13 June 2026
Possibility.
Opgenhaffen, Untitled, 2010
A VISION
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.
Wendell Berry
Thank you, Veerle.
Vaster.
Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.
Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.
When someone knocks on the door,
Think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,
Or that it's been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
Robert Bly
Fascinating.
Kurt remembers the heady days in Coach Stevens' history class ...
Roosevelt Junior High School was fortunate enough to have Bob Stevens as an 8th grade history teacher. Mr. Stevens would spend each history period walking between the desks of students bringing to life the history of this country. Hands behind his back he would walk and tell the stories of the country.Occasionally, he would grab the chalk and draw out a battle scheme on the chalkboard, supplementing the drawing with gory and fascinating details.Several friends and I even decided to bring our own history books into class to “check” Mr. Stevens on his facts. No way could he just roll these details out without at least some exaggeration.Imagine an 8th grade class with at least four young students feverishly flipping through a stack of books as the teacher told the lesson from memory.
My family moved to Ohio from Michigan in 1977. On my first day of school at Roosevelt, I had the bright idea to wear a Michigan jersey to school. Coach Stevens noticed it within minutes. He picked me up (in my chair), carried me to his room, placed me in my chair atop his desk and proclaimed to his class, “Look what I found!”
Thirty years later, after a pretty drastic career change, I was blessed to spend time with him in his third-floor classroom as he mentored me through my student-teaching experience.
Through those Roosevelt years, Coach Stevens told amazing stories to engage his students, he maintained the highest standards to set an example for his students, and he carried himself in a way that I still remember today. I knew he believed in me and all his students. He was a model of what it was to be not just a good teacher, but a great man. His sincerity and authenticity were such that you didn't want to let him down. That responsibility was transformative to a young punk like me.
I’m beginning my twenty-second year as a teacher and there isn’t a day that goes by that doesn’t catch me feeling grateful that I was his student. What a fine teacher. What a great man.
Happy Birthday, William Butler Yeats
Coburn, W. B. Yeats, 1913
What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
W.B. Yeats, born on this day in 1865, from The Celtic Twilight
12 June 2026
State.
We may build many imitation Greek temples and we may buy them full of pictures, but there is something more—in fact the one thing more which really counts before we can be an art nation—we must get rid of this outside feeling of looking in on art. We must get on the inside and press out.
Art is simply a result of expression during right feeling. It’s a result of a grip on the fundamentals of nature, the spirit of life, the constructive force, the secret of growth, a real understanding of the relative importance of things, order, balance. Any material will do. After all, the object is not to make art, but to be in the wonderful state which makes art inevitable.
In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don’t believe any real artist cares whether what he does is “art” or not. Who, after all, knows what is art?
Robert Henri, from The Art Spirit
Happy Birthday, John Wetton
John Wetton was born on this day 1949.
"Cutting It Fine," with Asia ...
Good morning.
11 June 2026
C.P.E. Bach, Flute Concerto in D Minor, Wq 22
Anna Besson and Kore Orchestra perform the Un poco andante ...
Happy Birthday, John Constable
Constable, Cloud Study, 1822
Light – dews – breezes – bloom – and freshness; not one of which has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world. Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments? We see nothing truly until we understand it.
John Constable, born on this day in 1776
Constable: A Country Rebel ...
10 June 2026
Wonder.
Loss is the tune of our age, hard to miss and hard to bear. Creatures, places and words disappear, day after day, year on year. But there has always been singing in the dark times -- and wonder is needed now more than ever.
Robert Macfarlane, from The Lost Spells
Stories.
Jeff Gill on the archaeoastronomy of Alligator Mound ...
On a hilltop overlooking the valley within which sit the Newark Earthworks, there perches an earthwork over 200 feet long, an effigy of sorts with a name that is a mystery in its own right, and a one-time stone mound with stories all its own now missing, but hidden in plain sight nearby.
Graupner, Overture in G major for Viola d'Amore and Bassoon, GWV 460
It's the Ensemble Der Musikalische Garten dancing through the Chaconne ...
Happy Birthday, Gustave Courbet
Courbet, Cedar Tree at Hauteville, 1868
I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients.
Gustave Courbet, born on this day in 1819
09 June 2026
Excellent.
An excellent book ...
Great states with good constitutions develop when most people think of their duties and restrain their appetites. Great states sink toward their dissolution when most people think of their privileges and indulge their appetites freely. This rule is as true for democracies as it is fro autocracies. And no matter how admirable a constitution may look upon paper, it will be ineffectual unless the written constitution, the web of custom and convention, affirms an enduring moral order of obligation and personal responsibility.
The ruin or recovery of American constitutions, and the general future of of American politics, will be determined more by choices than by circumstances. Here I have done no more than to suggest what some of those choices might be. "Not to lose ourselves in the infinite void of the conjectural world," Burke wrote near the end of his life in the First Letter of the Regicide Peace, "our business is with what is likely to be affected for the better or worse by the wisdom or weakness of our plans." To share the American political future through prudent and courageous choices is yet within the realm of possibility. "I despair neither of the public fortune or of the public mind," Burke continued. "There is much to be done undoubtedly, and much to be retrieved. We must walk in new ways, or we can never encounter our enemy in his devious march. We are not at an end of our struggle, nor near it. Let us not deceive ourselves; we are at the beginning of great troubles.
Russell Kirk, from On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776
Happy Birthday, Cole Porter
Cole Porter was born on this day in 1891.
The best interpreter of Porter's work takes "Night and Day" for a spin ...
Robert Greenidge, Rest in Peace
Robert Greenidge has passed.
Accompanying Jimmy Buffett on "Defying Gravity"...
08 June 2026
Happy Birthday, Robert Schumann
Völlner, Robert Schumann, 1850
To poetry belongs the golden, decisive word. Other arts have accepted nature herself as arbiter, from whom they have borrowed their forms. Music is the orphan whose father and mother no one can determine, and it may well be that precisely in this mystery lies the source of its beauty.
Robert Schumann, born on this day in 1810
Vladimir Horowitz performs Träumerei from Kinderszenen, Op. 15 ...
Happy Birthday, Frank Lloyd Wright
Wright, Wright Home and Studio, Great Room, 1889
Our forefathers were not only brave. I believe they were right. I believe that what they meant was that every man born had equal right to grow from scratch by way of his own power unhindered to the highest expression of himself possible to him. This of course not antagonistic by sympathetic to the growth of all men as brothers. Free emulation not imitation of the "bravest and the best" is to be expected of him.
Uncommon he may and will and should become as inspiration to his fellows, not a reflection upon them, not to be resented but accepted--and in this lies the only condition of the common man's survival. So only is he intrinsic to democracy.
Persistently holding quality above quantity only as he attempts to live a superior life of his own, and to whatsoever degree in whatever case he finds it; this is his virtue in a democracy such as ours was designed to be.
Only this sense of proportion affords tranquility of spirit, in itself beauty, in either character of action. Nature is never other than serene even in a thunderstorm. The assumption of the "firm countenance, lips compressed" in denial or resentment is not known to her as it is known to civilization. Such negation by human countenance may be moral (civilization is inclined to morality) but even so not nature. Again exuberance is repose but never excess.
Frank Lloyd Wright, born on this day in 1867, from A Testament
07 June 2026
06 June 2026
Jim Radford, "The Shores of Normandy"
As the years pass by
I can still recall the men I saw that day
Who died upon that blood-soaked sand
Where now sweet children play
And those of you who were unborn
Who've lived in liberty
Remember those who made it so
On the shores of Normandy ...
Noble.
Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force: You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.But this is the year 1944! The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to victory!I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle.We will accept nothing less than full victory!Good luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, 6 June 1944
05 June 2026
Synchronizing.
Malindine, Commanders of the 22nd Independent Parachute Company Synchronizing Watches, June 5, 1944, 1944
Maximus.
The Keewanau Refport on a deep dive into Superior Maximus ...
We are about to get our clearest look ever at the deepest portion of Lake Superior.Superior Maximus remains a mystery in and of itself. Located in the central part of the lake, its deepest point is approximately 1,332 feet below the surface. Sunlight does not penetrate to that depth, and the water stays at a constant 39 degrees Fahrenheit.Recently, it produced another mystery. Siscowit lake trout that live there have been spotted that appear to be emaciated, without the fat and flesh such trout normally carry. They’re being called “zombie fish.” No one knows what’s causing the problem ...
Happy Birthday, Richard Butler
STARS
The stars are out they spark and flash
A snake is sliding through the grass underneath
The moon is shining through the trees
The starlings on the wires leave while we sleep
These are the days
We will all remember
These are the days
That we will all remember
Your footsteps in the morning snow
The frost where all the dew is frozen and the crows
Into the sea where fishes swim
We drown and where do I begin these darling days
These are the days
That we will all remember
These are the days
That we will all remember
Richard Butler, born on this day in 1956
Resolution.
On this day in 1776, Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee introduced the formal resolution for Colonial independence to Congress.
Happy Birthday, Adam Smith
Unknown, Adam Smith, The Muir Portait, 1801
The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine. He neither endeavours to impose upon you by the cunning devices of an artful impostor, nor by the arrogant airs of an assuming pedant, nor by the confident assertions of a superficial and imprudent pretender. He is not ostentatious even of the abilities which he really possesses. His conversation is simple and modest, and he is averse to all the quackish arts by which other people so frequently thrust themselves into public notice and reputation.
Adam Smith, born on this day in 1723, from The Theory of Moral Sentiments
I wonder what Mr. Smith's thoughts on the blogopolooza would've been.
02 June 2026
Head-On.
Time release capsules humble the headstrong
Your thoughts of takin' me head-on are dead wrong ...
31 May 2026
29 May 2026
Mozart, Exsultate, jubilate, K. 165
Catherine Trottmann performs smartly with the Orchestre du Palais Royal, under the jubilant direction of Jean Philippe Sarcos ...
Exult.
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again” and the grown-up person does it again until nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
G.K. Chasterton, from "The Ethics of Elfland"
Happy Birthday, G.K. Chesterton
Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
G.K. Chesterton, born on this day in 1874
Happy Birthday, Patrick Henry
Matthews after Sully, Patrick Henry, 1891
Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men without a consequent loss of liberty! I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed, with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt.
Patrick Henry, born on this day in 1736, from his speech before the Virginia Ratifying Convention on June 5, 1788
Happy Birthday, T.H. White
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
T.H. White, born on this day in 1906, from The Once and Future King
Thanks, Jess.
28 May 2026
Act.
Be a boxer, not a gladiator, in the way you act on your principles. The gladiator takes up his sword only to put it down again, but the boxer is never without his fist and only has to clinch it.
Marcus Aurelius, from Meditations
Pink Floyd, "Learning to Fly"
About now, on this night in '88 ...
Conditioned grounded but determined to try
Thank you, Sherpa.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
