made their mark in a predominantly male world of 15th and 16th centuries. Florence, Uffizi Gallery and Pink floyd form an ecstatic holy trinity to Mia. Women then had three options, get married, hie them to nunnery or become prostitutes. 

Mia found them from 'Invisible Women: Forgotten Artists of Florence'  a 2009 book in English and Italian by Jane Fortune through the Advancing Women Artists Foundation (AWA) and published by The Florentine Press

Before this she was thinking of 17th Century, the Vennetian Arcangela Tarabotti spend time in nunnery but wrote - 'Convent Hell' and 'Paternal Tyranny' which were not published during her liftime. She zealously defended the female sex. 

Sofonisba Anguissola (ca 1532 -1625) was daughter of a noble family, born and raised in the city of Cremona in northern Italy. She is the first free woman artist and exemplar for all women artists. Wound up working in the Spanish court. Painted an extraordinary number of self-portraits and signed them "Sophonisba Anguissola, a virgin from Cremona, painted this herself with the aid of a mirror)". Her most famous paining is "The Chess Game", featuring three of her sisters - Minerva, Europa and Lucia. 

Night Women's Advice 7: You do whatever you like. I paint. 

• If you know what you want to do, do it. 
• If no one you know has ever done it before, so much the better. 
• Mark everything you do in big proud letter: I d i d   t h i s. 
• Advertise your skills. Distribute your calling cards. 
• In the pictures, look straight at the camera. Be sincere, calm, self-confident and wonderful 

Lavinia Fontana Artists daughter, later wife, mother, and career woman. Supported her large family by paining. Branded herself the favorite artist of noblewomen and earned like a man. Born on 24 August 1552 she was a Bolognese Mannerist painter active in Bologna and Rome. She is best known for her successful portraiture, but also worked in the genres of mythology and religious painting. She was trained by her father Prospero Fontana who was a teacher at the School of Bologna. She is regarded as the first female career artist in Western Europe as she relied on commissions for her income. Her family relied on her career as a painter, and her husband served as her agent and raised their 11 children. She was perhaps the first female artist to paint female nudes, but this is a topic of controversy among art historians. Her earliest known work, Child of the Monkey, was painted in 1575 at the age of 23. Though this work is now lost, another early painting, Christ with the Symbols of the Passion, painted in 1576, is now in the El Paso Museum of Art. Fontana married Gian Paolo Zappi in June 1577. The couple moved into Prospero's house in Bologna and Lavinia painted professionally, adding Zappi to her signature.She gave birth to 11 children, though only 3 outlived her: Flaminio, Orazio, and Prospero. In the midst of the hundreds of paintings, the portraits, the altarpieces, the astronomical fees, the success, and the praise, the baptismal record kept by Lavinia's husband was the list of birth of her 11 children and their names. She was constantly pregnant as she was building her remarkable career.  She died on 11 August 1614. She was like so many women today: a passionate, supernaturally hardworking and capable career woman who could do it all - work, kid, husband and her own aging parents - just with a few more kids, is all (I would add, without internet).  He painting were amazing, No one paints so well, just because her father or husband made her do it. Not like this. 

She fulfiled the 21st century self help manual's advice:

"To get what you want, you must act as if you've already gotten it. If you want to be a successful, wealthy career woman, you must dress as if you already were"....., to be rich, carry around check of million-dollar in your wallet. To be a writer-explorer, write on your calling card Literary Exploring and Human Experiments.

Night Women's Advice 8:  Do you want to combine family and career? No problem. You can have everything. 

• If you want a glorious career, make it. 
• If you plan to give birth to elecen kids while doing so, find yourself a man who is up to it.
• Follow your night women. Brand yourself. Paint yourself, the way you would like to be. 
• Bond with women but earn like a man
• Be industrious as hell
• Work out of passion
• If you suffer horrific losses, keep going. 

Artemisia Gentileschi. Reminded me of Susan Vreeland’s ‘The Passion Of Artemisia’. Artemisia at the age of 18-years was thrust into the local spotlight after she is raped by Agostino Tassi, a painter of some repute. Although Artemisia does not wish to file charges against Tassi, her father Orazio insists—although it is suggested that Orazio, also a painter, is less angry about the rape than he is about a missing painting that he suspects Tassi of stealing. Having already suffered a horrific ordeal, Artemisia steels herself for yet another: the rape trial itself. Because of how Italian society at the time treats rape victims, Artemisia feels as if she is as much on trial as Tassi is.

 Ironically, it is thanks in part to Tassi’s connections to Orazio that he is acquitted of any crime by the Inquisitor. Meanwhile, Artemisia suffers humiliation, abuse, and a ruined reputation at the hands of an intensely patriarchal society and judicial system. In addition to producing great paintings, Artemisia is expected to fulfill certain duties as a wife and mother. In an arranged marriage that’s thrown together rather quickly because of Artemisia’s supposed “lost virtue” due to the rape indictment, Artemisia marries a fellow artist named Pietro Stiattesi. The couple grows closer after the birth of a daughter named Palmira.

 After moving to Florence, Artemisia becomes the first woman ever chosen to join the Accademia dell’Arte, a prestigious and exclusive arts academy. Unfortunately, Artemisia’s success makes her husband Pietro intensely jealous, highlighting just one of the many unique challenges faced by female artists of the 17th century. Nevertheless, Artemisia’s womanhood is also an advantage in some ways. For example, she becomes known as one of the most accomplished painters of the female form, nude or otherwise. One of her most famous paintings of this first decade of artistic output is Judith Slaying Holofernes. This work depicts the eponymous Israelite woman of the Old Testament’s apocryphal Book of Judith decapitating an Assyrian general named Holofernes.

 After Artemisia’s marriage falls apart and she is lured to Genoa by new patronage, the artist is forced to raise Palmira alone, and much of the novel focuses on how motherhood serves as both a distraction to Artemisia’s work as an artist and also fuel for her work. Upon arriving in Florence, for example, Artemisia earns the attention and patronage of the famous banking family the Medicis, and in particular Cosimo de Medici II. Later, she has an enlightening conversation about the relationship between art and science with the famed astronomer, Galileo, telling him, "Where art and science touch is the realm of the imagination, the place where original ideas are born, the place where both of us are most alive." The author continues to follow Artemisia’s career all over Italy, from Venice to Rome to Naples. She constantly struggled with/for money. 

How absurd it is that nothing has changed in four centuries. Money matters, deadlines, working conditions, finding clients, marketing yourself, constant worries about workload, maintaining your ability to work, and how your work is received: all the same today as back then. You'll find the spirit of Caesar in this soul of a woman. - Artemisa

Night Women's Advice 9: Deal with your truma. Slay your Holofenes. it's all grist for the mill. 

•  If you know what you want to do, do it.
• If you've been humiliated or wronged, if you've suffered, don't get trapped in those experiences. Forge onward. Go to Florence. Or Rome. Or Venice. Or Naples. 
• Transform your wounds into your strengths. Paint them on a big fucking canvas for all to see.
• If there's something you don't know how to do, like reading and writing, learn.
• Imbibe the spirit of Caesar and hold it close. 
• Demand the same pay that men are getting
• Don't sell yourself cheap.
• Learn to negotiate.
• Don't grovel. 

The book concludes with the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who is sometimes called ‘the princess of polka dots'. Although she makes lots of different types of art – paintings, sculptures, performances and installations – they have one thing in common, DOTS!

Eventually Yayoi Kusama persuaded her parents to let her go to art school and study painting.

In the late 1950s she moved to New York as lots of the most exciting art seemed to be happening there. It must have been a bit frightening arriving in a big city with such a different culture from what she knew. But she was determined to conquer New York. 

As well as being an art pioneer, Yayoi Kusama put her creativity into other things including music, design, writing and fashion.

Yayoi Kusama's installation and sculptural works are inspired and informed by her memories of childhood abuse, repression, and trauma, and her ongoing experiences with mental disorder and sexual anxiety.

Night Women's Advice 10: Dive into what you're afraid of. Work like crazy. 

• Play the cards you're dealt. Illnesses and weaknesses are grist for the mill. 
• Surround yourself with what you fear. Laugh at it. 
• Ask the night women for advice. They'll reply, never fear. 
• Arrange your living conditions so that they're livable for you - even if that means a psychiatrc hospital
• Keep working.
• Still.

Perfect working conditions:

• Live in a hospital
• Live with a relative who cooks for you
• Live in a Tibetan monastery
• Move into a German castle with full room and board. 

Thus Mia:

"I boil Alexandra's tea and drink.

I examine Mary's fish to remind myself that any kind of passion can be meaningful.

I think of Isabela, who always felt better when she had tickets in hand for a sea voyage. 

I think of Yayoi, who accepted life's limitations and made money off them. 

I think of sofonisba, who sat in her cabin belowdecks on a sailing ship en route to the court of Spain, her cassone filled with paining equipment. 

I think of Ema Saiko with her travel permits at the checkpoints, who'd rather go to Kyoto to drink sake and write poems than get married. 

I think of Lavinia in childbed, longing to hold a brush in her hand again, and Artemisia taking things in hand in a series of new cities.

When I lie in bed with a migraine, I think of Karen and all the things she suffered through a hundred years ago, in Africa, alone. 

When I feel the pinch of dwindling finances, I think of Ida.

And when it comes time to pack my suitcase, I try very hard to think of Nellie. "

----

Writing first book is easy. Second; people keep asking - how it is coming along. 

The whole point of travelling is here: seeing and writing down what you've seen. For in some strange way the world keeps getting more marvelous and more meaningful as you write about it. Only as you write do you being to understand. 

'Msabu, do you believe yourself that you can write a book?' Kamante's words echo in my head. But what you write is some here and some there. When the people forget to close the door it blows about, even down on the floor and you are angry. It will not be a good book. (Out of Africa)

Night Women's advice: Write every evening. 

I know, I know. Force Yourself. 

I am a mountain, 

I'm a pebble in the current, 

serene as a stone,

ommmm,

I'm a gust of wind. 

Compassion for myself and others

try to see the truth about yourself, even if it's unpleasant 

use your energy wisely

don't cling to things either physical or mental

don't attach yourself to your identity, or imagine that it is unchanging, for it changes all the time. 

Everybody in this world seems to want to do something other than what they're doing right now, and how for various reasons they can't do what they'd like to do. .....Nobelwomen in the Renaissance would undoubtedly have preferred to do something other than give birth. ....Human cells are renewed so thoroughly that by our forties there is little left in any of us of what we were as children. .....Cell renewal can be used to explain practically everything. It makes everything possible: a new life, a new attitude, literal rebirth. 

A renaissance. 

It seems as if behind almost every successful night woman there is a father who in one way or another encouraged his daughter to chart an extraordinary path.  A heroic father who could be admired above all else(Karen); a strict father who educated his daughter like a son(Ida), an absent father whose approval was sought and whose life's work was continued (Mary).

And, somewhere in the background, the shadowy mothers: conventional, slaving in the kitchen, bedridden, ill, dead. 

Night women's advice: Whatever you do, find yourself a magic mountain. (Irresistibly pushing each person's work forward)

Come, Muses, 

                    Leave your golden (house)

Divorce

Divorce should be seen as an option of getting out of bad marriages. Better to get out, than being in a bad marriage. 

Top 5 reasons for divorces now:

In the court of law Men are considered guilty until proven innocent. 

In the court of social fabric women are guilty until proven innocent. 

Law in itself need time to evolve, it begins as very stringent. 

There is no perfection in life or in any law. It can be misused by anyone. 

Girl:

10 to 12 years of marriage - 2 children 

• Feeling - you have done your duty - what about emotional need. Start for looking friends outside, which is not acceptable in India - emotional support
• Patent adultery of the guy
• Mother In Law - You cant expect girl to do thing, and husband just move out and say it's not my duty
• Supressed - relatives important, and girl's voice not heard. 
• Domestic abuse - A lot. Educated uneducated. North abuse is unbelievable.  (Girls are expected to be like 2 minute noodle, change as soon as they enter a new home)
• Sexual compatibility. 

Creative difference, support to different political party etc. could also be a reason.  Difference in upbringing the child. 

Behind the media, people would want to keep it. For creative people, in their mind the rules don't apply. 

Court say live your life. They don't stop you from doing any life. Earlier Adultery was a crime, but now it is not. Earlier you could jail. Now you go only to social jail. 

Don't stop doing things you were doing before wedding. Continue doing superficial things. These things make you feel happy and save marriages. Explore each other.  So you will not have to hire divorce lawyers. 

India is a very strange country, bound by social fabric. 

------

Ex-Files ~ Vandana Shah

When to call it quits in a marriage

Marriage is a beautiful institution when both the partners are compatible and giving. Yet , it wastes no time in crumbling when one of the partner's out of step with the other. Here are some signs that tell you all is not right:

A change for the better: When one half of the couple is more ambitious and the other cannot keep pace with the change, chances are that one will completely overshadow the other.  When this happens and there is no recourse for communication and rapprochement, it’s time to call it quits.

Big, fat Indian weddings: These  are expensive affairs where the entire family are stakeholders in the marriage and expect couples to stay in it as return on investments. If society and family are the main reasons for sticking it out in a marriage, it’s time to rethink because  a reality check will tell the couple that it’s not really the family but two consenting adults who are in a

relationship together.

In it for the children: Having children in a warring relationship is tough. Wanting to protect them as caring parents is the most natural thing in the world. Yet, experts and counsellors will tell you that staying in a marriage for the kids may actually be detrimental to everybody involved. Children  have  a sixth sense and intuitively know when things aren’t working out. It’s time to take a stock of your relationship and figure out whether the couple is doing anyone any good by staying in a constantly bickering marriage.

Trust: The test of a healthy marriage is that partners have an increased sense of self-esteem rather than the feeling that they are prisoners in a relationship. If you are constantly doubting and cross-checking what your spouse says or does, trust has flown out of the window and sadly, so has your marriage.

When three is a crowd: Partners hire detectives to tail their spouses and when suspicions are confirmed, the information they have received is used as a weapon while  continuing the marital relationship. Couples  as martyrs don’t exactly  paint a pretty picture.

Either work on your marriage,  forgive and move on or confront and check out.

Use and abuse:  When the woman is in an emotionally and physically abusive marriage, she really needs to drop all other thoughts except ‘Let’s get the hell out of here’. There is no excuse or justification for staying on — be it kids, finances or the mistaken hope that he’ll change with time.

History, research and social scientists have proved that the abuser-abused is a vicious cycle and almost never changes.

-----

Society do not support Independent women. India is a patriarchal society. 

Men always called the shots, women were not economically independent, For children, women feel let us make it work. 

"When there is no love in marriage, there will be love after marriage." - This is greed. 

People are looking for bigger, better deals. 

There are marriages that work, not sure beautifully well. 

People stick to marriage, because they feel they have comfortable existence, feel ashamed what if child hear,  have no time, or feel things are worse outside. Shame, Fear, Karma - make people stay in marriage.

Obsession with one person wears off soon. It is habit that make people stick to the marriage. There is familiarity. Like the love for old T-Shirt. 

Guy: Get excited about big things, and forget small things. Girls get excited about small things. Men need to start doing little thing. 

Prenup is not legal in India. It is against the law. Marriage is Sacrosanct. Like religion, it cannot be questioned. We are a pro marriage country, and not a pro divorce country. 

Unacceptable form of dowry, 'Gifts', Mamaji rule - Shakuni/Kans

You should be happy with your choices, you should be responsible. Person should have similar thoughts, encouraging, EQ, these internal checklist are important. 

How do we save marriage?

• Communicate, speak, speak speak,
• Sibling you trust,
• Go to a councillor
• Go to a divorce lawyer.
• Relatives are like death nail in the marriage. (Relatives are relatives to your success) They will not forget. 
• Bad mouthing your partner is an absolute no-no
• Please talk only to people who is an outsider to the marriage.

Movie Provoked.  Absolute No is abuse. But it's grey and will change from person to person. 

Ostracism, 'Invisible women of India' - Widows of India - Son leave. 

Divorce - Unwanted house guest, who is here to stay. 

Divorce Kit :

• Have finance ready
• Have support kit ready - Non Judgemental. 360 degree back to life. 
• Children can see and sense, they are smart.
• Start doing your own research - know the lawyer. Get the best.
• Be mentally and emotionally prepared. 

Social legal process. Band baja. Where all are involved. House help is also called as witness. 

Hindu marriage act : Section 24 - Interim maintenance - provides grant for your livelihood when the case is going on. Court mandate husband give affidavit of income. Court draws evidence. 

• Councelling
• Settlement - get out of court if possible
• Go to next court
• Kids access 
• Stay at home

Actual judgement can take 8 to 10 years. There is no recourse. Your entire life is jammed. 

After 10 years, you can decide to remain separated. 

Law in India is Pro marriage, and not Pro divorce. 

Go for amicable - mutual. Mandatory cooling period - may be 6 months. 

Eliminate stigma on Divorce. 

Option for guy - keep dragging the case. he can date outside the country without being cost. 

Go with the aim of getting settlement. Divorce cannot be life. It is a sub-set of life. 

Don't get stuck in court. Have faith in higher force. 

You're aim is to raise yourself higher and not bring other person down. 

Choose the why in your goals. 

No marriage begins with the thought of divorce but sometimes things just don't work out, no matter how hard one tries.

Under domestic abuse, you feel humiliated. You start blaming yourself. Abuse victim become so week, instead of going forward, they feel like going back. 

360 degree back to life,  Vandana Shah started this group and wrote the book too. 'Invisible women of India' BBC broadcasted and started writing and got a lot of press coverage. 

25th Sept. Human Empowerment day. 

Mary Oliver – Gratitude Poem

 What did you notice?

The dew-snail;

the low-flying sparrow;

the bat, on the wind, in the dark;

big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance;

the soft toad, patient in the hot sand;

the sweet-hungry ants;

the uproar of mice in the empty house;

the tin music of the cricket’s body;

the blouse of the goldenrod.

What did you hear?

The thrush greeting the morning;

the little bluebirds in their hot box;

the salty talk of the wren,

then the deep cup of the hour of silence.

When did you admire?

The oaks, letting down their dark and hairy fruit;

the carrot, rising in its elongated waist;

the onion, sheet after sheet, curved inward to the pale green wand;

at the end of summer the brassy dust, the almost liquid beauty of the flowers;

then the ferns, scrawned black by the frost.

What astonished you?

The swallows making their dip and turn over the water.

What would you like to see again?

My dog: her energy and exuberance, her willingness,

her language beyond all nimbleness of tongue,

her recklessness, her loyalty, her sweetness,

her strong legs, her curled black lip, her snap.

What was most tender?

Queen Anne’s lace, with its parsnip root;

the everlasting in its bonnets of wool;

the kinks and turns of the tupelo’s body;

the tall, blank banks of sand;

the clam, clamped down.

What was most wonderful?

The sea, and its wide shoulders;

the sea and its triangles;

the sea lying back on its long athlete’s spine.

What did you think was happening?

The green beast of the hummingbird;

the eye of the pond;

the wet face of the lily;

the bright, puckered knee of the broken oak;

the red tulip of the fox’s mouth;

the up-swing, the down-pour, the frayed sleeve of the first snow—

so the gods shake us from our sleep.

[Gratitude is copyrighted to Mary Oliver and her Estate and Publisher. No money is made on the use of this poem.

Rebecca Solnit & Books

 

Contemporary Activist and Feminist; she is the author of many well known books. According to her stupidity and nastiness is contagious during this era of social media. Gaslighting is a collective cultural phenomena now. Solnit has worked on environmental and human rights campaigns since the 1980s, notably with the Western Shoshone . She has been and independent writer since 1988 writing for Harpers Columns. With a varied literary career, as a writer, historian and activist she has written on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster.  

Book was like a magic box, since childhood, and wanted to be a writer since childhood. Though first thought was to be a librarian. Work most central to the Vision is writing, so can write. Otherwise would have been pulled onto other things happening around. Her page is http://rebeccasolnit.net/

It is her book on Cinderella- her name contained Ella and as she is planning to rewrite Sleeping Beauty. Emma Watson Interviews Author Rebecca Solnit and Emma Watson is part of retelling of 'Little Women' with three possible endings. 

Prolific writer on feminism, her books are:

1. Secret Exhibition :  (1991) This is about Six California Artists of the Cold War Era 

2.Savage Dreams:(1994) A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West - In 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants that has yet to come to a real conclusion. A century later - 1951 - and about a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U. S. government started setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site, in what was called a nuclear testing program but functioned as a war against the land and people of the Great Basin. "Savage Dreams" is an exploration of these two landscapes. Together they serve as our national Eden and Armageddon and offer up a lot of the history of the west, not only in terms of Indian and environmental wars, but in terms of the relationship between culture - the generation of beliefs and views - and its implementation as politics.

3. A Book of Migrations: (1997) Some Passages in Ireland. In this acclaimed exploration of the culture of others, Rebecca Solnit travels through Ireland, the land of her long-forgotten maternal ancestors. A Book of Migrations portrays in microcosm a history made of great human tides of invasion, colonization, emigration, nomadism and tourism. Enriched by cross-cultural comparisons with the history of the American West, A Book of Migrations carves a new route through Ireland’s history, literature and landscape.

4. Hollow City : (2001) :The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism

5.Wanderlust : (2002): A History of Walking. What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? In this first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories to create a range of possibilities for this most basic act. Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the poets of the Romantic Age, from the perambulations of the Surrealists to the ascents of mountaineers. With profiles of some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction-from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Rousseau to Argentina's Mother of the Plaza de Mayo, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja-Wanderlust offers a provocative and profound examination of the interplay between the body, the imagination, and the world around the walker.

6. As Eve Said to the Serpent - On Landscape, Gender, and Art (2001): To Rebecca Solnit, the word "landscape" implies not only literal places, but also the ground on which we invent our lives and confront our innermost troubles and desires. The organic world, to Solnit, gives rise to the social, political, and philosophical landscapes we inhabit. As Eve Said to the Serpent skillfully weaves the natural world with the realm of art―its history, techniques, and criticism―to offer a remarkable compendium of Solnit's research and ruminations.

The nineteen pieces in this book range from the intellectual formality of traditional art criticism to highly personal, lyrical meditations. All are distinguished by Solnit's vivid, original style that blends imaginative associations with penetrating insights. These thoughts produce quirky, intelligent, and wryly humorous content as Solnit ranges across disciplines to explore nuclear test sites, the meaning of national borders, deserts, clouds, and caves―as well as ideas of the feminine and the sublime as they relate to our physical and psychological terrains.

Sixty images throughout the book display the work of the contemporary artists under discussion, including landscape photographers, performance artists, sculptors, and installation artists. Alongside her text, Solnit's gallery of images provides a vivid excursion into new ways of perceiving landscape, bodies, and art. Animals and the human body appear together with space and terra firma as Solnit reconfigures the blurred lines that define nature.

7. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003):

8. Motion Studies time, space and Eadweard Muybridge (2003) :

9.Hope in the Dark (2004): Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

10. A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005) : Written as a series of autobiographical essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Rebecca Solnit's life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place.

11. Storming the Gates of Paradise (2007) :Landscapes for Politics

12. The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle (2008) :

13. A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) : The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

14. Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (2010) : City Atlases, Book 1

15. Unfathomable City (2013): A New Orleans Atlas City Atlases, Book 2

16. The Faraway Nearby (2013) :

17. Men Explain Things To Me (2014) : This slim book-seven essays, punctuated by enigmatic, haunting paintings by Ana Teresa Fernandez--hums with power and wit. The book starts out with a funny, almost playful anecdote about being mansplained to by a pompous idiot at a party in Aspen, but then quickly moves into darker waters. Solnit goes on to use politics, art, history and new media as springboards for discussing the interconnectedness of cultural misogyny and how mansplaining and rape can be viewed as existing on a continuum. Towards the end of the book she summarizes this nicely: “It’s a slippery slope. That’s why we need to address the slope, rather than compartmentalizing the varieties of misogyny and dealing with them separately.” (p. 134) It’s a new way of looking at an ancient problem, articulated in a way that I don’t think I’ve heard before, and Solnit rounds out her case by anticipating counter arguments (i.e. men being falsely imprisoned for rape) and responding to them to the degree that they deserve.

Sometimes I wonder where it all began? This idea that the second sex is inferior. This idea that women have no credibility. This idea that women should not have the basic human rights. How were these ideas given birth?

Rebecca Solnit lays down some important statistics and talks about the different Feminist movements like 'yesallwomen'. She talks about Woolf's essays on liberation of women and spills the beans on IMF. At the centre of it all, she kept on stressing on how women were always made to seem they had no power in any situation and were at the mercy of men's wants and wishes and impluses.

Her wit and comic touch uplift these essays

18. The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (2014) :

19. Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (2016) : City Atlases, Book 3 - She mapped names of places with women's names. She plans to make one for London. 

20. The Mother of All Questions (2017) Further Feminisms. She asks if 'There is only one proper way for women to live - have children?' If  women having children - cannot be taken professionally? Women are questioned about their private life, their body.  XYZ composes happy life - It's not like that. Happiness is not something we are always.  Talk with Jia Tolentino was amazing to listen to. 

According to her Silence is what is imposed on us and what we seek to achieve. It is the ocean of the unsaid, the repressed, and the erased. It surrounds the scattered islands of those who are allowed to speak and what can be said. Violence against women is often against our voices and our stories. It is a refusal of our voices, and of what a voice means: the right to self-determination, to participation, to consent or dissent, to live and participate, to interpret and narrate.

Who has been heard. The sea of unheard is vast, and the surface of the ocean is unmappable. We know who has been heard on the official subjects: who held office, attended university, commanded armies, served as judges and juries, wrote books, and ran empires. The same can be said for many North American figures, such as Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, Bill Cosby, and Jian Ghomeshi. The voices of these prominent public men devoured the voices of others, until nothingness was left but their impunity.

21. Drowned River (2017) The Death and Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado

22. Call Them by Their True Names (2018): Language is very important. 

23. Cinderella Liberator (2019) : In this modern twist on the classic story, Cinderella, who would rather just be Ella, meets her fairy godmother, goes to a ball, and makes friends with a prince. But that is where the familiar story ends. Instead of waiting to be rescued, Cinderella learns that she can save herself and those around her by being true to herself and standing up for what she believes. Cinderella Liberator is a stunning example of how talking lizards, cakes, misguided stepsisters, and even a prince Nevermind can reframe some of our most iconic traditional narratives, and is a beautifully refreshing wind of change in the arid desert of modern-minded children’s stories. In her debut children’s book, Rebecca Solnit reimagines a classic fairytale with a fresh, feminist Cinderella and new plot twists that will inspire young readers to change the world, featuring gorgeous silhouettes from Arthur Rackham on each page. She says, her inspiration is not two generation back, but two generation forward. Step mother - Buddhist hungry person. 

24. Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters (2019) :

25 Recollections of My Nonexistence (2020) : In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas.

26 Orwell's Roses 2021 :  “In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses.” So be-gins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power. Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the roses he reportedly planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this overlooked aspect of Orwell’s life journeys through his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left) to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism. Through Solnit’s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers are drawn onward from Orwell‘s own work as a writer and gardener to encounter photographer Tina Modotti’s roses and her politics, agriculture and illusion in the USSR of his time with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell’s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid’s examination of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes Solnit’s portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as offering a meditation on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.

27 Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World Essays 2022 : Only Introduction is by her.  Barry Lopez is the author. An ardent steward of the land, fearless traveler, and unrivaled observer of nature and culture, Barry Lopez died after a long illness on Christmas Day 2020. The previous summer, a wildfire had consumed much of what was dear to him in his home place and the community around it—a tragic reminder of the climate change of which he’d long warned.

At once a cri de coeur and a memoir of both pain and wonder, this remarkable collection of essays adds indelibly to Lopez’s legacy, and includes previously unpublished works, some written in the months before his death. They unspool memories both personal and political, among them tender, sometimes painful stories of his childhood in New York City and California, reports from expeditions to study animals and sea life, recollections of travels to Antarctica and other extraordinary places on earth, and meditations on finding oneself amid vast, dramatic landscapes. He reflects on those who taught him, including Indigenous elders and scientific mentors who sharpened his eye for the natural world. We witness poignant returns from his travels to the sanctuary of his Oregon backyard, adjacent to the McKenzie River. And in prose of searing candor, he reckons with the cycle of life, including his own, and—as he has done throughout his career—with the dangers the earth and its people are facing.

With an introduction by Rebecca Solnit that speaks to Lopez’s keen attention to the world, including its spiritual dimensions, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World opens our minds and souls to the importance of being wholly present for the beauty and complexity of life.

Gaslighting: manipulate (someone) using psychological methods into questioning their own sanity or powers of reasoning. Feminist gave the name sexual harassment in 1970's. 

Women's right to express anger, is liberation. It is the right to expression for all. Though not pro anger, as it is not good for health, but it should be for both genders. Language is very important. It is unexpectable to use bad ones. Short term range is not good for any one. 

Her essays are personal and related to public issues too. 

Mentalhealth and Wellbeing

 Wellbeing, anything that makes you at peace with yourself. 

"We will help you. You are worth helping." “There is nothing in your budget for joy. No books, no flowers, no music, not even a cold beer. And there is nothing in your budget to give away to someone else. We don’t help people who don’t have better values than you do.” "What I had to give away was this story itself."

Gita talks about remaining collected, focused and tranquil not only in the midst of the battlefield of life, but a physical battle field too. 

"May be we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would lanuch one first - before we tried anything else. .....people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination instead of death. 

What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World by Tina Seelig Ph.D

 Dr. Tina Seelig a professor at Stanford University performed an interesting experiment on her students as part of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

The class was divided into 14 teams. Each team received an envelope with five dollars of “seed funding” and was told they could spend as much time as they wanted planning. However, once they cracked open the envelope, they had two hours to generate as much money as possible.

Their goal is to make as much money as possible within two hours and then give a three-minute presentation to the class about what they achieved. They were encouraged to be entrepreneurial by identifying opportunities, challenging assumptions, leveraging the limited resources they had, and by being creative.

If you were a student in the class, what would you do?

Typical answers range from using the five dollars to buy start-up materials for a makeshift car wash or lemonade stand, to buying a lottery ticket or putting the five dollars on red at the roulette table and many teams did that.

However, the teams that followed these typical paths did not earn much.

The teams that made the most money don’t use the five dollars at all.

They realize the five dollars is a distracting, and essentially worthless, resource.

So they ignored it. Instead, they go back to principles and start from scratch. They reframe the problem more broadly as “What can we do to make money if we start with absolutely nothing?” One particularly successful team ended up making reservations at popular local restaurants and then selling the reservation times to those who wanted to skip the wait. These students generated an impressive few hundred dollars in just two hours.

But the team that made the most money approached the problem differently. They realized that both the $5 funding and the 2-hour period weren’t the most valuable assets at their disposal. Rather, the most valuable resource was the three-minute presentation time they had in front of a captivated Stanford class.

They sold their three-minute slot to a company interested in recruiting Stanford students and walked away with $650. They recognized that they had a fabulously valuable asset that others didn’t even notice just waiting to be mined.

It is important to remember that just because a $5 bill is sitting in front of you doesn’t mean it’s the right tool for the job.

Tools, “can be the subtlest of traps.” When we’re blinded by tools, we stop seeing other possibilities in the peripheries.

Aristotle popularized the concept of a first principle: which means establishing a fundamental fact or conclusion you know is true, deconstructing it down to its core elements, and working up from there. 

In the case of the $5 project, that meant ignoring assumptions and determining the most valuable asset. At first glance, the $5 seemed like their only asset. Some teams fell for that mental trap. Nor was the students' collective two hours, even though that was a better use of their resources. 

Three minutes in front of the perfect audience? That was the most valuable thing they possessed.

The $5 experiment has some interesting lessons for us in our life.

- What are the $5 things that we are fixated on in our life?

- Are we focusing too much on the $5 and forgetting the other resources?

- How can we ignore it and find the 2-hour window?

- Or even better, How do we find the most valuable three minutes in our arsenal?

From the Book - What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World by Tina Seelig Ph.D

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum

 ~ Robert Fulghum, ‘All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten’.

 Title of the first essay. Nevertheless, 'To the reader from the author' ends with "I will not make the usual reservation that "the opinions expressed within are entirely my own." The older I get the more I realize how much I think is a composite of the goods selected from the supermarket shelves of the world of thought. What is mine is an attitude about what passes through my mind. To expound on that theme, the 15th revised edition of this book begin with a profound admonition found on  a bumper sticker:

"DONT BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU THINK"

“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. 

That myth is more potent than history. 

That dreams are more powerful than facts. 

That hope always triumphs over experience. 

That laughter is the only cure for grief. 

And I believe that love is stronger than death.” 

The book begins with Credo:

“These are the things I learned (in Kindergarten):

 1. Share everything.

2. Play fair.

3. Don't hit people.

4. Put things back where you found them.

5. CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS.

6. Don't take things that aren't yours.

7. Say you're SORRY when you HURT somebody.

8. Wash your hands before you eat.

9. Flush.

10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

11. Live a balanced life - learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work everyday some.

12. Take a nap every afternoon.

13. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.

14. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that. And few days later dead.  (LifeDeath one short event)

15. Goldfish and hamster and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.

16. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.”

"Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living."

"Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. “Think what a better world it would be if we all-the whole world-had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess."

And it is still true, no matter how old you are-when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.”

In between you have:

In Deep Kindergarden it says that LifeDeath is one short event, don't be surprised when doctor say life is short, you need to know that. 

The Rest of Story - Soon enough, there will be sleepless nights when "what happen next?" will not be plot inquiry but the entreaty of prayer. 

“Nobody goes "AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!" when they sing it. Maybe because it puts the life adventure in such clear and simple terms. The small creature is alive and looks for adventure. Here's the drainpipe--a long tunnel going up toward some light. The spider doesn't even think about it--just goes. Disaster befalls it--rain, flood, powerful foces. And the spider is knocked down and out beyond where it started. Does the spider say, "To hell with that"? No. Sun comes out--clears things up--dries off the spider. And the small creature goes over to the drainpipe and looks up and thinks it really wants to know what is up there.” -"Capacity of life to triumph over adversity - about perseverance in adventure"

All I really need  know is that Sometime acting foolish and being wise are the same. Puddles are there as a test about staying young as long as you can. Do it  now or it would be 'Too Late.'

“Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well.” - Elias Schwarts 145th incarnation of Haiho Lama

He is an angel, marrying Rachel who had cancel and could not have children, but they ended up having four. some Angels can fix your soles and mend your soul the same time. 

“Hide-and-seek, grown-up style. Wanting to hide. Needing to be sought. Confused about being found.”. "I don't want anyone to know." "what will people think?' "I don't want to bother anyone." - Get found kid. “Every person passing through this life will unknowingly leave something and take something away.”

“Now Everybody has some secret goals in life...Sometimes you can get what you want and what you need at the same time.” "....

Chicken Fried Steak:“And sure, I know if you eat this way you'll die. So? If you don't eat this way you're still going to die. Why not die happy?”

Charles Boyer's story - was no move. There was only one women. For forty -four years as in the first year, His wife Patricia. A life long love affair. soul mates. He could not bear to tell her she had cancer, set by her bed side to provide hope and cheer. She died in his arms, two days later he was also dead. 

“Why is it that love and life so often have to be carried forth with so much pain and strain and mess?  I ask you why is that?

Why isn't love easy?

I don't know. And the raccoons don't say.”

“Until you have experienced raccoons mating underneath your bedroom at three in the morning, you have missed one of life's sensational moments.”

Larry Walters flying up in balloon in 1982 is a proof that “It’s the spirit here that counts. The time may be long, the vehicle may be strange or unexpected. But if the dream is held close to the heart, and imagination is applied to what there is close at hand, everything is still possible.”

"Ten years after his flight - on October 6, 1993 - Larry Walters went hiking in the Angeles National Forest alone. He shot himself in the heart. And died. Why? Why? We don't know why. Nobody saw this coming. Larry left no word. "

At baloon launch in France, Old Ben Franklin said: "What good isa newborn baby?" "This ballon will open skies to mankind." “Imagination is more important than information. Einstein said that, and he should know. And they come. And they look. And we push. And they fly. We to stay and die on our beds. They to go and die howsoever, yet inspiring those who come after them to find their own edge. And fly.”

Laundry - “When I’m finished, I have a sense of accomplishment. A sense of competence. I am good at doing the laundry. At least that. And it’s a religious experience, you know. Water, earth, fire—polarities of wet and dry, hot and cold, dirty and clean. The great cycles—round and round—beginning and end—Alpha and Omega, amen. I am in touch with the GREAT SOMETHING-OR-OTHER. For a moment, at least, life is tidy and has meaning.” "I like cheer, I like happy wash"

"We've made a lot of progress, you know. We used to think that disease was an act of God. Then we figured out it was a product of human ignorance, so we've been cleaning up our act-literally-ever since. We've been getting the excrement off our hands and clothes and bodies and food and houses. If only the scientific experts could come up with something to get it out of our minds. One cup of fixit fizzle that will lift the dirt from our lives, soften our hardness, protect our inner parts, improve our processing, reduce our yellowing and wrinkling, improve our natural color, and make us sweet and good.”

"I am a sucker for colorful packaging. Any old product that says "NEW AND IMPROVED" on it calls out to me. I, too, hope to be New and Improved someday."

Medicine cabinets, in our bathroom; our bathrooms are "Temple of Reality". "Most people are secret slobs. Deepest mysteries of the race are tucked into the nooks and crannies of the bathroom, where we go to be alone, to confront ourselves in the mirror, to comb and curry and scrape and preen our hides, to coax our aging and ailing bodies into on more day, to clean ourselves and reliever ourselves, to paint and deodorize our surface, to meditate and consult our oracle and attempt to improve our lot. 

“Ignorance and power and pride are a deadly mixture, you know.” Good Samaritan

“It wasn’t in books. It wasn’t in a church. What I needed to know was out there in the world.” “Keep your eyes open. Suspend judgment. Be useful,” Bar Story was important to know

"We will help you. You are worth helping." “There is nothing in your budget for joy. No books, no flowers, no music, not even a cold beer. And there is nothing in your budget to give away to someone else. We don’t help people who don’t have better values than you do.” "What I had to give away was this story itself."

Majority of stuff come from two sources People and meteorites. It isn't dirt. It's all compost. Cosmic compost. We are the stuff of stars. 

“Speed and efficiency do not always increase the quality of life.” "Pushing leaves with mechanical air is not the same as hearing the wind blow through the trees." Vaccum Vs. Handtools. 

“It is not true, by the way, that mermaids do not exist. I know at least one personally. I have held her hand.” {Reminded me of why fit in, when you are meant to stand out}

“If you only make it up, you never have to live it down.”

"Sometimes the world seems like a fine place, don't it?" - Disagree? - Weiser's still there - Idaho.

"Scientists tell us the Earth has been around 4.5 billion years and has another 5.7 billion to go. What does a flower care about what label we apply in passing? The labels only stick to us. "

"There's no commercial value in water of this kind. There are two secret ingredients, which can't be manufactured or bottled, imagination and memory. Such vintage refreshment is always a product of home brewing. The liquid is flavored by experience and given character by the creative effort it takes to fill the wine cellar of the heart. Let the glass be filled and lifted - Cheers!"

Third Aid : After the Frist and second, "ABC check up - for Airway, Blood and Comfort or something like that." "Ask Are you Breathing, Bleeding, Comfy - If answer is Yes, No, Yes you are going to live longer. In addition to ABC there is the Placebo Effect. No matter what you do, anywhere from 30 to 60 % of what gets wrong with you heals itself if you just give it time and think good thoughts. It's kind of like staying amused while your body does its things. Doctor's can help only 15%. Your body does the rest. Or else you die. Your body makes house call - so does your brain. This is crucial. When in down, get down. Take a nap. 

Yelling : “Machines and relatives get most of the yelling. But never trees. As for people, well, the Solomon islanders may have a point. Yelling at living thing does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts.” In the Solomon Islands in south Pacific, if people are unable to cut down trees they yell at them for thirty days. At the end of it, the tree dies and falls over. 

“So you drive as far as you can, even when you can clearly read the sign. You want to think you are exempt, that it doesn’t apply to you. But it does. Life is still a dead end. And we still have a hard time believing it”

Testing is needed in life. Even after school , of most of the lessons. “But love may have to be left off the exam. Most of us will never learn.” Also we will never know - already over questioned:

“Why is there Something instead of Nothing?” "When will I have time, and who knows where the time goes?" When is enough enough? What are people for? Is there life before death? Is it true that little knowledge is a dangerous thing? If bird's fly over the rainbow, why can't I? Lucy asking Charlie Brown, "Don't you wish you knew back then what you know now?" Charlie stares blank-eyed for a while, and then ask, "What do I know now?"

Buffalo Tavern: “The Indian danced on alone. The crowd clapped up the beat. The Indian danced with a chair. The crowd went crazy. The band faded. The crowd cheered. The Indian held up his hands for silence as if to make a speech. Looking at the band and then the crowd, the Indian said, "Well, what're you waiting for? Let's DANCE.”

Gummy Lump - gift made by kids, the best ever gifts. 

“We can do no great things; only small things with great love.(Mother Teresa)”

Census- “Every person passing through this life will unknowingly leave something and take something away. Most of this “something” cannot be seen or heard or numbered or scientifically detected or counted. It’s what we leave in the minds of other people and what they leave in ours. Memory. The census doesn’t count it. Nothing counts without it.”

Pass it on: “The Sikh gave him the money. When Menon asked for his address so that he could repay the man, the Sikh said that Menon owed the debt to any stranger who came to him in need, as long as he lived. The help came from a stranger and was to be repaid to a stranger.”

Stargazing, grandfather would take you out to see stars. Missed both grandfathers. And tell him I said I'd really like it if he came home for Christmas.” “You'd like my grandfather. And he'd like you, I think. Happy Grandfather's Day to him, wherever he is. If you see him, let him take you out to see the stars some night.

What is real does not matter. "It's harmless enough for yearning to be so strong that what you need becomes very real in some corner of your heart. Picasso said, "Everything you can imagine is real"""Grandfather is made of the cloth of yearning and imagination."

"Some people are concerned about how it is that good things happen to bad people, and there are those concerned about how bad things happen to good people. But my grandfather is interested in those times when miracles happen to ordinary people. Here again he like small scale."

"When small miracles occur for ordinary people, day by ordinary day When not only did the worst not happen, but you got the gift of what-could-never-happen-but-did, How grand to beat the odds for a change. My grandfather says he blesses God each day when he takes himself off to bed having eaten and not having been eaten once again. 

In a sense we make up all our relatives, though. ...Especially if they are dead or distant. We take what we know, which isn't ever the whole story, and we add it to what we wish and need, and stitch it together into some kind of family quilt to wrap up in on our mental couch. .......Memories are creative. There is always the conflicting truth of many witnesses. Always. We make ourselves up, fusing what we are with what we wish into what we must become...it is....Here is the good part: Thinking about the grandfather I wish I had prepared me for the grandfather I wish to be and am becoming. ....It is a preparation. 

“Moths and butterflies are not the same thing. Moths sneak around in the dark munching your sweater and are ugly. Butterflies hand out with flowers in the daytime and are pretty. Never mind any facts or what silkworm moths are responsible for, or what poisonous butterflies do.”

“Out of the mouths of babes may come gems of wisdom, but also garbage.”

"It is said that people don't like to talk about death. Yet in just one afternoon I heard people say: "Your mother will kill you if you wear that outside the house." "Working overtime is murder". "I laughed so hard I thought I'd die." "My feet are killing me."

Do I believe in near-death experience? Yes. 

Life is a near-death experience.

The leading cause of death is life.

Is there life after death? I'm dying to find out. 

“... all things live only if something else is cleared out of the path to make way. No death; no life. No exceptions. Things must come and go. People. Years. Ideas. Everything. The wheel turns, and the old is cleared away as fodder for the new.”

What if we all had Term limits and would need to renew our citizenships?

“What I notice is that every adult or child I give a new set of Crayolas to goes a little funny. The kids smile, get a glazed look on their faces, pour the crayons out, and just look at them for a while....The adults always get the most wonderful kind of sheepish smile on their faces--a mixture of delight and nostalgia and silliness. And they immediately start telling you about all their experiences with Crayolas.”

"May be we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would lanuch one first - before we tried anything else. .....people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination instead of death. 

“And I’m not confused about the lack of, or the need for, imagination in low or high places. We could do better we must do better. There are far worse things to drop on people than crayolas.”

“It doesn’t matter what you say you believe - it only matters what you do.”  Father would always say Jesus was Jew around, Christmas, which would annoy mother. He was a great Heathen but worked for the Salvation Army year after year as long as he lived. The Great Heathen : Heathen is a dated term used primarily of someone who is not religious, or whose religion is not Judaism, Islam, or especially Christianity. 

Brass Rule:

“My mother was pulling my leg on that one. I have collected so much gift-wrapped trash over the years from people who copped out and hurriedly bought a little plastic cheapie to give under the protective flag of good thoughts. I tell you, it is the gift that counts. Or rather, people who think good thoughts give good gifts. It ought to be a rule—the Brass Rule of Gift Exchange.”

“I know what I really want for Christmas.

I want my childhood back.

Nobody is going to give me that. I might give at least the memory of it to myself if I try. I know it doesn't make sense, but since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? It is about a child, of long ago and far away, and it is about the child of now. In you and me. Waiting behind the door of our hearts for something wonderful to happen. A child who is impractical, unrealistic, simpleminded and terribly vulnerable to joy.”

"It's delight and simplicity that I want. Foolishness and fantasy and noise. Angels and miracles and wonder and innocence and magic. That's closer to what I want."

Valentine Christmas Tree:  "It's about loving something - not just one's self or one's family or one's neighbor. It's about loving life - about loving this world - and seeing this world as our living room. "

Christmas in August:  "I guess wonder and awe and joy are always there in the attic of one's mind somewhere, and it doesn't take a lot to set it off."

Beethoven's Nineth: Best remedy for depression. - Ode to joy. "Crazy drams can come true when the dreamer has a crazy fairy godmother or two. "

“Does the giraffe know what he's for? Or care? Or even think about his place in things? A giraffe has a black tongue twenty-seven inches long and no vocal cords. A giraffe has nothing to say. He just goes on giraffing.”

Next Six Stores: About neighbor. “And good neighbors make a huge difference in the quality of life. I agree.” We get to choose our house but not our neighbors. A lady, who would look for the trees in the yard and neighbors before buying a house. 

“The leaves let go, the seeds let go, and I must let go sometimes, too, and cast my lot with another of nature’s imperfect but tenacious survivors.” 

“Remember, most of us got something for nothing the first time just by showing up here at birth. Now we have to qualify.”

“I get tired of hearing it's a crummy world and that people are no damned good. What kind of talk is that? I know a place in Payette, Idaho, where a cook and a waitress and a manager put everything they've got into laying a chicken-fried steak on you.”

“The gift was not large as money goes, and my need was not great, but the spirit of the gift is beyond price and leaves me blessed and in debt.”

“We even make ourselves up, fusing what we are with what we wish into what we must become. I'm not sure why it must be so, but it is.”

“You will continue to read stories of crookedness and corruption - of policemen who lie and steal, doctors who reap where they do not sew, politicians on the take. Don't be misled. They are news because they are the exceptions.”

“Liberation, I guess, is everybody getting what they think they want, without knowing the whole truth. Or in other words, liberation finally amounts to being free from things we don't like in order to be enslaved by things we approve of. Here's to the eternal tandem.”

“As one old gentleman put it, " Son, I don't care if you're stark nekkid and wear a bone in your nose. If you kin fiddle, you're all right with me. It's the music we make that counts.”

“It's just this: that there are places we all come from-deep-rooty-common places- that makes us who we are. And we disdain them or treat them lightly at our peril. We turn our backs on them at the risk of self-contempt. There is a sense in which we need to go home again-and can go home again. Not to recover home, no. But to sanctify memory.”

“Th communique repeated the information. “He went to the body of his wife and wouldn’t leave it, although she was dead.”

How strange. why didn’t he run and save his own hide? What made him go back? is it possible that he loved her? Is it possible that he wanted to hold her in his arms one last time? Is it possible that he needed to cry and grieve? Is it possible that he felt the stupidity of war? Is it possible that he felt the injustice of fate? Is it possible that he thought of children, born or unborn? Is it possible that he didn’t care what become of him now?

It’s possible. We don’t know. Or at least we don’t know for certain. But we can guess. His actions answer.

And so he sits alone in a prison. Not a “Russian” or a “Communist” or “solider” or “enemy” or any of these categories. Just-a-man who cared for just-a-woman for just-a-time more than anything else.

Here’s to you, Nicolai Pestretsov, wherever you may go and be, for giving powerful meaning to the promises that are the same everywhere; for dignifying that covenant that is the same in any language— “for better or for worse, in good times and bad, in sickness and in health, to love and honor and cherish unto death, so help me God.” You kept the faith; kept it bright— kept it shining. Bless you!”

“Life will examine us continually to see if we have understood and have practiced what we were taught that first year of school.”

“I may be wrong”

“Peace is not something you wish for; it's something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away!”

“Knowledge is meaningful only if it is reflected in action. The human race has found out the hard way that we are what we do, not just what we think.”

“Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.”

“Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., the summer I turned”

“As long as life exists, something always happens next. There are always consequences—always sequels.”

“It is comforting to know that some very old and very simple ways of getting from one place to another still work.”

The Odds:

“Always trust your fellow man. And always cut the cards. Always trust God. And always build your house on high ground. Always love thy neighbor. And always pick a good neighborhood to live in.”

“About winning and losing: It isn't important, what really counts is how you play the game. About playing the game: PLAY TO WIN!”

Where the snow goes: 

“And snow—snow is not my enemy, I tell him. Snow is God’s way of telling people to slow down and rest and stay in bed for a day. And besides, snow always solves itself. Mixes with the leaves to form more earth, I tell him. Think compost, says I.”

"For he and I - and even you - will become what the leaves and snow become, and go where the leaves and snow go - whether we rake or shovel or not. 

Hair: “Without realizing it ,we fill important places in each other's lives. It's that way with the guy at the corner grocery, the mechanic at the local garage, the family doctor, teacher, neighbours, co-workers.  Good people who are alway 'there', who can be relied upon in small, important ways. People who teach us, bless us, encourage us, support us, uplift us in the dailiness of life. We never tell them. I don't know why, but we don't”

"And, of course, we fill that role ourselves. There are those who depend in us, watch us, learn from us, take from us. And we never know."

“Don't sell yourself short. 

You may never have proof of your importance, but you are more important than you think. There are always those who couldn’t do without you. The rub is that you don’t always know who.”

“It reminds me of an old Sufi story of a good man who was granted one wish by God. The man said he would like to go about doing good without knowing about it. God granted his wish. And then God decided that it was such a good idea, he would grant that wish to all human beings. And so it has been to this day.”

There are reflections 

1. 17. Everything looks better at a distance
2. 18. If you made it up, you have to live it down
3. 19. Everything is compost
4. 20. There is no they - only us
5. 21. It's a mistake to believe everything you think.
6. 22. You can get used to anything
7. 23. Sometimes things are just as bad as they seem
8. 24. It helps if you always have somebody to kiss goodnight
   

“Everything looks better at a distance. If you made it up, you have to live it down. Everything is compost. There is no they—only us. It’s a mistake to believe everything you think. You can get used to anything. Sometimes things are just as bad as they seem. It helps if you always have somebody to kiss goodnight.” Add these too, to the kindergarten Credo list. 

And ends with a CODA

Leaving midsentence without punctuation or explanation , to come back again and