Keith Richards, "Words of Wonder/Get Up, Stand Up""

Routine.

If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It is lethal.

Paulo Coelho

Bob Marley, "Roots, Rock, Reggae"

Darkness.

Across the United States, natural darkness is an endangered resource.

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Bach, Cello Suite No. 1 (BWV 1007)

Pablo Casals performs ...

Happy birthday, Leonardo.

Leonardo, Self-portrait, 1510

Leonardo da Vinci was born on this date in 1452.

The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.  Life, if well spent, is long.

Leonardo da Vinci

Gentler.

Unlike booze, good wine resonates so broadly it draws in the world that surrounds us. The effects of it are slow enough so that you can check yourself, an absolutely vital talent if you drink. As a Zen dictum says, you must find yourself where you already are and the effects of booze make this unlikely. Good wine increases the best aspects of camaraderie and sweetens the tongue for conversation. It softens the world's sharp edges in contrast to the blunting power of booze. In short, you don't become dumb at a blinding pace, and your mood swings from gentle to gentler.

Jim Harrison

The Police, "Message in a Bottle"

Message.

A message in a bottle tossed in the sea in Germany 101 years ago and believed to be the world's oldest has been presented to the sender's granddaughter.

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Spirit.

Write it on your heart

that every day is the best day in the year.

He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day

who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.

You have done what you could.

Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.

Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;

begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit

to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,

with its hopes and invitations,

to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Happy birthday, Wordsworth.

Pickersgill, William Wordsworth, 1873

William Wordsworth was born on this date in 1770.

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798

Five years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur.—Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

The day is come when I again repose

Here, under this dark sycamore, and view

These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,

Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,

Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves

'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines

Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,

Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke

Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!

With some uncertain notice, as might seem

Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,

Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire

The Hermit sits alone.

                                              These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.

                                                        If this

Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—

In darkness and amid the many shapes

Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir

Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,

Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,

O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,

         How often has my spirit turned to thee!

   And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,

With many recognitions dim and faint,

And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again:

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years. And so I dare to hope,

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first

I came among these hills; when like a roe

I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led: more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then

(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days

And their glad animal movements all gone by)

To me was all in all.—I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, not any interest

Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this

Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts

Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,

Abundant recompense. For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

                                            Nor perchance,

If I were not thus taught, should I the more

Suffer my genial spirits to decay:

For thou art with me here upon the banks

Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,

My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch

The language of my former heart, and read

My former pleasures in the shooting lights

Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while

May I behold in thee what I was once,

My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,

Knowing that Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,

Through all the years of this our life, to lead

From joy to joy: for she can so inform

The mind that is within us, so impress

With quietness and beauty, and so feed

With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,

Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life,

Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb

Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold

Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon

Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;

And let the misty mountain-winds be free

To blow against thee: and, in after years,

When these wild ecstasies shall be matured

Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind

Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,

Thy memory be as a dwelling-place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,

If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,

Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts

Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,

And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—

If I should be where I no more can hear

Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams

Of past existence—wilt thou then forget

That on the banks of this delightful stream

We stood together; and that I, so long

A worshipper of Nature, hither came

Unwearied in that service: rather say

With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal

Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,

That after many wanderings, many years

Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,

And this green pastoral landscape, were to me

More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

William Wordsworth

Quality.

William Stafford's achievement is extraordinary. He wrote more than 20,000 poems, of which more than 4,000 have been published, in more than 80 books and 2,000 periodicals. But it is the quality of his work that distinguishes him.

The poet Katrina Porteous, who also writes daily, visits to Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where for decades Stafford taught, wrote and developed his ideas. There she meets his son, Kim, who takes her to places that were important to him. She visits the huge William Stafford Archive, hears recordings of his readings, meets people who knew him, and students and poets he continues to influence.

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Swim.

The resources in language and the adventures in writing are available to us—I don’t want to echo Wordsworth on this—in the language we use everyday, though it is not necessarily that of ordinary people in whatever circle we inhabit. We may not be with ordinary people (I’d like to be with extraordinary people, myself), but it would be the language they use not when they are writing but when they are talking, when they are saying things like, Pass the butter. Bonuses in language are not literary bonuses; they are available to everyone who flourishes the language every day with people who are their peers in communication. It would be a mistake to try to heighten or lower my place in the language that comes to me. Instead, I try to accept whatever fluency and fluidity is possible at my level of understanding with my kind of people. To do it artificially, to try to hype myself into being a better writer by doggedly reading better literature, is also a mistake. I learn to use the language by the pleasures it gives me when I am able to swim in it or maneuver in it or interchange in it with the people around me.

William Stafford

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David Gray, "Morning of My Life"

Simply Red, "The Air That I Breathe"

Resumes.

Shishkin, Dark Forest, 1890

In actual thickets there is ideally a stump to sit on and enough brambles so that you may frame the surrounding landscape in the apertures formed by branches. If you sit there long enough the natural world that surrounds you resumes its activities, either forgetting that you are there or accepting the idea that you are harmless because you are behaving harmlessly. Best of all you can see out and no one else can see in.

Jim Harrison

Hierarchy.

For scholars, monks, and heredity-minded royal families, trees served as a handy way to divvy information into groups and sub-groups. Lima figures, "They had the concept of hierarchy in their minds and used the tree as a symbol for mapping because it was convenient. Over time, it became ingrained in our minds so that now when we talk about the root of a problem or describe genetics as a branch of science, we're really going back to this Medieval era when people started using diagrams to convey complex new knowledge."

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