"It is necessary for the heart of the one who speaks to rest itself on the heart of the friend who listens."
-Countess du Barry

I don't think I could have said it better myself. :) Happy Valentines Day to all of you, my dear friends.

It is the time of year when the old year starts really dying and passing away into sleep and rest to give way to the new. There seems to be an awful lot of other passing on or away as well that I've been witness to or have had connected to me. The most recent was the passing of a great man who was the husband of a woman I used to garden for, ( Read more... )

Tea Invitation by Ibtisam Barakat ( Read more... )

Yes, I seem to praise them muchly. But there is much to praise. We had our first performance of our fall season this evening. We are doing a form of improv theatre called Playback Theatre. The gist is, the ensemble of actors are trained in multiple storytelling improv formats. At a performance, we ask for stories from audience member's lives ( Read more... )

Madeleine L'Engle passed away yesterday, Thursday, September 6th. She was 88 years old. She didn't have any major illnesses or sufferings. It was simply her time. I have had only limited experience with her writings. I have read very few. My wife read "House Like Lotus" aloud to me, which was a beautiful experience, both being read to as well ( Read more... )

I've had a lot of good healing/restorative experiences lately. I had the brilliant idea of taking a vacation day on Monday and planning the entire day with one of my dear friends/former collegues/former professors/gardening mentor/sometimes surrogate mother, Geraldine. I learned pretty much everything I know about gardening from her, including my ( Read more... )

Our concert performance on Saturday night inspired one woman to sigh, extremely vocally, the moment after our final note. We were all a bit startled. And then the audience shot up in a standing ovation that lasted quite some time. People near this woman said it was as if she were in a bit of religious ecstasy. Wow. At first I had the mistaken ( Read more... )

. . .like William Wilburforce. Jenn and I just saw the film "Amazing Grace" last night. This film tells the story of the abolition of slavery in Great Britain during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a bit before the Americans. William Wilburforce was a British MP who had found God in that very traditional evangelical sense of seeing the ( Read more... )

Perhaps I shouldn't have driven today. Perhaps not. But I was doing fine. No slipping. Driving carefully. But they always say in bad conditions, it's other people you need to worry about. Yeah ( Read more... )

I found my way to a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet." They are just beautiful. The care and thoughtfulness with which they are written, plus all of the wisdom he was able to convey with such humility and honesty is just overwhelming at times ( Read more... )