A good life

For my mother, Peggy Perkins Lersch
April 23, 1915 - May 8, 2008

Who well lives, long lives;
for this age of ours should not be numbered
by years, days, and hours.

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas - 1578

The biggest heart

"The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. …There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived, we know nearly nothing. Nothing is known of the mating habits, the travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. But we know this: the animals with the largest heart in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles."

- Brian Doyle

Freedom, spontaneity and love

"Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of the unnumbered seeds perish and are lost because men are not prepared to receive them. For such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere, except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love."

- Thomas Merton