Some words, like salut and aloha, mean both hello and goodbye. It reminds me of the nonsensical lyrics of the Beatles song, catchy tune that it is, but which blathers on endlessly about goodbyes and hellos. A simple word that means both is rather handy, don’t you think? My daughter flew home from across the…
“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick “Ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and…
Death twitches my ear.“Live’” He says, “I am coming.“— Virgil The twitch is there, reminding me to make the most of each day. You may have noticed a lean towards Stoicism early on in this blog. Stoicism celebrates every moment of life, because we remind ourselves that infinity is calling. So decide what to be…
“Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.” — Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero I read this on the two year anniversary of the passing of my favorite Navy pilot….
“Habit is a rope. We weave a thread every day, and eventually we can’t break it.” — Thomas Mann “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle This business of repeatedly doing is leading somewhere, with our destination highly dependent on what we repeatedly do. Such…
God it’s so painful when something that’s so closeIs still so far out of reach— Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, American Girl September conjures up images of red and gold leaves in crisp air. I thought of their possibility while sneaking another swim in water that believes it’s still summer. But what we linger on…
“Days to come stand in front of uslike a row of lighted candles—golden, warm, and vivid candles.Days gone by fall behind us,a gloomy line of snuffed-out candles;the nearest are smoking still,cold, melted, and bent.”— C. P. Cavafy When you think about it, our days gone by are a stack of previous lives, somewhat resembling us…
“Society is the cave. The way out is solitude.” — Simone Weil We know, deep down, that our way is found in the quiet moments. It’s so easy to be caught up in the expectations and scandals of society, so easy to trap ourselves in the words so tightly shaped around the stories of our…
About suffering they were never wrong,The old Masters: how well they understoodIts human position: how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waitingFor the miraculous birth, there always must beChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skatingOn a…
“For you and your children hold a message: act so that the fruit of hatred, whose traces you have seen here, bears no new seeds, either tomorrow or forever after.” — Primo Levi This world offers a full sampling of good and evil. We sip from the fountain we choose to belly up to. It…
