A daily dose of dharma

Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Do it now

“For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn't conspire against you, but it doesn't go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it's important to you and you want to do it "eventually," just do it and correct course along the way.”
Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Darkness

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”
C.G. Jung

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Therapy

“To all of you reading this who are on the fence about therapy because of the cost: It’s smart money, spend it. That one hundred bucks an hour pays off down the road when you learn through therapy how to get out of your own way, stop self-sabotaging and thus make good decisions about relationships and career. Think of it as an investment in yourself. Simply going to therapy helps. Just carving out an hour for yourself, and deciding that you and your life are worth spending some time and money on makes a difference. That simple act alone boosts your self-esteem. Don’t think of going to therapy as “I’m a broken pile of crap and need someone to fix me,” think of it as “I’m going to change myself for the better instead of crying, masturbating and blaming my parents for the rest of my life.”

Adam Carolla, Daddy, Stop Talking!: And Other Things My Kids Want But Won't Be Getting

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Mother

“And now I need To do something Excessively Indian So I will name All of the pine trees On the reservation. That one is Mother And that one over There is Mother And so is that third Pine in the valley And that tall one On the ridge is Mother.

Okay, I’m either lazy Or I have an arboreal strain Of Oedipus complex. So let me take this down A few degrees.

That pine, the closest one To my mother’s grave— I imagine its roots Will eventually feed On what my mother Will become After many years In the earth. So let my mother Be that tree And let that one tree Be my mother. And let my Mother Tree Turn every toxin Into oxygen So that my siblings And I can finally And simply breathe.”

Sherman Alexie, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Good paths

“We all share the same Earth Mother, regardless of race or country of origin, so let us learn the ways of love, peace and harmony, and seek the good paths in life. It is good to have spoken.”

Sun Bear, The Medicine Wheel: Earth Astrology

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Elders

“Oh, no, no, you've got that all wrong. You're not required to respect elders. After all, most people are idiots, regardless of age. In tribal cultures, we just make sure that elders remain an active part of the culture, even if they're idiots. Especially if they're idiots. You can't just abandon your old people, even if they have nothing intelligent to say. Even if they're crazy.”

Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian in the World

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

the big lie

“Guess what? The Nazis didn't lose the war after all. They won it and flourished. They took over the world and wiped out every last Jew, every last Gypsy, black, East Indian, and American Indian. Then, when they were finished with that, they wiped out the Russians and the Poles and the Bohemians and the Moravians and the Bulgarians and the Serbians and the Croatians--all the Slavs. Then they started in on the Polynesians and the Koreans and the Chinese and the Japanese--all the peoples of Asia.

This took a long, long time, but when it was all over, everyone in the world was one hundred percent Aryan, and they were all very, very happy. Naturally the textbooks used in the schools no longer mentioned any race but the Aryan or any language but German or any religion but Hitlerism or any political system but National Socialism. There would have been no point.

After a few generations of that, no one could have put anything different into the textbooks even if they'd wanted to, because they didn't know anything different. But one day, two young students were conversing at the University of New Heidelberg in Tokyo. Both were handsome in the usual Aryan way, but one of them looked vaguely worried and unhappy. That was Kurt. His friend said, "What's wrong, Kurt? Why are you always moping around like this?" Kurt said,

"I'll tell you, Hans. There is something that's troubling me--and troubling me deeply." His friend asked what it was. "It's this," Kurt said. "I cannot shake the crazy feeling that there is some small thing that we're being lied to about." And that's how the paper ended.’

Ishmael nodded thoughtfully. 'And what did your teacher think of that?'

'He wanted to know if I had the same crazy feeling as Kurt. When I said I did, he wanted to know what I thought we were being lied to about. I said, 'How could I know? I'm no better off than Kurt.”

Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Appreciation

“When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”

Ram Dass

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Existence

“Take hold of your own life.
See that the whole existence is celebrating.
These trees are not serious, these birds are not serious.
The rivers and the oceans are wild,
and everywhere there is fun,
everywhere there is joy and delight.
Watch existence,
listen to the existence and become part of it.”
Osho

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Judging

“As I’ve often said, this is the biggest problem we have in our society—unwanted kids. If we solve this problem we solve all the other problems. So we have to start judging. As I said before, we judge smokers more harshly than we judge deadbeat dads in our current society. Seriously, how many antismoking PSAs have you seen this week vs. ones saying raise your kids, or don’t have kids if you can’t afford them? And what’s hurting our society more? People need to see that asshole and call him an asshole so maybe other people thinking about being assholes wouldn’t become assholes. We stopped judging people a long time ago because the idiots on the left told us everyone is the same and that we couldn’t do that. We need to bring back judging.”

Adam Carolla, President Me: The America That's in My Head

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Pushups in space

“Humans need challenges to overcome, just like a muscle needs resistance to grow. In a zero-gravity environment, an astronaut’s muscles atrophy because there is no resistance. The government giving you a bunch of handouts and living your life for you is the equivalent of doing push-ups in outer space. Big government is like the void of space—it’s massive, constantly expanding, and if we immerse ourselves in it, we’ll simply wither away.”

Adam Carolla, President Me: The America That's in My Head

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Tribal Belonging

“I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms. And the tribe of cartoonists. And the tribe of chronic masturbators. And the tribe of teenage boys. And the tribe of small-town kids. And the tribe of Pacific Northwesterners. And the tribe of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers. And the tribe of poverty. And the tribe of funeral-goers. And the tribe of beloved sons. And the tribe of boys who really missed their best friends. It was a huge realization. And that's when I knew that I was going to be okay.”

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Saunter

"I don't like either the word [hike] or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not 'hike!'

Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It's a beautiful word.

Away back in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, 'A la sainte terre', 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers.

Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them."
John Muir

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

strawberries

“There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass.

She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below.

This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.”

Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Answerable

“We must everywhere be part of the cry for civilian review boards, not in the naive belief that they are a panacea but in the conviction that police conduct is not the exclusive responsibility of commissioners and politicians. Police must be answerable to the citizenry they presumably protect, and if they have been educated to any other concept of their role, now is the time to educate them.”

Bayard Rustin, Down The Line

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

PLAY YOUR hand

“Daddy had never been able to understand how I, a college student, could consider myself "oppressed." He didn't think of himself that way and didn't see why I should. My job, he insisted time and again, was to "play the hand you're dealt," the way he'd done his whole life. Besides, I had a better hand than he'd ever held - and we both knew it. My life was full of opportunities of which he had never dared to dream. All I had to do was reach out and take them. What right, then, did I have to whine about "the man" ?... I'd been drunk on revolutionary rhetoric, but now I knew it was nothing more than talk.”

Clarence Thomas, My Grandfather's Son

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Children’s VIEWPOINTS

“I think we're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional.

We have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressmen and presidents about nuclear energy.

They're not a decade old, and they're being thrown these kinds of questions that can absorb the lifetime of a very brilliant and learned man. And they're being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about.

It's important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more important to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something, they hear some rhetoric, and they run with it.”

Thomas Sowell

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Michael Donovan Michael Donovan

Soil

“We do not have to be ashamed of what we are. As sentient beings we have wonderful backgrounds. These backgrounds may not be particularly enlightened or peaceful or intelligent. Nevertheless, we have soil good enough to cultivate; we can plant anything in it.”

Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

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