My dear Humoristian hooligans-
If ever the world needed your kind-hearted sass and your good-natured love of humanity it is now. We are living in interesting times, for sure – but you were made for these times – and the world needs what you have to offer. May your love and courage touch and uplift all you meet today. May your sense of humor lighten the burden of those who are athirst for joy in a desert of responsibility and solemnity. May your smile be contagious, and your joy transforming.
Go out there and work your magic!
Karen
“Old age” comes little by little, I think –
little surrenders of who we are
to the experts and authorities,
to convenience and comfort –
someone tells us we need to stay out
of the sun, to eat only certain foods,
to travel only at the right times
and to the right places,
and to wash our hands after every
handshake and human touch –
and we listen and obey.
And so we spend our days in “preventative”
exams – counting the pills into our trays –
hoping to increase the number of our days.
And little by little we relinquish
the small pleasures that make life
meaningful – the joy of adventure,
noon-time lunch with our faces turned
towards the sun, whipped cream on
our cocoa, shaking hands with new friends,
and listening to our own hearts to create lives
worth living.
And we lose our lives in a fear of death.
– Karen Molenaar Terrell
My young friend, Jonathan, gave me the gift of Kurt Vonnegut’s If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? for Christmas. I enjoyed it immensely. I found Vonnegut’s musings on life comforting and reassuring. Vonnegut reminded me that the times we are now entering are not any worse that the times that have come before. And he assured me that – although I maybe can’t fix the whole world – I can, at least, make my little corner of it a more humane and beautiful place.
“I apologize because of the terrible mess the planet is in. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any ‘Good Old Days,’ there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, ‘Don’t look at me. I just got here myself.'”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: ‘Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.'”
– Kurt Vonnegut, quoting his son, Mark.
“The teacher… asked me one time, ‘What is it artists do?… They do two things,’ he said, ‘First they admit they can’t straighten out the whole universe. And then second, they make at least one little part of it exactly as it should be. A blob of clay, a square of canvas, a piece of paper, or whatever.'”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“I suggest to you Adams and Eves that you set as your goals the putting of some small part of the planet into something like safe and sane and decent order. There’s a lot of cleaning up to do. There’s a lot of rebuilding to do, both spiritual and physical. And, again, there’s going to be a lot of happiness. Don’t forget to notice!”
– Vonnegut speaking at Butler University.
“My politics in a nutshell: let’s stop giving corporations and newfangled contraptions what they need and get back to giving human beings what we need.”
– Kurt vonnegut
***
“How about Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?
‘Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth,
Blessed are the merciful,
for they shall obtain mercy,
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called the children of God…’
“For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
“‘Blessed are the merciful’ in a courtroom? ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ in the Pentagon? Give me a break!”
– Kurt Vonnegut
***
“Revenge provokes revenge which provokes revenge which provokes revenge – forming an unbroken chain of death and destruction linking nations of today to barbarous tribes of thousands and thousands of years ago.
“We may never dissuade leaders of our nation or any other nation from responding vengefully, violently, to every insult or injury. In this Age, the Age of Television, they will continue to find irresistible the temptation to become entertainers, to compete with movies by blowing up bridges and police stations and factories and so on…
“But in our personal lives, our inner lives, at least, we can learn to live without the sick excitement… And we can teach our children and our grandchildren to do the same – so that they, too, can never be a threat to anyone.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
***
“When my father was dying, he said, ‘I want to thank you, because you’ve never put a villain in any of your stories.’ The secret ingredient in my books is, there has never been a villain.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“…I would like to infect people with humane ideas before they’re able to defend themselves.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“Culture is a gadget; it’s something we inherit. And you can fix it the way you fix a broken oil burner. You can fix it continuously.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long for all of human experience so far that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on… Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn’t the gold standard that they want to put us back on; they want something even more basic than that. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard again.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“Our founding fathers never promised us that this would be a painless form of Government, that adhering to the Bill of Rights would invariably be delightful. Nor are Americans proud of avoiding pain at all costs… So it is not too much to ask of Americans that they not be censors, that they run the risk of being deeply wounded by ideas so that we may all be free. If we are wounded by an ugly idea, we must count it as part of the cost of freedom and, like American heroes in the days gone by, bravely carry on.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“So the advice I give myself at the age of 71 is the best advice I could have given myself in 1940, when detraining for the first time in Ithaca, having come all the way from Indianapolis: ‘Keep your hat on. We may wind up miles from here.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“And here’s what I think the truth is: we are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, we are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“Much has been written about the effects on institutions of higher learning of the sudden influx of veterans after my war. One thing it did was bamboozle many teachers whose authority and glamour was based on their having seen more life and the world than their students had. In seminars I would occasionally try to talk about something I had observed about human beings while a soldier, as a prisoner of war, as a family man. I had a wife and kid then. This turned out to be very bad manners, like coming to a crap game with loaded dice. No fair.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
***
Kurt Vonnegut speaking to Joe Heller, author of *Catch-22*:
“‘Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that only yesterday our host probably made more money than Catch-22, one of the most popular books of all time, has grossed world-wide over the last forty years?’
“Joe said to me, ‘I have something he can never have.’
“I said, ‘What’s that, Joe?’
“And he said, ‘The knowledge that I’ve got enough.'”
– Kurt Vonnegut
Happiness is spiritual, born of Truth and Love. It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it.
– Mary Baker Eddy
…joy cannot be turned into sorrow, for sorrow is not the master of joy…
– Mary Baker Eddy
Christmas morning walk…
“Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'”
– Kurt Vonnegut
Something very cool happened this year: People I never knew existed suddenly appeared in my life voicing the same concerns I’ve voiced, sharing the same values as me, befriending me, offering their support when I’ve felt discouraged or afraid, and letting me know I’m not alone. It’s been amazing, really, how we’ve all managed to find each other in these unsettling, dark times. Just as the metaphorical batteries in my flashlight start to die, and the light starts to go out, suddenly someone will appear out of nowhere and shine his light out of the darkness and offer help, and tell me I’m not alone.
It has meant the world to me.
There have also been friends who have “defriended” me in the last year, too, of course – because I am so controversial and badass and stuff 🙂 – but I’m thinking for every friend who felt the need to defriend me, three more new friends have suddenly appeared to offer friendship.
I am rich with true friends – both old friends and new – I am wealthy beyond imagining.
My dear Humoristian hooligans –
May you bring your abundant kindness and wisdom into today. May you lighten the hearts of the scared and despairing with your courage and good will to all mankind, and may you bring healthy, healing laughter to the stodgy, stingy, and staid. May you find hope and beauty in the good continually unfolding around you. May you make a new friend, find a new song, and leave behind something beautiful. Amen.
Go out there and work your magic!
Love,
Karen
Happy solstice, everyone! “Let there be light!”
Stopped at the local post office on the way home from work. There was a complicated transaction with the customer in front of me that took maybe 10 minutes. A couple of people came in and lined up behind me. We’re all standing there, quiet, behaving ourselves – like people do in elevators. Of course, seeing as how *I* was there – this couldn’t last long.
I turned around and said, “Merry Christmas!” and the two people standing behind me smiled and wished me a merry Christmas back. The woman behind me said, “They should be playing Christmas music.” I started singing, “We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas…” – grand finale – “we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new (raised my voice an octave) year!” The people behind me laughed.
Pretty soon my old friend, Mr. Rousseau, came in and greeted me. I told him we were having a party in there. He suggested there should be caroling – my cue – I started singing “Jingle Bells” – everyone joined in. Just as we finished Jingle Bells the customer in front of me finished her transaction, and it was my turn. Perfect timing! I bought my stamps and picked up a package, and as I was leaving I said to my fellow customers, “And my next show will be at…” and they started laughing.
And for your listening pleasure (or listening something) :), here’s another Christmas carol I recorded on singsnap a couple years ago: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
I went to the Brainy Quotes page for Anne Frank to find some inspiration for myself. Wonderful quotes there – full of love and hope and a steadfast belief in the power of good – and then at the end I came upon this one: “I’ve reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, and I can’t do anything to change events anyway.” And… yeah… that one caught me up short.
Of course Anne Frank was wrong about that – her words and thoughts have had a huge impact on mankind – although she wasn’t here to see it.
But her words got me thinking about my own place here. I don’t know if I’ll be around long enough to see a time when the world is, finally, at peace, and recognizes the rule and might of Love. But I want to be part of the movement that leads that direction, you know? I want to be part of the wave that pushes Love to the shore, even if maybe I don’t get to the shore myself.
But I get ascared sometimes. Sometimes I get frustrated. Sometimes I get angry. And discouraged. Sometimes I make humongo mistakes.
We are in times that test us – times that bring out the worst in mankind, and the best. And I really hope I can rise to the occassion (one c? one s? – that word gets me every time).
So. Those are my thoughts as I wake up on this morning of December 16, 2016.
Just thought I’d share.
Alrighty. Carry on then…
– Karen
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
– Anne Frank
“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”
– Anne Frank
“Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!”
– Anne Frank
“I see the world slowly being transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.”
– Anne Frank
Adventures of the Madcap Christian Scientist 