Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Book Note Quotes on Mary Pipher's "Seeking Peace"




Baby picture is of Payton, my great-neice, (Lois' grandaughter, Megan's first born) who is love and light and joy...

Here are some of the quotes from "Seeking Peace" that I couldn't help recording:

"Since the beginning of human time, we have yearned for peace in the face of death, loss, anger and fear. In fact, it is often trauma that turns us toward the sacred and it is the sacred that saves us."
"When we learn to face our pain and the pain of others, we start flourishing. The opposite of despair is not a surcease of despair. (Sorrows are all around us.) Rather, it opposite is an explosion of liveliness and joy ... Love and light exist deep within us, waiting for us to welcome them into our consciousness and share them with all we meet."

"Meditation helped me stay with my own experience and not censure upsetting information. Instead of being utterly entangled in my thoughts and feelings, I learned to note them without judging them."
And here is my favorite:

"We all share similar journeys. We live through childhoods filled with ups and downs. We share houses with people who both love us and make us miserable. We pass developmental milestones, build identities and see them change. We fail miserably and we accomplish important goals. We make the best of it. We take turns being the afflicted and the comforter. We experience a crisis and realize our old ways are not working. We stumble around lost and unhappy, only to see the light, find our path and move forward. This is our universal human story."

Cottage Fishing

A big part of cottage life is fishing. Our most
frequent catch was yellow perch, but bass was
common too. Grandpa Cowie was considered the expert. He was the kind of fellow who if you weren't catching anything and he was, he'd give you his pole all baited up and ready to go, take yours, drop the line over the side and catch a fish on your pole while you still couldn't get a bite. If you thought his side of the boat was better, he'd change sides with you and still be the one to pull in the fish.
Grandfather told me the rules every time just before the boat left the dock. They were: You will not whine to come back to shore, once the anchor has been dropped and the poles have been set. You will bait your own hook. You will sit still in the boat. All three rules were hard on me when I was a squirmy four, five or six year old. Doing my own bait was the hardest, especially if we were using frogs, which we did espicially if going for bass. Finding and catching the little buggers was fun the day before, but putting a sharp hook through their little... ooh, I can't even talk about it. I got used to worms even though they were slimy. I guess I didn't think them cute enough to feel bad about, and they weren't much fun to gather either, but I remember the process as if it were yesterday. After an afternoon rain, just as dusk became darkness, we took flashlights and prowled the grass bent over double to grab the little buggers before they wiggled down into their holes again.

I remember falling overboard one time while trying to wash the icky slime off my hands. I must have been pretty small.
I went out fishing less frequently as I grew older. Grandfather advised me not to learn how to clean fish, so I wouldn't have to. I took that advice to this day, but I still love fish for breakfast (Arlene).