Author: L.E. Hansen

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The Form Of It

Alfons Mucha – Madonna of the Lillies
 
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
Mary Oliver

Posted by Ravenous Butterflies, a very fine site as I’ve said and shared often. It has consistent appeal for me and touches on the things I love.

Something has occurred to me as I enjoyed this and chose it to post. When I was little, in grade school, I collected holy cards. I must have had hundreds. Lord knows where they ended up, I can’t imagine throwing them away, but like many things of childhood, disappeared they are.

So, as I captured this, I thought of those bygone treasures and their singular importance to me. I was struck by the holy-card look of the Mucha painting. How I would have loved to purchase it in the treasured form to be held in the Missal of the Mass. And then it struck me that perhaps I had not stopped collecting at all, but turned to other things such as this, to hold on these pages, or in another venue, but as well both in my heart.

I’ve always known we don’t really grow up, but now I know we don’t quit the things we hold to heart. We just change the form.

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Home

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.

“It’s a most painful thing, having to leave ‘home’. No matter where or what else it is to us, home is our haven, our safe place, our soul place, a place to refuel and launch into the world again and again. Home is something that we all always want to go back to; if we can’t go back, home is what we want to make again as quickly as we can, wherever we are.” Beryl Markham – West with the Night 

Posted by Ravenous Butterflies

  • Isabel Codrington – Evening, 1925

 

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Poe

  • Posted by Cory Fogarty

Our poor man, dear Mr. Poe. The nightmare he feared became a sad truth when he disappeared for several days when he was 40 years old. He was found a week later, delirious and in a state of awful disrepair. A letter was sent to those who recovered him from a gutter:

“Dear Sir—There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance.” Yours, in haste, Jos. W. Walker

He did reek of alcohol but it is disputed as to cause. Was he horribly beaten, and did he suffer the outcome of someone(s) pouring alcohol into and over him? Or did he indeed imbibe of his own will and suffer as a result, as some of his enemies claimed? Poe’s appearance was described as “repulsive”, with unkempt hair, a haggard, unwashed face and “lusterless and vacant” eyes. His clothing, which included a dirty shirt but no vest and unpolished shoes, was worn and did not fit well.

In any case, Poe never recovered to tell the tale of his own suffering and death. He did indeed enter deep into that darkness that he so feared.

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Uncle Albert

“I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care about money. Decorations, titles or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. I claim credit for nothing. A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.”~ Albert Einstein

Once again, the Greats have the same thoughts on Life and what is important. To live simply seems always the wisdom of not just a good life, but a fine life. And one of non-attachment as the Buddha imparts. Without want, or greed, life is easy. And we do not need to suffer.

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Bruce Lee

“Every morning like a scholar at his first class I prepare a blank mind for the day to write upon.The mind must be emancipated from old habits, prejudices, restrictive thought processes and even ordinary thought itself.The more aware you become, the more you shed from day to day what you have learned so that your mind is always fresh and uncontaminated by previous conditioning.Conditioning obstructs our view of reality. We do not see it in its suchness because of our indoctrination, crooked and twisted.A conditioned mind is never a free mind. Wipe away and dissolve all its experience and be “born afresh”.The unconditioned mind intuits truth.Truth comes when your mind and heart are purged of all sense of striving and you are no longer trying to become somebody; it is there when the mind is very quiet, listening timelessly to everything.”~ Bruce Lee

Ah yes, Bruce Lee. Another of those we love. Too soon gone from us. “Be like water,” he said. And so we should, flow around the rocks, the hurdles, the fallen in our way. Accept what is, and just flow on.