Bethyfly > Recent Status Updates

That was the thing about death. Only the specifics of it hurt. Death, in a general sense, was background noise. She stood in the silence of it.

“You’re slowing down and processing it…I understand self-loathing. However, don’t stay too long with that. There’s no power there. There never will be.”

Hope alone was insufficient. If it did not translate into concert, planned and targeted action, then it was nothing more than fine words, and those meant nothing to these poor exiles.

Why other choice was there? Treaties can be reconstructed, renegotiated, remade. Lives, once lost, are gone for good.

A simple, magnificent equation: ingenuity plus hope equals change.

Be willing to stare down the ugliness and sadness. Life is absurdly hard, and pretending it isn’t is exhausting.

That’s the secret- don’t skip to the end.

I read an article about how people in grief swear because they feel the English language has reached its limit in a time of inarticulate sorrow. Or at least that’s what I tell people when I am casually dropping f-bombs over lunch as I explain the mysteries of Lent.

The promise of heaven to me is this: someday I will get a new set of lungs and I will swim away.
But first I will drown.

Spiritual laws offer an elegant solution to the problem of unfairness. They create a Newtonian universe in which the chaos of the world seems reducible to simple cause and effect. The stories of people’s lives can be plotted by whether or not they follow the rules. In this world there is not such thing as undeserved pain. There is no word for tragedy.

Anyone who has lived in the aftermath of something like this knows that it signifies the arrival of three questions so simple that they seem, in turn, too shallow and too deep.
Why?
God, are you here?
What does this suffering mean?

I am still in progress, and I hope I always will be.
For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self.

Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.
“I can hurt you and get away with it”

It was possible, I knew, to live in two planes at once- to have one’s feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress.

Grief and resilience live together.

As a kid, you learn to measure long before you understand the size or value of anything. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you learn that you’ve been measuring all wrong.

To my dismay, he never rushed anyone along. Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.

The lesson being that in life you control what you can.

It helped, too, to debunk various myths about who was who and what was what around the neighborhood, reinforcing the possibility- something that had long been a credit of my dad’s- that most people were good people if you just treated them well.

Live your moments as you can....Accept happiness as you find it. Hold it as long as possible. Because for you, some moments have yet to happen, and some are gone forever. For this you have my pity and my awe.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good, or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

These words we try to use to describe it, to describe that feeling, these words like live and bravery and truth, the reason they can’t describe it all the way, and the reason that sounds or music or pictures can’t describe it all the way either, is because THEY’RE all shadows too! WORDS ARE SHADOWS TOO!

What if the times when we feel love and act brave and tell the truth are all the times we’re four dimensional, the times were as big and everywhere as the cosmos, the times when we remember, like REALLY remember, really KNOW, that we’re made of starstuff and we’re human beings from the planet Earth

what if these things I’ve been trying to figure out, like the meaning of love and bravery and truth, what if the reason they’re so hard to see is because they’re ALSO tesseracts.

And if I’m still seeing them, still seeing his shadows, still learning things...about him that I didnt know before, then doesn’t that mean that even though he died there’s something about him that keeps living? That there’s something four-dimensional, a tesseract that never dies and we can never really see

Zed said one thing he loves about Contact and about Cosmos is they show how science can be deeply spiritual too. He said that a writer he really likes once said that most religions started off being based on science, only it was the best science that they had at that time

she said the building doesn’t have a basement but it does have a laundry room downstairs with machines that take quarters. I said, Oh, you mean like a slot machine, and Terra said they’re like the lamest slot machines ever, because even if you are lucky the only thing you win is clean clothes.

There’s an unspoken rule in my family that it’s best not to talk religion or politicos with my father. When the topic is religion he won’t talk at all, and when it’s politics he won’t stop talking.

The room is dim, the grayness of an afternoon nap, though beyond the curtains you can see the outside light bursting to come in.