“Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these.”
~Gautama Buddha
I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything; but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
– Edward Everett Hale (American author, historian, and clergyman, 1822-1909)
Advice
There is that within you that can reach a star...
Find it!
A song no one but you can hear ...
Sing it!
There is that without you that would pull you down ...
Fight it!
A bird doesn't get into trouble unless it flies too low ...
Fly high!
The universe is a question ...
Answer it!
Jay Cole Simser
"Better appreciate a sunset than to be lord of a thousand conquered cities. The man that can be moved by music is happier than he whose acclaim is shouted from the hilltops. The soul grows not by material things, but only by thought. If a man thinketh not, even though he sits upon a throne his soul is still in embryo." Taylor Caldwell
Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
Kindness
is more important than wisdom
and the recognition
of this
is the beginning of wisdom.
~Theodore Isaac Rubin, American psychiatrist and author
Christian Wiman's pen went silent for three years. Poetry about the ineffable just didn't seem fitting during his intensive bouts of treatment for cancer. And then, one day in what came as a shock to him, he sat down and wrote the line:
God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made
The lines flowed into what Mr. Wiman describes as a "highly formal" poem, "Every Riven Thing," which would end up being the title of a book of poetry. On its face, the poem may appear to be a villanelle, a poem that repeats two lines in every stanza and uses two rhymes throughout the poem. But the syntax of that one line changes in every stanza — and with each change, a nuance of meaning shifts:
God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why
God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into a stillness where
God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see
God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,
God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.
