Advice for Life
June 15, 2008
Filed under Children, Fatherhood, Life, Mab's Mentor, News, Politics, Reading, Writing, blogging, family, gifts, health and wellness, history, poetry, quotations, reporting
Tags: Add new tag, advice, Children, Father's Day, legacy, live, love, Meet the press, NBC, News, Tim Russert, words, words of wisdom
Priceless and something to pass on to my daughter! Tim has inspired me to write to my daughter but I’ll quote him often as his advice to his son, Luke, was sheer poetry.
Happy Father’s Day
Q
“Count Your Blessings”
It’s so true…
May 21, 2007
Filed under Life, Motherhood, Reading, Writing, blogging, poetry, quotations
May 21, 2007
 Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward. 
— Kurt Vonnegut |
Poetry to think on…
May 3, 2007
Filed under Life, Motherhood, Reading, Writing, blogging, family, poetry, quotations, women
in honor of Mother Poem A Day: from Poets.org
I found the poem to at first turn me off, not what I expected to something truly thought provoking and intriguing. I love the last stanza especially.Mother
by Herman de Coninck
translated by Kurt Brown & Laure-Anne Bosselaar
What you do with time
is what a grandmother clock
does with it: strike twelve
and take its time doing it.
You’re the clock: time passes,
you remain. And wait.
Waiting is what happens to
a snow-covered garden,
a trunk under moss,
hope for better times
in the nineteenth century,
or words in a poem.
For poetry is about letting things
grow moldy together, like grapes
turning into wine, reality into preserves,
and hoarding words
in the cellar of yourself.
A Moment of Brilliance…
April 28, 2007
Filed under Life, Murder and Suspense, Mystery, Reading, Writing, blogging, poetry, quotations
…as I was reading John Connolly’s, Dark Hollow:
“An Old Man walks through the lush August grass with wood in his arms, brushing away loose bark with a gloved hand; an old man, tall unbowed, with a halo of white hair like an ancient angel, a dog stepping slowly beside him, older, in its way, than the man himself, its grey-beard muzzle flecked with foam, its tongue lolling, its tail swinging gently through the warm evening air. The first patches of red are showing in the trees, and the clamor of the insects has begun to subside. The ash trees, the last to unfurl their leaves in spring, are now the first to let them fall to the ground. Pine needles decay on the forest floor and the black berries are ripe and dense as the old man passes by , at one with the rhythms of the world around him…”
The next paragraph describing the ax in his hands, splitting wood, and I was there wishing for when that rhythm will resonate with us as people from away learning to be of Maine.
Happy Birthday William Shakespeare!
William Shakespeare (approx. April 23)
1564-1616
Some of my favorite words to live by:
“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”
Hamlet (III, iii)
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Consider the Hands..
…begins the poem Consider the Hands that Write This Letter
by Aracelis Girmay (poetnews@poets.org)
Which leads to all sorts of stories. I always liked the country song about Daddy’s hands because it made me think of my grandfather’s big gnarled hands that so gently held my hand, taught me to drive the tractor, and made such beautiful pieces of furniture. Arthritis had made them nearly immobile in many ways but it never stopped him from participating in life to the fullest. He taught me to always count my blessings and I do as I consider his hands…
Oh What a Blessed Day…
April 7, 2007
Filed under Life, Reading, Writing, blogging, environment, family, health and wellness, poetry, quotations
…has dawned again today and in gratitude I found a poem by James Wright called Blessing on Poets.org to commemorate the day. Coming up this week is a revisit to The Secret and the 50 thing throw away! The Laws of Attraction are alive and well in this family!
I am blessed with sunshine, my family, and all the possibilities that I can imagine for our future. What are some of your blessings this day?
In Search of…
…the triggered thoughts and words of inspirational wisdom. On Poets.org, I found just that by Mark Doty.
One paragraph of Souls on Ice by Mark Doty
…”Our metaphors go on ahead of us, they know before we do. And thank goodness for that, for if I were dependent on other ways of coming to knowledge I think I’d be a very slow study. I need something to serve as a container for emotion and idea, a vessel that can hold what’s too slippery or charged or difficult to touch. Will doesn’t have much to do with this; I can’t choose what’s going to serve as a compelling image for me. But I’ve learned to trust that part of my imagination that gropes forward, feeling its way toward what it needs; to watch for the signs of fascination, the sense of compelled attention (Look at me, something seems to say, closely) that indicates that there’s something I need to attend to. Sometimes it seems to me as if metaphor were the advance guard of the mind; something in us reaches out, into the landscape in front of us, looking for the right vessel, the right vehicle, for whatever will serve.”
National Poetry Month
Some quotes for any and everyday from two of my favorite poets, Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson. Each is from previous National Poetry Month posters.
http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/98
“Poetry is…
the human soul entire,
squeezed like a lemon or a lime,
drop by drop,
into atomic words.”
- Langston Hughes
“To You”
To sit and dream, to sit and read,
To sit and learn about the world
Outside our world of here and now—
Our problem world—
To dream of vast horizons of the soul
Through dreams made whole,
Unfettered, free— help me!
All you who are dreamers too,
Help me to make
Our world anew.
I reach out my dreams to you.
- Langston Hughes
And finally,
The 2005 poster (National Poetry Month) features Emily Dickinson’s dress and a quote from her letters: “Nature is a haunted house—but Art—is a house that tries to be haunted.”
Big Sigh…
