Russell and Carol - hayle and hearty

The pleasure of what we enjoy is lost by wanting more

Chinese

...few things are so important you would risk your life for them, but all sorts of things are important enough to risk somebody else’s life.

Chapter 12

I always thought people like us needed people like Raphaëlle to cope with certain situations but it is way more complex than that.

The world is made up of our differences.    It needs people like us, who only see the coloured stains and not the landscape, and it needs people like Raphaëlle, who only see the landscape even if it sometimes leads them to lose their judgments.  It is only when we are together that we can see the entirety of the picture.    One cannot work without the other.

"Astrid Et Raphaelle" S02 E01

"Would I that he was not here now, but was then, than he never was here at all’"

Freya North

"I mean to say that the impulse towards good involves choice and is
complicated, and the impulse towards bad is hideously simple and easy"

Maeve Brennan; ‘Talk of the Town’ for New Yorker

“We need to dispel the myth that empathy is ‘walking in someone else’s shoes.’ Rather than walking in your shoes, I need to learn how to listen to the story you tell about what it’s like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesn’t match my experiences..”

― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience, 2021

“True is such a twentieth-century concept. The question is, can I get you to believe it, can I get it repeated enough times to make it as good as true.”

—? Salman Rushdie, The Golden House 2017

Seamus Heaney On Suffering, Self-healing, and Hope for a Great Sea Change

To mark Joe Biden's President-elect status, RTE put together a piece on his history and voiced by him reading an excerpt from the Seamus Heaney poem “The Cure at Troy” written in 1991 - his version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes written in the fifth century BC. 

As though Heaney wrote it for this exact time as we navigate a mighty sea-change.

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

“My mission is to seek beauty, find humour, and bring joy.”

As I spoke that aloud, I woke up.

It was as if a huge stone had rolled off my chest.

I had a mission statement!

Who knew, now that my hair’s turned white, to finally have a mission statement?  Let alone such a mission!

So simple, so delightful to fulfill. One that is not transactional; that does not include commodification. 

Your sea change has stimulated a sea change in me.

“Whither leads the voyage?

Today is the Tomorrow you Worried about Yesterday and All is Well
- attributed to Dale Carnegie

Seen on a wooden plaque repaired on BBC The Repair Shop

BBC iPlayer - The Repair Shop - 60-Minute Versions: Episode 19

Wood wizard Will Kirk repairs a hand-carved wooden plaque, the remarkable work of Carol Bolton’s father, in 1937 when he was just 12 years old

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0007znp/the-repair-shop-60minute-versions-episode-19