Beneath the surface of light . . .
Here in Okieland the heat-hammer is falling with indices forecasted at 113º by late afternoon.
In the mailbox this Odin's day:
… even silence can feel, to the world, like happiness. – Mary Oliver, from Blue Iris, 2004.
Milan Kundera died yesterday. The Czech author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being died in Paris at 94.
Some significant birth dates today:
Henry David Thoreau was born 206 years ago todayin 1817 Concord, Massachusetts.
It's the 119th anniversary of Pablo Neruda's birth. The Chilean poet was born Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto on this date in in 1904 Parral, Chile. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
Today is the 133rd anniversary of Egon Schiele's birth. The revolutionary painter was born on this date in 1890 Tulln, Lower Austria
“Envy those who see beauty in everything in the world.”-- Egon Schiele in Maria Popova's Marginalian
The radiant mind isn't something created or invented or produced—it’s actually there all the time, but it’s covered over. – Donald Rothberg
Look deep into the Watercourse on its Way. Beneath the flotsam, jetsam and flashing surface reflections of sky are the living depths of stone becoming sand, becoming canyons.
Ask Me
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
Living in a haunted wood . . .
It's a windy morning here in Okieland. In Tew's day's mail box...
Jhumpa Lahiri, author of the Pulitzer Prize for The Interpreter of Maladies(1999)was born on this date in 1967 London to Bengali parents.
Today is also the 124th anniversary of Elwin Brooks (E.B.) White's birth. The essayist and author of Charlottes Web and among others the revision editor of William S. Strunk's The Elements of Style was born on this date in 1899 Mount Vernon, New York.
198 years ago today, John Quincy Adams, Sixth President of the United States (1825 was born in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/john-quincy-adams
Today is also the day in 1533 that Henry VIII was excommunicated from the Catholic Church by Pope Clement VII. Henry had initiated the English Reformation, separating the church from papal authority. He appointed himself Supreme Head of the Church of England and dissolved convents and monasteries, for which he was excommunicated by the pope.
And in 1975 Archaeologists unearthed an army of 8,000 life-size clay figures created more than 2,000 years ago for the Emperor Qin Shi Huang.
If our egos are still in charge, we will find a “disposable” person or group on which to project our problems. People who haven’t come to at least a minimal awareness of their own shadow side will always find someone else to hate, fear, and exclude. Hatred holds a group together much more quickly and easily than love and inclusivity . . . Sadly, the history of violence and the history of religion are almost the same history. When religion remains at an immature level, it tends to create very violent people who ensconce themselves on the side of the good, the worthy, the pure, the saved. They project all their evil somewhere else and attack it over there. – Richard Rohr
...who can live for long
in an euphoric dream.
The lights must never go out,
the music must always play,
lest we should see where we are,
lost in a haunted wood,
children afraid of the night
who have never been happy or good.
– W.H. Auden (edited by jb)
Where does time go? Or come from for that matter . . .
In the Moon day mailbox . . .
Yesterday, July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. . .No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. . .Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” – Heather Cox Richardson
Today is the birthdate of inventor Nikola Tesla, born in 1856 Smiljan, Austria-Hungary (now Croatia).
It's also the 152nd anniversary of Marcel Proust's birth. The author of the seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past (or, more literally, In Search of Lost Time) (1913–27), was born on this day in 1871 Auteuil, France,
"The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things.
Of shoes and ships, and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings,
and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings." – Lewis Carroll
Human beings are creatures of belonging, though they may come to that sense of belonging only through long periods of exile and loneliness. We belong to life as much through our sense that it is all impossible as we do through the sense that we will accomplish everything we have set out to do. — David Whyte