Author: L.E. Hansen

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Love This

Sometimes there’s just nothing to add.

“Drink water from the spring where horses drink. The horse will never drink bad water. Lay your bed where the cat sleeps. Eat the fruit that has been touched by a worm. Boldly pick the mushroom on which the insects sit. Plant the tree where the mole digs. Build your house where the snake sits to warm itself. Dig your fountain where the birds hide from heat. Go to sleep and wake up at the same time with the birds – you will reap all of the days golden grains. Eat more green – you will have strong legs and a resistant heart, like the beings of the forest. Swim often and you will feel on earth like the fish in the water. Look at the sky as often as possible and your thoughts will become light and clear. Be quiet a lot, speak little – and silence will come in your heart, and your spirit will be calm and full of peace.”
-Saint Seraphim of Sarov

Posted by Juniper Fox

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In Keeping and Why Not

  • Happy Birthday, Thomas Sterns, just a little belated, we still go through “those certain, half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats…”
  • Born: September 26, 1888, St. Louis
  • Died: January 4, 1965, London
  • Cause of Death: Emphysema
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
Ah, yes, the man.
The hero of many a lit class, many an English survivor. Who among us did not read “The Wasteland” or at least “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”? It occurs to me now though not then, why were we not queried on behalf of “love song”? Why indeed is it called a love song?
And about the above, how do we make it thru the parts where there is not only no ecstasy, but torment?
 In The Paris Review

2nd June 1951: American-English poet and playwright, TS Eliot (1888 – 1965). He wrote amongst many other things, ‘The Waste Land ‘ and the plays, ‘The Cocktail Party’ and ‘Murder in the Cathedral’. Original Publication: Picture Post – 5314 – Are Poets Really Necessary? – pub. 1951 (Photo by George Douglas/Picture Post/Getty Images)

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Happy Birthday 2 and oh my!

I seem to be running one day behind on things, most especially on birthdays. It was Glenn Gould’s birthday yesterday, September 25. *Sigh*

  • Born: September 25, 1932, Toronto
  • Died: October 4, 1982, Toronto

He’s an all-time favorite, the best of pianists, and an all-around honorable fellow. He predicted his own death at 50 years of age, saying he would die then and of a stroke. In later years he became obsessed with checking his blood pressure. The question then becomes, did he indeed know it in advance, or did he direct it by obsessing over it? Truth is such a tricky thing at times.

Photo at top is from the Boston Globe and the one on the bottom from the NY Times.

When you watch a video you can clearly see how he uses his left hand to direct his right hand, especially when playing Bach.

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Happy Birthday

Author H.G. Wells was born September 21 in 1866
When I think of H.G. Wells I always picture Orson Wells. I’m not sure if that’s due to the same last names, or if the actor played the part of the author in some long-forgotten film that lingers in the recesses of the mind. Or maybe even a character in a film that originated with H.G. Wells. Who knows. Maybe even word association. As I recall someone’s name at the swimming pool: Spring, for Spring Byington. This is pretty funny as the swimming pool Spring is Chinese, hardly a stand-in for the movie star. But whatever works, I say.
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America Now—America Today

From a speech given in 1947

So much is happening right now that too many things of worth, of note, get lost in the noise. It seems only a little corner sometimes, a little light gets to the deepest darkness. I read where sterilizations have taken place and continue to in the camps run by ICE. The camps that have yet to be disbanded, where children have yet to be reunited with their parents, where women are subjected to the horrors of Nazi German. In America. In America today.

Sometimes I shake my head in despair. I don’t know what to do.

Meanwhile, hysterectomies are performed on women.

This from Feminist News:
Close the Camps
BREAKING: Pauline Binam, a Cameroonian mother who says she was involuntarily sterilized while held at the privately-owned Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia, has been granted humanitarian release. Binam’s attorney says Binam’s fallopian tube was removed without her knowledge by the same doctor who’s accused of performing forced hysterectomies on a number of other prisoners, and who is reportedly not a board-certified OB-GYN. Last week, Binam’s deportation was halted at the last minute after pressure from immigration rights advocates and members of Congress.
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Still, we go on. We endure in our small apartments with our timely haircuts and our pedicures. We walk our dogs. We play with our kittens and search out new sheet music for the piano. To be played with martini on the board above. We sing. And we cry.