Poem: The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer

Of course I regret it. I mean there I was under umbrellas of fruit

so red they had to be borne of Summer, and no other season.

Flip-flops and fishhooks. Ice cubes made of lemonade and sprigs 

of mint to slip in blue glasses of tea. I was dusty, my ponytail

all askew and the tips of my fingers ran, of course, red

 

from the fruitwounds of cherries I plunked into my bucket

and still—he must have seen some small bit of loveliness

in walking his orchard with me. He pointed out which trees

were sweetest, which ones bore double seeds—puffing out

the flesh and oh the surprise on your tongue with two tiny stones

 

(a twin spit), making a small gun of your mouth. Did I mention

my favorite color is red? His jeans were worn and twisty

around the tops of his boot; his hands thick but careful, 

nimble enough to pull fruit from his trees without tearing

the thin skin; the cherry dust and fingerprints on his eyeglasses. 

 

I just know when he stuffed his hands in his pockets, said

Okay. Couldn't hurt to try? and shuffled back to his roadside stand

to arrange his jelly jars and stacks of buckets, I had made

a terrible mistake. I just know my summer would've been

full of pies, tartlets, turnovers—so much jubilee.
 

                                Aimee Nezhukumatathil

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is it

If we want to appreciate the mystery of life, it is essential to evade the compulsion of our desires by understanding that there does not need to be anything else in our current situations. There is no greater feeling, state, or condition that we have to achieve. There is no lesser or more limited feeling, state, or condition that we have to be liberated from. This is it. And this poignancy is always here. We can give ourselves permission to experience it; to be right here with it. To be available to it. To be available to the mystery of life is to be free.

    J. Jennifer Matthews, Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are

 

 

 

 

 

There's a difference

Man is not a rational animal,
        he is a rationalizing animal.

                Robert A. Heinlein, Assignment in Eternity

 

 

 

 

Connection

Connection for connection’s sake is not the point.
What we want to do is elevate the work of connectors
as the condition that makes transformation possible.

            Peter Block, Connecting for the Common Good    

 

 

 

 

 

Sound of silence

There are all kinds of silences
        and each of them means a different thing.

                 Beryl Markham, West with the Night

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Certainly absurd

Doubt is not an agreeable condition,
but certainty is an absurd one.

        Voltaire, in a 1767 letter to Frederick II of Prussia

Thou mayest

But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—
‘Thou mayest’—
that gives a choice.
It might be the most important word in the world.
That says the way is open.
That throws it right back on a man.
For if ‘Thou mayest’—
it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”

            John Steinbeck, East of Eden

 

 

 

 

Poem: Fishing on the Susquehanna in July

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure—
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one—
a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table—
trying to manufacture the sensation
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt
that others have been fishing
on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
sliding the oars under the water
then raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come to
fishing on the Susquehanna
was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

when I balanced a little egg of time
in front of a painting
in which that river curled around a bend

under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,
dense trees along the banks,
and a fellow with a red bandanna

sitting in a small, green
flat-bottom boat
holding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikely
ever to do, I remember
saying to myself and the person next to me.

Then I blinked and moved on
to other American scenes
of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown hare
who seemed so wired with alertness
I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

                            Billy Collins

 

 

 

 

 

All there is

Maybe the moment is all there is. Maybe I should just gather my clamshells and be quiet. The exquisite experience of joy—when I am completely consumed by a pleasurable activity such as conversation with good friends or good food or laughing with my children—is certainly one of the moment. But for some reason, I and many of my fellow travelers are not satisfied with the moment. The Now isn’t enough. We want to go beyond the moment. We want to build systems and patterns and memories that connect moment to moment to eternity. We long to be part of the Infinite.

Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

Old friends, new worlds

Each friend represents a world in us,
a world possibly not born until they arrive,
and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

            Anaïs Nin, March 1937, Diary entries

Wonder

Punctuationally speaking, wonder is a period
at the end of a statement we've long taken for granted,
suddenly looking up and seeing the sinuous curve
of a tall black hat on its head,
and realizing it was a question mark all along.

        David James Duncan, My Story as told by Water

 

 

 

 

 

Learn from the best

Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality,
for one can temporarily evade reality
by avoiding the distasteful situation;
but anxiety is a source of education always present
because one carries it within.

        Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

 

 

 

 

An insider's view

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying,
since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

                George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

 

 

 

 

 

Sacred and healing

A shaman, according to Claude Levi-Stauss, is a person who has a concrete relationship with language, because he uses it for healing, as a tool and as medicine. To the shaman, words aren’t just words, but a scalpel for slicing and reorganizing what’s in this world, for cutting and binding; a phenomenon with power over all other phenomena – something truly sacred. In his Structural Anthropology, Levi-Strauss says that scientists’ problem with shamans is that they really do heal people.

                Alvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Shakespeare never used the word “ping” and neither should you

When you say
ping me
I want to punch you.
It’s true.
Bio break, too.
It makes me cringe.
And if I am being honest
I don’t care about your ducks or the row they’re in.
I don’t know what net-net means unless it’s being said by an excited tennis announcer.
Come to think of it
let’s not circle back
or drill down
or take a deep dive
or take it offline
or level the playing field
or create action items
and honestly I don’t care
if this won’t scale
and may I add that
going forward I would like to park this project.
And this job.
I quit.
Now.
Sorry.
I have a hard stop.

        John Kenney, Love Poems for Anxious People

 

 

 

 

 

 

A state of grace

Age has no reality except in the physical world.
The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time.
Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits
remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom.
Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything,
but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.

            Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

 

 

 

 

Priorities

You have to get your priorities right.
Women are around all the time
but World Cups come only once every four years.

        Peter Osgood, English footballer
        quoted in A Commonplace Book: British Heritage Travel

 

 

 

 

 

If in doubt, assume life

You may discover someone apparently dead,
and it can be difficult to tell whether he is really dead or not….
If there is any doubt whether someone is dead, treat him as being alive.

What to Do When Someone Dies
British Consumers Association book 1967
quoted in Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Longing for Utopia

A map of the world that does not include Utopia
is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out
the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
And when Humanity lands there, it looks out,
and, seeing a better country, sets sail.
Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

        Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism 

 

 

 

 

 

Get up!

I say to the body, Up with you now,
and I can feel it struggling,
like an old hack foundered in the street.

        Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing

Remembering the Beatitudes

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

Kurt Vonnegut, Cold Turkey, at online publication In These Time

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Answer July

Answer July —
Where is the Bee —
Where is the Blush —
Where is the Hay?

Ah, said July —
Where is the Seed —
Where is the Bud —
Where is the May —
Answer Thee — Me —

Nay — said the May —
Show me the Snow —
Show me the Bells —
Show me the Jay!

Quibbled the Jay —
Where be the Maize —
Where be the Haze —
Where be the Bur?
Here — said the Year —

            Emily Dickinson

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy people

If we observe genuinely happy people, we shall find that they do not just sit around being contented. They make things happen. They pursue new understandings, seek new achievements, and control their thoughts and feelings. In sum, our intentional, effortful activities have a powerful effect on how happy we are, over and above the effects of our set points and the circumstances in which we find themselves. If an unhappy person wants to experience interest, enthusiasm, contentment, peace, and joy, he or she can make it happen by learning the habits of a happy person.

Sonja Lyubomirsky
The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want

Look, but don't touch

An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument.
Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin.
What if everybody jumped on his violin?

        Marilyn Monroe, Life magazine 1962

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, to be in England

The English winter — ending in July,
To recommence in August.  

        Lord Byron, from Don Juan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You gotta love it

When you leave New York,
you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is.
Clean is not enough.

        Fran Lebowitz, reported in Rand Lindsly's Quotations

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Common weal

To the ignorant and bawling fanatics who stun you with their pother about liberty, political or civil liberty seems to be the principal end for which government ought to exist. But the final cause or purpose for which government ought to exist, is the furtherance of the common weal to the greatest possible extent.

            John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined 

 

 

 

 

 

E Pluribus Unum

America is woven of many strands;
I would recognize them and let it so remain.
It's "winner take nothing" that is the great truth
of our country or of any country.
Life is to be lived, not controlled;
and humanity is won by continuing to play
in face of certain defeat.
Our fate is to become one, and yet many—
This is not prophecy, but description.

            Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man

 

 

 

 

Hold fast to the dream

The republic is a dream
Nothing happens unless first a dream.

    Carl Sandburg, Washington Monument by Night, stanza 4

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: The High-School Lawn

Gray prinked with rose,
White tipped with blue,
Shoes with gay hose,
Sleeves of chrome hue;
Fluffed frills of white,
Dark bordered light;
Such shimmerings through
Trees of emerald green are eyed
This afternoon, from the road outside.

They whirl around:
Many laughters run
With a cascade's sound;
Then a mere one.

A bell: they flee:
Silence then: —
So it will be
Some day again
With them, — with me. 

                Thomas Hardy

 

 

 

 

 

 

The quest

We spend our life, it's ours,
trying to bring together in the same instant
a ray of sunshine and a free bench... 

            Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your own village

That you need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it.
Your own village means that you're not alone,
that you know there's something of you
in the people and the plants and the soil,
that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you.

            Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfire

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A glimpse of nothing

Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York,
a place on the plains that I love,
a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles,
she asked, "But what is there to see?"
The answer, of course, is nothing.
Land, sky, and the ever-changing light.

            Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

 

 

 

 

 

Hindsight

When we look back,
the only things we cherish
are those which in some way met our original want;
the desire which formed in us in early youth,
undirected, and of its own accord.

            Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

 

 

 

 

 

Paradigm of infinity

Whatever else prairie is—grass, sky, wind—
it is most of all a paradigm of infinity,
a clearing full of many things except boundaries,
and its power comes from its apparent limitlessness;
there is no such thing as a small prairie
any more than there is a little ocean,
and the consequence of both is this challenge:
try to take yourself seriously out here,
you bipedal plodder, you complacent cartoon.

                William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: So This Is Nebraska

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of the redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting at every post.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like

waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

                     Ted Kooser 

 

 

 

 

A good place

But, for a little while, this is the place for us —
a good place too —
a place of good omen, a place of beginning things —
and of ending things I never thought would end.

            Beryl Markham, West with the Night

 

 

 

 

 

 

Midwestern machismo

Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest.
There was something athletic about it.
You flexed your face into a smile
and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.

            Lorrie Moore, The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

 

 

 

 

 

One great secret

Human beings—any one of us, and our species as a whole—
are not all-important, not at the center of the world.
That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret,
offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains
or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.

            Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

 

 

 

 

 

 

A recipe for kindness

Have a heart that never hardens,
    and a temper that never tires,
        and a touch that never hurts.

                    Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

 

 

 

 

 

Worth the effort

Anyone can be a barbarian;
it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

        Leonard Woolf, Barbarians Within and Without

 

 

 

 

 

Summer Soltice: New York City

By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it,
he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building
and over the soft, tarry surface
to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice
and said if they came a step closer that was it.
Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,
the cops came in their suits blue-grey as the sky on a cloudy evening,
and one put on a bullet-proof vest, a
black shell around his own life,
life of his children's father, in case
the man was armed, and one, slung with a
rope like the sign of his bounden duty,
came up out of a hole in the top of the neighboring building
like the gold hole they say is in the top of the head,
and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die.
The tallest cop approached him directly,
softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking,
while the man's leg hung over the lip of the next world
and the crowd gathered in the street, silent, and the
hairy net with its implacable grid was
unfolded near the curb and spread out and
stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive a birth.
Then they all came a little closer
where he squatted next to his death, his shirt
glowing its milky glow like something
growing in a dish at night in the dark in a lab and then
everything stopped
as his body jerked and he
stepped down from the parapet and went toward them
and they closed on him, I thought they were going to
beat him up, as a mother whose child has been
lost will scream at the child when its found, they
took him by the arms and held him up and
leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the
tall cop lit a cigarette
in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and
then they all lit cigarettes, and the
red, glowing ends burned like the
tiny campfires we lit at night
back at the beginning of the world.

                        Sharon Olds

Poem: This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
    They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself.

 

                    Philip Larkin 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Juneteenth

I'm not gonna help nobody get something my negroes don't have.
If I'm gonna die, I'll die now right here fighting you, if I'm gonna die.
You my enemy.
My enemies are white people, not Viet Congs or Chinese or Japanese.
You my opposer when I want freedom.
You my opposer when I want justice.
You my opposer when I want equality.
You won't even stand up for me in America for my religious beliefs,
and you want me to go somewhere and fight,
but you won't even stand up for me here at home.

        Muhammad Ali in 1967 statement on television,
        on refusing to register for the draft and fight in the Vietnam War 

In pursuit of the profound

Transformation comes more from pursuing
        profound questions than seeking practical answers.

                    Peter Block, The Answer to How is Yes

 

 

 

 

 

All the world's a stage

New York is the city where the future comes to rehearse.

       Mayor Ed Koch, New York Times, 1986

 

 

 

 

Bloomsday

James Joyce’s friends used to say
that even though he had lost his faith,
he never ceased to be a Jesuit.

        Leo Damrosch, Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

 

 

 

 

 

Harder than you think

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

            Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grace

Imperfection is the prerequisite for grace.
Light only gets in through the cracks.

           Philip Yancey, What's So Amazing About Grace?

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

                Theodore Roethke

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome

New Yorkers are born all over the country,
and then they come to New York City and it hits them:
Oh, that's who I am.

        Delia Ephron, Sister Mother Husband Dog (Etc.)

 

 

 

 

Raw material

And so I learned what solitude really was.
It was raw material - awesome, malleable,
older than men or worlds or water.
And it was merciless -
for it let a man become precisely
what he alone made of himself.

            David James Duncan, The River Why

 

 

 

 

Fallible, unpredictable, improbable

The future is too interesting and dangerous
to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency.
We need all the fallibility we can get.
Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability
and total improbability of our connected minds.

        Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why?

Why blame the dark for being dark?
It is far more helpful to ask
why the light isn’t as bright as it could be.

        Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

 

 

 

 

Things hold

Things don't fall apart. Things hold.
Lines connect in thin ways that last and last
and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept.

            Lucille Clifton, Generations: a memoir

 

 

 

 

 

 

Living faith

The Allah of Islam is the same as the God of Christians and the Ishwara of Hindus. Even as there are numerous names of God in Hinduism, there are as many names of God in Islam. The names do not indicate individuality but attributes, and little man had tried in his humble way to describe mighty God by giving Him attributes, though He is above all attributes, Indescribable, Inconceivable, Immeasurable. Living faith in this God means acceptance of the brotherhood of mankind. It also means equal respect for all religions.

                        Mahatma Gandhi, My God 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: More Than Enough

The first lily of June opens its red mouth.
All over the sand road where we walk
multiflora rose climbs trees cascading
white or pink blossoms, simple, intense
the scene drifting like colored mist.

The arrowhead is spreading its creamy
clumps of flower and the blackberries
are blooming in the thickets. Season of
joy for the bee. The green will never
again be so green, so purely and lushly

new, grass lifting its wheaty seedheads
into the wind. Rich fresh wine
of June, we stagger into you smeared
with pollen, overcome as the turtle
laying her eggs in roadside sand.

                        Marge Piercy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Following the rules

 [This is taken from an excellent longer article, the link to which is below]

Every couple will eventually have some version of the “Let’s Make a Rule” fight, where they try to solve some interpersonal issue through legislation. “You think I don’t take enough interest in your life, so let’s make a rule: I have to ask you three things about your day before I start telling you about mine.” The theory behind the Let’s Make a Rule fight is that we could live in harmony with one another if we could just compile all of our expectations into one big Google Doc.

The Let’s Make a Rule fight never leads to a satisfying conclusion because nobody actually wants their partner to follow the rules. They want their partner to care. Being asked “How was your day, dear?” through gritted teeth because that’s what our Relationship Handbook says to do is probably worse than not being asked at all.

You want your partner to realize that your preferences are not silly affectations that can be belittled, ignored, or disputed until they go away, that they are, in fact, load-bearing parts of your personality, and to reject them is to reject you. In return, you have to realize that some of your preferences are more malleable than you thought, that maybe they don’t all have to be foundational to your sense of self, and that some of them can be bent or jettisoned in the interests of coexistence.

This is the work of love, and it takes a lifetime. You can’t speedrun it by filling out a spreadsheet or signing a contract. The frictions of a lifelong relationship can be made intelligible—that is, understandable to the people involved, but they cannot be made legible—that is, understandable to everyone else.

The best couples I know have all sorts of arrangements and accommodations that make zero sense to me but perfect sense to them, and that’s exactly why they work well together. A successful relationship is nothing more than a package of haphazard remedies and rickety fixes that people would only ever devise and maintain when they really, really want to be together.

Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History

Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them!

Good advice

There is nobody like Golda for seeing what needs doing—or saying.
She is always telling people: "Don’t be so humble—you’re not that great."

Simcha Dinitz, aide to Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel 1969-1974,
New York Times interview, March 1969

 

 

 

 

 

 

One question

One of the cheapest commodities in the world is unfulfilled genius.
All of us want to be known as a unique individual,
the one who broke out of the pack.
So, you offer yourself up as a sacrifice and what you're afraid of
is losing and being thrown back into the pack.
One question taunts you.
Do you want to have, or do you want to be?

                Leon Uris, Mitla Pass

Here and now

This is what you must be like.
Grow wherever life puts you down.

            Ben Okri, The Famished Road

 

 

 

 

Change starts here

If you want to change the world, change yourself.

                    Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues 

 

 

 

 

 

Pay attention

The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.

            Simone Weil, Waiting on God

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Tornado Imagined from Far Away

Up from the south it came, out of the
west, at a diagonal,
fifty miles in its full course,
once it was done—and in its body length, each
time it touched down, from a mile long
to twenty miles. “All we could see
was a lot of gray and stuff.” “It was like
a train, but much louder.” “All we saw was this
white wall of water, if you will.”
Witnesses reported funnel
clouds setting down eleven times, like
anteater noses looking for something,
or a grayish teat growing down
to search out and eat,
but of course it was just cold and heat,
wet and dry, wind, counter-
clockwise force. One life
ended, within a collapsed home,
curled around her stepson’s infant son.
Some homes almost disappeared,
as if the atoms that had made them were gone,
and many homes now partially stand, as if
gored, or chewed on. And how many trees,
how many hairs on a head, torn out,
how many plants turned back from discrete
beings into wads of matter.
Pine, oak, maple, beech,
hemlock, witch hazel, lady’s slipper,
pitcher plant, trillium,
Indian pipe. Gardens, trails—
by a waterfall, a bench, gone in one
bite, dissolved like a grain of salt, as if
thousands of years passed in a minute,
as if we jumped the Pleistocene
to the Hiroshimal. But it’s just weather.
Friend, let us be good to one another.

                   Sharon Olds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wisdom Art

Stevie Van Zandt, who has been playing guitar in Springsteen’s E Street Band since the early seventies, said, “The rock generation has changed the concept of chronological time. I personally know seven artists in their eighties still working. And the entire British Invasion is turning eighty in the next few years. Nobody’s grandparents made it past their sixties when we grew up.” He sees the “the birth of something I call ‘wisdom art’ – art that the artist could not have created when they were young…so there is a legitimate justification for continuing to create.”

        David Remnick, The New Yorker, 2021

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is
        while you are thinking about it.

                     Sonja Lyubomirsky, The Myths of Happiness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First love

I was in love with New York.
I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way,
I mean that I was in love with the city,
the way you love the first person who ever touches you
and never love anyone quite that way again.

            Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

 

 

 

 

Happiness

Getting what you go after is success;
but liking it while you are getting it is happiness.

        Bertha Damon, A Sense of Humus

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memorial Day

England
Tuesday Night
May 30, 1944

My Dearest Sweet Darling Bette:
        (Good-I like it)

Sweetheart this isn’t going to be much of a letter. Surprise, I said I wasn’t going to write tonight but the situation changed. So I will keep up my good record.

I am writing this by flashlight so it probably won’t look like much as it is turning out to be a quite difficult job.

Surprise, it’s raining, and I happen to be wet from my feet up to my waist. It isn’t bad, though, after you get used to it. It’s the easy way to take a bath I guess.

The packages are starting to roll in. So I should be getting one before long. Will that ever be a happy day.

If I remember correct, today is Memorial Day. It hasn’t seemed like it here, but I suppose you had the day off today. That was one holiday I always enjoyed. I wish that I could have been there to spend it with you darling.

Gosh, but I am lonesome tonight. I don’t know what I would do or give to see you or be with you tonight. I guess anything in the world. Even swim the ocean for you. Do you know something honey – I love you.

Darling, this probably won’t make sense, but I have thought of you so much that I had to write whether it makes sense or not.

Dear I must stop and hit the bedroll. I do miss you darling very, very much, and I love you more than anyone else in the world. Take care of yourself & write soon. I Love You Darling.

All My Love & Kisses,
Goodnight
Larry

I Love You Sweetheart.

Reasons to meditate, if you need them

Meditation is always becoming. Meditation is always transformation. Meditation always moves us from one place to another; from unconsciousness to awareness, from tension to relaxation, from being scattered to being centered, from a shallow relationship with our environment and ourselves to a deeper one, from sleep to wakefulness, from a sense of God’s absence to the sense that God was in this place all along and I didn’t know it!

Alan Lew, Be Still and Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Most of the Warriors

Most of the warriors I knew
Have settled down to gardening, and the morning Times,
Tired of stalking ghosts
and the melody of secret rhythms
above the sound of traffic
and other monotonous voices,
Finally content to stare and wonder.

Most of the warriors I knew
Have unsaddled stallions and built a fence in the backyard,
Weary of studying the clouds
And the shadows creeping across mountains
beyond the flash of neon
and other pretentious symbols,
Finally content to stare and wonder.

Most of the warriors I knew
Have died before their time and are forgotten
Save in the memory of their sons
And the dreams they seldom share
beyond the taint of time
and other unimportant measures

Finally content to stare and wonder.

                        James Kavanaugh 

 

 

 

 

From up there

There is a famous story that you and Springsteen were invited to a dinner party at Sinatra’s house around the time you did that TV tribute to him. Had you met him before? Did you feel like he knew your stuff?

Not really. I think he knew “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and “Blowin’ In the Wind.” I know he liked “Forever Young,” he told me that. He was funny, we were standing out on his patio at night and he said to me, “You and me, pal, we got blue eyes, we’re from up there,” and he pointed to the stars. “These other bums are from down here.” I remember thinking that he might be right.

        Bob Dylan, Q&A with Bill Flanagan, March 2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

Small steps

People seldom see the halting and painful steps
by which the most insignificant success is achieved.

        Anne Mansfield Sullivan, Helen Keller: The Story of My Life

 

 

 

 

One reason to wake up

That of which we are not aware, owns us.

        James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

 

 

 

The risk

Where there is danger,
that which will save us also grows.

        Friedrich Hölderlin, Patmos

 

 

 

Great artists

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist
and that there are as few as there are any other great artists.
It might even be the greatest of the arts
since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

        John Steinbeck, America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

An Irish story of everlasting friendship

St. Ciaran of Clonmacnoise was St. Kevin's soul-friend, and they were very close. When Ciaran approached death, he said: "Let me be carried to a small height."  Then angels went to meet his soul, filling as they did all the space between heaven and earth. He was carried back into the little church, and raising his hands, he blessed his people. Then he told the brethren to shut him up in the church until Kevin should come from Glendalough. 

Kevin arrived three days after Ciaran's death, having left his monastery as soon as he heard that his closest friend was dying, but he had been very delayed. At once Ciaran's spirit returned from heaven and reentered his body so that he could commune with Kevin and welcome him. The two friends stayed together for a long time, engaged in mutual conversation, and strengthening their friendship. 

 Excerpted from: https://orthodoxwiki.org/Kevin_of_Glendalough  

Poem: Remorse for Intemperate Speech

I ranted to the knave and fool,
But outgrew that school,
Would transform the part,
Fit audience found, but cannot rule
My fanatic heart.

I sought my betters: though in each
Fine manners, liberal speech,
Turn hatred into sport,
Nothing said or done can reach
My fanatic heart.

Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.

            William Butler Yeats 

Burning silence

When something is festering
in your memory or your imagination,
laws of silence don’t work,
it’s like shutting a door and locking it
on a house on fire
in hope of forgetting that the house is burning.
But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.
Silence about a thing just magnifies it.
It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant.

            Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Good stories

Some of these things are true
and some of them lies.
But they are all good stories.

        Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stay out

True happiness, we are told,
consists in getting out of one's self;
but the point is not only to get out -
you must stay out;
and to stay out
you must have some absorbing errand.

             Henry James, Roderick Hudson

 

 

 

 

The era of tea

The joy of the new, hip, happening, double-espresso Dublin
is that you can blame any strange mood on coffee deprivation.
This never worked in the era of tea,
at least not at the same level of street cred.

            Tana French, In the Woods

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dangerous inclinations

The spiritual disposition of a poet inclines to catastrophe.

        Osip Mandelstam, Selected Essays

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well played

Whereas elsewhere in Europe,
no educated man would be caught dead speaking a vernacular,
the Irish thought that all language was a game.

            Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyone can do it

Repentance need not be multilateral.

Bayard Rustin as quoted by Andrew Young,
The Free Press Interview, March 2026

Poem: Long Thoughts - Short Walks

some believe in general motors,
others in market purity;
some believe in earnings per share
and their financial security-
still more believe in politics,
and everything they've read;
but i believe the sun
when its shining on my head.

                A. Cohen

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Irish way

In Ireland, you go to someone's house, and she asks you if you want a cup of tea. You say no, thank you, you're really just fine. She asks if you're sure. You say of course you're sure, really, you don't need a thing. Except they pronounce it ting. You don't need a ting. Well, she says then, I was going to get myself some anyway, so it would be no trouble. Ah, you say, well, if you were going to get yourself some, I wouldn't mind a spot of tea, at that, so long as it's no trouble and I can give you a hand in the kitchen. Then you go through the whole thing all over again until you both end up in the kitchen drinking tea and chatting.

In America, someone asks you if you want a cup of tea, you say no, and then you don't get any damned tea.

I liked the Irish way better.

             C.E. Murphy, Urban Shaman

 

 

 

 

Happy Birthday, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.

        David Gerrold, The War Against the Chtorr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's in the details

The true secret of happiness lies in taking
a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.

            William Morris, The Beauty of Life