Poem: Stay Up Late on New Year's Eve

The old year is parting,
Like a snake slithering into a deep ravine.
Scales barely seen; none could stop its course.
Try as hard as we might to grab its tail, but in vain.
Children strive to stay awake, laugh and play all night long.
Rooster, please don’t crow yet, but the morning drum is urging.
The lamp has burnt out, and the Big Dipper descends on the horizon.
Year after year, time flies and my worries are futile.
Better to cherish this night, and I still have the spirit of a young man.

                        Su Shi (960 – 1127)

 

The Chinese New Year begins on January 22 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More taxi driver wisdom

I’m going to tell you something my dad taught me when I was a kid:
If you do your job at the best of your ability, you have no competition.

                    Larry Bowles, Charlottesville (VA) Weekly

 

 

 

 

 

Surprised and puzzled

The miracle that so amazed Galileo and Arnauld —
        and still amazes me, I can’t understand it —
            is how can we, with a few symbols,
                    convey to others the inner workings of our mind?
That’s something to really be surprised about, and puzzled by.
        And we have some grasp of it, but not a lot.

                                Noam Chomsky, The Secrets of Words 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wisdom

If you want to build a ship,
        don't drum up the men to gather wood,
                divide the work and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

                 Attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 

 

 

 

Family heirlooms

Heirlooms we don't have in our family.
             But stories we've got.

                    Rose Cherin, Family Therapies: A Comprehensive Christian Appraisal

 

 

 

 

 

From neighborhood to brotherhood

The world in which we live is geographically one.
The great challenge now is to make it one in terms of brotherhood.

Now it is true that the geographic togetherness of our world
has been brought into being, to a large extent,
through modern man's scientific ingenuity.
Modern man, through his scientific genius,
has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains.

Yes, we've been able to carve highways through the stratosphere,
and our jet planes have compressed into minutes
distances that once took weeks and months.
And so this is a small world from a geographical point of view.

What we are facing today is the fact that through our scientific
and technological genius we've made of this world a neighborhood.

And now through our moral and ethical commitment
we must make of it a brotherhood.
We must all learn to live together as brothers -
or we will all perish together as fools.

This is the great issue facing us today.
No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone.
We are tied together.

        The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., June 1965
        Commencement Address, Oberlin College 

Poem: The Word of God

Arise,
you are a word in the mouth of God:
Unstoppable.
You are a word pouring forth beginnings,
unstoppable like early spring rivers.
Pouring forth beginnings you are noisy.
Like early spring rivers you are bright and dangerous.
You are noisy in the mouth of God.
You are bright and dangerous:
Arise.

                    Laura Gail Grohe