Posts tagged "freedom" — Page 2
I am because I am! means I exist because I exist and need no justification whatsoever for my existence. The fact of my being is enough. I require no terms, conditions or permits from myself or anyone else. I live, and in living I am fully entitled to go on living. My life, my existence, my being is not predicated on standards, values, achievements or accomplishments …
“How do I feel?” is a very important question as applied to people, issues, myself and especially as to my state of well-being. If I feel good, that’s good. If I feel bad, then is there anything I can do to make myself feel better? Am I involved in any way in a self-hating enterprise? Most important, do I feel bad because I haven’t accomplished enough? Achieved enough? Conformed enough? This is blackmail and antithetical to my philosophy. I must fight to give myself the right to feel good about myself and to feel good mood-wise, regardless of any accomplishment or nonaccomplishment whatsoever.
— Compassion and Self-Hate, Theodore Issac Rubin
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Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.
—Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
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a bird
courageously
flying into the city
—Issa
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Very early in my life it was too late.
— The Lover, Marguerite Duras
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It’s been at least three decades since she told me that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace, and I’m the only one who knows what she means. She never had in mind any sort of flight, a change of identity, the dream of making a new life somewhere else. And she never thought of suicide, repulsed by the idea that Rino would have anything to do with her body, and be forced to attend to the details. She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to leave not so much as a hair anywhere in this world …
She was expanding the concept of trace out of all proportion. She wanted not only to disappear herself, now, at the age of sixty-six, but also to eliminate the entire life that she had left behind.
— My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
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