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I understood why war zones are called 'theaters' because they frame a kind of play acting or, worse, deceit, that can stain a human life forever: the deceit of hate on hearsay - hating an enemy one doesn't know.

Gretel Ehrlich

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Gretel Ehrlich
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: January 21
Essayist
Writer
Santa Barbara
California
Kind
Forever
Frame
Life
Acting
Deceit
War
Zone
Hearsay
Hate
Worse
Zones
Doesn
Theater
Stain
Human
Understood
Theaters
Humans
Enemy
Stains
Play
Called
Hating

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A tree is an aerial garden, a botanical migration from the sea, from those earliest plants, the seaweeds it is a purchase on crumbled rock, on ground. The human, standing, is only a different upsweep and articulation of cells. How treelike we are, how human the tree.
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All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call aware--an almost untranslatable word meaning something like beauty tinged with sadness.
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Ritual which could entail a wedding or brushing one's teeth goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed solitude with rushing, irreducible conditions of life.
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Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.
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How odd it is that sewing is thought to be 'women's work' when surgeons, sailors, and cowboys sew too. Yet how many female thoracic surgeons are there? And if precision motor activities are thought to be performed better by women, why wouldn't they make better surgeons too?
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Survival is as much a matter of grace as fight. The expression, 'grace under pressure' implies the attainment of equanimity and equilibrium. The fundamental durability of the human body surprises us because the pain can be so intense - yet pain is often transient and hides the tremendous effforts the body is engaged in to heal itself.
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Walking is also an ambulation of mind.
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To trace the history of a river . . . is to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body.
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True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.
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Islands are reminders of arrivals and departures.
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There was not one cause for our internment, but many - a deep-seated racial prejudice working on top of fear, distrust, and greed. So how is one to say exactly where history begins or ends? It is all slow oscillations, curves, and waves which take so long to reveal themselves ... like watching a tree grow.
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Perhaps despair is the only human sin.
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I thought: to be tough is to be fragile to be tender is to be truly fierce.
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To long for love, to have experienced passion's deep pleasure, even once, is to understand the mercilessness of having a human body whose memory rides desire's back unanchored from season to season.
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Am I like the optimist who, while falling ten stories from a building, says at each story, I'm all right so far?
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Fog rolled in like a form of sorrow. To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma. ... The sea was a memory bank into which everything fell and was lost. I dove in but came out empty-handed.
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The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile to be tender is to be truly fierce.
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Between highway sounds I heard waves and thought how the curve of the coastline here had sheltered and nurtured live-born sharks, humans, and migrating whales. Here, at the edge of the continent, time and distance stopped in the lull between sets of waves I could get a fresh start.
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It's no wonder human beings are so narcissistic. The way our ears are constructed, we can hear only what is right next to us or else the internal monologue inside.
Gretel Ehrlich
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To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves.
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