Eagles, "Already Gone"

So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains
And we never even know we have the key 

Presence.

Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines—it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits. That’s just a feeling, not a fact, but remember (I repeat): people believe weirder things than this.

Robin Sloan, from Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Elsewhere.

You know what I am doing, Miss Kenton? I am placing my thoughts elsewhere while you chatter away.

Happy birthday, Reagan.

Ronald Reagan was born on this day in 1911.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

Ronald Reagan

Map.

Ching, after Nolli, Map of Rome (detail), Undated

Library.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges

Paul Weller, "White Sky"

Strategy.

Patience.

Being an artist means: 

not numbering and counting, 

but ripening like a tree, 

which doesn’t force its sap, 

and stands confidently in the storms of spring, 

not afraid that afterward summer may not come. 

It does come. 

But it comes only to those who are patient, 

who are there as if eternity lay before them, 

so unconcernedly silent and vast. 

I learn it every day of my life, 

learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!

Rainer Maria Rilke

Simply.

When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one's ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender, of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries.

Kenneth Graham, from Wind in the Willows

Willie Nelson, "A Song for You"

Single.

What is a friend?  A single soul dwelling in two bodies.

Aristotle

Palimpset.

Anderson-Lunby, As Evening Falls, Undated

Darkness comes out of the earth
And swallows dip into the pallor of the west;
From the hay comes the clamour of children's mirth;
Wanes the old palimpsest.

The night-stock oozes scent,
And a moon-blue moth goes flittering by:
All that the worldly day has meant
Wastes like a lie.

The children have forsaken their play;
A single star in a veil of light
Glimmers: litter of day
Is gone from sight.

D.H. Lawrence

Map.

Styx, "Mademoiselle"

Happy Friday!

Happy.

Happy Friday!

Reveries.

How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes. Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined.  There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history.  These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.  In reimagining them, we have the possibility of recovering the very life of our reveries as a solitary child.

Gaston Bachelard

Experienced.

Like song or dance, poetry needs to be experienced in performance before it can be fully understood.

CONNECT

Remote.

Please, Medicine Man, I feel a pain.
I always believed in spells and incantations.
Sure, women have only one, Catholic, soul,
But we have two. When you start to dance
You visit remote pueblos in your sleep
And even lands you have never seen.
Put on, I beg you, charms made of feathers,
Now it's time to help one of your own.
I have read many books but I don't believe them.
When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers.

Czeslaw Milosz, from “I Sleep A Lot”

Gravity.

Today we learned that gravity is a fine musician. A team of Japanese filmmakers constructed an incredibly long wooden xylophone along a steady slope in the middle of a beautiful forest in Kyushu in southern Japan. Once the awesome instrument was built and carefully tuned a wooden ball was released at the very top. As the ball rolls down the xylophone it strikes each wooden bar once, producing a single note, performing Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring“ accompanied by the gentle sounds of a peaceful forest. 

Thank you, Archie McPhee's Endless Geyser of Awesome.

Anywhere.

Sit down anywhere you like, on a wall, a stone, a tree stump, on the grass or the earth: everywhere they surround you, a painting and a poem, everywhere the world resonates beautifully and happily around you.

Herman Hesse

Grandeur.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Chico Marx, "Collegiate"

Accuracy.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

Wallace Stevens

Delivers.

In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart. As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities, and there is no joy in things that do not exist.

As soon as you begin to take yourself seriously, and imagine that your virtues are important because they are yours, you become the prisoner of your own vanity and even your best works will blind and deceive you. Then, in order to defend yourself, you will see sins and faults everywhere in the actions of other men. And the more unreasonable importance you attach to yourself and your own works, the more you will tend to build up your own idea of yourself by condemning other people.

When humility delivers a man from attachment to his own works and his own reputation, he discovers that perfect joy is possible only when we have completely forgotten ourselves. And it is only when we pay no more attention to our own deeds and our own reputation and our own excellence that we are at last completely free to serve God in perfection for His own sake.

Thomas Merton

Passed.

Leonardo, Archer, 1485

He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.

Franz Kafka

Live.

So here we are happily for half the year. I’ve been given both javelina and mountain lion sausage but didn’t care for either. We eat lots of doves and quail roasted over wood fire and my ace urologist, Dr. Alfredo Guevara, cooked a wonderful cabrito last year. Down here much of my taste for American food wanes. Eat where you live is a far better practice. 

CONNECT

The Decemberists, "Rise to Me"

Big mountain, wide river,
there's an ancient call,
these tree trunks these stream beds,
leave our bellies full
they sing out, I am gonna stand my ground
you rise to me and I'll blow you down

Neat.

Explosion.

Urban planners the world over yearn to replicate the success of Silicon Valley: witness Thames Valley (England) and Silicon Oasis (Dubai), to name just two of these attempts. Invariably, these well-intentioned efforts fail for the simple reason that they’re trying to replicate the wrong model. Silicon Valley is too new, too now, to glean lessons from. Those hoping to launch the world’s next great innovation hub would be better off looking to an older, even more remarkable genius cluster: Renaissance Florence. The Italian city-state produced an explosion of great art and brilliant ideas, the likes of which the world has not seen before or since. This hothouse of innovation offers lessons as relevant and valuable today as they were 500 years ago. Here are a few of them ...

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Discovered.

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.

Italo Calvino

As.

Maruyama, Water Sculpture, 2009

The great human questions arose. What is the purpose of desire? What is a dream? A song? How do we know the depth of silence in another human being? What is the heart? What is it to be a true human being? What is the source of the universe and how do these individual awarenesses connect to that? They asked the Faustian question in many guises: What is it at bottom that holds the world together? How do we balance surrender and discipline? This high level of continuous question-and-answer permeated the poetry and music, the movement, and each activity of the community. They knew that answers might not come in discursive form, but rather in music, in image, in dream, and in the events of life as they occur. Stop weaving and watch how the patterns improve.

Coleman Barks

Joy.

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.

Rumi

Happy birthday, Bonhoeffer.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on this day in 1906.

Unless we have the courage to fight for a revival of wholesome reserve between man and man, we shall perish in an anarchy of human values. Socially it means the renunciation of all place-hunting, a break with the cult of the “star,” an open eye both upwards and downwards, especially in the choice of one’s more intimate friends, and pleasure in private life as well as courage to enter public life. Culturally it means a return from the newspaper and the radio to the book, from feverish activity to unhurried leisure, from dispersion to concentration, from sensationalism to reflection, from virtuosity to art, from snobbery to modesty, from extravagance to moderation.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Today.

1983.

Savall.

Jordi Savall plays the music of Karl Friedrich Abel, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Johann Schenck ...

Hello.

Winter.

It really is winter somewhere.

Webcam shots of Alter Saentis, Switzerland ...

Before:

After:

CONNECT

Will.

It’s that dream that we carry with us
that something wonderful will happen,
that it has to happen,
that time will open,
that the heart will open,
that doors will open,
that the mountains will open,
that wells will leap up,
that the dream will open,
that one morning we’ll slip in
to a harbor that we've never known.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Nonexistence.

I like to be tired. In some ways, that’s the point of what I do. I don’t want to be thinking when I go to bed, or, if there is some residue from the day, I want it to drain out and precipitate me into nothingness. I’ve always enjoyed the idea of nonexistence. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with my ability to communicate: I have a cell phone, but I only use it to call out.

Tom McGuane

Happy birthday, Weil.

Simone Weil was born on  this day in 1909.

Above all it is thus that we can acquire the virtue of humility, and that is a far more precious treasure than all academic progress. From this point of view it is perhaps even more useful to contemplate our stupidity than our sin. Consciousness of sin gives us the feeling that we are evil, and a kind of pride sometimes finds a place in it. When we force ourselves to fix the gaze, not only of our eyes but of our souls, upon a school exercise that we have failed through sheer stupidity, a sense of our mediocrity is borne in upon us with irresistible evidence.  No knowledge is more to be desired. If we can arrive at knowing this truth with all our souls we shall be well established on the right foundation.

If these two conditions are perfectly carried out there is no doubt that school studies are quite as good a road to sanctity as any other.

To carry out the second, it is enough to wish to do so. This is not the case with the first.  In order really to pay attention, it is necessary to know how to set about it.

Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one's pupils: “Now you must pay attention,” one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles.

We often expend this kind of muscular effort on our studies. As it ends by making us tired, we have the impression that we have been working. That is an illusion.

Tiredness has nothing to do with work. Work itself is the useful effort, whether it is tiring or not. This kind of muscular effort in work is entirely barren, even if it is made with the best of intentions. Good intentions in such cases are among those that pave the way to hell. Studies conducted in such a way can sometimes succeed academically from the point of view of gaining good marks and passing examinations, but that is in spite of the effort and thanks to natural gifts; moreover such studies are never of any use.

Will power, the kind that, if need be, makes us set our teeth and endure suffering, is the principal weapon of the apprentice engaged in manual work. But contrary to the usual belief, it has practically no place in study. The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.

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Barefoot.

My dreaming thoughts go barefoot in the evening.

Guillaume Apollinaire

Happy birthday, Mendelssohn.

Magnus, Mendelssohn, 1845

Felix Mendelssohn was born on this day in 1809.

Life and art are not two different things.  Though everything else may appear shallow and repulsive, even the smallest task in music is so absorbing, and carries us so far away from town, country, earth, and all worldly things, that it is truly a blessed gift of God.

Felix Mendelssohn

Kurt Masur leads the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, Op. 21 ...

Better.

Sleeping In The Forest

I thought the earth remembered me, she

took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

Mary Oliver

True.

As I look out at all of you gathered here, I want to say that I don't see a room full of Parisians in top hats and diamonds and silk dresses. I don't see bankers and housewives and store clerks. No. I address you all tonight as you truly are: wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, and magicians. You are the true dreamers.

Brian Selznick, from The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Apprentices.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one becomes a master.

Ernest Hemingway

Only.

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. 

Neil Gaiman

Gillian Welch & Dave Rawlings, "My Dear Someone"

I want to go all over the world
And start living free
I know that there's somebody who
Is waiting for me
I'll build a boat, steady and true
As soon as it's done
I'm going to sail along in the dreams
Of my dear someone

One little star, smiling tonight
Knows where you are
Stay, little star, steady and bright
To guide me afar
Blow, little wind, over the deep
For now I've begun
Hurry and take me straight into the arms
Of my dear someone
Hurry and take me straight into the arms
Of my dear someone

John Hartford, fiddle ...

Flees.

Shishkin, Dark Forest, 1890

Ah vastness of pines, murmur of waves breaking,
slow play of lights, solitary bell,
twilight falling in your eyes, toy doll,
earth-shell, in whom the earth sings!

In you the rivers sing and my soul flees in them
as you desire, and you send it where you will.
Aim my road on your bow of hope
and in a frenzy I will flee my flock of arrows.

On all sides I see your waist of fog,
and your silence hunts down my afflicted hours;
my kisses anchor, and my moist desire nests
in your arms of transparent stone.

Ah your mysterious voice that love tolls and darkens
in the resonant and dying evening!
Thus in the deep hours I have seen, over the fields,
the ears of wheat tolling in the mouth of the wind

Pablo Neruda

Loud.

If you ask what I came to this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.

Émile Zola