Rest

Reminders in the Sunday mailbox this 12th day of 2023 February, ahead of a 4-day, sun-filled-pre-Spring warmup here in Okieland . . .

Today is the 214th Anniversary of the births of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, both born on today's date in 1809. Lincoln we think was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky. Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England.

Today is also the birthday of Judy Blume. Born in 1938 Elizabeth, New Jersey, she'd be 85 today.

And, it's the 58th birthday of Deborah Garrison. The poet and editor was born today in 1965 Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Yesterday was Pico Iyer’s 66th birthday. He was born in Oxford, England.

. . . the unrest you feel will always have more to do with you than with what’s around you. Pico Iyer

Your thoughts are not the Truth. The Truth is the earth on which you walk,

the air you are breathing, the rain and sun on your face.

The Tranquil Wild

In the Saturday mailbox this sunny 11th of 2023 February . . .

Birthday's today: It's the 176th anniversary of Thomas Alva Edison's birth, in 1847 Milan, Ohio; also on today's date 66 years ago novelist and travel writer Pico Iyer was born to Indian parents in 1957 Oxford, England;

The Watercourse moves with the vast tranquility of the Cosmos—even now, as it unleashes this Great Vanishing called by some as the Sixth Great Extinction. – David Hinton (adapted)

It's impossible: remembering wild and not wanting it back. – Mary Oliver. (adapted)

The Creative Stream

Freya's mailbox this cold and cloudy Okieland 10th of 2023 February was filled with notes from musicians, poets, and novelists . .

59 years ago yesterday, in 1964, the beginning of the "British Invasion" of music in the United States began when The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. The live audience was filled with screaming teens who seemed never to stop during the entire time the “Fab Four” were on stage. The program was watched by 73 million at home viewers which was a record.

Yesterday also marked the birth dates of poet Amy Lowell, in 1874 Brookline, Massachusetts; in 1944 of novelist Alice Walker, born in Eatonton, Georgia; and in1940 the Nobel Prize winning author J.M. (John Maxwell) Coetzee, was born in Cape Town, South Africa.

Today is the 125th anniversary of Bertolt Brecht's birth. The playwright and poet was born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht in 1898 Augsburg, Bavaria. It is also Boris Pasternak's birthday 133 years ago today in an 1890 Moscow.

No matter where we are, we can step into the stream of the Great Mystery occupied by the great teachers of then and now and find a real presence that can transform us, not by lifting us out of ourselves but by opening us into the joy and struggle of being human incarnate amid an infinite and eternal flow.