take-root

Late-Spring thoughts: Gamble everything for love, if...

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:38:19 -0400

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...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:54:00 -0400

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.

a love poem

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 16:41:00 -0400

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...

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 01:12:08 -0400

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...

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 13:17:28 -0400

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.

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 11:03:07 -0400

I miss California.

Photos by Michael A. Muller.

Springtime

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 18:45:00 -0400

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...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:39:13 -0500

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.

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:36:02 -0500

James and Josh. Santa Barbara.

Amy and Nate in Brooklyn. 2012

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:34:22 -0500

Amy and Nate in Brooklyn. 2012

Paradou, France. Summer 2009.

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:32:56 -0500

Paradou, France. Summer 2009.

The ultimate communal table. Seating for 200 at the French...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:31:28 -0500

The ultimate communal table. Seating for 200 at the French Foreign Legion in Puyloubier, France. 2008

Sunday thoughts

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 13:23:30 -0500

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...

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:55:00 -0500

“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...

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 11:10:09 -0500

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

Alone Together

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 11:09:55 -0500

What is so seductive about texting, about keeping that phone on, about that little red light on the BlackBerry, is you want to know who wants you.

…

It used to be that people had a way of dealing with the world that was basically, ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call.’ Now I would capture a way of dealing with the world, which is: ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.’ That is, with this immediate ability to connect and almost pressure to … because you’re holding your phone, you’re constantly with your phone, it’s almost like you don’t know your thoughts and feelings until you connect.

Distressing thoughts from MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle, who wrote Alone Together: Why We Expect More fromTechnology and Less from Each Other. More here.

Two things I discovered while going through my old grad school...

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 11:11:00 -0500

Two things I discovered while going through my old grad school notebooks yesterday:

The designer’s task is to urge a central location for structures of communal celebration and to design the structures so that they inspire a sense of orientation and festivity in the participants rather than reduce the celebration to a commodity and the attendants to mere consumers. Albert Borgmann, The Depth of Design

AND

I’ve discovered that the most amazing things happen to you when you are standing around sharpening a pencil or doing something equally mundane, thinking absolutely nothing exciting is ever going to happen. Jean Van Leeuwen

The aesthetic life

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 11:21:10 -0500

“The aesthetic life is immediately lived—a life lived for ‘the moment.’ It is the lifestyle in which people are absorbed in satisfying their ‘natural’ desires and impulses, whether physical, emotional. or intellectual. These people are solely concerned with their own happiness and believe that the key to happiness is found in externals—who they know, what they do, the roles they play, what they possess, where they live, and so on. They live for enjoyment, on the surface of life. They are observers, spectators, tasters, but not serious participants. They have no real inner life, no real self to offer to others. Their well-being is determined by the choices or moods of others and by forces that extend beyond their control. When they make decisions, they are not internalized. Thus, when things go wrong, aesthetic persons never accept responsibility or blame. Such people are apathetic, indifferent, and unintegrated. They are unable to commit themselves to any one thing. Something better might always come along, and so they split their energies in different directions.”

-Charles Moore

Woe to me if I should ever live merely the aesthetic life.

Saturday

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 20:49:53 -0500

Two thoughts:

If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the crowd. s.k.

I finished reading The History of Love today. I mourned its ending because I wanted to keep feeling the way I felt while reading it, which is difficult to maintain once you reach the last page and then can never read the book for the first time again.

Winter listlessness

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:28:49 -0500

Winter listlessness