Jori Kandra > Recent Status Updates

“The immune system’s main function is to manage our relationships with our resident microbes. It’s more about balance and good management than defense and destruction.”

“Always a ‘we’ and never a ‘me’.”

“In his sermons, [Martin Luther King Jr.] did not use philosophical language… but instead talked watch person’s ‘sombodyness.’ This idea of personhood is oddly powerful. Everyone deserves basic respect because they have their own ‘sombodyness,’ a basic dignity. Each person without exception is unique and of great value; no one is dispensable or interchangeable.”

“The more unconscious we are of any of this stuff, whether part or UB, complex or archetype [as in Jungian psychology], the more freedom it has and therefore the more ability to take us over.”

“‘Man was not made to know so much… They compete with God, they disturb the seasons, they seek to know more than God Himself. In the end, that knowledge they seek will destroy us all…’”

“… grief never disappears; it just reorganizes itself. Maybe this is what life is: a constant reorganization and dilation of emotions and events.”

“Sometimes, we find our gifts in times of great duress, like pinecones in a forest fire, releasing seeds.”

“… shame and guilt festering in the lower part of our minds, like Gollum at the root of the Misty Mountain. These bottom-feeder emotions slither around in the fight-or-flight space rather than… the “Top of Mind” [neocortex]… Rather than feeling bad (shame and guilt) maybe it’s more about shifting your perspective… ‘That was then, but what is now? What next?”

“‘But no matter how many days you have, it’s never enough. Life is never enough for us. That’s the great tragedy of life.’”

“‘Everyone loves you.’ ‘Everyone find me funny,’ he said. ‘Same thing,’ I said. ‘No it isn’t,’ said Billy. Which is true.

“‘My mum isn’t really like a proper mother… She’s too delicate to be a proper mother.’”

“There are worse prisons than words.”

“I had become used to picturing him as an ogre, a despicable and resentful being, but all I was able to see before me was a kind man, blind to reality, confused like everybody else.”

“‘’Tell me, young man, have you ever been in a Mercedes-Benz… It’s like going to heaven, but without dying.’”

“… perhaps a major symptom of emotional instability is a desire to bathe at inappropriate times.”

“I thought I would rebuild my faith, but instead I am shedding. Maybe what’s left after all the shedding is my religion.”

“I sometimes wonder if Paradise, the Garden of Eden, is nothing more than the state of feeling loved.”

“What are we if not what the light says we are?”

“What are we if not what the light says we are?”

On the Trappist monastery: “Here men knew nothing of hatred. They sought to make themselves conform ever more perfectly to God’s will, whereas outside I had seen mostly men who sought to make God’s will conform to their wretched prejudice. Here men sought their center in God, whereas outside they sought it in themselves.”

“What had she done to her brother, so that she could survive, so that she could be the one who thrived?”

“When I was younger I didn’t eat because I had a nervous stomach, or I wanted to disappear. In some ways learning to feed myself has been my greatest teacher, because I needed to see the way to get the most out of life, out of this body.. is through real nourishment.”

“It’s taken me until writing this book to realize how malnourished I’ve always been. I don’t have a goal weight… I don’t limit myself, I don’t have an active eating disorder, but clinically I have anorexia…”

“Now that I was a mother I would never be able to check out [of my body] ever again.”

“… it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.”