Wise Words 2

 

DUKES FANS:  

 “Listening is an art that requires attention over talent, spirit over ego, others over self.” Dean Jackson 

 Wise Words 2 

In the last newsletter I talked about some of the wise words I have heard in my life that help me deal with being a human and remaining fairly sane and doing fairly well at living this life thing. I ended the newsletter by asking if readers had any words of wisdom that guide and help them, and if so, would they please send some to me. And I got a slew of responses Thank you for that; I am glad that what I wrote resonated with so many of you. I am glad also that you were willing to share some of the important words and ideas that help you navigate the world. I love picking up new thoughts and ideas, and I can’t always do that by myself. I often need others to show me things and awaken me to things. You did that for me. 

     Some of these sayings and quotes were new to me. Some were from people with whom I am familiar. Others were from people I had not heard of. Some were not attributed to any one person but had been floating around the general culture for decades. Still others reminded me of things I had all but forgotten. Thank you for all of them; I needed to encounter them all. 

    I am a human and such I had to try to “label” and “make order” out of what I received; we humans love to do that.  So I spent some time classifying them as I saw them applying to me. Someone else, of course, would probably classify them differently, but what follows is how they resonated with me. 

  A number of these sayings I would classify as general, “How To Approach the Day-to-Day World’-suggestions for staying in a good frame of mind and emotionally balanced as we go through our normal days; 

Nothing is constant but change. 

The love you take is equal to the love you make. 

It’s the journey that matters; not the destination 

It takes only 17 muscles to smile, but 43 to frown

Others were about offering comfort and solace and navigating tough times: 

“If the pain is that real, then the love must have been that strong.”

"Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses our understanding. It is the bitter 

  potion by which the physician within heals our sick self.   Therefore, trust the 

physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility."

"They're never far from us, you know...the dead. No morin' a breath.  

You let that last one go and you're with them again." 

 “Transitions are almost always signs of growth, but they can bring feelings of 

loss and hurt. To get somewhere new, we may have to leave somewhere else behind.”

“We have friends because we can’t always carry the weight of the world by  

ourselves.” 

  “We fall apart: friends and family help put us back together”

And some seemed to be aspirational/inspirational or about 

personal values:

"Ring the bells that still can ring.  

Forget your perfect offering.  

There is a crack in everything.  

That's how the light gets in."

“Love is the hardest lesson”

"I have three wishes for you. I wish you the joy of a purposeful life. I wish you 

 new worlds and the vision to see them. I wish you the decency and nobility 

of which you are capable."  

"Never give in - never, never, never in nothing great or small, large or petty, 

never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense, never yield to 

the overwhelming might of the enemy." 

“Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light,  

not our darkens that most frightens us.” 

 

 “If you don’t stand for something, then you’ll fall for anything” 

  “If there is no struggle there is no progress”. 

  “What you do makes a difference., you decide the type of difference you 

want to make.” 

  “When you are faced with a tough choice, imagine that your mother is  

standing over you and watching. What do you want Mom to see?” 

There were more quotes, but these were the ones that stood out to me. I thought about putting in the sources for the quotes, but I decided not to. I wanted to let the ideas shine through. Again, I am amazed at the power of human connection; the way we can help, teach, inspire, support, and grow with each other. You have given me a lot. I am so glad that the human experience is not a solitary one. Thank you all. 

(To those of you who are new to the mailing list and curious about previous newsletters, go to our website and click on “John’s Blog” www.dukesofdestiny.com   

The Importance of Hope

 

DUKES FANS:   

“If given a choice between facts and myth, most people will choose myth.”- writer Ishmael Reed 

“It is the intangible things that matter most to people; that holds us together as individuals and as groups. Faith, hope, fear and love move people to do things they would otherwise be unable or unwilling to do.” - Anon. 

When I was a teacher my 8th grade class was an interdisciplinary course focused on the history of civilization. It looked at this lifestyle from the first civilization that started in what is now Iraq until the fall of the Roman Empire. It also looked at how this lifestyle is similar no matter where or when or the planet it appeared. We started the course by brainstorming, reading about, and exploring ideas of just what it means to be a “human being,” and what it is that enables us to somehow hold together in groups and societies. We concluded that all humans need to be in groups, and that it was the need to survive that inspired us to form groups; we were safer and more productive in them. But we also realized that it was the intangibles of human behavior and thinking that helped us stay in groups. Things we couldn’t see or hold somehow lead us to trust other humans, work with them and even sacrifice for them. 

 In all societies one of the most important of those intangibles was the universal existence of “story "and “myth.”  No, not “myth” in the sense of false or made-up, but myth in the sense of an essential set of stories providing identity, belief, a sense of place and belonging and a guide on how to live for humans living in groups. It can be called, religion, faith, belief, a practice, philosophy, or folklore; It looks different in different parts of the world, at different times, and depending upon who is doing the looking. But it is essential to being human. We need to do it and to have it, for what it does is give humans a sense of place in the universe and provides guides on how to maintain that place. It is one of the key parts of what we call our” identity, “and it enables us to hope. 

I am thinking about that because in my last newsletter I mentioned Baltimore’s American Visionary Arts Musuem as one of my favorite and most inspirational places, and I provided links to some of their past exhibitions. The one that I have looked at a number of times over this past week is, The Big Hope Show, the exhibit that celebrated the start of the second decade of the museum’s existence and was probably one of its most ambitious offerings.  My wife and I were very awed and affected by that exhibit when we saw it in 2016 and looking again at the introduction to it and some of the displays from it on the museum website brought back many of those feelings. 

The exhibit looked at “hope” as one of the defining characteristics of what it means to be human and as something humans need in order to survive. Through a variety of media, words, and images, this exhibit fully explored that idea, linking people such as Emily Dickinson, John Waters, a survivor of an armed robbery, a person waiting over a decade for a kidney transplant, someone who spent decades in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit, and many more. It also offered definitions of what hope is and can be and provided examples of what it does to and for humans. Seeing this again had me vividly thinking about the ways hope has held groups together and inspired change in societies. The Civil Rights Movement and the constant movement of peoples from one part of the world to another are and have both been kept alive and driven by this thing called “hope.’ The idea that women can do what used be thought of as “men's jobs” is likewise driven by that. And that intangible has motivated change throughout all the centuries we have been on this planet and on every continent on which we humans have settled. It has led to and continues lead to important positive changes in all aspects of human life. life as we know it would not exist without it. 

Seeing the exhibit again also made me reflect on the ways having the gift of hope has helped propel me forward throughout my life, whether it has been inspired by parents, family, spiritual things, my friends, heroes, books, and/or music. In fact, it has been and is all of these things and more that inspire it, and it continues to help me do much more than just “survive” in this universe. 

 Hope is one of those necessary intangible things that somehow turns up in all different ways and in all different times and places to help us humans. It is one of those things we can’t see or touch, but it serves to let humans be human. It keeps people alive and moving forward even in spite of all the logic and “common sense” that can argue against doing just that. It is one of the things that draws groups together, gives them strength, and helps maintain many of them, even in unbearable situations such as the Holocaust and the Cherokee Trail of Tears. It enables us to dream and act to become different and better people, different and better groups, and even different and better societies. I have a longtime friend named Charles who is a few years older than I am. When I see him and ask him how he’s doing, he often says, “I’m still becoming.” Hope, indeed.  

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I invite you to look at the introduction and images from the Big Hope Show: 

a1f55b_9d41cf2044a948299167bfa6616ce651.pdf (avam.org) 

Here Is a link to a trailer of a documentary about Herman Wallace, the man featured in the show who spent over three decades in solitary confinement in Louisiana: 

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi712967193/?ref_=tt_vi_i_1  

To those of you who are new to the mailing list and curious about previous newsletters, go to our website and click on “John’s Blog” 

www.dukesofdestiny.com 

Down to Baltimore

 

DUKES FANS:   

“I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore. You can look far and wide, but you'll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It's as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay.”  John Waters, Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste 

A few weeks ago I wrote about being ready to do some more traveling and to visit some of my favorite cities. Yes, I m a birdwatcher and I love camping and hiking and nature. But I am also the consummate urbanite; I love cities and what they offer. I especially love downtowns, museums, the diversity of city life and the varieties of neighborhoods and foodstuffs. Last week I got out of Philadelphia for a few days and spent some time in one of my favorite cities. 

I had been familiar with Baltimore in an historic sense for most of my life. It was the setting during the War of 1812 for Francis Scott Key, Fort McHenry and the Star-Spangled Banner. It was a major port in colonial American trade, including the slave trade, and it was the port in whose shipyards Frederick Douglass worked and from which he escaped to freedom in 1838. It, along with New York City, was also one of Philadelphia’s main rivals for shipping traffic, both nationally and internationally, for much of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. But none of that got me going to that city. I started going to Baltimore in the mid-1990's, spurred by my favorite regular network series, Homicide: Life on the Street. The series was filmed in Baltimore, and my wife, son and I watched that show regularly and loved it. One day, after having watched the show for several seasons, my wife suggested a trip down to Baltimore to do a “Homicide tour” and visit the places featured in the show! We did that for a day and loved it. We went to the Fells Point Market, The Daily Grind Coffee Shop, the fire station that served as the police headquarters on the harbor, and some of the seafood restaurants where the characters ate. That became part of our regular yearly trips, even after the show was cancelled. We explored new ares in the city and we discovered several museums that we loved. We visited that city at least once a year from 1995 until 2018, and we never had a bad time 

 The most exciting museum we discovered was The American Visionary Arts Museum on Francis Key Highway. We first visited it in 1997, two years after it opened, and it immediately grabbed us. Originally one building, it has since expanded to three buildings with exciting architecture, mosaics on the outer walls, 2 sculpture plazas, a wildflower garden and classroom space for its intensive works with Baltimore schools. It has an incredibly large permanent collection of outsider art, and it is never boring to see some of it again. it also features special thematic exhibits take over the mina building such as The Science and Importance of Play; YUMMM’-the History, Fantasy and Future of Food; Storytelling; All Faiths Beautiful, and many, many more incredible special delights. The exhibits are always colorful, multi-media, amazingly arranged, and thought provoking. This is one of my favorite places I have ever been, and it has always surprised, challenged and engaged me and helped/led me see the world in different, more complex ways. 

The special exhibit that is there until Sunday, September 4 is titled, Healing and the Art of Compassion (and the Lack Thereof!) It is an unbelievably moving and powerful exhibit that examine the power, science, spiritual and poetic, culturally specific and nuanced ways that this simple word has resonated and been a force throughout human history. It is mutli, multi-media. There is a series of designed plaques and quotes from religious, artistic, political, literary and other people on what compassion can do and the hope it can hold. There are medical charts showing the effects and health benefits research has shown that living a life filled with compassion can bring to human beings. There are photographs of children, the Dalai Lama, parents, and war-torn places. There are sculptures of essential workers, animals, paintings of mystical places, and postcards. And there are looks at what a lack of compassion can do as well. There is an video of former members of Neo-Nazi groups talking about why they initially were drawn to such beliefs and why they felt they needed to be in those groups. There are quotes, displays, and articles showing how medical and psychological professions in earlier times exhibited, and can still exhibit, cruel, insensitive, and inhumane behavior. There is an incredible mural-mosaic about the sufferings of Job from the Bible and the power of faith and hope. And there is a moving video of a TED Talk by Kevin Briggs, a former Golden Gate Bridge police officer who has had 92 encounters with people attempting suicide from that bridge. The talk examines how he has tried to help them find their way to a little bit of hope, and what he has learned about the power of simply listening to another human being. It is a four-story examination of much of the human condition, shown and arranged in ways that caused me to stop in my tracks, think, pause, cry, sit in exhaustion, nod and speak quietly to other museum goers, and feel that combination of hope, love, disappointment and joy the keeps us as humans going and striving in spite of some of the things we do to each other. Healing and Compassion; we are both capable of and need plenty of both. 

There were two other exhibits in the main building that I did not get to see. The Healing and Compassion exhibit left me too thoughtful and exhausted. I left the museum, had a good meal at one of my favorite seafood lunch spots, then had a great, though sweaty, walk around the Inner Harbor and the Fells Point neighborhood. It felt good to be back. I need to visit places that engage and challenge me, and make me feel fully alive. I am so glad that that TV show hooked us and got us to visit Baltimore. No, it is not home to me as Philadelphia is. But it is a place that always brings me joy and satisfies me in deep ways. I will visit again soon. I do not want to stay away. 

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The American Visionary Art Museum 

https://www.avam.org 

Past exhibits at AVAM: 

Past Exhibitions | American Visionary Art Museum (avam.org) 

Fairy Tales

 

 

 

DUKES FANS:   

‘ As for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths - intrusions of reality into fantasy, like toast crumbs on a wizard's beard.” - Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer 

    Like most little kids, I loved hearing and reading fairy tales growing up. Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood and more were all staples of my young life. We read them in school, parents and teachers read them to us, and after I learned to read, I read countless versions of them in library books and children’s magazines. Of course, the clearest and most steadfast ideas about those tales came from the many Walt Disney cartoons and movies I saw that were based on them. Those of us of a certain age have clear images of Rapunzel and her hair, of Little Red Riding Hood and that wolf, and of Cinderella and the faces of those evil twin sisters. I was told that these were all fairy tales by some people called, “Grimm”, and for a long while that meant nothing to me.”  It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I decided to look into who these brothers really were, what these tales were about, and where they came from. And when I read more about them and read translations of some of the original stories, I was shocked and amazed. This was not Disney; this was not Disney at all.  

   The Grimms collected their stories from oral interviews and from old books in Germany. Many of these tales were hundreds of years old, and the violence in them was very notable. In some of the stories eyeballs are pecked out by birds, children are cooked and fed to a parent, people cut off toes, and more. Being punished in many of these stories meant truly horrible things, and it did not seem that they were for children at all. As they were originally intended they actually were for kids, but most them were not just “entertainment.” Many were what we would now call “morality tales”: They were designed to teach lessons about the real and scary world of The Middle Ages and the dangers of a world beyond what most people could see and visit. Not listening to your parents or your feudal lord, being lost in the woods or away from home-in such a world those things could have real consequences. This was not Disney at all 

   I am thinking about this because I just finished reading the June issue of the Smithsonian Magazine, and in it is an article entitled, “The Real Pinocchio.” The article takes us to a place in Italy, and it looks at the truth behind the original stories of the piece of wood that comes to life. Again, most of us know the story via Disney, and it is hugely popular. It is one of the most popular stories inb the world. In fact, Netflix and Disney are each planning new versions of it to be released soon. It has had incredible staying power and an incredible effect on our culture-just look at how many political ads these days feature politicians whose noses grow longer as their opponents paint them as liars. But there was much more going on behind the story than just a puppet whose nose grew every time it lied. The story had was written with important social intent, and it provides a view of what Italy was like at that time. 

   Pinocchio was written in the late 19th century by Carlo Lorenzini, nee Collodi, and it was constructed against the backdrop of what was happening and might be possible in this newly unified country called “Italy”. Lorenzini had been a political satirist and columnist for a while, and he had strong ideas about universal education and how children had to apply themselves as the country had moved from medieval-like separate kingdoms into a unified nation in 1860. He saw a need for a unity of purpose for the new nation, and he wanted all children and their parents involved in making that happen. The stories were in part about the role education could play in facilitating that transition, the behaviors that could support it, and the possibilities that could be seized. The stories were originally serialized in a magazine called-Gironale per I bambinie-A Journal for Children. This was the first publication intended for children in the nation, and in many ways these were morality tales for the new nation. And as they were written in an informal Italian language, they were intended to also be a unifying force. 

   Across geographic and class lines the stories were an instant hit, and they were about more than lying and more than just entertainment. The plots and characters in the stories related to the poverty of much of the Italian people, the pettiness and/or corruption that could be found in some institutions, and the hope for better times ahead. Reading about this was an incredible revelation for me.  

   There is a new English translation of Pinocchio co-authored by Anna Kraczyna and John Hooper, two of the people who are our travel guides in the article. I look forward to reading it, and I assume it will please me much as reading the translations of the Grimm’s tales did. I still love the Disney versions of both the fairy tales and Pinocchio, of course. They are incredibly well done, and they are a big part of my childhood. Reading this book will probably add some things to that and deepen my understanding of how this, and indeed many beloved stories work on so many different levels. Always something new to uncover...(smile)__________________________________

Here are a few links should you wish to follow up on The Brothers Grimm and Pinocchio: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms'_Fairy_Tales  

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/the-real-pinocchio-180980027/  

The Italian Riveter: Pinocchio for Adults by John Hooper and Anna ...