His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and where the furniture has rotted away. But tonight it was as if lamps had been lighted through all the gloomy dead rooms. It had begun to happen when he saw Tico Feo coming though the dusk with his splendid guitar. Until that moment he had not been lonesome. Now, recognizing his loneliness, he felt alive. He had not wanted to be alive. To be alive was to remember brown rivers where the fish run, and sunlight on a lady's hair.

from A Diamond Guitar
Truman Capote

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Antonio Machado

Pete knew one thing about grownups: they were dumb, even dumber than crabs on a beach.

(illustration caption from a torn page from Woman's Day magazine, July, 1963)

Live and don't learn, that's us.
Hobbes
Bill Watterson

This blog is a funny business. Like a grudging politician who can’t decide whether to cooperate or not. He wants his hand in every pie.

Likes to add little symbols at the end of entries. Or repeat the last letter. As though to put his stamp on every issue.

Deleted entries have a way of not disappearing. Or abruptly returning to life. Then disappearing again.

Yesterday, he didn’t want to publish at all, and kept sending ‘apache tomcat’ error reports.

He does have colorful language.

So today I come back, and there is yesterday’s rejected entry. Over and over.

The redundancies of bureaucracy.

Or somebody thought somebody needed to read this entry. Over and over.

My first computer was a quirky secondhand thing. As the years went by, it started to mess with time. One day, it would be June 4, 1953, the next April 10, 2004, the next September 29, 1936. I became a time traveler. Felt cold north winds on mornings in July. Saw men in suits and derbies waiting for trains.

The beauty of computer science and politicians. So rational. So blooming irrational.

grace...is unearned love...It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Ann Lamott
Traveling Mercies

grace...is unearned love...It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Ann Lamott
Traveling Mercies

grace...is unearned love...It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Ann Lamott
Traveling Mercies

i

grace...is unearned love...It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Ann Lamott
Traveling Merciesl

grace...is unearned love...It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Ann Lamott
Traveling Merciesl

grace...is unearned love...It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Ann Lamott
Traveling Mercies

grace...is unearned love...It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Ann Lamott
Traveling Mercies

grace...is unearned love...It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or b reeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Ann Lamott
Traveling Mercies

grace...is unearned love...It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Ann Lamott
Traveling Mercies

"Alors," he said, peering over my shoulder. "Des carottes."
Who can explain why a few words in a particular tone can clear acres of sudden unfamiliarity? Could anyone else hear those words exactly as I did? Would that person look up and grin and find him grinning back, full of the sweet miraculous relief of having been perfectly received? He was not just mocking the ridiculous proportion of those carrots to the other ingredients on the counter. He was saying, If it's not carrots, it's something else; he was saying, How futile life is, the slicing of carrots, the eating of meals; he was saying, How wonderful life is, to come home to the security of carrots in the kitchen; he was saying, Another day come to its devastating close. He was saying all this and I heard him because he was like me, entirely ambivalent about life.

Lily King
The Pleasing Hour

Aloneness, if accomodated in the right spirit, has as many riches as a peopled world.

Angela Huth
Wives of the Fishermen

Religion is a momentous possibility, the possibility...that what is highest in spirit is also deepest in nature--that there is something at the heart of nature, something akin to us, a conserver and increaser of values...that the things that matter most are not at the mercy of things that matter least.

Gates of Prayer p. 9 copyright 1975

She started to speak, but then stopped. Anything she could think of to say seemed a mistake. In fact, speech in general seemed a mistake. It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.

Anne Tyler
Back When We Were Grownups

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.
From within, I couldn't decide what to do.
Unable to see, I heard my name being called.
Then I walked outside.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.

Rumi

And did you get what
you wanted from this life even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver

Some day after we have mastered the winds, the waves and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for a second time in the history of the world, humans will have discovered fire.

-Teilhard de Chardin–