ThoughtsOnLiving

Protection and Love

We will not protect what we do not love.

    - Stephen Jay Gould

To Be a Saint

To be a saint is to be human because we were created to be human. To be a saint is to live with courage and self-restraint and more than that. To be a saint is to live not with the hands clenched to grasp, to strike to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it; but it is to live with the hands stretched out to give and to receive with gladness. To be a saint is to work and weep for the broken and suffering of the world, but it is also to be strangely light of heart in the knowledge that there is something greater than the world that mends and renews. Maybe more than anything else, to be a saint is to know joy. Not happiness that comes and goes with the moments that occasion it, but joy that is always there like an underground spring no matter how dark and terrible the night. To be a saint is to be a little out of one's mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full.

- Received via email, quoting Frederick Buechner in ''The Magnificient Defeat''

Those Who Believe They Believe In God...

Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

       - Miguel de Unamuno

Time Perception

Layers of Time:

"Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span."

* * *

When Brian first moved to New York City he found that in New York here and now meant this room and this five minutes, as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England. We have since adopted the term as the title of our foundation as we are trying to stretch out what people consider as now.

The Long Now

On Privacy and the "Human Need for Connection"

We’re more than happy to report what we’ve eaten for breakfast, who we’re dating, the books we’re reading, even when we’re taking a bath. It seems as if we can’t wait to tell the whole world the most trivial facts about ourselves. Yet when someone on the elevator asks us how we’re doing, we say, "fine" regardless of the true state of our condition.

It seems as if we’ve created social networks with a slew of supporting technologies without having any idea about who our next door neighbors are.

from Coding Slave

Happiness, Indirectly

"Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product" - Eleanor Roosevelt

Seen and Unseen Wonder

The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

From the famous editorial "Yes Virigina, There Is A Santa Claus"

New Photo Album: Chihuly Glass Exhibit

Shots from recent visit to the Chihuly Glass exhibit at the de Young Museum.  Simply amazing glass work.

Thoughts On Creativity

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."
    - Sir Ken Robinson

(From this fabulous TED talk)

In That Place Of More Wall Than Room

"The main thing about playing the guitar, though, was that I was able to sit by myself and play and dream. And I was always happy doing that. I used to go off in the bathroom, because the bathroom had tiles, so it was a slight echo chamber. I'd turn on the faucet so that water would run — I like that sound, it's very soothing to me — and I'd play. In the dark. 'Hello darkness, my old friend / I've come to talk with you again'."

        - Paul Simon