Pristine Afternoon

Finally! The sun shines after the storm. Nothing like a week of rain to fuel the celebration of clear skies and fair weather. (Yes, it's also Agricultural Fair/football weather.)
There's a touch of autumn on the breeze that unlocks dry leaves from their branches.
Papery, brown foliage carpets the lawn. Yet the trees and the grass are still deep, lush green. How can there be such a clash between the living and the dead? What a contradiction for the eyes!

But the sky! O, the sky is that indescribable blue that gives perfect contrast to the white, billowing clouds. Everything has that crisp, clean freshly-etched quality. The purity of light in the fall can be sheer crystalline. If only one could capture this treasured sight for a keepsake....photos, perhaps?

Last Footprints

With the feathers of the cock and some finely crushed fresh eggshell,
he would be able to prepare a powerful fetish to the spirits,
whom he would ask to bless the dust
where his last footprints had touched in his village.
If that dust was blessed,
his footprints would one day
reappear in Juffure,
where every man's footprints
were recognizable to his neighbors,
and they would rejoice at this sign that
Kunta Kinte was still alive and
that he would return safely to his village.
Someday.

from Roots, p. 217
by Alex Haley
(c.1976)

Sing Praises!

Thought is the wind

Knowledge the sail

and mankind the vessel.

---August Hale

Sing a new song to the Lord!

Sing his praises

from the ends of the earth!

Sing all you who sail the seas,

all you

who live in distant 

coastlands.

--Isaiah 42: 10

Wild Weather Woes...or Safe harbour ?

Wild nights---wild nights!

Christ in the Storm by Rembrandt

Were I with thee
Wild nights
     should be                                               
Our luxury!

Futile---the Winds---
To a heart in port---
Done with the compass---
Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden--
  Ah, the sea!

Might I but moor
---Tonight---
          In thee!!

Emily Dickinson
(1861)

Love Never Dies !!!

Sigh no more, ladies,                                   
sigh no more!
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in the sea,
and one on the shore;
To one thing constant never.
--Wm.Shakespeare
Much Ado About Nothing, II, iii

"If I ache,
it's because we are apart

and yet that can't be

Nancy and Ronald Reagan 1964

because you are inside 

and a part of me,

so we really aren't apart at all.

Yet I ache

but wouldn't be without the ache,

because that would mean

being without you 

and that I can't be."

---from a letter (1963) 

written by
former president(1981-89)

Ronald Reagan 

to his wife, Nancy;

as quoted in her book

"I Love You, Ronnie" [2000]

The Last Camel Died at Noon

The cool night breeze
stirred the damp tendrils of my hair.
The vault of heaven blazed with stars
that cast a magical glow
along the sides of the pyramid.
Feeling like a queen enthroned,
surrounded by kneeling courtiers,
I sipped my whiskey and
opened my senses
to the allure of the desert wastes.
And when Emerson sighed deeply and remarked,

           "Ah, my dear Peabody,

                life cannot hold

         any greater charm than this,"

I was forced to agree that he was right.

--Elizabeth Peters

Live Life & Live it Well

I could not at any age

be content to take my place

in a corner

by the fireside

and simply look on.

Life was meant to be lived.

One must never,

for whatever reason,

turn one's back on Life.

---Eleanor Roosevelt

[1884- 1962]

First Lady of the U.S.

1933-1945

Success?

To have succeeded is
to have finished one's business on earth:

like the male spider who is killed by the female                   
the moment he has succeeded in his courtship.

I like a state of continual becoming,
with a goal in front
and not behind.

---George Bernard Shaw

Steps of Faith [2004]

I stood at the door

of the New Year and I said,

"Give me a light that I might 

see my way safely 

into the unknown."

But a voice came to me and said,

"Instead, step into the darkness

and take the hand of God---

for it will be to you better than light

and safer than a known way."

---Evelyn Husband,

widow of Comm. Rick Husband,

NASA shuttle Columbia [2003]

in High Calling, p. 205

Mirage--Christina Georgina Rosetti

The hope I dreamed of was a dream,

was but a dream; and now I wake;

Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old,

For a dream's sake.

I hang my harp upon a tree,
A weeping willow in a lake;
I hang my silent harp there,
   wrung and snapt
   for a dream's sake.                                                                

Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;
My silent heart, lie still and break:
Life, and the world, and mine own self,
   are changed
   for a dream's sake.

Storms!!

I am not afraid of storms,                            
for I am learning
how to sail my ship.
--Louisa May Alcott
[1832-1888]

   On becoming lost in the woods at night....

By night, 

the perplexity is infinitely greater.

In our most trivial walks,

we are constantly, though unconsciously,

steering like pilots

by certain well-known beacons and headlands;

and if we go beyond our usual course,

we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape;

and not until we are completely LOST, or turned around

---for a man needs only to be turned around once, 

with his eyes shut, in this world to be lost---

do we appreciate

the vastness and strangeness of nature.

Every man has to learn

the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, 

whether from sleep or any abstraction.

Not till we are lost, in other words---

not til we have lost the world,

do we begin to find ourselves, 

and realize where we are

and the infinite extent of our relations.

---H.D. Thoreau

"The Village"

Walden

Emotional Scribbles

He shouldn't have chanced putting it in writing,                               
but he couldn't help it.
Feelings had always been strange,
inscrutable markings in his heart,
like the ones he'd seen on the Rosetta Stone once.
He'd stared at the stone for a very long time,
while at least a hundred,
maybe a thousand, other museum tourists had come and gone.

He'd felt he was looking at something deeply personal,
and from then on he'd been trying to describe
the emotional scribbles
inside himself
by writing them down.
Oddly, they became accessible that way,
transposed into something deeply felt.

---fr. The Mermaid Chair
Sue Monk Kidd [2005]

Living Well

Thoreau declined to give up                               
his large ambition of

knowledge and action
for any narrow craft or profession,
aiming at a much more comprehensive calling:
the art of living well.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1862)
      in his eulogy to
          Thoreau




                                  Henry David Thoreau
                                  [1817--1862]

Life is like a... Football Game !

Keep the habit of the observer, and,

as fast as you can,

break off your association 

with your personality

and identify yourself with the Universe.

Be a football to time and chance, 

the more kicks,  the better;

so that you inspect the whole game

and know its uttermost law.

As true is this ethics 

for trivial as for

calamitous days.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's journal

October 1837