Sage Advice

"Let the beauty you love be what you do. There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth." -- Rumi

Yey for Dogs!

There are now more households in the U.S. with dogs (43 million) than with kids (38 million).


And, on another note. . .

It's the birthday of the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, the lifelong muse of poet W.B. Yeats, born in Aldershot, England, in 1865. She and Yeats were the same age, born only a few months apart, and they first met when they were 25 years old. He was introduced to her by a friend, the Irish nationalist John O'Leary, and later referred to the day when he met her as "when the troubling of my life began."

She was tall and exquisitely beautiful. In his Memoirs, Yeats wrote: "I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past. A complexion like the blossom of apples, and yet face and body had the beauty of lineaments which Blake calls the highest beauty because it changes least from youth to age, and a stature so great that she seemed of a divine race."

Yeats immediately fell in love with Maud Gonne, and he asked her to marry him in 1891, but she refused. It was the first of many proposals of marriage that he made and that she rejected. They remained close to each other throughout their lives, though, and agreed at one point that they had a "spiritual union" to each other.

In response to one of Yeats' many marriage proposals, Maud Gonne told him: "You would not be happy with me. ... You make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and you are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry."

Prayer for Loved Ones

If we could have a lifetime wish. . .

If we could have a lifetime wish
A dream that would come true,
We'd pray to God with all our hearts
For yesterday and You.
A thousand words can't bring you back
We know because we've tried...
Neither will a thousand tears
We know because we've cried...
You left behind our broken hearts
And happy memories too...
But we never wanted memories
We only wanted You.
~~~~Unknown~~~~

Jim Harrison - Writer from Michigan

Broom

by Jim Harrison

To remember you're alive
visit the cemetery of your father
at noon after you've made love
and are still wrapped in a mammalian
odor that you are forced to cherish.
Under each stone is someone's inevitable
surprise, the unexpected death
of their biology that struggled hard, as it must.
Now to home without looking back,
enough is enough.
En route buy the best wine
you can afford and a dozen stiff brooms.
Have a few swallows then throw the furniture
out the window and begin sweeping.
Sweep until the walls are
bare of paint and at your feet sweep
until the floor disappears. Finish the wine
in this field of air, return to the cemetery
in evening and wind through the stones
a slow dance of your name visible only to birds.

"Broom" by Jim Harrison, from Songs of Unreason. © Copper Canyon Press, 2011.

It's the birthday of poet and novelist Jim Harrison (books by this author), born in Grayling, Michigan (1937). When he was 25 years old, he tried to decide whether he should go on a hunting trip with his father and sister, but in the end, he decided not to. They were both killed a few hours later when they were hit by a drunk driver. Harrison said their dying "cut the last cord that was holding me down," and he immediately wrote his first finished poem.

He drifted around for a while, then went to live with his brother John, who was a librarian at Harvard. He published his first volume of poems, Plain Song (1965), and he thought he wanted to be a poet. He wrote two more books of poems, and then he was out hunting birds with his dog and he fell off a cliff and hurt his back and had to stay in bed for months.

His friend Thomas McGuane convinced him to try writing a novel as a way to pass the time. Harrison wrote Wolf: A False Memoir (1971).But he didn't have an agent, so he sent the one copy of his manuscript off to his brother John, in the hopes he could find a publisher for it. Unfortunately, the postal workers went on strike and the manuscript was lost in the mail. Harrison assumed it was lost forever and that it was probably the end of his novel-writing career, but it resurfaced after a month, and his brother managed to find a publisher for it, and Harrison become a novelist as well as a poet.

His other books include the novella Legends of the Fall (1979); the novels True North (2004) and The Farmer's Daughter (2009); and the poetry volumes Returning to Earth (1977) and In Search of Small Gods (2009). This fall, he published a new book of poetry, Songs of Unreason (2011), and a new novel, The Great Leader (2011).

Jim Harrison said: "Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That's the main content. The biggest thing in people's lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know."

Inspirational Quotes

“Spirituality leaps where science cannot yet follow, because science must always test and measure, and much of reality and human experience is immeasurable.”

Put yourself in a state of mind where you say to yourself, "Here is an opportunity for you to celebrate like never before, my own power, my own ability to get myself to do whatever is necessary.” Anthony Robbins

“We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been — a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when” Starhawk

Look In Your Heart

I know that the answer to what we need to do next is in our own hearts. All we have to do is listen, then take that one step further and trust what we hear. We will be taught what we need to learn.

Melody Beattie

American Self-Help Author and Journalist

Woody Allen's Birthday

Today is the birthday of filmmaker Allen Stewart Konigsberg, better known as Woody Allen (1935) (books by this author). He legally changed his name to "Heywood Allen" when he was 17, to pay homage to clarinetist Woody Herman. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and New York City often figures prominently in his movies. It's getting harder, and more expensive, to film on location there, so lately he's taken to setting his movies in Europe, but he always comes back to the city he sees through a romantic lens. He told USA Today: "Guys like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee depict New York very often very realistically. Very, very beautifully and very correctly. I don't. The New York I've shown over the years is the New York I got from Hollywood movies."

Though he's become a movie icon, he consistently refuses to appear at the Academy Awards. He's always claimed that the ceremony conflicts with his standing gig playing jazz clarinet at Michael's Pub in New York, but he's also said, "The whole concept of awards is silly. I cannot abide by the judgment of other people, because if you accept it when they say you deserve an award, then you have to accept it when they say you don't." He made one exception, showing up unannounced at the 2002 ceremony; he made a brief speech asking filmmakers to continue to make movies in New York City in spite of the attacks of September 11, 2001. "I didn't have to present anything," he explained backstage. "I didn't have to accept anything. I just had to talk about New York City."

He wrote in New York Magazine: "I still fantasize that a million interesting stories are occurring in those apartments on Fifth Avenue and in those redbrick houses on Bank Street and on Central Park West. You know, it's still so vibrant that I've never felt any diminution of intensity for the city. It's always Manhattan, this little, compact island, where everything is going on. The cosmetics have changed. You know, it's a computer world now, and terminology changes, and styles of psychotherapy changed to a degree, and the protocols of relationships go in and out. But the fundamentals have not changed."

Horse Quotes About Love

"The essential joy of being with horses is that it brings us in contact with the rare elements of grace, beauty, spirit, and fire."~ Sharon Ralls Lemon

 

"Horses change lives. They give our young people confidence and self-esteem. They provide peace and tranquility to troubled souls. They give us hope!"
~ Toni Robinson

 

A true horseman does not look at the horse with his eyes, he looks at his horse with his heart.

Author Unknown