knowabundance.com

“There has never been a better time to explore ideas and methods to bring forth places of great strength in your work and philanthropy.”

- Tuti Scott

The Rain Stick by Seamus Heaney

Upend the rain stick and what happens next
Is a music that you never would have known
To listen for. In a cactus stalk

Downpour, sluice-rash, spillage and backwash
Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe
Being played by water, you shake it again lightly

And diminuendo runs through all its scales
Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes
a sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,

Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;
Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.
Up-end the stick again. What happens next

Is undiminished for having happened once,
Twice, ten, a thousand time before.
Who cares if all the music that transpires

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?
You are like a rich man entering heaven
Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

(from The Spirit Level, poems by Seamus Heaney)

“Nobody has all the answers. Knowing that you do not know everything is far wiser than thinking that you know a lot when you really don’t. Phony expertise is neurotic. Fortunately, once the symptoms are recognized, the cure is easy: stop it.”

#71 from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching adapted by John Heider

“People aren’t either wicked or noble,” the hook-handed man said. “They’re like chef’s salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.”

- from The Grim Grotto, A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe Me.”

Look what happens with
A love like that,
It lights the Whole Sky.

- from The Gift by Hafiz

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”

- Audre Lorde

There are things
We live among ‘and to see them
Is to know ourselves’.

- George Oppen from Of Being Numerous

The eye of the Sea is one thing and the foam another. Let the foam go, and gaze with the eye of the Sea. Day and night foam-flecks are flung from the sea: of amazing! You behold the foam but not the Sea. We are like boats dashing together; our eyes are darkened, yet we are in clear water.

- Rumi

“If your goal is to find a center, a focus, a gathering place within your life, then you would do well to practice fidelity. By slowing down, abiding in relationships, staying in place, remaining faithful to a calling, we create the conditions for paying attention, for discovering depths, for finding a purpose and a pattern in our days. We cannot give ourselves to every person or place, cannot answer every need if we wish to act responsibility. Stake out your own workable territory.”

Scott Russell Sanders (from Hunting for Hope)

“Associations are the single largest source of post-graduate professional development for America’s workforce.”

- American Society for Association Executives

“Nothing so baffles the scientific approach to human nature as the vital role words play in human affairs. How can one deal with a physiochemical complex in which reactions are started and checked, accelerated and slowed down, by the sound or image of a word – usually a meaningless word?”

Eric Hoffer from The Ordeal of Change

“We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.”

- Thomas Merton

“…in the end, there is only one bus.”

- Paul Hawken (from Blessed Unrest – How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming, p. 190)

There is an inner knowing deeper than thought.

“Grazing
my fishing line –
the summer moon.”

- Chiyo-ni (1703-1775) from Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, Edited by Jane Hirshfield.

“…a soft effort born of the understanding that there is no enemy.”

Ezra Bayda (from Being Zen, pg. 84)

“It seems impossible until it’s done.”

- Nelson Mandela (who became the President of South Africa after 46 years of apartheid imprisonment.)

Economist Steven Levitt and (Malcom) Gladwell have a running dispute about whether the fall in New York’s crime rate can be attributed to the actions of the police department (as claimed in The Tipping Point). In his book Freakonomics, Levitt attributes the decrease in crime to a decrease in the number of unwanted children because of Roe v. Wade.^[18]

- Wikipedia on “The Tipping Point”

“Let no neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.” – from the Memorial Day Order

and

“I live about a mile from Hangman Valley, near Spokane, Washington, and thrice that far from Fort George Wright Drive, one of the city’s arteries. Prior to Colonel Wright’s tenure in this city, Hangman Valley and the creek that runs through it were known as Latah, which means in the native tongue ’stream where little fish are caught’.

At the time, 1858, whites had not been able to bring all of the region’s Indians to terms. Then Wright had an idea. Under a flag of truce he called the Yakama warrior Qualchan and his wife to Wright’s residence, telling them he was going to proffer a peace treaty. Having already put Qualchan’s father in chains, Wright arrested Qualchan, led him directly to a tree and with Qualchan’s wife as witness hanged him….

The road, which I drive often, remains named in his honor.”

- Derrick Jensen (from A Language Older Than Words, pg. 45)

“Our results confirm a survey completed in January by the Chronicle of Philanthropy that reported that more than 52 percent of people who donated in 2008, would donate the same as they did in 2008 and only 17.5 percent said they would give less. Thirty percent were uncertain. What this means to all of us, is that most people continue to be caring and altruistic even when times are tough.”

- Jamie Inman, Development Director for the YMCA of Greenville

and

“Just as during the Great Depression, when Americans doubled the amount they donated to charity, individuals are picking up the slack left by floundering foundations.”

- Kristen Moulton from The Salt Lake Tribune

“Expansion and positive change on the outer level is much more likely to come into your life if you can enjoy what you are doing already, instead of waiting for some change so that you can start enjoying what you do.”

-  Eckhart Tolle (from A New Earth)

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

- Voltaire

“No one can possibly know what is about to happen. It is happening each time, for the first time,
for the only time.”

- James Baldwin

“Sincerity is the highest compliment you can pay.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

(from Guest Blogger, Leanne Grossman)

“I gave you a $100 and I didn’t hear anything from you.”

- from this fun Network for Good video. Check to make sure your donor appreciation strategies are working. They might be stale and need updating.

The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,
The first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.

Wisława Szymborka (from Poems New and Collected)

“How many times will you continue to press a button that does nothing? Do you press elevator call buttons that are already lighted—despite your suspicion that, once the button has been pressed, no amount of further attention will hasten the car’s arrival?”

James Gleick (from Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, p.30)

Thousand Layer Lasagna Recipe from Heidi Swanson

Gather your Ingredients

1 pound fresh egg pasta sheets (or make some from scratch)
butter to prep baking dish
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon fine grain sea salt
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 28-ounce can crushed organic tomatoes
zest of one lemon
3 4-ounce balls of fresh mozzarella, torn up into little pieces
a handful of slivered basil (optional)
freshly grated Parmesan (optional)

Savor Each Step of the Process

Preheat your oven to 375. Start by clearing off every flat space in your kitchen, you are going to need and use all of it.

(Click here for the full recipe from 101 cookbooks.com )

Bake until everything is melted and fragrant, 35 minutes or so. Let it sit for 10 minutes before serving, so everything has a chance to set up a bit. Dust with Parmesan and a bit of slivered basil.

Serves many.

“Jean Traore, an exchange student from Burkina Faso in Eastern Africa, finds the concept of ‘wasting time’ confusing. ‘There’s no such thing as wasting time where I live,’ he observes. ‘How can you waste time? If you’re not doing one thing, you’re doing something else. Even if you’re just talking to a friend, or sitting around, that’s what you’re doing.”

from A Geography of Time by Robert V. Levine (p. 91)

“Your time perspective biases you. It can put blinders on your eyes, plugs in your ears, and barriers around your mind, depriving you of fully appreciating who you are and what you could become. It causes you to see everything through one lens, which can prevent you from learning from the past, enjoying the present, and planning for the future.”

Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd (from The Time Paradox p. 297)

“Dusk – of a summer night. And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants – such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable.”

Theodore Dreiser (from An American Tragedy)