Who dreams in Latin?

Me apparently.  Now I understand there is going to be a minority of educated peeps who regularly visit their night time muse and discourse via that ancient language.  Because they can.  I am not of them.  I detested taking Latin in school and confounded attempts to make me regular or irregular with verbage, refused to consort with Hannibal and Hasdrubal despite the allure of elephants, and exited the class only with the ability to ‘tu, te, tui, tibi, te’ to  rhythm courtesy of my doctors eccentric wife who brought a whole new dimension of dance into the conjugation theme. Saying that I do know that ‘Julia puella parva est’ tells me what anyone with eyes could determine – Julia is a small girl. Latin as a discipline was forced onto my curriculum by my mother, who had been denied the opportunity and believed it to be necessary in any right thinking girls armoury, which may have been the case in Montaigne’s time, whose father denied his son the use of any other language as he grew up. But times change. Move on – the thrust of my enquiry is why would I be dreaming Latin phrases?  I awoke recently with the clear message of ‘Nosce te ipsum’ plastered all over my consciousness in the style of a Banksy’s graffiti.  I knew I knew what it meant, but couldn’t recall – I had to resort to the husband, who resorted to the Google machine.  Of course – Nosce te ipsum is ‘Know Thyself’  – now the nub of the real enquiry is why is my subconscious sending me this command?  Is it thrust at me dagger like, suggesting I lack self awareness and something very dark and looming is about to reveal itself in my personality?  Or is it somewhat self congratulatory , extolling the virtues of introspection and reflection which anyone who knows me will confirm I expound.  I like neither scenario – self congratulation is about as welcome as self flagellation in my eyes, with less soreness. And I have lived a whole life like Henny Penny who clucked around her friends asking whether the sky was falling .

Despite the anxiety around whether my subconscious is alerting me to something I ought to know, I welcome this intrusion .  ‘Know thyself’ seems a good mantra to me.  Look at your virtues and examine your faults – try every moment you can to be the best version of yourself – this is what I take from the message.  I fail, I pick myself up and I fail again, but in the attempt to understand my errors, my poor decisions, I end up making better ones. Everyone’s a winner. I have never regretted saying sorry. Sometimes I have not said it, or not soon enough and I have regretted that. I suppose saying sorry makes you vulnerable, shows a side that is less than perfect.  I like that. I like that when I create something and something goes wrong, I always end up with creating something better in it’s stead. Always.  And when someone says sorry to me, I tend to cut them some slack. That’s the way it works.

Nosce te ipsum.

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For the sake of a life.

                              The Layers   by Stanley Kunitz

 

I am repeating myself because I sent this poem out into the ether earlier in my blogging life.  It bears repeating. I remind myself from time to time about what I want from this one and precious life.  Nowadays the buzz word is mindfulness, but the concept behind mindfulness is as ancient as time. At least as ancient as man’s consciousness began to reflect upon its self-awareness.  Our lives are different to those that were lived by the peoples of ancient civilizations, but in the perspective of the brain evolution, that span of time is just a nano second, so it is worth reflecting upon how humans in the past have reconciled themselves to the parodoxes that appear in all our lives.  You can choose from the philosophers who all have a different take , or the religious men who all have their differing stories they want to share, or you can listen to the poets.  The poets assume nothing of the reader, do not desire any allegiances, demand no tithes.  They write about the human experience because they are stuck in it. And in that attempt to soothe themselves a line of energy transmits from them to the reader. Sometimes it simply vaporises and never arrives anywhere, it just disappears as a coil of smoke will disappear into the air. Other times it sends an electric current through the reader and the reader is changed forever. As all the food that we eat, the sights that we see, the people we meet all impact on the messages our brains control our minds with, so with words.

Savour

Enter a caption

My capture of a wonderful morning sky earlier last month.

Oh,and a reminder to attend.

 Against Entropy

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

— John M Ford

 

“Books are good company. Nothing is more human than a book.”

 ”I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of the miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention.”

Marilynn Robinson, with  ‘her quiet brilliance’ writes about a ‘ profound consideration of a life, without any fanfare’ in ‘Lila’, the third book narrating the voice of John Ames wife.

The author introduced us to the small American town  of Gilead in her second  novel which was a resounding success following up from a novel ‘Housekeeping’ written two decades earlier and earning her a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The recurrent message that the author communicates is complicated, as is life. It is hopeless, and full of hope.  A paradox that is biblical in its incomprehensiveness.  That kind of sums up her writing and the reason it works so luminously. It is a mirror to our own experience, that life can be simultaneously filled with horror, trauma, insignificance, hope and joy.  The overwhelming sense the reader comes away with is one of recognition wherever and whenever that reader happened to live.

Lila illustrates what Robinson described in  ‘Home’ as humanity’s “odd capacity for destitution,” “as if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human.”  We can only ask “how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.”

All three novels present loneliness as the human condition, suggesting that if our imprisonment within our own perspectives tempts us toward judgmentalism, then compassion is the best palliative.

John Ames in ‘Gilead’ is a man in search of wisdom from the story of his own life’.  Robinson’s treatment of her characters is compassionate, and that is the imperative of life that this reader shares with the author – the hope that in despair and suffering, the miracle of being human saves us – redeems us, even if   redemption we need is from our own fears and natures themselves.

One of the joys in reading her books comes from that ‘quiet brilliance’ that can narrate the ordinary, the slow, the mundane in such a way that life becomes more meaningful for it’s lack of ‘bling’, and not less.  The lack of sensationalism somehow underlines the sensibilities that accompany most of us in coming to terms with living ordinary lives. What I seem to value are those qualities that carry us through the tedium of a job, the trials of parenting, the petty dramas of relating to those closest to us – that soul search that impels us to be better, kinder, more loving human beings. I think these books carry that message too.  Read them if you havn’t, read them again if you have. Let me know if the world seemed different or not.

Mopping and mowing in the social space with William Golding.

Recently I have had a phrase dizzily scootering around my brain – the ‘aboutness of being’- which has recklessly abandoned itself for examination and there is neither rhyme nor reason why. Except this – the fact that I understand there is no earthly impetus for me to consider the abstraction of consciousness points to the question itself. I am not alone and I know I am not because I read words that reflect a similar preoccupation with not merely how we think, which in itself is fascinating, but why we think about the abstractions that occur to us. Why do we look for meaning and purpose? Is it merely a by product of a brain that is at its evolutionary point, wherever that is on a timeline which has some way yet to go? Or is the impulse to understand consciousness an act of creativity in and of itself? Is it necessary for a satisfying life? Or necessary only to some to fulfil their lives. We are not all the same, although we share common tendencies, so what I may demand from my consciousness is clearly different from what my spouse or my children demand from theirs. Not to mention the 7 other billion I share the planet with. Oh and that is only mentioning the human lives,because how do I know what conciousness looks, feels like to my dog?

So now you know what I think about after a cup of coffee has been introduced into the system, and to help me think about the ‘aboutness of being’ I am going to introduce one of my favourite novelists , ‘William Golding’, who investigates and describes in a far more articulate manner than I can. As a school girl I read ‘Lord of the Flies’ and found the story full of momentum and interest ; but it was much later that I discovered the relief of reading a master novelist at work. I say relief because it is the closest expression I can find; I was a young adult who was continually seeking the companionship of shared insight, shared experience and it was in his works that I could feel understanding, resonance and even validity. As members of a singular species we want to affirm our existence, and one of the ways we do that is recognising that the way we think and feel is not specific to ourselves. While we desire individuality and uniqueness we also desire companionship,
shared values, shared feelings. I had been married to a man for twelve years before I faced the truth that one critical facet of our relationship was missing- recognition. When I met my second husband it was a powerful sense of coming home,inexplicable and astonishing at the time, devastating and demanding levels of courage and understanding not just from the main players in the drama , but affecting everyone in our little world.

Recently I read an article by a scientist that questioned whether we needed to consider our ‘aboutness of being’, or another way to put it would be whether the practice of examining theory of mind was pertinent in modern era.
‘ ” As we learn more about the detailed mechanisms in the brain, the question of ‘What is consciousness?’ will fade away into irrelevancy and abstraction,” he said. ‘(Desimone , Article in The New Yorker.Oct 1 2014 Attention by Alan Lightman.

That isn’t how I see it, or how Golding saw it either ( nor Bryan Appleyard via whose feed I found said article).

I am in the process of re-reading a selection of essays Golding wrote decades ago called ‘A Moving Target’, which is divided into the two sections of “Places” and “Ideas”. It is the second section that I refer to here. In his essay Belief and Creativity he discusses the difficulty in discovering,retaining and using an authentic voice. In being identified as a successful novelist Golding fights the entrapment of the role of novelist.

“To some extent we are all victims of a similar fate, The teacher may create his own image for the purposes of discipline and find himself unable to creep out of it. In the end, he may consent and become the image entire, at last the parody of a schoolmaster, don, lecturer. The actor, the politician – since our global television suburb is not so much bookist as imagist – must think first of an action, ‘How will it affect my image?’ Watch the box and see it happen. Constrained by the necessities of his trade he will adjust either his action or his image so that another figure of fantasy mops and mows in the social space. That space, our divided but communal awareness, is so full of the image, the real unreality or unreal reality, it is a wonder men can breathe. Perhaps we cannot. Perhaps it is our fate as human beings that none of us knows what it is to draw a lungful of psychically unpolluted air, to look and to examine innocently the crowded impressions on every sense with which our individual selves cope, suffer and enjoy as the essence of being. “

How pertinent is that paragraph today, in the world of cyber space – a world that did not exist as Golding wrote these words.

“From Aristotle onwards – even from Hecataeus and Herodotus – the glum intellect of man has succeeded in constructing bolts and bars, fetters, locks and chains. …We have had great benefits from that same intellect but are having to pay for them. I say we have erected cages of iron bars; and ape-like I seize those bars and shake them with a helpless fury. . ..The simplistic popularization of their ideas ( Marx, Darwin, Freud) has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence. These men were reductionist, and I believe – peering from the middle between the bandages (of mummification) saying not what I ought to think but what I find my centre thinking honestly in spite of itself- I do indeed believe that at the bottom the violence of the last thirty years has been less a revolt against the exploitation of man by man, less a sexual frustration, certainly less a process of natural selection operating in human society, than
a revolt against reductionism, even when the revolutionary, or it may be the terrorist, does not know it. “

Golding explains his own development in attempting to shrug off the prism of explanation via a third party ( i.e. through the accepted ideologies of the day) and think for himself and writes the best put down of Marx I have encountered, succinct and humorous.

“I have no doubt that Marx said this somewhere. He seems to have said most things according to those who have examined his work closely; but the crude system extracted from the corpus of his work omitted this unpredictability. I could, by including it, account for the fact that Marxism always got the future wrong and excelled in predicting the past. The whole of its illustrations of human conduct was what the French have called l’esprit d’escalier, – an expression drawn from a common experience – the brilliant retort that occurs to us after an argument when we are going down the stairs. “

He describes the approach of the novelist as one that is trying to communicate via a world he can create himself restricted by the innate constraints of that form.

” I fumble. I practice a craft I do not understand and cannot describe….. The little, lighted awareness that we call a conscious person is indescribable and incommunicable yet needs neither description nor communication since we all know it and how it is. If we cannot agree on that it is impossible to agree on anything. We are it. It is our burden and pleasure. The awareness is not a point, a position without magnitude, but an area. Awareness, like belief is a matter of position in that area. …another dimension must be added to the area and I do not see how I can present you with a three dimensional surface. Yet the area is moving through the third dimension of time. .. You read as the novelist must write,one word at a time….we ought to be up to our eyes in mystery and astonishment, and we have only just begun. …it is possible to live astonished for a long time’ and it looks increasingly possible that you can die that way too. My epitaph must be ‘He wondered’….Let
us return. What man is, whatever man is under the eye of heaven, that I burn to know and that – I do not say this lightly – I would endure knowing. “

William Golding sheds some light for me on how to consider my own position , reminds me of the necessity to think, and to evaluate where my thoughts stem from to identify their validity. He is a glorious companion to share the perturbations and complexities of being human in a ‘naughty world’. I want to stay in wonder, to die curious.

How to bear solitude – how and when to love.

 

 

How often has Rilke been quoted?  Letters to a young poet was written over a century ago when the poet was responding to a young soldier who had read his poetry and was having doubts about his chosen military career. The first letter was written in 1903 as a response to the young soldiers request to critique his own poems. Rilke refused that request but continued a correspondence which fortunately the young would-be poet had the presence of mind to keep.  The letters will continue to challenge, inspire and bring solace to anyone who chooses to dive in. Dive deep, float and re emerge refreshed and reinvigorated.  

I want to recommend these lines to my two young men sons, as they begin their individual journeys into adult life.  Somehow a recommendation from their mother doesn’t always get the reaction I most want, so sometimes I wait, I hold, there may be occasion when I need to draw upon this well of sagacity.

 

 

….And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is some thing in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance. Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything, in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.”

 

One more thing I would say to my lovely boys, which appears in the story Rilke proposed the young soldier read, ‘Mogens’ by Jens Peter Jacobsen, 

“you know in the darkness things often seem larger than they are.”

The Poetry of Architecture, and the reason you don’t want to become a brand.

 

St Marks

Boy are you in for a treat today!!!  Recently I have been researching some Pre Raphaelite art as a favour to a fellow crafter, and in pursuing said research , I was distracted by a fabulous volume written by the critic John Ruskin, ‘Stones of Venice’ in which he praises the achievements of the massive numbers of common workers who laboured with skill, patience, and reverence on the great Gothic structures of medieval Europe. This treatise on architecture has been described not simply in terms of scholarship, but also as a work of art in itself.

I havn’t indulged to the degree of now being versed in the history or topography of archtitecture – I barely slipped over the surface- but the passages I have read can be understood as deeper messages than understanding that area of interest.  I will admit to having to overlook his many allusions to a Victorian God, but he was of his time and I am of mine.  Although I confess to a more agnostic outlook, I can see the virtue in believing in a connecting thread through time and space (albeit not Ruskins vision).

I hope you see value in the passages I have recorded below – ( a labour of love since I couldn’t copy and paste and had to type it out!)  It shouts loudly to me about ignoring the clarion call to give yourself a brand identity and express yourself in all endeavour simply with integrity, for the satisfaction that brings of itself.  Oh Ruskin!! I hear you!!!

…for it is necessary first to teach men to speak out, and say what they like, truly; and in the second place, to teach them which of their likings are ill set, and which justly. If a man is cold in his likings and dislikings, or if he will not tell you what he likes, you can make nothing of him. Only get him to feel quickly and to speak plainly, and you may set him right. And the fact is, that the great evil of all recent architectural effort has not been that men liked wrong things; but that they either cared nothing about any, or pretended to like what they did not. Do you suppose that any modern architect
likes what he builds or enjoys it? Not in the least. He builds it because he has been told that such and such things are fine, and that he should like them. He pretends to like them, and gives them a false relish of vanity. Do you seriously imagine, reader, that any living soul in London likes triglyphs? – or gets any hearty enjoyment out of pediments? You are much mistaken. Greeks did: English people never did,never will. …Very few faults of architecture are mistakes of honest choice; they are almost always hypocrisies.
So then the first thing we have to ask of the decoration is that it should indicate strong liking, and that honestly. It matters not so much what the thing is, as that the builder should really love it and enjoy it, and say so plainly. The architect of Bourges Cathedral liked hawthorns ; so he has covered his porch with hawthorn,- it is a perfect Niobe of May. Never was such hawthorn ; you would try
to gather it forthwith, but for fear of being pricked. The old Lombard architects liked hunting ; so they covered their work with horses and hounds, and men blowing trumpets two yards long. the base Renaissance architects of Venice liked masquing and fiddling ; so they covered their work with comic masks and musical instruments. Even that was better than our English way of liking nothing and professing to liking triglyphs….
..Half the evil in this world comes from people not knowing what they do like ; -not deliberately setting themselves to find out what the really enjoy. All people enjoy giving away money , for instance ‘ they don’t know that,they rather think they like keeping it; and they do keep it, under this false impression, often to their great discomfort. Everybody likes to do good, but not one in a hundred finds this out. Multitudes think they like to do evil ; yet no man ever really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world.

So in this lesser matter of ornament. It needs some little care to try experiments upon yourself; it needs deliberate question and upright answer. But there is no difficulty to be overcome, not abstruse  be gone into ; only a little watchfulness needed, and thoughtfulness, ans so much honesty as will enable you to confess to yourself, and to all men, that you enjoy things, though great authorities say you should not.

This looks somewhat like pride, but it is true humility, a trust that you have been so created as to enjoy what is fitting for you, and a willingness to be pleased, as it was intended you should be. It is the child’s spirit, which we are most happy when we most recover’ remaining wiser than children in our gratitude that we can still be pleased with a fair colour, or a dancing light. And, above all, do not try to make all these pleasures reasonable, not to connect the delight which you take in ornament witht hat which you take in construction or usefulness. They have no connection; and every effort that you make to reason from one to the other will blunt your sense of beauty, or confuse it with sensation altogether inferior to it. You were made for enjoyment, and the world was filled with things which you will enjoy, unless you are too proud to be pleased by them, or too grasping to care for what you cannot turn to other account than mere delight. Remember the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance….

We won’t be alone admiring it ; it became one of the most influential books of the 19th century, inspiring William Morriss to re publish the chapter ‘The Nature of Gothic’ and prompting the narrator of Marcel Proust’s ‘Recherce’ to visit Venice with his mother enthused with Ruskin like spirit.

 

“To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.”

See the whole book here   http://ebook.lib.hku.hk/CADAL/B31390055V1/

 

Based on the original by John Ruskin in his architectural treatise, The Stones of Venice

 

Be my speech the beams of the sun

 

BUAINIDH mi an earr reidh,
Gum bu cheinide mo chruth,
Gum bu bhlathaide mo bheuil,
Gum bu gheinide mo ghuth.
Biodh mo ghuth mar ghath na grein,
Biodh mo bheuil mar ein nan subh.

Gum bu h-eilean mi air muir,
Gum bu tulach mi air tir,
Gum bu reuil mi ri ra dorcha,
Gum bu lorg mi dhuine cli,
Leonaidh mi a h-uile duine,
Cha leoin duine mi.

 

I WILL pluck the yarrow fair,
That more benign shall be my face,
That more warm shall be my lips,
That more chaste shall be my speech,
Be my speech the beams of the sun,
Be my lips the sap of the strawberry.

May I be an isle in the sea,
May I be a hill on the shore,
May I be a star in waning of the moon,
May I be a staff to the weak,
Wound can I every man,
Wound can no man me

 

From  Carmina Gadelica, Volume 2, by Alexander Carmicheal, [1900]

Illustration is a digitally altered illustration from the original :

Plantarum effigies /è Leonartho Fuschio, ac quinque diuersis linguis redditae …  by Leonhart 1501 – 1566

http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/8050#/details

 

 

 

 

 

 

A trio of treasures from Lao Tzu to you.

 

 

 

 

I have three treasures. Guard and keep them
The first is deep love,
The second is frugality,
And the third is not to dare to be ahead of the world.
Because of deep love, one is courageous.
Because of frugality, one is generous.
Because of not daring to be ahead of the world, one becomes the leader of the world.

Lao Tzu

I have no ambition whatsoever to be leader of anything, but apart from that remove, Lao Tzu speaks for me.  Deep love.  Whenever I feel disconnected  from the love I feel for my family for whatever reason, I sink into despair.  The pit is dark and deep, and I have fallen in many times in the past, and know I will be visiting it again before my brief sojourn on this earth is at its end.  I hold on to very little, possibly because I have had breakdowns in the past which lead to new perspectives that can benefit .  It is good to travel light but sometimes I feel so weightless that I defy gravity. Well almost. It is hard to come back to the world inhabited before a breakdown and  feel at home.  Everywhere is strange and everywhere you feel a stranger. I imagine myself as The Little Prince and suddenly the day is more inhabitable.

I feel certain that we all share the human experience of feeling inadequate sometimes,  and the times for me that are the most challenging are when I don’t feel the love I know I have.  I have to remind myself about the reality of that love, that I can return to it and it is not removed forever. In the past I have confused this with not feeling loved by others, but as I get older I know my deepest challenge is when I am not loving enough to the people in my life who deserve it.  No one said it would be easy now , did they? If they did, they were deluded, or simply lying.

Frugality comes much easier to me.  I find it relatively comfortable to live modestly.  I have never liked conspicuous consumption, finding it more akin to bragging than anything else.  Good job as needs must, and we are relatively stretched as a single income family, having both had divorces to deal with and five children between us.  Perhaps I would feel differently were we to win the lottery.  Except I don’t waste my money on lotteries.  I don’t waste money. I want to be more self sufficient than we are, living the Good Life that Felicity Kendal advertised in the 1970’s.  The good life. Somehow it feels closer the less one owns. That’s one of the paradoxes I can live with.

And the final words, not desiring to be ahead of the world  – now that I can identify with.  I don’t need to feel the admiration of the modern world, I barely recognise most of what the modern world views as reasonable.  I stay content in a little corner of it, mainly out of plain sight.

 

Good cheer,

 

 

 

 

Morning call – take a moment.

I was working earlier this morning at promoting my hand made books on a craft site called Etsy, wherein there are forums which enables the site users to engage with one another, a method of bringing people together in shared endeavour.  Mainly the forums ask questions relating to their shops, or customers, or problems or simply to have a chat to break up the day.  This morning a question provoked my interest as it broke away from the everyday and asked

“What are you doing when you find yourself truly connected to nature?”

There was a variety of interesting replies,  many supporting the view about how nature was a resource for recharging and inspiration.  One reply noted how seeing an animal in distress connected her to the immediacy and demands nature sometimes places on us.  I thought about it for a few moments and replied.  This is my reply,

“nature holds everything , our existence on the planet is all about connection. When we learn how interconnected everything is, we start to take on responsibility in our own lives for how we choose to live. I am beginning to feel that life is about understanding that interconnection, and living fully within that realisation. It is lifelong learning full of challenges and deep joys. The journey toward Truth and Beauty is the totality of our lives, we determine how far we proceed on that journey. ”

I am loving how rich that journey is, and how important my decisions are everyday, every moment as to how satisfying my brief encounter on this planet is.  At the same time I face the constant reminders that the human experience is very different depending what situations we are born into. My responsibility is not only to myself and my immediate family, it extends to all living matter.

I am sending my thoughts out in the hope that they resonate and that as companions in time, we all respect our individual journeys.

The beautiful image is by Monet, an artist who worked tirelessly at his vision of truth and beauty.