strange business

You sit here for days saying, This is strange business. 
You are the strange business.
You have the energy of the sun in you,
but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine.
You are some weird kind of gold
that wants to stay melted in the furnace,
so you won’t have to be coins.


— Rumi, from "Strange Business"; translated by Coleman Barks

in love

We are so lightly here. It is in love that we are made. In love we disappear.

― Leonard Cohen

original intent

I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn’t the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why. 

— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

no matter

It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening. 

― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

it is well

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

— Horatio G. Spafford, from the hymn "It is Well with My Soul"


Today is my mother's birthday. She would have been 97 (she died in 1997). Mom played piano at church (among many other duties), and this was one of my favorite hymns, partly because every time we sang it in church I remembered the back story of Spafford's life:

"This hymn was written after traumatic events in Spafford’s life. The first was the 1871 Great Chicago Fire which ruined him financially (he had been a successful lawyer and had invested significantly in property in the area of Chicago which was decimated by the great fire). His business interests were further hit by the economic downturn of 1873 at which time he had planned to travel to Europe with his family on the SS Ville du Havre. In a late change of plan, he sent the family ahead while he was delayed on business concerning zoning problems following the Great Chicago Fire. While crossing the Atlantic, the ship sank rapidly after a collision with a sea vessel, the Loch Earn, and all four of Spafford's daughters died. His wife Anna survived and sent him the now famous telegram, "Saved alone . . .". Shortly afterwards, as Spafford traveled to meet his grieving wife, he was inspired to write these words as his ship passed near where his daughters had died." (from Wikipedia)

the goal

The goal of man is Truth. Truth is more than happiness. The man who has Truth can have whatever mood he wishes, or none. . . . We have pretended that Truth is happiness and happiness Truth, and people have believed us. Therefore you, too, have until now imagined that happiness must be the same as Truth. But happiness makes you its prisoner as does woe. 

— Sufi teaching

though you may

". . . though you may get a new life, you can't get a new past. You don't get to leave your story. If you leave your story, then how you left your story is your story, and you had better not forget it." 

— Wendell Berry. Imagination in Place, "Sweetness Preserved"