The Artisan Cafe, Trumansburg, NY

I stumbled on this hidden gem one weekend while holding out for a really good place to eat. It was divine. And inspirational. I've always dreamed of living someplace that allowed me to paint quotations on the walls. Here are some of my favorite shots from The Artisan Cafe. The daughter told me that these quotations come from her mother's journal. The family recently moved to Trumansburg from Chicago and opened the restaurant....

'Who looks outside dreams. Who looks inside awakens.' Jung-- appropriately written over the window:


'Go into yourself and see how deep is the place from which your life flows.' Rainier Rilke

'... one learns to live, not by hearing of other lives but by living; for words are infinitely less important than acts' A.S. Neill


'remember that books supply you only with the materials of knowledge and wisdom. It is your own critical thinking that gives you possession of what you read.' Ashley Montagu


'Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.' Mozart

'Children often try to tell us what we in our blindness and deafness have so seriously failed to tell them.' Joseph Chilton Pearce

'Children learn what they live.' Andre Tardeil


This is what the street the Artisan Cafe is on looks like:


I was so impressed with the creativity of the owner of The Artisan Cafe (I'll be eating there again most certainly)! In my dreams of a room of my own that I could decorate as I pleased, the quotation that is most central is from Henry Beston's book about his year living alone on Cape Cod:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethen, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

--from _The Outermost House_

I can't think of anyone who says it more poetically and more accurately. They are not underlings!

What else would I paint on my walls, given complete freedom?

Some of my favorite Adrienne Rich quotations:

Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself. It has to be created between people.

--from "Women and Honor: Some Notes On Lying"

Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it is a movement into evolution. Women are only beginning to uncover our own truths; many of us would be grateful for some rest in that struggle, would be glad just to lie down with the shards we have painfully unearthed, and be satisfied with those. The politics worth having, the relationships worth having, demand that we delve still deeper.

--from "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying"

The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams comes from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.

--from "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying"

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance

--from _The Dream Of A Common Language_

Of course, as anyone who lived with me in college knows, some Ani DiFranco would also go on the walls:

'cause i know the biggest crime
is just to throw up your hands
say 'this has nothing to do with me
i just want to live as comfortably as i can'
you got to look outside your eyes
you got to think outside your brain
you got to walk outside your life
to where the neighborhood changes

tell me who is your boogieman
that is who i will be
you don't have to like me for who i am
see what you're made of by what you make of me
and i think it's absurd
that you think i am the derelict daughter
you know i fight fire with words
words are hotter than flames
words are wetter than water

--from 'Willing To Fight'

i want somebody who sees the pointlessness
and still keeps their purpose in mind
i want somebody who has a tortured soul
at least some of the time
i want somebody who will either put out for me
or put me out of my misery
or maybe just put it all to words
and make me go, you know
i never heard it put that way
make me say, what did you just say?

if you hear me talking
listen to what i'm not saying
if you hear me playing guitar
listen to what i'm not playing
and don't ask me to put words
to all the silences i wrote
don't ask me to put words
to all the spaces between notes
in fact if you have to ask, forget it
do and you'll regret it
i'm tired of being the interesting one
i'm tired of having fun for two
just lay yourself on the line
and i might lay myself down by you
but don't sit behind your eyes
and wait for me to surprise you

--from 'Asking Too Much'

(The closest I ever came to posting a personal ad in college-- or ever-- was putting the lyrics to 'Asking Too Much' on my Amherst vax plan account for other Amherst students to see, now that really dates me...)

And while on a semi-romantic note, why not throw in another college favorite, Jeanette Winterson:

There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time consuming process; it concerns essences and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.

--From _Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit_

*
It is, in fact, a challenging exercise for me to think of and catalog all the possibilities for quotations I might want to paint on my bedroom walls one day. It is a delicious fantasy, a room truly of my own to decorate. I will have to start keeping a journal, here or elsewhere, of possible quotations, and maybe someday I will live someplace where I will whittle that list down into just four or five to use on my walls...