Maria Semple
Saturday, March 26th, 2022
March 26, 2022From historian Michael Beschloss:
FDR gave “Four Freedoms” speech to Congress on eve of US entry in World War II, 1941–here are his changes on the fifth draft:
Eleanor Roosevelt:
‘At all times, day by day, we have to continue fighting for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom from want—for these are the things that must be gained in peace as well as in war.’
April 15, 1943 My Day ❀
From her 1963 book, Tomorrow is Now:
‘In a sense, nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would literally rather die than change.’
History will no doubt consider this to be his finest speech at a moment it was needed most. -dayle
President Biden:
“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
“Their brave resistance is part of a larger fight for essential democratic principles that unite all free people. We stand with you. Period.”
Posted by Michael Marquardt, appointed by President Biden to the US Comm. Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad:
‘Take it from this Berliner who was there when the Iron Curtain started falling in 1989, this is one of the most consequential speeches from an American president in decades. Thank you.’
Indeed.
Garry Kasparov, Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation:
‘No free world leader should hesitate to state plainly that the world would be a far better place if Putin were no longer in power in Russia. A good way to make that come about is to say exactly that. Russia will be a pariah until Putin is gone.
As I Worte today, Putin’s war in Ukraine and against the world order will not end as long as he is in power. Either the war criminal is isolated or he isn’t. No more half-measures.’
Humanity with all its fears,
with all its hopes of future years,
is hanging breathless on thy fate.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
‘I don’t mean to ruin the ending for you, sweet child, but life is one long headwind. To make any kind of impact requires self-will bordering on madness. The world will be hostile, it will be suspicious of your intent, it will misinterpret you, it will inject you with doubt, it will flatter you into self-sabotage. My god, I’m making it sound so glamorous and personal! What the world is, more than anything? It’s indifferent.’
-Maria Semple, Today Will Be Different, p. 96
Beautiful prompt.
March 17, 2022How should we celebrate your day?
If today was a holiday in your honor, what would it be about?
If we had to examine everything about you, your work, your impact, your reputation–what would be the positive caricature we would draw? What sorts of slogans, banners and greetings would we use to celebrate you and your work?
It’s never accurate to boil down an organization or a person’s work to a simple sentence or two, but we do it anyway.
What’s yours?
-Seth Godin
We can create this honor in any moment, and shift our lives to live that honor. What will your day be about? -dayle
Mother Teresa, 1985
“Make your life a little less difficult to another.”
A. Stoddard:
“Don’t quite before the finish line. Walking away from something that is bad for you is not quitting.”
Horace, ‘Never despair.’ Winston Churchill, ‘Never, never.’
Thomas Merton:
“The history of the world, with the material destruction of cities and nations and people, expressed the interior division that tyrannizes the souls of all men, and even of the saints.” -New Seeds of Contemplation
From Merton’s The Sigh of Jonas
“Sooner or later the world must burn, and all things in it…for by that time the last man in the universe will have discovered the bomb capable of destroying the universe, and will have been unable to resist the temptation to throw the thing and get it over with.
And here I sit writing a diary.
But l o v e laughs at the end of the world, because love is the door to eternity; and, before anything can happen, love will have drawn him over the sill and closed the door, and he won’t bother about the world burning because ehe will know nothing about love.”
“Today will be different. Today I will be present. Today, anyone I speak to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply. […] Today I will take pride in my appearance. I’ll shower, get dressed i proper clothes, and change into yoga clothes only for yoga, which today I will actually attend. […] Today there will be an ease about me. My face will be relaxed, its resting place a smile. Today I will radiate calm. Kindest and self-control will abound. Today I will buy local. Today I will be my best self, the person I’m capable of being. Today will be different.”
“Mother Earth and culture, the mother of mothers, are both a state, even as reverence toward Pachamama is on the rise.”
[Pachamama is a goddess revered by the indigenous peoples of the Andes.]
“Let us apply Julian’s teachings on motherhood to Mother Earth. As we saw in chapter 4, Hildegard was explicitly in her language about Mother Earth, demanding that ‘the earth must not be destroyed.’ The destruction of the earth is the destruction of the feminine. Matricide is ecocide, and ecocide is matricide. Invasion of indigenous lands and destruction of their cultures, the spreading of viruses that killed millions of indigenous peoples…the outcomes were the same. History is filled with matricides of all kinds Genocides, too” (p. 95).
[…]
“The ancient Hindu sages, we are told, ‘predicts the age in which we are now living.’ For them Kali Yuga represents the collapse of every kind of inner and outer coherence and personal and institutional forms of compassion, concern, and justice” (p. 95).
Matthew Fox, ‘Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic-and Beyond.’
