Navjot Singh Sidhu
If an ocean steamer is caught in a fog the best thing to do is to anchor and stand still; when in our troubles we are befogged the best thing we can do is to anchor and stand still until the light of heaven appears.
Category Archives: STEP 10
It is more necessary to guard the mouth than the chest.
When the treasure chest is open, even the just man sins.
Ecuador
The peg swallowed the necklace. (Arabic).
King Vikram in time of misfortune hung his necklace on a peg. As misfortunes follow one another, the necklace soon disappeared. No one being able to tell how it was lost, the saying went abroad that the peg had swallowed it. When good fortune returned, the King found his necklace on the peg where it had been hung.
“I am the only one of us who brings in any money. the other two cannot make money fortune telling. this is because they only tell the truth, and the truth is not what people want to hear. it is a bad thing and it troubles people, so they do not come back.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods
When young “sow wild oats,” but when old, grow sage.
H. J. Byron, An Adage
The gardener’s rule applies to youth and age:
The Grass-Cutter TRACEY RYAN
Jay says Everyone here just uses spray, the “quick”
solution, compounding the problem, for everyone
also drinks from bores and tanks and no one
thinks of the consequence and so he’s out there,
my husband, in that crazed casing, razing the dry wild oats,
making us fit as he can for the feared fire season
that is always to come, doing it hard, meeting each
stalk the same way God reportedly counts each hair
of your head, each sparrow that falls, alive to this patch
of six acres as only such work can make you, all he can do.
I like to sleep In a cosy bed, With a blanket for my feet And a pillow for my head.
SLEEP BY JILL MCDOUGALL
“I’ve always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves
Buddy tried to look as inconspicuous as a human can look if he is accompanying a dwarf with a big horn, an ape, and a troll carrying a piano in a bag. TERRY PRATCHETT
Doc Childre and Sara Paddison, HeartMath Discovery Program
Love is not automatic. It takes conscious practice and awareness, just like playing the piano or golf. However, you have ample opportunities to practice. Everyone you meet can be your practice session.
May sleep envelop you as a bed sheet floating gently down, tickling your skin and removing every worry. Reminding you to consider only this moment. Jeb Dickerson
http://www.quotegarden.com/sleep.html
“It was much better to imagine men in some smokey room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told the children bed time stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, then what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo
The chains of addiction are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
The Wilderness
for Peter Barden
Penury in Sydney had grown stale
And, at twenty-two, my childhood was in danger
So I preceded you, in all but spirit,
To the far-back country
Where the tar roads end.
In the silent lands
Time broadens into space.
Approaching Port Augusta, going on,
Iron-brown and limitless, the plains
Were before me all day. Burnt mountains fell behind
In the glittering sky.
At dawn, the sun would roll up from his lair
In the kiln-dry lake country, fire his heat straight through
The blind grey scrub, awaken me beside wheeltracks
And someone’s car, and I would travel on.
At noon, far out in a mirage, I would brew
Tea with strangers, yarn about jobs in the North
And, chewing quietly, watch maybe an upstart
Dust-devil forming miles off, going high
To totter, darken
And, quite suddenly, vanish
Leaving a formless, thinning stain in the heavens.
Where the spirits of sea-cliffs
Hovered on the plain
I would remember routines we had invented
For putting spine into shapeless days: the time
We passed at a crouching trot down Wynyard Concourse
Tell each other in loud mock-Arunta and gestures
What game we were tracking down what haunted gorge . . .
Frivolous games
But they sustained me like water,
They, and the is-ful ah!-nesses of things.
http://www.lesmurray.org/uncollected_twc.htm#rttw
Euroa Advertiser (Vic. : 1884 – 1920), Friday 20 February 1885,
The chains of addiction are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. SWAHILI.
http://swahiliproverbs.afrst.illinois.edu/love.html
Bread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing room, is ambrosia eaten under a tree.” – Elizabeth Von Antrim
We trawl the sunken city, cast webs to catch what’s left
Tamryn Bennett
Dream merchants
http://redroomcompany.org/poem/tamryn-bennett/dream-merchants/
SHAKESPEARE MERCHANT OF VENICE
O hell! what have we here?
A carrion Death, within whose empty eye
There is a written scroll! I’ll read the writing.
All that glitters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold:
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgment old,
Your answer had not been inscroll’d:
Fare you well; your suit is cold.
This story’s right, the story’s true I would not tell lies to you Like the promises they did not keep
ARCHIE ROACH
http://ozpoemaday.wordpress.com/category/aboriginal/
“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
― Edward Abbey
Speak like a parrot; meditate like a swan; chew like a goat; and bathe like an elephant. Indian
Judith Bishop
Swan Lake
As music curves through the body, the swing of it
lifting mind’s invisible feet, so it happened
a ballet I’d gone to in the days after breaking up
with someone who had found me rather clumsy
left behind a troupe of swans in my heart.
Now the inner band played on, a waltz as searing
as a light too brightly shining in a room that should be dark,
and the swans, pirouetting through the dark
and joyful moments of the plot, took my heart
dancing, till the grief that remained
turned to a mood of gentle swanning
through the fine, vacated ballroom of the mind;
till the swans evaporated with a cry.
Even a bear can be taught to dance.
When a man is wrong and won’t admit it, he always gets angry.
Haliburton
“We are all mistaken sometimes; sometimes we do wrong things, things that have bad consequences. But it does not mean we are evil, or that we cannot be trusted ever afterward.”
― Alison Croggon
all that is required is that you take an honest moral inventory.
and when wrong promptly admit it.
It’s easy to tell the truth when it won’t cost you anything. It’s harder when the truth brings about difficult circumstances. But whether the result is good or bad, let your truthfulness be known to all so that you can live with a clear conscience and be a trustworthy friend.
Never ruin an apology with an excuse.
~Kimberly Johnson
The spot check inventory. Steps one through nine have sensitized us to see the truth about our own behaviour and the manner in which the rest of the world, especially people, respond to our actions. Having developed this awareness, we come to see, during each moment of each day, what is really going on. In other words, we are living in the truth of the moment. We have, in addition to a new awareness, also developed some measure of ability to actually control our actions. No longer are we simply sleep-walking under the direction of old habits—habits, the way we think and act when we are not thinking about what we are doing, and our elaborate delusions. The process of exchanging good habits for destructive old habits is, unfortunately, laborious.
A hundred wagon loads of thoughts will not pay a single ounce of debt.
(Italian
Be like the old lady who fell out of the wagon.
(you aren’t involved, so stay out of it)
You’re still in prison if you do nothing better in freedom.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
We are products of our past, but we don’t have to be prisoners of it.
Great teams do not hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry.
They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.”
― Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
We can do anything for one day. So, just for today, let us be unafraid of life, unafraid of death which is the shadow of life; unafraid to be happy to enjoy the beautiful, to believe the best.
Just for today let us live this one day only, forgetting yesterday and tomorrow, and not trying to solve the whole problem of life at once.
— Joseph Fort Newton
everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.”
― Chaim Potok, Davita’s Harp
When a man finds that he was wrong to have refused to eat, he should leave his anger and play a harp to call for harmony.
The way a donkey expresses gratitude is by giving someone a bunch of kicks.
http://quotations.about.com/od/proverbs/a/swahilipro.htm
If a donkey kicks you and you kick back, you are both donkeys.
(Gambia)
Behaviour is a mirror in which everyone shows his or her image.
Even if your sore is putrefied, you don’t smell the bad odour.
You don’t see your own bad behaviour or that of your family and if you see it you don’t hate is as other people do.
Joy and sorrow are the light and shade of life; without light and shade no picture is clear.
http://www.1world1way.com/coach/quotes_islamic_wisdom.html
Many a time have I merely closed my eyes at the end of yet another troublesome day and soaked my bruised psyche in wild water, rivers remembered and rivers imagined. Rivers course through my dreams, rivers cold and fast, rivers well-known and rivers nameless, rivers that seem like ribbons of blue water twisting through wide valleys, narrow rivers folded in layers of darkening shadows, rivers that have eroded down deep into the mountain’s belly, sculpted the land, peeled back the planet’s history exposing the texture of time itself. — (Harry Middleton, On the Spine of Time or Rivers of Memory)
To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”
― Jeanette Winterson
When a dying man cries, it is not because of where he is going which he knows nothing about, but because of what he wishes he would have done in the world he is leaving behind.
nigeria
He who would enjoy the fruit must not spoil the blossom.
http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/corpus/seanfhaclan/MacDonald.html
“It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate: and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get–when our will strains after a path we may not follow–we need neither starve from inanition, not stand still in despair: we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden fruit it longed to taste–and perhaps purer; and to hew out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
THE OLD PROVERBIAL RECOVERY 
