Bee's view

Real or unreal

"We are at liberty to be real or unreal. We may be true or false. The choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never if we so desire, appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects. And if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them."

Thomas Merton

Despair is not required

“To be around young people, who haven’t yet made all of the compromises and concessions that life will urge them to make, and to see them finding old people who can help them go a different way, is to be reminded that the world really is constantly fresh, and that therefore despair for its prospects is not required.”

from Wandering Home by Bill McKibben

Shooting stars

“There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be. Sign-posts toward greater knowledge.”

- Robert Henri

Inner toolbox

“I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox, full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools – friendships, conscience, honesty – and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they’re enough.”

- Annie Lamott

Obama in 2008

"They say we can't talk to our enemies; I say 'Watch me!' "
Barack Obama in Portland, Oregon, March 2008

The place of the artist

"I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than the full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. Where power corrupts, poetry cleanses."

- John F. Kennedy