miaphilipscoaching-blog

[miaphilipscoaching-blog]

How Wonderful

How wonderful to be understood, to just sit here while some kind person relieves you of the awful burden of having to explain yourself, of having to find other words to say what you meant, or what you think you thought you meant, and of the worse burden of finding no words, of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person has found just the right words for you—and you have only to sit here and be grateful for words so quiet so discerning they seem not words but literate light, in which your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous. How wonderful that is!

And how altogether wonderful it is not to be understood, not at all, to, well, just sit here while someone not unkindly is saying those impossibly wrong things, or quite possibly they’re the right things if you are, which you’re not, that someone —a difference, finally, so indifferent it would be conceit not to let it pass, unkindness, really, to spoil someone’s fun. And so you don’t mind, you welcome the umbrage of those high murmurings over your head, having found, after all, you are grateful —and you understand this, how wonderful!— that you’ve been led to be quietly yourself, like a root growing wise in darkness under the light litter, the falling words.

by Irving Feldman

[miaphilipscoaching-blog]

The Laughing Heart

your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous the gods wait to delight in you.

by Charles Bukowski

Boost Post

[miaphilipscoaching-blog]

Special Problems in Vocabulary

There is no single particular noun for the way a friendship, stretched over time, grows thin, then one day snaps with a popping sound.

No verb for accidentally breaking a thing while trying to get it open —a marriage, for example.

No particular phrase for losing a book in the middle of reading it, and therefore never learning the end.

There is no expression, in English, at least, for avoiding the sight of your own body in the mirror, for disliking the touch

of the afternoon sun, for walking into the flatlands and dust that stretch out before you after your adventures are done.

No adjective for gradually speaking less and less, because you have stopped being able to say the one thing that would break your life loose from its grip.

Certainly no name that one can imagine for the aspen tree outside the kitchen window, in spade-shaped leaves

spinning on their stems, working themselves into a pale-green, vegetable blur.

No word for waking up one morning and looking around, because the mysterious spirit

that drives all things seems to have returned, and is on your side again.

by Tony Hoagland

[miaphilipscoaching-blog]

Nothing is Far.

Though I have never caught the word Of God from any calling bird, I hear all that the ancients heard. Though I have seen no deity Enter or leave a twilit tree, I see all that the seers see. A common stone can still reveal Something not stone, not seen, yet real. What may a common stone conceal? Nothing is far that once was near. Nothing is hid that once was clear. Nothing was God that is not here. Here is the bird, the tree, the stone. Here in the sun I sit alone Between the known and the unknown.

BY ROBERT FRANCIS