Elinor Nauen

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson

 

In karate we say Control the body, control the breath, control the mind. Same idea. 

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage

 

Would he have said that if his brain was boiling like mine has been this week. Hottest EVER temperatures in England. There was a blast of heat on the sidewalk a few minutes ago that almost knocked me over. I felt like I'd been hit by a motorcycle. 

 

I'm a big fan of RLS. When he & Alice moved to France 30 years ago, Doug gave me his complete works in two dozen volumes (which I could buy on Kindle for 99¢). I take one down at random once or twice a year, read a few pages or an essay. What a fine temperament that man had. A quiet observant mind with great kindness & curiosity. 

There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson

That explains we can go somewhere very very other & still take everything along: wherever you go, there you are. But why you can also, if you allow it to happen, have your mind blown. If I let myself feel foreign, anything can happen. Hint: it's wonderful. Or an adventure, anyway. Feeling foreign is how we remember to feel alive.  Read More 

It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours…and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure.” —Robert Louis Stevenson Read More 

When Doug & Alice moved to Paris in 1992, Alice gave me a fancy coat, a hand-me-down from Lita Hornick, & a book of Troubador poems; Doug gave me a set of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94), 26 volumes published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1903. As with the Encyclopedia Britannica, I know that I could get the complete Stevenson on my iPod for a buck or 2, but these are beautiful & pristine and make me wonder who else besides Doug ever opened them.

Stevenson, by the way, is a really good writer, who had pretty enlightened politics. Yesterday in Across the Plains, he deplored the prejudice against the Chinese ("Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to keep pigs") and Indians ("a chapter of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways base if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget").  Read More