Rob Tourtelot
@rtourtelot
Rob Tourtelot
Yet the fundamental loss remains—it doesn’t just dissipate—and, in a strange way, I think it can become a magnet for other losses. We come to see we are all simply creatures carrying around our ever-deepening loss. Small griefs seem to collect around the bigger primary grief. I think this realization allows us to become a true human being.
Amanda Petrusich • Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life
A story filled with heart and humor. A story that expressed authenticity, vulnerability, and truth. This should be our goal.
Dan Kennedy • Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling
After all our futile efforts to transform our ordinary minds into idealized, spiritual minds, we discover the fundamental paradox of practice is that leaving everything alone is itself what is ultimately transformative.
Barry Magid • Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide
Imagine that you're passing a lazy afternoon at a sidewalk café on a mild spring day, sipping your drink, chatting with a couple of friends, and watching the cars go by. That's easy. In fact, it's effort-less: the cars just go wherever they go, and you're happily unem-ployed. But now suppose that for some reason you suddenly fall under the delusion
... See moreDean Sluyter • Natural Meditation
Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”
George Saunders's Advice to Graduates
Let go of self-delusion, which is maybe the hardest thing of all to let go of. Shape the thing you’re making into a pure expression of the thing you’re making: “Cut away, strip away the unnecessary, and strip away what people expect.”
Zach Baron • Martin Scorsese: “I Have to Find Out Who the Hell I Am”
intimacy with others necessarily includes facing yourself, reckoning with what you truly desire, humbling yourself, noticing your bad habits, and observing your defense mechanisms. You have to be able to admit the many, many ways you fuck up and blame others and distance yourself every day in order to be a good friend to another flawed human being.... See more
Talking about friendship with Heather Havrilesky
How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.
Elizabeth Lesser • Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
No matter how seriously sick one may be, for example, one’s life is still 100% life. Even if we are dying, our life is still 100% life. Even if we are in prison, our life is still 100% life. There is no such thing as a 50% life or a 70% life. Each moment is all of our life.
The Imperfectionist: Living two hours in the future
-Zen priest Shohaku Okamura