Purify.

Ray Bradbury on life and love ...

We keep cleansing the stream just as any impurity running downhill in a river by the time it travels nine miles is purified.   So the life of a man traveling to the sea, which is our inevitable death someday, purifies itself.  It must, because if you do not purify, these tensions remain in and turn in on yourself and destroy you.  The man who cannot laugh freely is a sick man.  The man who cannot cry and release tears in that direction, there's a sick man.  The man who cannot be violent through exercise, through sports, through acting out his violence in paper or painting or acting on a stage, is a sick man.

Life.

I cannot exist without you - I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again - my Life seems to stop there - I see no further.

John Keats, from a letter to Fanny Brawne, 13 October 1819

Love.

van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1887

I’m always inclined to believe that the best way of knowing [the divine] is to love a great deal. Love that friend, that person, that thing, whatever you like, you’ll be on the right path to knowing more thoroughly, afterwards; that’s what I say to myself. But you must love with a high, serious intimate sympathy, with a will, with intelligence, and you must always seek to know more thoroughly, better, and more.

Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to his brother, Theo, June 1880

Love.

On the corner of Government and Bay Avenue

The old doomsday fanatic wore a crown of kudzu

Sirens were wailing in the gulf coastal heat

And it seemed like the whole world was in forced retreat

Paid no attention, revolved through the door

Passed the newspaper racks on the worn marble floor

Near Civil War history, my heart skipped a beat

She was standing in fiction, stretched high on bare feet

Love in the library, quiet and cool

Love in the library, there are no rules

Surrounded by stories, surreal and sublime

I fell in love in the library, once upon a time

I was the pirate, she was the queen

Sir Francis and Elizabeth, the best there's ever been

Then she strolled past my table and stopped at the stairs

Then she sent me a smile as she reached for Flaubert

Love in the library, quiet and cool

Love in the library, there are no rules

Surrounded by stories, surreal and sublime

I fell in love in the library, once upon a time

She gathered her books, walked while she read

Words never spoken but so much was said

You can read all you want into this rendezvous

But it's safer than most things that lovers can do

Well, stories have endings, fantasies fade

And the guard by the door starts drawing the shade

So, write your own ending and hope it comes true

For the lovers and strangers on Bay Avenue

Love in the library, quiet and cool

Love in the library, there are no rules

Surrounded by stories, surreal and sublime

I fell in love in the library, once upon a time

I fell in love in the library

Once upon a time

Jimmy Buffett

Happy Birthday, Lewis

Parkinson. C.S. Lewis, 1951

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason. ‘I knew thee that thou wert a hard man.’ Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.

C.S. Lewis, born on this day in 1898, from The Four Loves, "Charity"

Alan Jackson, "How Great Thou Art"

Love.

Kurt offers another gem from Reverend Baker ...

In attempting to love our neighbor, we do need some kind of a moral view; an aware conscience; some real ethic.  A university professor wrote that students taking a college ethics courses are debating abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, DNA research, and the ethics of transplant surgery, while they learn almost nothing about private decency, honesty, personal responsibility, or personal honor.  Social ethics has taken over any real focus on personal ethics and moral living.

CONNECT 

Happy Birthday, King

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on this date in 1929.

Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, "Love your enemies." It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies. 

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Heart

A canon is a guarded catalogue of that speech, music and art which houses inside us, which is irrevocably familiar to our homecomings. And this will include, if honestly arrived at and declared (even if solely to oneself), all manner of ephemera, trivial, and possibly mendacious matter.  No man or woman need justify his personal anthology, his canonic welcomes. Love does not argue its necessities.  The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart.  What you know by heart, the bastards cannot touch; they cannot take it from you. 

George Steiner

Perfect.

The first and last five minutes of Big Night are pristinely perfect.  

When this scene ceases to make me smile and tear up at the same time I'll know I'm no longer living ...

Happy Birthday, Hugo

Victor Hugo was born on this day in 1802.

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

Victor Hugo

Happy Fathers Day, Dad.

A few years ago, my Dad sent me an e-mail after we had a discussion about "the world today" ...

Dwelling on and blaming every day can take a physical and mental toll and eat up one's time.There is too much of this stuff along with other things in this world that are negative. This again is part of the problem(s) in this day and age. If it's on the internet in anyway, shape or form, it has to be true ... that's false ... but that is what "some are in to" today is.  Common sense says that some of this topic maybe correct, but more data has to be generated and discussed on topics "in open discussion," not, "If you don't believe me, you are against me," etc.!!!

At this point, hate and blaming DOES destroy good days and DOES give many people headaches and loss of sleep and this is TRUE, this we know, we must try to overcome or be above it, which is VERY, VERY hard to do! 

These are some of my thoughts ... Dad.

Dad, thanks for your infinite guidance, patience, and love.  Happy Fathers Day.

Love.

There is no good food if it is not made out of love for the one for whom it is intended.

Paul Bocuse

Copper.

Mine.

If I were hanged on the highest hill,
Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine
I know whose love would follow me still,
Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!

If I were drowned in the deepest sea,
Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine
I know whose tears would come down to me
Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!

If I were damned of body and soul,
I know whose prayers would make me whole,
Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!

Rudyard Kipling

Happy Mother's Day, Mum!

Dance.

ON LOVE

What is Love? Ask him who lives what is life; ask him who adores what is God.

I know not the internal constitution of other men, nor even of thine whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, I have thought to appeal to something in common and unburden my inmost soul to them, I have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant and savage land. The more opportunities they have afforded me for experience, the wider has appeared the interval between us, and to a greater distance have the points of sympathy been withdrawn. With a spirit ill-fitted to sustain such proof, trembling and feeble through its tenderness, I have every where sought, and have found only repulse and disappointment.

Thou demandest what is Love. It is that powerful attraction towards all we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves. If we reason we would be understood; if we imagine we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own; that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood:--this is Love. This is the bond and the sanction which connects not only man with man, but with every thing which exists. We are born into the world, and there is something within us, which from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts after its likeness. It is probably in correspondence with this law that the infant drains milk from the bosom of its mother; this propensity develops itself with the development of our nature. We dimly see within our intellectual nature, a miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of every thing excellent and lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man. Not only the portrait of our external being, but an assemblage of the minutest particles of which our nature is composed*: a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness: a soul within our own soul that describes a circle around its proper Paradise, which pain and sorrow and evil dare not overleap. To this we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they should resemble and correspond with it. The discovery of its anti-type; the meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own; an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and unfold in secret, with a frame, whose nerves, like the chords of two exquisite lyres, strung to the accompaniment of one delightful voice, vibrate with the vibrations of our own; and a combination of all these in such proportion as the type within demands: this is the invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends; and to attain which, it urges forth the powers of man to arrest the faintest shadow of that, without the possession of which, there is no rest nor respite to the heart over which it rules. Hence in solitude, or that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul awaken the spirits to dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone. Sterne says that if he were in a desert he would love some cypress. So soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes a living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was.

These words are ineffectual and metaphorical. Most words are so,--no help!

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Happy Birthday, Dad

Firchau, Self-portrait, 1971

My Dad was born on this date in 1937.

From an e-mail he sent me a few years back; still endures ...

Dwelling on and blaming every day can take a physical and mental toll and eat up one's time.There is too much of this stuff along with other things in this world that are negative. This again is part of the problem (s) in this day and age. If it's on the internet in anyway, shape or form, it has to be true ... that's false ... but that is what "some are in to" today is.  Common sense says that some of this topic maybe correct, but more data has to be generated and discussed on topics "in open discussion," not, "If you don't believe me, you are against me," etc.!!! 

At this point, hate and blaming DOES destroy good days and DOES give many people headaches and loss of sleep and this is TRUE, this we know, we must try to overcome or be above it, which is VERY, VERY hard to do! 

These are some of my thoughts ... Dad

Thanks, Dad.  Happy birthday.

If.

Abandon.

Drama is very important in life: You have to come on with a bang. You never want to go out with a whimper. Everything can have drama if it's done right. Even a pancake.  Cooking is like love; it should be entered into with abandon or not at all.

Julia Child

Let.

Forever.

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.

So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

Neil Gaiman