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

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

Red chairs

“I’m not nearly as afraid of dying as I am of the hinges inside my mind and soul rusting closed. I am desperate to keep them open, because I think that if they close, that’s one’s first death, the loss of hope, curiosity and possibility, the spiritual death. After that, it seems to me, the second one is just a formality. I wanted to oil the hinges, force the doors to stay open."

- Jon Katz

New growth

“The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.”

from Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Morning shadow

“You cannot draw lines and compartments and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. Yes, in the end it is all a question of balance.”

from A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

Restoration

"The monkey wrench is not a symbol of destruction. Ed Abbey told me right here on this ranch, the monkey wrench is a symbol of restoration. It's symbolic of your own talents. That's how you are going to fix the world - with your own gifts and talents."

- Ken Sleight