Here And Now

From the late 1960s, about the time she was making "The Loves of Isadora" (1968).

Learn more about Vanessa Redgrave at Wikipedia

TODAY, two weeks after the 1968 Academy Awards were announced, New Yorkers can see the performance that should have won the Oscar for Vanessa Redgrave, one of the three losers among the five women nominated for Best Actress of the Year. It is Miss Redgrave's funny, complex, grandly romantic evocation of the late Isadora Duncan, the high priestess of modern dance, a lady who never wrote of her Art without capitalizing it and who may have been—even with all her lovers, vanities and her muddled philosophy—this century's most innocent, most implacable, most successful American revolutionary.

     - Vincent Canby, The New York Times

"During the campaign I made a practice of stopping at homes where Yes on 1 signs were posted and performed a small act of ‘bearing witness.’ I would ring the doorbell, excuse the interruption, and make the point that I wanted to see what a voter in contemporary America looked like who would publicly announce that they thought neither my son nor my god-daughter was equal to them in civil terms. The responses were as telling as the nastiness and smugness of so many of the comments posted here. Some people were simply stunned that I would perform such an act of conscience on their doorstep. Some cited Romans I to me. Others smiled their broad, born-again smiles seemingly treating me like a little child who didn’t know any better and could therefore be forgiven, or facilely informed me that God loved the sinner but not the sin.

"Given the work of the Catholic (oxymoron!) Church and all the other so-called christians in Maine and elsewhere who would seek to impose their personal religious views on members of my immediate family by denying them civil rights most of the rest of us enjoy, I take this first opportunity to renounce my Calvinist baptism. It won’t stop me from working to achieve the end of equality for all, but I can continue to do it without a designation that has, in recent years, become deeply objectionable to me because of the decidedly un-christian attitudes and acts of those similarly designated."

- Hendrik Gideonse, in a comment left on the Bangor Daily News.

There comes a time when it is no longer important to prove one's point, but simply to live, to surrender to God and to love.

     - Thomas Merton

Holding to an ordinary notion of self, or ego, is the source of all our pain and confusion. The irony is that when we look for this "self" that we're cherishing and protecting, we can't even find it.

- Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche, from "Searching for Self,” Tricycle, Summer 2007