Late-Spring thoughts:
Gamble everything for love,
if you’re a true human being.
If not,
leave this gathering.
&
Spring, and everything outside is growing,
even the tall cypress tree.
We must not leave this place.
Around the lip of the cup we share, these words,
My life is not mine.
…
Give up wanting what other people have.
That way you’re safe.
Rumi
truly
i try to be good but sometimes
a person just has to break out and
act like the wild and springy thing
one used to be. it’s impossible not
to remember wild and want it back.
from “green, green is my sister’s house” by m.o.
How could your cheek not press a moment to his cheek,
which presses itself to yours from now on?
How could you not rise and go, with all that light
at the window, those arms around you, and the sound
coming and going, hard to say, of a single-engine
plane in the distance that no one else hears?
from “How could you not” by Galway Kinnell
do you love this world?
do you cherish your humble and silky life?
do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
from “peonies” by mary oliver
Ann, outside of Fredericksburg, TX. Forever ago.
More and more I crave being with those who are unconcerned with cool…or hippest, latest, best. Those who really live instead of talking about living.
I miss California.
Photos by Michael A. Muller.
I learned to value only that which truly activates what is in my heart. I came to value those experiences which activate my heart as it really is. I sought, more and more, only those experiences which have the capacity, the depth, to activate the feeling that is my real feeling, in my true childish heart. And I learned, slowly, to make things which are of that nature.
-Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order: The Luminous Ground
AND
I want to be like one of those
who ride through the night with wild horses,
with torches, which, like loosened hair,
stream back in the great wind of their pursuit.
-Rilke, The Boy
Portland, 2009.
Going through old photos always makes me nostalgic, giving the impression that these past moments held simpler times. But I know better—every season has its own worries, frustrations, and joys.
James and Josh. Santa Barbara.
Amy and Nate in Brooklyn. 2012
Paradou, France. Summer 2009.
The ultimate communal table. Seating for 200 at the French Foreign Legion in Puyloubier, France. 2008
Two things:
Sincerity is not a gift by but a duty.
There is only one end: the genuine Good; and only one means: to be willing only to use those means which are genuinely good. The good is precisely the end. One may think that the end is the main thing and that one need not be so particular about the means. Yet this is not so. To gain an end in this fashion is an unholy act of impatience.
s.k.
“The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of ‘style’ to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it’s not just depressingly dull, it’s also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one ever told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style. Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.”
From current read: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
This is from last January, a year ago, reminding me of all that can happen in 365 days. It was a year of change, and in retrospect, I was carried along by a tide I never could have foreseen. I felt myself like a natural growth in the sea, rooted to sturdy rock, but cast about and tossed in unruly waters.
A thought for 2013:
Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
-Sir Cecil Beaton
