Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Nation's Strength

What makes a nation's pillars high
And it's foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?

It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.

Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.

And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.

Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor's sake
Stand fast and suffer long.

Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly...
They build a nation's pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.

Dr. Seuss

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.” 

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.” 

Ernest Hemingway

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”

Jim Carrey

"It is better to risk starving to death then surrender. If you give up on your dreams, what's left?"

Eyes are a Window to the Soul

Link to National Geographic Article

The original picture of this girl was taken the year I was born.  Because of my love of National Geographic and because of the popularity of the picture, I have seen it many many times and have speculated, more than once, on the story behind those magnificent eyes.  The true story, however, and the more current photograph shake me.  I find myself being haunted by those eyes, especially when I see the pictures side by side.   The stunning young girl looking fiercely at life and into the future, and then . . . . the future.  I don't even know how to put into words all that I can see in those eyes, all that I feel when I try to imagine the lives that people actually live.  What will life make of me and of my eyes and what am I to take and do with stories such as this?  

Frank Lloyd Wright

“Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself with out it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.”

http://imgs.abduzeedo.com/files/articles/NatGeo/national_geographic_photography_contest_5.jpg

Underwater

Between the air and the water a steel wave quivers.  What people call the surface is also a ceiling.  A looking glass above, watered silk below.  Nothing is torn on the way through.  Only a few bubbles mark the diver's channel and behind him the frontier soon closes.  But once the threshold is crossed you can turn back slowly and look up: that dazzling screen is the border between two worlds, as clear to the one as to the other.  Behind the looking glass the sky is made of water.
Philippe Diole. The Undersea Adventure. 1951

Yes, I love it. The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe.
Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert where man is never alone for he feels life, quivering around him on every side.  There is supreme tranquility. The sea does not belong to despots. On its surface iniquitous rights can still be exercised, men can fight there, devour each other there, and transport all terrestrial horrors there. But at thirty feet below its level their power ceases,  their influence dies out, their might disappears.
Ah, sir, live in the bosom of the waters! There alone is independence.
There I recognise no masters! There I am free.
Jules Verne. 2000 Leagues Under The Sea.

 

"Water - the ocean - is our most natural environment. 
We are born naked from the miniature ocean of the mother's womb." 
Jacques Mayol, 1927-2001

"Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it."  Lao Tzu

Who is me?

I watched the vow tonight.  I enjoy chick flicks.  I heard someone explain once, "cheesy chick flicks are like wrapping yourself in a warm blanket."  I like that, and kind of agree with it.  I also love sappy love songs and sunsets, maybe I hung out with my mother a little too much as a child or something.  Anyways, the movie really got me thinking.  Who am I . . . really?  If I were the girl who suffered the brain trauma in the movie, would there be a common space I would move into?  In searching for that answer, I have been looking through this blog and seeing what things have stuck out to me and inspired me.  One thing I found was this quote; “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” What is my originalNESS?  The root of that word is origin.  So, when I was a kid I was a crazy friendly cowboy with lots of energy.  I wanted to be just like John Wayne, but is that origin the real me?   I don't know if I honestly have any originality in me.  The person I am today or the person I feel that I am today seems to be just a hoarders warehouse of stolen ideas, beliefs, manor isms, clothing, etc. . .  I look at people I admire and to ideas that I agree with and let those things mold me, but what is the medium being molded.  What is the true me?  I don't know if I know. 

(old pics of me playing on photo booth)
 

Winston S. Churchill

"What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone?...I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun." 

African proverb

“When death finds you, may it find you alive.”

John Milton

The mind is it's own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven.

Happy Halloween

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3161/3056076295_21122bdda0.jpg

 

Haunted Houses

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

All houses wherein men have lived and died

Are haunted houses. Through the open doors

The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,

With feet that make no sound upon the floors.

We meet them at the door-way, on the stair,

Along the passages they come and go,

Impalpable impressions on the air,

A sense of something moving to and fro.

There are more guests at table than the hosts

Invited; the illuminated hall

Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts,

As silent as the pictures on the wall.

The stranger at my fireside cannot see

The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;

He but perceives what is; while unto me

All that has been is visible and clear.

We have no title-deeds to house or lands;

Owners and occupants of earlier dates

From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands,

And hold in mortmain still their old estates.

The spirit-world around this world of sense

Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere

Wafts through these earthly mists and vapours dense

A vital breath of more ethereal air.

Our little lives are kept in equipoise

By opposite attractions and desires;

The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,

And the more noble instinct that aspires.

These perturbations, this perpetual jar

Of earthly wants and aspirations high,

Come from the influence of an unseen star

An undiscovered planet in our sky.

And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud

Throws o'er the sea a floating bridge of light,

Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd

Into the realm of mystery and night,—

So from the world of spirits there descends

A bridge of light, connecting it with this,

O'er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,

Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.

Prayer for My Unborn Niece or Nephew by Ross Gay

Last week I sat with a coworker at lunch and talked about his life growing up in Liberia and Sierra Leone.  I mentioned that I had read Ishmeal Beah's book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, to which he simply stated "war is a terrible thing".  It is weird that a kid my age is a true war surviver.  I cannot imagine what he saw and felt as a young boy in Sierra Leone and it awes me to see what a happy exuberant man he is now.   Anyways, this poem struck me as I read it this morning and I imagine it is because of my talks with my friend last week.  Enjoy!  

 
Today, November 28th, 2005, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
I am staring at my hands in the common pose
of the hungry and penitent. I am studying again
the emptiness of my clasped hands, wherein I see
my sister-in-law days from birthing
the small thing which will erase,
in some sense, the mystery of my father's departure;
their child will emerge with ten fingers,
and toes, howling, and his mother will hold
his gummy mouth to her breast and the stars
will hang above them and not one bomb
will be heard through that night. And my brother will stir,
waking with his wife the first few days, and he will run
his long fingers along the soft terrain of his child's skull
and not once will he cover the child's ears
or throw the two to the ground and cover them
from the blasts. And this child will gaze
into a night which is black and quiet.
She will pull herself up to her feet
standing like a buoy in wind-grooved waters,
falling, and rising again, never shaken
by an explosion. And her grandmother
will watch her stumble through a park or playground,
will watch her sail through the air on swings,
howling with joy, and never once
will she snatch her from the swing and run
for shelter because again, the bombs are falling.
The two will drink cocoa, the beautiful lines
in my mother's face growing deeper as she smiles
at the beautiful boy flipping the pages of a book
with pictures of dinosaurs, and no bomb
will blast glass into this child's face, leaving
the one eye useless. No bomb will loosen the roof,
crushing my mother while this child sees
plaster and wood and blood where once his Nana sat.
This child will not sit with his Nana, killed by a bomb,
for hours. I will never drive across two states
to help my brother bury my mother this way. To pray
and weep and beg this child to speak again.
She will go to school with other children,
and some of them will have more food than others,
and some will be the witnesses of great crimes,
and some will describe flavors with colors, and some
will have seizures, and some will read two grade
levels ahead, but none of them will tip their desks
and shield their faces, nor watch as their teacher
falls out of her shoes, clinging to the nearest child.
This child will bleed
and cry and curse his living parents
and slam doors and be hurt and hurt again. And she will feel
clover on her bare feet. Will swim in frigid waters.
Will climb trees and spy cardinal chicks blind
and peeping. And no bomb will kill this child's parents.
No bomb will kill this child's grandparents. No bomb
will kill this child's uncles. And no bomb will kill
this child, who will raise to his mouth
some small morsel of food of which there is more
while bombs fall from the sky like dust
brushed from the hands of a stupid god and children
whose parents named them will become dust
and their parents will drape themselves in black
and dream of the tiny mouths which once reared
to suckle or gasp at some bird sailing by
and their tears will make a mud which will heal nothing,
and today I will speak no word
except the name of that child whose absence
makes the hands of her parents shiver. A name
which had a meaning.

As will yours.

                             
                    —for Mikayla Grace

Gandhi

Where there is love, there is life.

General Conference

Dare to be a Mormon; Dare to stand alone. Dare to have a purpose firm, And dare to make it known.

Ghost Story by Matthew Dickman

So call me a nerd, but I get the poem of the day via e-mail each morning and today's poem struck a chord, so I thought I'd post it.

Ghost Story
by Matthew Dickman

for matthew z and matthew r

I remember telling the joke
about child molestation and seeing
the face of the young man
I didn't know well enough
turn from something with light
inside of it into something like
an animal that's had its brain
bashed in, something like that, some
sky inside him breaking
all over the table and the beers.
It's amazing, finding out
my thoughtlessness has no bounds,
is no match for any barbarian,
that it runs wild and hard
like the Mississippi. No, the Rio Grande.
No, the Columbia. A great river
of thorns and when this stranger
stood up and muttered
something about a cigarette,
the Hazmat team
in my chest begins to cordon
off my heart, glowing
a toxic yellow,
and all I could think about
was the punch line "sexy kids,"
that was it, "sexy kids," and all the children
I've cared for, wiping
their noses, rocking them to sleep,
all the nieces and nephews I love,
and how no one ever
opened me up like can of soup
in the second grade, the man
now standing on the sidewalk, smoke smothering
his body, a ghost unable
to hold his wrists down
or make a sound like a large knee in between
two small knees, but terrifying and horrible all the same.

Lost and Found by David Hollies

The first few times
Being lost was frightening
Stark, pregnant
With the drama of change
Then, I didn't know
That everywhere is nowhere
Like the feeling when a ocean wave
Boils you in the sand
But as time goes by
Each occurrence of lostness is quieter
Falling from notice
Like the sound of trains
When you live near the tracks
Until one day
When a friend asks
"How often do you get lost?"
And I strain to recall a single instance
It was then that I realized
Being lost only has meaning
When contrasted with
Knowing where you are
A presumption that slipped out of my life
As quietly as smoke up a chimney
For now I live in a less anchored place
Where being lost is irrelevant
For now, only when there is a need
Do I discover where I am
No alarm, no fear
Just an unconscious check-in
Like glancing in the rear-view mirror.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

John Milton

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.."

James 4

13 Go to now, ye that say, Today or to ^amorrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain:

14 Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a ^avapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.

15 For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.

Two lessons I learned and am trying to apply in my life from these verses:

1. Life is short, make the most of every day
2. Let the lord show you how to do that right, so your not fumbling along your own path