“Make of yourself a light,” said the Buddha, before he died.” – Mary Oliver, The Buddha’s Last Instruction Last night I lay quietly in the backyard well past my bedtime watching bits of billion-year-old space dust streak across the sky in brilliant dying gasps of white light. The dust is debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle,…
“No doubt in Holland, when van Gogh was a boy, there were swans drifting over the green sea of the meadows, and no doubt on some warm afternoon he lay down and watched them, and almost thought: this is everything. What drove him to get up and look further is what saves this world, even…
“It takes many hours to make what you want to make. The hours don’t suddenly appear. You have to steal them from comfort. Whatever you were doing before was comfortable. This is not. This will be really uncomfortable.” – Derek Sivers, Where To Find The Hours To Make It Happen This phrase, stealing hours from…
I quietly shelved plans to hike yesterday. Thunderstorms in the forecast, friends coming over, yard work to do… you know: excuses. Instead I did projects and regretted not getting out there and hiking. Lesson learned. But the bulkhead looks better than it ever has with a fresh coat of paint and the lawn has been…
Monday morning wasn’t offering me any free rides today. The well of creativity felt tapped out. I looked through the 27 drafts I had going and wasn’t inspired to pursue any of them. I tried sitting in my favorite reading chair and read Seneca’s On the Happy Life for inspiration, highlighting many passages yet finding…
I watched a housefly bouncing about on a pane of glass, attracted to the light but unable to find a way through. We aren’t very different in this respect, are we? So focused on the bright light that we don’t see the opportunities around us. Noses pressed to screens of all shapes and sizes, and…
“Consider the hummingbird for a long moment…. Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backward. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are…
The Saturday workout was supposed to be a 10,000 meter row. Sometime around 1:30 I realized that wasn’t happening, but I got a six hour workout in anyway: I painted the ceilings downstairs. Now before you roll your eyes dismissively at me, consider the logistics for a moment. In that time I climbed the equivalent…
My mind’s distracted by work and projects. I need to write them all down and get them out of my head. Prioritize and tackle the list. First on the list is writing, and in writing I’m tackling another distraction: I’ve noticed my quote collection piling up again, which means I’m not sharing enough of them….
This weekend the bluebirds came back. I needed that more than I realized. It’s a small sign of brighter days ahead in the ebb and flow world of New England in March, like early crocuses or the green spear tips of daffodils breaking the ground. We could use more signs of hope in this particularly…