Birds sing "Stay out of my space!" so sweetly that no one ever takes offense.
From The Care of the Self, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
A house finch spent the whole morning on the gutter above the Mulveys' porch, pouring out that long tumbling song, and the woman in the lawn chair below shut her eyes and smiled at it. I knew what he was saying. It was not a pleasantry. It was the fence line, sung over and over so the next finch would know where the fence line was, and he sang it until noon because the other finch kept testing it. For years I thought song was overflow, that it came out of us the way light comes off water. Then I learned the grammar of it, and I have not heard a cheerful morning since; birds sing "Stay out of my space!" so sweetly that no one ever takes offense. Switch says he only ever chatters when he means it, which I think is a boast and not a confession.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Have it on something
More like it
- By the time most of us begin to know ourselves, there seems too much to know.
- Others don’t get to define you unless you let them.
- It's hard to win a tug-of-war with yourself.
- We want others to see in us qualities we do not believe we possess.
- If people knew how to be truly selfish, we would live in a more generous world.
- If you fall in love with yourself, you can't leave when it all goes bad.