Perfecting perfection while deluded . . .
In Tew's day's mailbox, awaiting the heat-hammer . . .
The nature of perfection is always mutating. What constitutes enlightenment today will always be different tomorrow. Even if you're fortunate and wise enough to score a sliver of "enlightenment," it's not a static treasure that becomes your indestructible, everlasting possession. Rather, it remains a mercurial knack that must be continually re-earned. You must not only be willing to change ceaselessly—you have to love to change ceaselessly. Lucky you: All of creation is conspiring to help you live like that. – Rob Brezsney
Birthdays of note today:
Helen Keller was born on this date in 1880, Tuscumbia, Alabama.
It's Lucille Clifton's birthday. The multiple Pulitzer finalist and nominee for her poetry was born Thelma Lucille Sayles today in 1936 Depew, New York.
One of the first African-American writers to gain popular recognition for his work, poet and short story writer Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on this date in 1872 Dayton, Ohio.
And, the poet Frank O’Hara was born today in 1926 Baltimore, Maryland. He was among the leaders of the “New York School” of poets in the 1950's and 60's.
The sense of the loved one seeing themselves through the intensity with which you are seeing them—and the reciprocation of that seeing—is the essence of the mutual, loving gaze. It is not confined to the merely human. Looking intensely at a landscape or the ocean, the give and take of the shoreline where the two meet, we fall in love, and perhaps equally, even find ourselves with a sense of being loved by the tidal essence of the world that we inhabit. – David Whyte
Growing chilis in an apple orchard . . .
In the Moon day mailbox this morning . . .
Today in 1997 J.K. Rowling's first book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published in Britain.
Another children's book author, Walter Farley, was born on this day in 1916 Syracuse, New York. Farley wrote The Black Stallion series.
And, Pearl Buck was born on this date in 1892 Hillsboro, West Virginia. A Nobel Prize winner, she was a prolific writer, including the novel The Good Earth.
Báyò's blog from two weeks ago seems to have anticipated last week's wind storm here in TulseyTown . . .
To ‘slow down’ … seems like the wrong thing to do when there’s fire on the mountain. But here’s the point: in ‘hurrying up’ all the time, we often lose sight of the abundance of resources that might help us meet today’s most challenging crises. We rush through the same patterns we are used to. Of course, there isn’t a single way to respond to a crisis; there is no universally correct way. However the call to slow down works to bring us face to face with the invisible, the hidden, the unremarked, the yet-to-be-resolved.... It is about staying in the places that are haunted. – Báyò Akómoláfé.
There’s no such thing as “drive-by loving.” In order to love, you have to slow down. – Barbara Holmes
All results come from causes that have the ability to create them. If we plant apple seeds, an apple tree will grow, not chili. If chili seeds are planted, chili will grow, not apples. – Ven. Thubten Chodron
Bang, bang
It’s Sol's day's here on the Watercourse Way in Okieland . . .
And in Russia, folks have been shooting at each other.
Also in the mailbox this morning . . .
The elite gatekeepers of yesterday’s mass media were often castigated for “manufacturing consent” among a “phantom” public by leaving too many voices out. What may be worse is that the structural fragmentation of today’s digital media ecosystem is manufacturing a level of dissensus detrimental to the possibility of arriving at consensually agreed truths necessary to hold any society together. – Renée DiResta writing in Noema.
. . . any two people may cross each other’s path at any given moment without knowing who they would become to one another in some future season of being. . . – Maria Popova
Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through. — Wislawa Szymborska
We rode on horses made of sticks
I wore black, you wore white
You would always win the fight
Bang bang, you shot me down – Sonny Bono