Quiet hours

Do not hurry too fast in these early winter days—
a quiet hour is worth more to you than anything you can do in it.

            Sarah Orne Jewett, Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wonder

Remain in wonder if you want mysteries to open up for you.
Mysteries never open up for those who go on questioning.
Questioners sooner or later end up in a library.
They end up with scriptures, because scriptures are full of answers.
And answers are dangerous, they kill your wonder.

        Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh), The Book of Wisdom

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: The Shortest Day

So the shortest day came, and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive,
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us—Listen!!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

        Susan Cooper 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time well spent

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's just wonderful. And … the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.

Douglas Adams, responding to the question "What is it about science that really gets your blood running?" Quoted by Richard Dawkins in his 2001 eulogy for Adams

Greater miracles

That the starry vault shall surcharge the heart with all rapturous marvelings,
is only because we ourselves are greater miracles,
and superber trophies than all the stars in universal space.

        Herman Melville, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities

 

 

 

 

Tomorrow has arrived

Tomorrow everybody - or practically everybody -
will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday,
and will expect equivalent opportunities.
That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job
meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man.

Peter F. Drucker, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World

 

 

 

Riches

Riches... don't consist in having things,
but in not having to do something you don't want to do....
Riches is being able to thumb your nose.

        Josephine Tey, Brat Farrar

 

 

 

 

 

Patience

A goose never voted for an early Christmas.

            Irish saying

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smart

An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.

        Paul Valery, Mauvaises Pensées et Autres

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Hannukah

The path of the righteous ones is like the bright light
that is getting lighter and lighter until the day is firmly established.

        Solomon, Proverbs Chapter 4, Verse18

 

 

 

 

Poem: They Build the Tabernacle

To devotion God set no limits,
and to dedication of the spirit
God set no bounds.

But great quantities of tribute God did not demand,
and the people were restrained from bringing
too much gold for the Tabernacle.

Though the Temples of Solomon and Herod
were far more costly,
it is written that the Divine Presence was found
more constantly in the humbler structure.

To dedicate the spirit to God is more difficult
than to give money,
to devote the whole heart to God
is more difficult than bringing gifts.

Not because of the gold on the walls
does the light of the sanctuary shine forth,
but because of the spirit within.

Those who worship carry away with them
more than they bring
for they find there the light to illumine
their lives.

                    Ruth Brin 

 

 

 

 

 

Deep in December it's nice to remember

December is a month that is rife with nostalgia.
If there’s anything deep in your heart that you want to keep buried,
you can count on December to bring it to the surface.

        Lois Duncan, Don’t Look Behind You

 

 

 

 

 

The pleasure of one's company

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against but it does not make me angry.
It merely astonishes me.
How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?

        Zora Neal Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

 

 

 

Real self importance

If only you could sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet;
how important you can be to people you may never even dream of.
There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.

    Fred Rogers, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: Thoughts For All Ages

 

 

 

 

 

 

Justification

To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—
but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.

        Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

 

 

 

 

What the world needs now

I agree with Paul that love is more important than faith and hope;
but so are honesty, integrity, and moral courage.
The world needs less faith and more love and nobility.

        Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The higher gifts

Be ambitious for the higher gifts,
And I’m going to show you a way
that is better than any of them.
If I speak in the tongues of men and angels,
but have no love,
I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbol.
I may have the gift of prophecy,
and know every hidden truth;
I may have faith strong enough to move mountains;
but if I have no love,
I am nothing.
If I offer all my goods to the poor, piece by piece
and deliver my body to be burned,
I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind;
love is not jealous or boastful,
it is not arrogant or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the truth.
Love forgives all things,
bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
Endures all things.

Love never ends;
as for prophecies, they will pass away;
as for knowledge, it will vanish.
For our knowledge and our prophecy alike are imperfect,
and the imperfect vanishes when wholeness comes.
When I was a child,
my speech, my outlook and my thoughts were all childish.
When I grew up, I had done with childish things.
Now we see only puzzling reflections in a mirror,
but then we shall see face to face.
My knowledge now is imperfect,
then it will be whole,
like God’s knowledge of me.

So faith, hope, love abide –
these three –
but the greatest of these
is love. 

      Saint Paul, Letter to the Corinthians

 

 

 

Poem: Don't Do That

It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything
hard, so I brought Johnnie Walker Red
along with some resentment I’d held in
for a few weeks, which was not helped
by the sight of little nameless things
pierced with toothpicks on the tables,
or by talk that promised to be nothing
if not small. But I’d consented to come,
and I knew what part of the house
their animals would be sequestered,
whose company I loved. What else can I say,

except that old retainer of slights and wrongs,
that bad boy I hadn’t quite outgrown—
I’d brought him along, too. I was out
to cultivate a mood. My hosts greeted me,
but did not ask about my soul, which was when
I was invited by Johnnie Walker Red
to find the right kind of glass, and pour.
I toasted the air. I said hello to the wall,
then walked past a group of women
dressed to be seen, undressing them
one by one, and went up the stairs to where

the Rottweilers were, Rosie and Tom,
and got down with them on all fours.
They licked the face I offered them,
and I proceeded to slick back my hair
with their saliva, and before long
I felt like a wild thing, ready to mess up
the party, scarf the hors d’oeuvres.
But the dogs said, No, don’t do that,
calm down, after a while they open the door
and let you out, they pet your head, and everything
you might have held against them is gone,
and you’re good friends again. Stay, they said.

                    Stephen Dunn 

 

 

 

 

Where are they?

If the future and the past do exist
I want to know where they are.
I may not yet be capable of such knowledge,
but at least I know that wherever they are,
they are not there as future or past, but as present.
For if, wherever they are,
they are future, they do not yet exist;
if past, they no longer exist.
So wherever they are and whatever they are,
it is only by being present that they are.

        St. Augustine, Confessions, Book II

As the twig is bent

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

    Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

 

 

 

Luxury

There is nothing more luxurious
than eating while you read—
unless it be reading while you eat.

        E. Nesbit, The Magic World

 

 

 

 

Consolation prize

The consolation of imaginary things
        is not imaginary consolation.

                Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination

 

 

 

 

 

Isn't it obvious?

Come December, people always say, 'Isn't it cold?'
Well, of course it's cold. It's the middle of winter.
You don't wander around at midnight saying, 'Isn't it dark?'

            Arthur Smith, Arthur Smith's Hamlet