Open.

Curtis, Hidatsa Medicine Man, 1907

Opening the letter of the body's life inside the words.  This body, your life, is a letter to the king of the universe.

Go to a private place and open it and read to see if the words are right.  If they

aren't, start another!  And don't think it's easy to open the body and read the secret

message.  This is the most courageous work, not something for children playing with knucklebones in the dirt.

Open to the title page.  Is what it says there the same as what you have said it says?  If

you're carrying a heavy sack, empty out the stones!  Bring only what should be given.

- Rumi

Table.

The table is one of the most intimate places in our lives. It is there that we give ourselves to one another. When we say, "Take some more, let me serve you another plate, let me pour you another glass, don't be shy, enjoy it," we say a lot more than our words express. We invite our friends to become part of our lives. We want them to be nurtured by the same food and drink that nurture us. We desire communion. That is why a refusal to eat and drink what a host offers is so offensive. It feels like a rejection of an invitation to intimacy.

Strange as it may sound, the table is the place where we want to become food for one another. Every breakfast, lunch, or dinner can become a time of growing communion with one another.

- Henri J. M. Nouwen

Thank you, Karen.

Unleash.

Why do we ever stop playing and creating? With charm and humor, celebrated Korean author Young-ha Kim invokes the world's greatest artists to urge you to unleash your inner child -- the artist who wanted to play forever.



Thank you, TED.

Thank you, Jess.

Hungry.

Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew (detail), 1599

The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry.

- Simone Weil

The Cars, "Just What I Needed"

Robert Plant.

From the 2010 BBC Electric Proms ...

Happy birthday, Praetorius.

Michael Praetorius was born on this date in 1571.

John Williams performs three dances from Praetorius' Terpsichore, here.

Happy birthday, Galileo.

Galileo Galilei was born on this date in 1564.

The NOVA production, Galileo's Battle for the Heavens ...

Milk.

Doisneau, Diagonal Steps, 1953

School can be a devastatingly social, deeply emotional, and cognitively complex arena. The most powerful lesson any institution of learning can bestow upon us is helping us discover how we learn best and, then, how to milk that. Milk, in this situation, means learning how to take in information in the most salient ways, collaborate, use tools, make tools, grow our own capacities, and output information articulately. In other words, if schools functioned for one reason, it should be to help us all discover our “learning potential.” To learn one’s own constraints, skills, and possibility, and be able to articulate that in whichever literacy you are inclined to use -- be it digital or visual or oral. To learn to embrace one’s own neurodiversity as it fits or does not fit in with others, is perhaps one of the most empowering foundations to build a career of learning, living, and growing on. If we all left high school knowing fully and deeply our “learning potential,” we would be well ahead of the game of life.

Read the rest at The Creativity Post.

Sssssssstones, "Saint of Me"

... all the special pleasures of doin' somethin' wrong.

Dance.

Friedrich Gulda performs and leads the Munich Philharmonic in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 26 in D major, K.537, "Coronation," ...

Allegro, Part 1 ...



Allegro, Part 2 ...



Larghetto ...



Allegretto ...



The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.

- Thomas Merton

Doozie.

French news site, Rue 89, has a doozie ...

Everlasting.

Modeled on M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf — written in 1942 during wartime rations to convince readers that good eating was always possible — An Everlasting Meal teaches how to cook well regardless of circumstance, offering a practical, pleasurable path to the kitchen.

Tamar Adler shares what chefs instinctively know: each ingredient you buy, chop, and cook ought to be prepared with a keen eye toward future meals.

Having An Everlasting Meal means using yesterday’s roasted broccoli as the sauce for tonight’s pasta, which fills tomorrow’s vegetable omelet, which is made into a sandwich the next day. 

Thanks, Jess.

Truck.

The Daily Meal has 2012's "101 Best Food Trucks in America."

Check out Mai Chau, sure to be a local favorite.  Good luck, Scottie

Peter Rowan, "To Live Is To Fly"

... with Bryn Davies, Sharon Gilchrist, and Tony Rice.



I've got a raging case of hat envy.

Fondly.

Thank you, Michael.

Peter Rowan, "The Night Prayer"

For Drew & Zoë ...

World.

Karr, Untitled, 2013

... like stumbling upon yet another world.

Thank you, Jess.

Primative.

Ortner, Swell, 2006

The more I dim my eyes over print and frazzle my brain over abstract ideas, the more I appreciate the delight of being basically an animal wrapped in a sensitive skin: sex, the resistance of rock, the taste and touch of snow, the feel of the sun, good wine and a rare beefsteak and the company of friends around a fire with a guitar and lousy old cowboy songs. Despair: I'll never be a scholar, never be a decent good Christian; just a hedonist, a pagan, a primitive romantic.

- Edward Abbey

Treasure.

Frazier, Cotton Balls, 2013

Old comrades cannot be manufactured. There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories, so many bad times endured together, so many quarrels, reconciliations, heartfelt impulses. Friendships like that cannot be reconstructed. If you plant an oak, you will hope in vain to sit soon under its shade.

For such is life. We grow rich as we plant through the early years, but then come the years when time undoes our work and cuts down our trees. One by one our comrades deprive us of their shade, and within our mourning we always feel now the secret grief of growing old.

If I search among my memories for those whose taste is lasting, if I write the balance sheet of the moments that truly counted, I surely find those that no fortune could have bought me. 

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Thanks, buddy.

HOCKEYTOWN.

Master.

From 1977, Mike Wallace interviews The Master, Vladimir Horowitz ...

New.

If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

- Henry Miller

Recognition.

Unknown, Big Mouth Hawk, Arapaho, 1872

In the life of the Indian there was only one inevitable duty - the duty of prayer - the daily recognition of the Unseen and Eternal. 

- Charles Eastman

Free.

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars. 

- Walt Whitman

Vladimir Horowitz performs Chopin's Nocture in F Minor, Op. 55 ...

Revivified.

He’s practicing what I’ve long thought of as “Jim Yoga,” focusing his attention alternately skyward (mountains, birds, clouds) and at ground level (dogs, trout, plants). It’s a ritualistic way of moving through the world that’s revivified him, a way of seeing through eyes other than his own—and those of us who’ve read his books have been revivified as well. “If you spend a fair amount of time studying the world of ravens,” he’s said, “it is logical indeed to accept the fact that reality is an aggregate of the perceptions of all creatures, not just ourselves.”

Read the rest of this wonderful article at Montana Headwall.

Exactly.

Collins, Dune with Storm, 2008

the mind is exactly this tree that grass 
without thought or feeling both disappear

- Ikkyu

Silence.

Curtis, Winter Camp, Sioux Tepee, 1908

The Wise Man mingled with his pride a singular humility. Spiritual arrogance was foreign to his nature and teaching. He never claimed that the power of articulate speech was proof of superiority over the dumb creation; on the other hand, it is to him a perilous gift. He believes profoundly in silence - the sign of a perfect equilibrium. Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind and spirit. The man who preserves his selfhood ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence - not a leaf, as it were, astir on the tree, not a ripple upon the surface of the shinning pool - his, in the mind of the unlettered sage, is the ideal attitude and conduct of life. Silence is the cornerstone of character.

- Ohiyesa

Awake.

•18•

My zabuton doubles as a dog bed.  Rose sleeps
there, full the fur with mu.  Glanced in
on a moonlit night; her slight white figure coiled
on the green cushion, shaking with quail dreams.
Sensing me, an eye opens, single tail wag.  Back to
sleep.
When she's awake, she's so awake I'm ashamed
of my own warm water dance, my sitting too long at
the fire.

- Jim Harrison

Happy birthday, National Weather Service.

The National Weather Service was created on this date in 1870.

Know it. 

Learn it.

Live it.

Thanks, Dad.

Dreamer.

Paden, Blue Desert Coyote, 2012

Coyote No. 1 

Just before dark 
watched a coyote take crap 
on rock out cropping, 
flexing hips (no time off) 
swiveled owl-like to see 
in all six directions: 
sky above 
earth below, 
points of compass 
in two half circles. 
There. 
And there is no distance. 
He knows the dreamer 
that dreams his dreams 

- Jim Harrison 

Reveled.

Curtis, A Smoky Day at the Sugar Bowl, 1923

Knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks and the birds and animals that shared, alike with us, the storms and blessings of the earth. We learn to do what only the student of nature ever learns, and that is to feel beauty. We never rail at the storms, the furious winds, the biting frosts and snows. To do so intensifies human futility, so whatever comes we should adjust ourselves by more effort and energy if necessary, but without complaint. Bright days and dark days are both expressions of the Great Mystery, and the Indian reveled in being close to the Great Holiness.

- Luther Standing Bear

Los Lobos, "Emily"

Form.

Void in Form

The tree is stripped,
All color, fragrance gone,
Yet already on the bough,
Uncaring spring!

- Ikkyu

Rush, "Caravan"

In a world where I feel so small 
I can't stop thinking big 

Now.

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

- Howard Zinn

Special.

It was late on a Friday night in 1964, a time when Roman Catholics still confined themselves to fish and vegetables on Fridays…Some regulars had been spending a lot of money, and Dom asked his mother to make something special to pass around gratis at the stroke of midnight. Teressa Bellissimo picked up some chicken wings—parts of a chicken that most people do not consider even good enough to give away to barflies—and the Buffalo chicken wing was born.

The Smithsonian instructs us on the birth of joy.

The Vienna Philharmonic performs Beethoven's tribute to wings, the Symphony No. 9, "Choral," here's the Presto - Allegro assai - Recitativo ...

Influence.

3) The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious.

The New York Review of Books looks at the rest of Italo Calvino's "Why Read the Classics?"

Woodcut by Lynd Ward.

Happy birthday, Mendelssohn.

Felix Mendelssohn was born on this date in 1809.

Kurt Masur conducts the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig in performing Mendelssohn's Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, Op. 21 ...

Chief Chris Kyle, R.I.P.

Retired Navy SEAL and the U.S. military's most lethal sniper, Chief Chris Kyle, was fatally shot Saturday.

Details here. 

Endeavors.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

- Henry David Thoreau

Thank you, Brain Pickings.

Sharpening.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

- Abraham Lincoln

Is.

de Saedeleer, Winter landscape, 1931

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

- Wallace Stevens

Nigel Kennedy.

Sting, Ten Summoner's Tales

Mystery.

The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake. To luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out; it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.

- John  Keats

Michigan.

Michigan, My Michigan 

A song to thee, fair 
State of mine,
Michigan, my Michigan;
But greater song than this is thine,
Michigan, my Michigan;
The whisper of the forest tree,
The thunder of the inland sea;
Unite in one grand symphony

Of Michigan, my Michigan.

I sing a State of all the best,
Michigan, my Michigan;
I sing a State with riches blest,
Michigan, my Michigan;
Thy mines unmask a hidden store,
But richer thy historic lore,
More great the love thy builders bore,

Oh, Michigan, my Michigan.

How fair the bosom of thy lakes,
Michigan, my Michigan;
What melody each river makes;
Michigan, my Michigan;
As to thy lakes the rivers tend,
Thy exiled children to thee send
Devotion that shall never end,

Oh, Michigan, my Michigan.

Thou rich in wealth makes a State,
Michigan, my Michigan;
Thou great in things that make us great,
Michigan, my Michigan;
Out loyal voices sound thy claim
Upon the golden roll of fame
Our loyal hands shall write the name 

Of Michigan, my Michigan

- William Otto Messner & Douglas M. Malloch 

Engaged.

Dou, Astronomer by Candelight, 1657

Can you recall a time when you were so engaged in learning that you became unaware of your surroundings, that each step of the process energized you to pursue your goal further, and the learning became its own reward?

Read the rest here.

Sing.

Reni, Drinking Bacchus, 1623

To exalt, enthrone, establish and defend,
To welcome home mankind’s mysterious friend
Wine, true begetter of all arts that be;
Wine, privilege of the completely free;
Wine the recorder; wine the sagely strong;
Wine, bright avenger of sly-dealing wrong,
Awake, Ausonian Muse, and sing the vineyard song!….

Hilaire Belloc

Thin Lizzy, "Rosalie"

Live & Dangerous ...