Easter

Once more the northbound Wonder

Brings back the goose and crane,

Prophetic Sons of Thunder,

Apostles of the Rain.

In many a battling river

The broken gorges boom;

Behold, the Mighty Giver

Emerges from the tomb!

Now robins chant the story

Of how the wintry sward

Is litten with the glory

Of the Angel of the Lord.

His countenance is lightning

And still His robe is snow,

As when the dawn was brightening

Two thousand years ago.

O who can be a stranger

To what has come to pass?

The Pity of the Manger

Is mighty in the grass!

Undaunted by Decembers,

The sap is faithful yet.

The giving Earth remembers,

And only we forget.

John G. Neihardt

Poem - Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay.
Want more of everything ready-made.
Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery any more.
Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something they will call you.
When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something that won't compute.
Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace the flag.
Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot understand.
Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium.
Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion--put your ear close,
and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world.
Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable.
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap.
Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions
of your mind, lose it.
Leave it as a sign to mark a false trail, the way you didn't go.
Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

                    Wendell Berry 

 

 

 

 

 

Is that you?

People see God every day.
They just don't recognize Him.

    Pearl Bailey, in Black Pearls by Eric V. Copage

 

 

 

 

 

 

Opening day

You learn 'em English,
        and I'll learn 'em baseball.

                Dizzy Dean, America's Dizzy Dean

 

 

 

 

 

This way out

The best way out is always through.

        Robert Frost, A Servant to Servants

 

 

 

 

 

Birthday wishes

A life is like a garden.
    Perfect moments can be had,
        but not preserved, except in memory.
            LLAP (Live long and prosper)
            

Leonard Nimoy's last tweet
    Born March 26, 1931     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A good recommendation

Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say,
    "In this world, Elwood, you must be," — she always called me Elwood —
        "In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant."
            Well, for years I was smart.
                I recommend pleasant.
                    You may quote me.

                            Elwood P. Dowd in the movie Harvey

God's work, and ours

I believe that appreciation is a holy thing,
that when we look for what's best in the person
we happen to be with at the moment,
we're doing what God does;
so in appreciating our neighbor,
we're participating in something truly sacred.

    Fred Rogers, 2001 Commencement Address, Middlebury College 

 

 

 

 

Poem: To Daffodils

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having pray'd together, we
Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again.

                    Robert Herrick

New math

Anxiety = Uncertainty x Powerlessness
Curiosity = Wonder + Awe
Joy = Love - Fear
Event + Reaction = Outcome

        Chip Conley, Emotional Equations

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take me to the fool in charge

Inviting people to laugh with you while you are laughing at yourself is a good thing to do.
        You may be a fool but you're the fool in charge.

                Carl Reiner, My Anecdotal Life: A Memoir 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No hope

There is no hope, my friend.
        There is only what we do.

                Doc Holiday in film Wyatt Earp

 

 

 

 

Language creates

A lie, once uttered, changes reality just as surely as if it were a great truth.

                    Peter Ackroyd, English Music

 

 

 

 

 

I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry,
    who ran off with the mailman four years ago,
        and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

                John Updike, The New York Times 1968

 

 

 

 

 

 

St. Patrick's Day

I cannot keep silent, nor would it be proper,
so many favours and graces has the Lord deigned
to bestow on me in the land of my captivity.
For after chastisement from God, and recognizing him,
our way to repay him is to exalt him
and confess his wonders before every nation under heaven.

        The Confession of St. Patrick, translated by John Skinner 

 

 

 

 

Poem: A Pint of Plain is Your Only Man

When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night –
A pint of plain is your only man.

When money’s tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt –
A pint of plain is your only man.

When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say you need a change,
A pint of plain is your only man.

When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare –
A pint of plain is your only man.

In time of trouble and lousey strife,
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life –
A pint of plain is your only man.

                    Flann O'Brien 

Pass it on

There are few pleasures equal to that of imparting to a voracious learner
        the knowledge that one has grown old and weary in acquiring.

                        Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March

 

 

 

 

 

 

No quarter asked or given

I believe very deeply in the human spirit
and I have a sense of awe about it
because I don't know how people carry on.
What makes the difference in people?
What is it?
I've known people that the world has thrown everything at
to discourage them, to kill them, to break their spirit.
And yet something about them retains a dignity.
They face life and don't ask quarters.

        Horton Foote, The New York Times Magazine 1986

 

 

 

 

 

Times must change

It is all very well to sit back and hope for "the best in this best of all possible worlds"
but it's the course of personal and national suicide.
Unless there is a vast alteration in man's civilization as it stumbles along today,
man will not be here very long and none of us.
Times must change.

     L. Ron Hubbard, Ability newsletter, March1966

Getting what we want

Remember one thing about democracy.
We can have anything we want and at the same time,
we always end up with exactly what we deserve.

        Edward Albee, in Unleashing Intellectual Capital by Charles Ehin

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spring forward

Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

        Ray Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom  

 

 

 

 

 

 

A ribbon of dreams

The camera is much more than a recording apparatus;
it is a medium via which messages reach us
from another world that is not ours
and that brings us to the heart of a great secret.
Here magic begins...A film is a ribbon of dreams.

Orson Welles, in the documentary
Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: The Movies

I would like to watch a movie tonight
in which a stranger rides into town
or where someone embarks on a long journey,

a movie with the promise of danger,
danger visited upon the citizens of the town
by the stranger who rides in,

or the danger that will befall the person
on his or her long hazardous journey—
it hardly matters to me

so long as I am not in danger,
and not much danger lies in watching
a movie, you might as well agree.

I would prefer to watch this movie at home
than walk out in the cold to a theater
and stand on line for a ticket.

I want to watch it lying down
with the bed hitched up to the television
the way they'd hitch up a stagecoach

to a team of horses
so the movie could pull me along
the crooked, dusty road of its adventures.

I would stay out of harm's way
by identifying with the characters
like the bartender in the movie about the stranger

who rides into town,
the fellow who knows enough to duck
when a chair shatters the mirror over the bar.

Or the stationmaster
in the movie about the perilous journey,
the fellow who fishes a gold watch from his pocket,

helps a lady onto the train,
and hands up a heavy satchel
to the man with the mustache

and the dangerous eyes,
waving the all-clear to the engineer.
Then the train would pull out of the station

and the movie would continue without me.
And at the end of the day
I would hang up my oval hat on a hook

and take the shortcut home to my two dogs,
my faithful, amorous wife, and my children—
Molly, Lucinda, and Harold, Jr.

                    Billy Collins

 

 

 

 

International Women's Day

And what is better than wisdom?
        Woman.
And what is better than a good woman?
        Nothing.

            Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

 

 

 

 

 

Sleep

Happiness consists in getting enough sleep.
    Just that, nothing more.
        All the wealthy, unhappy people you’ve ever met take sleeping pills;

                Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

 

 

 

 

Being alive

I like living.
I have sometimes been wildly despairing,
acutely miserable, racked with sorrow,
but through it all I still know quite certainly
that just to be alive is a grand thing.

        Agatha Christie, An Autobiography

 

 

 

Crispus Attucks Day

He is one of the most important figures in African-American history,
not for what he did for his own race but for what he did for all oppressed people everywhere.
He is a reminder that the African-American heritage is not only African but American
and it is a heritage that begins with the beginning of America.

           Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait

March 5 is the anniversary of the death of Crispus Attucks,
the first person to die in the Boston Massacre

 

 

 

 

So often true

They were heedless of the fact
    that they’d gain more converts if they just stopped talking.

                        James Ellroy, Perfidia

 

 

 

 

 

 

The miracle of love

The Bible is full of miracles,
and they have been accepted by thinking and unthinking individuals alike.
But the miracle which every one is permitted to experience some time in his life,
the miracle which demands no intervention, no intercessor, no supreme exertion of will,
the miracle which is open to the fool and the coward as well as the hero and the saint, is love.
Born of an instant, it lives eternally.
If energy is imperishable, how much more so is love!
Like energy, which is still a complete enigma, love is always there, always on tap.
Man has never created an ounce of energy, nor did he create love.
Love and energy have always been, always will be.
Perhaps in essence they are one and the same. Why not?
Perhaps this mysterious energy which is identified with the life of the universe,
which is God in action, as some one has said,
perhaps this secret, all-invasive force is but the manifestation of love.

                    Henry Miller, The Rosy Crucifixion III: Nexus

 

 

 

 

 

 

Partial evidence

Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.

Hilary Mantel, The Guardian

 

 

 

 

A revelation

You can lie to your wife or your boss, but you cannot lie to your typewriter.
        Sooner or later you must reveal your true self in your pages.

                         Leon Uris, Writers on Writing