PERFECTly Surreal

Life is so amusing.

Dorothea Tanning, age 101

PERFECT Reminder

The beginning is always today.

Mary Wollstonecraft

PERFECT Waldo

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

PERFECT Glimpse

But certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it and are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and humane, is still soaked with the sense of exile.
J. R. R. Tolkien

PERFECT Lily

Instead of working for the survival of the fittest, we should be working for the survival of the wittiest - then we can all die laughing.

Lily Tomlin

PERFECT Moore

"The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is -- it must be something you cannot possibly do."

Henry Moore

PERFECT Hallow

Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights hast thirty one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Shakespeare, Macbeth

Photo by Barbara Nicholes

PERFECT Birthday

Some people in desperation have turned to witchcraft, magic and occultism, to drugs and madness, anything to rekindle imagination and find a world ensouled. But these reactions are not enough. What is needed is a revisioning, a fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament we call modern consciousness.
James Hillman

PERFECT Peace

For a day, just for one day,
Talk about that which disturbs no one
And bring some peace into your
Beautiful eyes.

Hafiz


Art by Donald Hazeltine

PERFECT Wave

What you are is simply the ocean, which allows every wave of experience to rise and fall. Waves of fear, grief, pain, weakness, frustration, helplessness, and even heartbreak are not a problem for what you are. It is all simply the ocean breathing in and out. In the ocean's depths, there is a peace beyond understanding.
Jeff Foster

PERFECT Magic

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
Marie Curie

PERFECT "They don't make men like this anymore"

Theodore Roosevelt was shot while campaigning in Milwaukee, WI. Refusing immediate medical attention, he delivered his scheduled speech with blood seeping into his shirt. He spoke for 90 minutes. His opening comments: "Ladies and Gentlemen, I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than than to kill a Bull Moose."

PERFECT 24 hours

Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.
Isak Dinesen

PERFECT Campbell

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging. Negativism to the pain and ferocity of life is negativism to life. We are not there until we can say "yea" to it all.

A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

PERFECT Aging

A man's age is something impressive, it sums up his life: maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves. A man's age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944

PERFECT Miller

The great sacrifice which we must all make, each and every one of us, is to burn away the dross. In other words, consign the living flame that which is dead. If we put off the task, if we refuse to face the issue, the day will come when "the quick and the dead" are judged. There is a day of judgment, make no mistake about it. Life is continually weighing us in the balance. The Day of Judgment is not an invention of the religious-minded but a psychic or spiritual phenomenon obedient to the moving calendar of our own conscience. It is always Hades or Easter on the day of reckoning. It has been so since the beginning. And it promises to be so eternally.

This is the cross which man carries and on which he can burn with the flame of eternal life or be pilloried like a thief. There is no escape. As it says in the Avestas: "Evil exists not, only the past. The past is past; the present is a moment; the future is all."
Henry Miller

PERFECT Sense 3

Don't be angry with the rain. It simply does not know how to fall upward.

Vladimir Nabokov



Photo by Dratch & Beringer

PERFECT Infinity

Time as we live it and as we create it embodies our progressive disappearance; we are at the same time alive and in the face of death–that is the mystery of all living beings. The consciousness of this inevitable disappearance broadens our experiences without diminishing our joy. There is always the omnipresent idea of nature, of its ebb and flow of life. This essence of reality can be universally understood; it is not only mine but can be commonly shared in our unus mundus. (Trad. Mark Selwyn)

Roman Opalka - "Rencontre par la séparation", AFAA, Paris, 1987

PERFECT Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered "Man ... because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived." Amen.

PERFECT Sense 2

I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know.
Jean Houston

PERFECT Way of the World

As if we needed another reminder of the endless search for youth, especially among women: from the 1700 play The Way of the World, by William Congreve:

"I article, that you continue to like your own face, as long as I shall, and while it passes current with me, that you endeavor not to new-coin it. To which end, together with all the vizards for the day, I prohibit all masks for the night, made of oiled-skins, and I know not what - hogs' bones, hares' gall, pig-water, and the marrow of a roasted cat."

PERFECT Bricktop

“Greatness,” she said, “comes from a person knowing who he is, being satisfied with nothing but the best, and still behaving like a warm and gracious human being.”
Bricktop

(who also, at the age of 51, took an oath of celibacy, saying "Lord, never let me be a foolish old woman." Take that, Madonna).

PERFECT John Ronald Reuel

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

J. R. R. Tolkien

PERFECT Hans

I like the details of costume a lot. The costume is a very important thing. It speaks before you do. You know what you're looking at. You get a reference and it gives context.
Harrison Ford

PERFECT Rebirth

Most beings spring from other individuals; but there is a certain kind which reproduces itself. The Assyrians call it the Phoenix. It does not live on fruit or flowers, but on frankincense and odoriferous gums. When it has lived five hundred years, it builds itself a nest in the branches of an oak, or on the top of a palm tree. In this it collects cinnamon, and spikenard, and myrrh, and of these materials builds a pile on which it deposits itself, and dying, breathes out its last breath amidst odors. From the body of the parent bird a young Phoenix issues forth, destined to live a life as long as its predecessor. When this has grown up and gathered sufficient strength, it lifts its nest from the tree (its own cradle and its parent’s sepulcher), and carries it to the city of Heliopolis in Egypt, and deposits it in the temple of the Sun.
Ovid

PERFECT Line

There isn't a particle of you that I don't know, remember and want.

Private Lives
by Noel Coward

PERFECT 94

Sonnet #94

They that have pow'r to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation show;
They rightly do inherit heaven's graves
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flow'r is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die;
But if that flow'r with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

William Shakespeare

PERFECT Florine

Occasionally
A human being
Saw my light
Rushed in
Got singed
Rushed out
Called fire
Or it happened
That he tried
To subdue it
Or it happened
That he tried to extinguish it.
Never did a friend
Enjoy it
The way it was.
So I learned to
Turn it low
Turn it out
When I meet a stranger -
Out of courtesy
I turn on a soft
Pink light
Which is found
Modest
Even charming.
It is protection
Against wear and tears ...
And when I am rid of
The Always-to-be-Stranger
I turn on my light
And become
Myself.

Florine Stettheimer

PERFECT Bouquet

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.
Claude Monet

A bouquet in honor of MCL.

PERFECT July 4 Perspective

That all nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little animal, five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice ..."
Voltaire


American ships in New England waters flew a "Liberty Tree" flag in 1775. It shows a green pine tree on a white background, with the words, "An Appeal to Heaven."

PERFECT Huckleberry

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain

PERFECT Sense

The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder.
James Hillman

PERFECT James

To change one's life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.

William James

PERFECT Just Sayin ...

So, would you go to a dentist who has bad teeth? A skin doctor with acne? A psychiatrist in meltdown? Then why, women of a certain age, are you even considering buying Jane Fonda's new book? She might be a survivor but, hey girlfriend, she is no role model. We must separate the glitter from the gal - and see that beneath all her chatter, and there is a lot, is a fragile woman who has made a mess of marriages, children, aging (she's heading into some serious Faye Dunaway territory with the new face, new teeth, and poufy hair that if not a wig, should be) and career. She has a spanky body, to be sure, but doesn't it exhaust you - this struggle to look 5 years younger than you really are and find yourself a "boyfriend" (can we drop this turn when a woman reaches 60?) who is known for the women he dumped, odd looking creature that he is.

Turn away from this snake oil woman and walk in the direction of women of merit. Buy the Dame Judi Dench biography, the Diana Athill biography - listen at the feet of lusty women with age appropriate bodies who have real stories to tell, coming from lips untouched by filler.

I mean, come on.

PERFECT McQueen

This gold feathered coat from McQueen's last collection looks like an avenging angel, yes?

From a quote not long before he committed suicide:
"I’m 40 now, but I want this to be a company that lives way beyond me, and I believe that customers are more important to making that happen than press. When I’m dead, hopefully this house will still be going. On a spaceship. Hopping up and down above earth."
Alexander McQueen

PERFECT Reminder

Mindfulness rocks!

Einstein said it but everyone should intuitively know it:
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy to truth.

PERFECT Tom

no i don't want your sympathy
fugitives say that the streets aren't for dreaming now manslaughter dragnet and the ghost that sells memories want a piece of the action anyhow
go waltzing matilda, waltzing matilda you'll go waltzing matilda with me

Tom Waits
Waltzing Matilda

PERFECT Artist

From Cole Porter's song: Never Be An Artist

Never, never be an artist
If you think you can make one cent.
Never, never be an artist
If you've no one to pay your rent.
Never, never be an artist
If you're faithful to your wife.
Never, never be an artist
Unless you want to have a wonderful life.

PERFECT Overman

I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? … All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.... The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth....

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.
Friedrich Nietzsche "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"

PERFECT Lucy

From "Lucy" by William Wordsworth

II.

HE dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and oh,

The difference to me!

PERFECT Duke

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

PERFECT Maira

Flowers lead to books, which lead to thinking and not thinking and then more flowers and music, music. Then many more flowers and many more books.
Maira Kalman

PERFECT Seneca

"Rerum naturae adsentior; ab illa non deerrare et ad illius legem exemplumque formari sapientia est."

On The Happy Life by Seneca

PERFECT Alternative

Sexual attraction is just energy; if the time is not right to express it sexually, for whatever reason, then the energy can be used to create something that is productive, satisfying and fun.
Peter McWilliams

PERFECT Armor

Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasures.
Rainer Maria Rilke

PERFECT Mellow

As a picture painted in yellow always radiates spiritual warmth, or as one in blue has apparently a cooling effect, so green is only boring.
Wassily Kandinsky

PERFECT Leonard

Don't matter if the road is long
Don't matter if it's steep
Don't matter if the moon is gone
And the darkness is complete
Don't matter if we lose our way
It's written that we'll meet
At least, that's what I heard you say
A thousand kisses deep ...
Leonard Cohen

PERFECT Romance

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. (I am large. I contain multitudes).
Walt Whitman






by Edward Burnes Jones

PERFECT Gaga

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
Carl Jung




50 million year old fossil