Category: Honey Girl Books and Gifts

What if we listened to that song in our head?

Post author By Julia Douthwaite Viglione
Post date December 4, 2022
No Comments on What if we listened to that song in our head?

What would happen?

This morning my mind has been turning pleasantly over landscapes new and remembered, watching the sun push through the lid of clouds hanging over the snowy Cascades to the East, and wandering through picture postcards of my past, inspired by my recent discovery of James Joyce, Dubliners. “One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”

From the sublime to the pedestrian? In the shower a voice in my head began singing, “Shower the People You Love” by James Taylor. Who knows why? James to James?

Invigorated by all those words, I decided to run a CHRISTMAS SHOWER sale on my quilts via the Pratt Art School Holiday Online Sale!

From now until December 14, one item a day will be $100 off! Just look for the Honey Girl Books and Gifts shop, on the Pratt Sale platform.

Why not act on that little love song in your head, as sappy as it may be?

Why not “Shower the people you love with love” and hope that “Things are going to turn out fine, if we only would.”

Sending love can’t hurt a thing, so here’s trying….

Tags James Taylor

Honey Girl Books and Gifts humor meditation retirement wisdom work

a zinger about ambition, from Seneca (ca. 4 BC-AD 65)

Post author By Julia Douthwaite Viglione
Post date October 3, 2022
No Comments on a zinger about ambition, from Seneca (ca. 4 BC-AD 65)

Reading Seneca this morning, I had the feeling of being with a shrewd friend who was laughing at me! And I had to laugh along, because there was a lot of truth in what he said.

“We commonly give the impression that the reasons for our having gone into political retirement are our disgust with public life and our dissatisfaction with some uncongenial and unrewarding post. Yet every now and then ambition rears its head again in the retreat into which we were really driven by our apprehensions and our waning interest; for our ambition did not cease because it had been rooted out, but merely because it had tired–or become piqued, perhaps, at its lack of success.” Letter LVI, p. 111-112, in Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, ed. Robin Campbell (Penguin ed., 1969.

HA! just see all those books on my bibliography about Buddhism, alternative economies, compassion, and “letting go” etc., as contrasted with the exuberant posting when I made a sale on Etsy! We are all the same.