A more beautiful noise . . .

In Tew's day's mailbox . . .

So much of the noise being fed to us is just that: noise. And most of it is purposeful, much of it designed to keep us indoors with our doors locked and guns loaded. Short version: be afraid. That way you can live in a cocoon of your own making and feed your head with the stuff you've already fed your self that has led to your last venture outside when you went to the gun show and stopped in Lowes or Home Depot for a new lock set, so that you can be fearful not only of the next door-to-door political campaigner, but of the state police arriving after you've shot someone on your porch, or your kid has taken your pistol to school to exercise his new and rapidly growing ego. All of this is fiction. Too much of it is true.

Instead, think for a moment about sharing the reality of The Way:

Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts. . .suck up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. . .minister to it with positive, mischievous energy, seek spiritual enrichment and . . .see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. – after Nick Cave

How many of these walkers and runners [on an April day in Central Park] believe that the Illuminati use vaccines to cause autism, that the government is withholding the cure for cancer as a favor to Big Pharm, that a federal research facility in Alaska is engaged in mind control, that Bigfoot is drinking the blood of small children in Roswell, New Mexico, and that the shots came from the grassy knoll and not the School Book Depository? Not many, I would guess. The constant social interactions of urban life tend to erode the sharper edges of lunacy. – Garrison Keillor

Speaking of sanity:

Today is the 84th birthdate of poet Ted Kooser. Born in 1939 Ames, Iowa, He's been U.S. Poet Laureate, one of the few from the plains states, as well as a Pulitzer Prize honoree.
It is also the 106th anniversary of the birth of the “First Lady of Song" Ella Fitzgerald. The queen of jazz was born in 1917 Newport News, Virginia.

It does not matter if you are a man or a woman, wealthy or poor, an insider or an outcast – an action based on greed and grasping results in fear – of loss and an action of defensiveness – while an action based on love results in an open expansiveness, relaxation, and joy.

I want you to knock gently on your own door and stand there astonished as I do unable to speak to the one who has come out to meet you. Like Rilke's visiting angel of the Annunciation who forgot his message to Mary, and could only fall back to singing her praises, stuttering and overwhelmed as he was, by the untroubled beauty of her soul. – David Whyte, adapated and edited from The Bell and the Blackbird.

A strange passion is moving in my head.

My heart has become a bird

which searches in the sky.

Every part of me goes in different directions.

Is it really so that the one I love is Everywhere? – Rumi