You never know

Motherhood is the strangest thing,
        it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.

                 Rebecca West, Rebecca West: A Life 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Opening day

Since baseball time is measured only in outs, 

    all you have to do is succeed utterly; 

        keep hitting, keep the rally alive, 

            and you have defeated time. 

                You remain forever young.

                        Roger Angell, Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is it

The art of living
        is to enjoy what we can see
                and not complain about what remains in the dark.

                        Henri Nouwen, The Dance of Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Banned books

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading.
Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us – it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news.
The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. …
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

    Ray Bradbury, Bradbury Still Believes in Heat of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Seattle Times interview

 

 

 

 

 

How not to be a loser

Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!   

                Henry James, The Art of Fiction 

 

 

 

 

Faith

You can do very little with faith,
        but you can do nothing without it.

                Samuel Butler, Life and Habit

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Truant

Our high school principal wagged his finger
over two manila folders
lying on his desk, labeled with our names—
my boyfriend and me—
called to his office for skipping school.

The day before, we ditched Latin and world history
to chase shadows of clouds on a motorcycle.
We roared down rolling asphalt roads
through the Missouri River bottoms
beyond town, our heads emptied
of review tests and future plans.

We stopped on a dirt lane to hear
a meadowlark’s liquid song, smell
heart-break blossom of wild plum.
Beyond leaning fence posts and barbwire,
a tractor drew straight lines across the field
unfurling its cape of blackbirds.

Now forty years after that geography lesson
in spring, I remember the principal’s words.
How right he was in saying:
This will be part of
your permanent record.

                    Margaret Hasse 

 

 

 

 

Alternatives

We've got no money, so we've got to think.

   Ernest Rutherford, Quips, Quotes, and Quanta : An Anecdotal History of Physics 

 

 

 

 

The holy month of Ramadan begins

As long as your heart is beating, you have a purpose.
God is intentional, so He does not keep anyone on Earth that doesn’t have to be here;
if we are blessed with more life, it is because someone in the world needs us.
If we are alive, it means that what we were sent to this Earth to create has not yet been accomplished.

        A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When to quit

When I get old, I’ll quit.
I really feel that if you don’t keep your mind and body busy, then why are you here?

Jean Bailey, 103 year old resident of Elk Ridge Village Senior Living in Omaha, Nebraska,
who teaches a fitness class for other residents four times a week. Washington Post

 

 

 

 

A key to sanity

One very important key to maintaining our daily sanity
    is a simple scheduling tactic I call Putting Things the Hell Off.

            Ian Frazier, The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spring

Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos.

I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees.

        Pablo Neruda, Juegas Todos las Días (Every Day You Play)

 

 

 

 

 

 

What's in a name?

When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint.
        When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a Communist.

                Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop-Emeritus of Olinda e Recife, Brazil

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Dharma

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.
Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance—
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?
Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.
If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she
would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

                   Billy Collins 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A different mind set

Ireland has a very different attitude to success than a lot of places,
certainly than over here in the United States.
In the United States, you look at the guy that lives in the mansion on the hill,
and you think, you know, one day, if I work really hard, I could live in that mansion.
In Ireland, people look up at the guy in the mansion on the hill and go,
one day, I'm going to get that bastard.

    Irish singer-songwriter Bono, interview with Larry King on CNN 

 

 

 

 

 

Inflation

In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.

        Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography 

 

 

 

 

Terrifying and glorious

Am I sure that there is no mind behind our existence
and no mystery anywhere in the universe?
I think I am.
What joy, what relief there would be,
if we could declare so with complete conviction.
If that were so I could wish to live for ever.
How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed,
without guidance and without consolation
he must create from his own rituals
the meaning for his existence
and write the rules whereby he lives.

                Thornton Wilder, The Ides Of March 

 

 

 

Poem: Pi

The admirable number pi:
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also initial,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can't be comprehended six five three five at a glance.
eight nine by calculation,
seven nine or imagination,
not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison
four six to anything else
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth calls it quits at aboutforty feet.
Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.
The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
doesn't stop at the page's edge.
It goes on across the table, through the air,
over a wall, a leaf, a bird's nest, clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.
Oh how brief -- a mouse tail, a pigtail -- is the tail of a comet!
How feeble the star's ray, bent by bumping up against space!
While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen
my phone number your shirt size the year
nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor
the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code
in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert
alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,
as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,
it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,
its uncommonly fine eight,
its far from final seven,
nudging, as always, a sluggish eternity
to continue. 

                                Wislawa Szymborska

What matters

Nothing matters, and everything matters.

             Leonard Woolf

And the Oscar goes to . . .

Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts.
    Whenever we want something from somebody
        or when we want to hide something or pretend,
            we're acting. 

Most people do it all day long.

         Marlon Brando, New York Times interview 2004

 

 

 

 

 

The Times They Are A-Changin'

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

                    Bob Dylan 

 

 

 

Cunning glimpses

In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands;
and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself,
as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth,
— even though it be covertly, and by snatches.

            Herman Melville, Hawthorne and His Mosses

 

 

 

 

Good question

But what is the past?
Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion?
Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images
that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought?
And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?

        Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

 

 

 

 

 

International Women's Day

Someday there will be girls and women
whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male,
but something in itself,
something that makes one think not of any complement and limit,
but only life and reality: the female human being.

                  Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet