LIZZY FOREAL

2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life through the Oracle of the Animated Gif. They contemplate WINTER in the Valley. This unemployed WINTER. Their second winter. A winter on the border with Queensland which means its NOT COLD. Nevertheless Winter it is. The Mad O”Brians are up in the Armidale Winter and Kati B and IMM are back in the country for their first Kalang Winter in a long long time. IT IS WINTER.

 “Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories”
  [Author Unknown]

©6/15/08Terry Sutherland

The Flower Garden

Sweetly lingers the lilac

It has married with the wild rose

A perfume made in heaven

Pleasing the winter starved nose

LYNNE SANDERS-BRAITHWAITE

FOR THE WEEK JULY 4-11 - I AM LOCKED AWAY LOOKING AT OLD BRITISH NEWSPAPERS ONLINE. AND WRITING ON THE NELLIBELL49 BLOG.

http://nellibell49.wordpress.com/

SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIAN GENEALOGISTS HAS PROVIDED AN OPPORTUNITY TO TAKE A LOOK AT GALE CENGAGE LEARNING’S  OLD UK NEWSPAPER FILES AND I AM TAKING THAT OPPORTUNITY. http://www.sag.org.au/ http://find.galegroup.com/

2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life through the Oracle of the Animated Gif. They contemplate EGO. EASING GOD OUT is one way to describe it. The same Friend is wondering how EGO affects her life. LIZZY has no idea what it means to her. What does it mean to other people ? Jamie Duff once told HER that suicidal thoughts could be a healthy sign of one layer of the EGO killing off another. ‘ERE WE EGO.

The basic ego of a human being is expressed as ts’ao-yuan i-ti-shui, “a drop of water in the source”

from ZEN FROG

“Wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having. Let’s talk about that.”

Tolle replied: “One of the main structures of the ego is it is never satisfied.”

King Solomon who had more opulence, wealth, and women than probably any man who ever lived said repeatedly “It is all vanity and vexation of spirit” (Ecclesiastes 1:14). Solomon who also possessed great wisdom, astounded many with his sayings, perhaps including himself at such revelatory discoveries.

Sri Chinmoy Devotional Poems !

 “I like the moment when I break a man’s ego”
(Bobby Fischer)

2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life through the Oracle of the Animated Gif. They contemplate  PRIDE and EGO. SHE has a friend who identifies PRIDE and EGO as the elements deciding her life.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
C. S. Lewis

“The cold was our pride, the snow was our beauty.   It fell and fell, lacing day and night together in a
milky haze, making everything quieter as it fell, so that winter seemed to partake of religion in a way
no other season did, hushed, solemn.”
-   Patricia Hampl

When you find one that actually has no ability to love, stay away. If the ego is so big that all they want is for their “Me” to be taken care of, you will run out of gas.

  No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.

False Personality, Ego, Vanity, Self-Love, Pride….where do they reside?  In my present condition, I cannot hope to storm their camp.  At present, the most I can hope for is to fling a few stones in their direction and then watch them change form and adapt themselves to the changing inner landscape, much like the movie Predator, which illustrates the scale and magnitude of what we are up against when we take on the struggle against all that comprises the lower self in us.  It also reminds me of a kid throwing stones at a tank that is rumbling through his village….ineffectual, at best…and yet hearing that “clank” sound gives such a good feeling!   I feel it’s important to throw those stones and to make those efforts.  Each skirmish teaches something, if nothing else, how very daunting and hopeless the situation seems and that we have to redouble our efforts as well as modifying our techniques and tactics.  If hope does exist, the key lies in my attention, which is able to act as the sword that cuts through the veil of illusion and hypnosis by the simple act of observing the false personality/ego.  The light of observation has a way of bringing me into sharp focus since the false and lower self isn’t able to function while being watched and I thereby attain a degree of liberation from their influence. 

From the Nobel Prize Speech of the writer William Faulkner.

“…the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed–love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”

 A Sadguru does not, even in his dream, expect any service or profit from his disciples . On the contrary he wishes to serve them. He does not think that he is great and the disciple small. Not only he loves him as his son but regards him as equal to himself or as Brahma. The main characteristic of a Sadguru is that he is the abode of peace. He is never restless nor ruffled. He has no pride of his learning. The poor and the rich, the small and the great, are the same to him.http://www.starsai.com/

2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life through the Oracle of the Animated Gif. They contemplate bridges. From here to there one way or another.

I do not know much about gods;
but I think that the river is a strong brown god–sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities–ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonored, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
T. S. Eliot, Dry Salvages, The Four Quartets

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to
watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly
know everything there is to be known.
A. A. Milne, Pooh’s Little Instruction Book

 Don’t cross a bridge until you come to it. –”Papa” (Grandfather Abraham Lincoln Turner)

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

‘But which is the stone that supports the bridge?’ Kublai Kahn asks.

‘The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,’ Marco Polo answers, ‘but by the line of the arch that they formed.’

Kublai Kahn remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: ‘Why do you speak of the stones? It is onlyt the arch that matters to me.’

Marco Polo answers: ‘Without stones there is no arch.’

Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn - Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities, 1972

2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life through the Oracle of the Animated Gif. They contemplate Cooking Dinner in the turbo oven. They are not sure about this matter. When the atmosphere is chilled between two  people - is it wise to share the meal or better to eat separately. They will dine ensemble.

“The dinner table is the center for the teaching and practicing not just of table manners but of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments of polite society except the minuet.”
Judith Martin

“We have said how necessary it is that in the composure of a sallet, every plant should come in to bear its part, without being overpower’d by some herb of a stronger taste, so as to endanger the native sapor and virtue of the rest; but fall into their places, like the notes in music, in which there should be nothing harsh or grating: And though admitting some discords (to distinguish and illustrate the rest) striking in all the more sprightly, and sometimes gentler notes, reconcile all dissonances, and melt them into an agreeable composition.”
John Evelyn, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699)

It is an old maxim in the schools,
That flattery’s the food of fools;
Yet now and then your men of wit
Will condescend to take a bit.
From Cadenus and Vanessa by Jonathan Swift

  “Cold steel was not meant to be an after-dinner dessert!”
–Sword Swallower

  VICTORIAN DINNER PARTIES

    We have remarked that most recently a decided tendency has been apparent in the best English society to adopt a more simple mode of entertainment than has for a considerable time prevailed. Gradually it is beginning to dawn on the leaders of fashion that the best English cookery is by no means inferior to some of the productions of foreign cooks. In point of expensiveness - a very material consideration in the eyes of many - a thoroughly good English dinner may vie with the most elaborate bill of fare composed for the greater part of morsels with high-sounding names. Our real or mock turtle soup, saddle of Southdown mutton, sirloin of Scotch beef, fat capons, choice game, and finely-grown vegetables, are inferior to no class of living throughout the civilised world. What English cookery really does require is skill on the part of cooks, to send up their productions in perfection to table. Whilst nothing is more enjoyable than a well-roasted joint, hot and cleanly served, few kinds of food are equally unsatisfactory, if wanting in these attributes. Conscious of the genuine excellence of our nationa1 dishes, in many of the best Continental establishments the owners keep English servants exclusively to attend to the roasting of meat, and plain boiling of vegetables. Perhaps, when the above facts become more generally known, English housewives will take heart of grace, and no longer apologise to strangers for offering them a simple English repast. The attempt to give foreigners and others, who keep professed cooks, badly-made entrees, is very like sending coals to Newcastle. The labour is not appreciated ; regrets are felt for the host’s well-intentioned efforts, but the failure is none the less great.

As a general rule, the decorations of a dinner-table should only be slightly raised, admitting of an uninterrupted view of each other by the assembled guests. Flowers in pots and growing vines are no longer in favour. They are considered fit only to decorate, a sideboard or side table; and even in such places they may be found in the way, if the space be limited. Fresh flowers only should be used to decorate dinner-tables. Artificial flowers are not in good taste, and are never seen in private houses where refinement prevails. The taste displayed in decorating tables is never so commendable as when applied to some useful purpose. And now that it is the custom to place fruit on the table at the beginning of the repast, the effect produced by grouping fruit is a legitimate object of study. Nothing is more appropriate than a centre-piece composed of dessert fruit, leaving choice flowers to figure in small vases and specimen glasses, in different parts of the table, marking by their position the boundary of certain dishes, and breaking a line of plates and glasses.

 

Wild Onions with Scrambled Eggs

Every spring when the wild onions come

up, Choctaw women gather the onions and

cook a traditional Wild Onion Dinner. In

Oklahoma, we had Wild Onion Dinners all

over the state at a lot of Indian churches for

a Saturday feast. I helped serve the take-out

orders this year at our church and we

served wild onions with scrambled eggs,

salt pork or chicken, mashed potatoes, pinto

beans and grape dumplings with fry bread

or corn bread. Hundreds of people came

for this traditional feast.

I had a feeling once about mathematics — that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me — the Byss and the Abyss. I saw — as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor’s Show — a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why tergiversation was inevitable — but it was after dinner and I let it go. — Winston Churchill

2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life through the Oracle of the Animated Gif. They contemplate Travelling down the Highways.  They’re not going tonight. Tonight they’re home on Full Moon but THEY plan to travel next week in the StarWagon - down the Pacific Highway to Kalang and then up the WATERFALL WAY to Armidale.

A traveler to distant places should make no enemies.
Nigerian Proverb

FROM GARDEN DIGEST

I never saw a discontented tree.   They grip the ground as though
they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as
we do.  They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind,
going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the
sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven
knows how fast and far!
John Muir

A great traveller is a kind of introspective who, as she covers the ground outwardly, so she advances inwardly.Lawrence Durrell (1912 - 1990)
British novelist and poet.Referring to travel writer Freya Stark.

Extensive traveling includes a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

Paul Theroux (1941 - )
U.S. writer.
The Great Railway Bazaar

Traveling is almost like talking with men of other centuries.René Descartes (1596 - 1650)
French philosopher and mathematician.
Discourse on Method