The Tao of Thanksgiving
It's Tiw's day . . . our first hard freeze this morning ahead of a sunny day here in TulseyTown . . .
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living; we live ourselves into new ways of thinking. – Richard Rohr.
Today is the birthdate of playwright Eugène Ionesco. One of the founders of the Theater of the Absurd was born in 1909 Slatina, Romania.
Casablanca premiered this day in 1942 and became one of Hollywood's most-revered films.
As we approach Thanksgiving this week...
The cartoonist Charles Schulz was born in 1922, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Schulz was the creator of “Peanuts” and its principle character, the beloved Charlie Brown, who is celebrating Thanksgiving for as long as the holiday may last.
We have the capacity to practice receiving love, the scariest thing of all, and to experience the curiosity of a child. And, as it turns out, the family is the most incredible and efficient laboratory in which we can learn to work out the major blocks to these, which of course we got from the family in the first place....One might as well start this process at the dinner table, that way you can do this work, for which you were born, in comfortable pants...don’t bank on never...Here's the secret... we are all preapproved. The only way we can be at any moment, in this moment, is the best we can be at the moment. Mistakes, poor decisions, ghastly first drafts … And so here we are in amazement and hope, finding ourselves alive. Hope springs from that which is right in front of us.
– Anne Lamott, Almost Everything, Riverhead Books, NY, 2018. ppgs 174-175.
When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.
– Willie Nelson, The Tao of Willie: A Guide to the Happiness in Your Heart. Penguin Random House (2006)
Manifesto for the emotional season . . .
It's the Moon's day … Northerlies are forecasted to bring the first “hard” freeze – 29º – by tomorrow morning here in TulseyTown.
We've entered the emotional season. For the next two months, many of us will feel the ups and downs of joy and sorrow, thankfulness and gratitude for what seems to be a “great mystery.”
Trump and Project 2025. – Heather Cox Richardson, in Letters From An American.
These times do not have to be the final chapter in the American experiment. Already, as Trump prepares his next administration, there is work for us to do. – Joyce Vance, “The Week Ahead,” in Civil Discourse.
Martha Nussbaum provides an intelligent manifesto for including the storytelling arts in moral philosophy....the complex cognitive structure of the emotions has a narrative form — that is, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we feel shape our emotional and ethical reality. Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself. — Martha Nussbaum.
More about Dr. Nussbaum's academic interdisciplinary perspective is online at Univ of Chicago faculty website.
Getting somewhere . . .
It's Sol's day … a taste of Winter headed toward TulseyTown in the coming week.
The holiday season is one that viruses and bacteria love due to the changing weather. Cool, to warm, to cold, and back again repeatedly along with drier air and exposure to more crowds makes us vulnerable. So, get your vaccines, regardless of what RFK believes.
Today in 1859 Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published.
It's the birth date of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The impressionist painter was born in 1864, Albi, France.
Project 2025 is a wrap. It’s locked, loaded, and ready to go. If you believe it’s about to disappear or that Trump won’t use any of it, I have some swampland in Florida for you. – Joyce Vance, Civil Discourse.
People apparently believe Trump only when they want to. Contingency plans are flooding Republican-connected lobbying firms with calls desperate for their exemptions. If you think that’s a recipe for corruption and influence peddling, well of course it is. What they shouldn’t be is surprised. – Daily Kos, 11.20.24
High Desert, New Mexico
… Night blackens like a violin
and bright flour falls from the kitchens of heaven.
… Not everything is broken.
… Abandon your despair, you who enter here forsaken.
The wnd is saying something. Listen.
– Kim Addonizio, Now Were Getting Somewhere, W.W. Norton, 2021,