Alone in the crowd . . .
Thursday, May 22, 2025. It's Thor's day … and forecasts indicate moderate Easterlies, mid 70's and a 50/50 chance for storms this afternoon in TulseyTown.
“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. Nothing outside you can give you any place. You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show a place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood, Harcourt Brace,1952
Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters From An American provided an update after an all night session in the House. Trump's “big beautiful bill” is headed for the Senate.
Today is “Harvey Milk Day” in California. https://nationaltoday.com/harvey-milk-day/
It's Sir Laurence Olivier's birthday. The internationally acclaimed and legendary stage and film actor was born in 1907, Dorking, Surrey, England
Speaking of legends, today is also the birthday of Richard Wagner. The German composer who had a revolutionary influence on the course of was born in1813, Leipzig, Germany.
And, it's the birth date of Mary Cassatt. The painter and among the leading artists in the impressionist movement was born in1844, in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania.
The solitary act of making art involves intense, wordless dialogue. – Stephen Batchelor, in Maria Popova's Margialian
Solitude
– after Thomas Merton
It may be necessary for some of us to live alone.
Silence is our boon companion
and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world
becomes our love.
Out of the heart of that dark warmth
comes the secret that is heard only in silence,
but is the root of all the secrets
whispered by all the lovers in their beds
all over the world. Well may we be obliged
to preserve this stillness, the silent pure nothingness
arising in each moment-by-moment
at the center of all loves.
That we have chosen this task
may escape us in the doings of our being
amid the contradictory joyous burden
which sustains and drains our earthly life.
— jab