CONRAD: Oh, Jerry are you okay with this hinge?
JERRY: Yeah.CONRAD: I can get you any kind you want, you know. Four holes, three holes, two holes, bronze, no hinge at all.
JERRY: You know, why don’t we just go with the one in your hand?
CONRAD: Oh, these are different.
JERRY: Drop one. . . . left!
~ From episode 152 of Seinfeld, “The Nap”
Wishes of one’s old life wither and shrivel like old leaves if they are not replaced with new wishes when the world changes. And the world always changes. Wishes get slimy, and their colors fade, and soon they are just mud, like all the rest of the mud, and not wishes at all, but regrets. The trouble is, not everyone can tell when they ought to launder their wishes. Even when one finds oneself in Fairyland and not at home at all, it is not always so easy to remember to catch the world in its changing and change with it.
~ Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Talk about the joys of the unexpected, can they compare with the joys of the expected, of finding everything delightfully and completely what you knew it was going to be?
~ Elizabeth Bibesco
Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,
Yet let’s be merry; we’ll have tea and toast;
Custards for supper, and an endless host
Of syllabubs and jellies and mincepies,
And other such ladylike luxuries.~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
Let there be many windows to your soul, that all the glory of the world may beautify it.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Before World War II, Berenice Abbott roamed New York’s streets photographing buildings, and after it, Helen Levitt photographed children playing in the streets while Weegee photographed the underworld of fresh corpses on sidewalks and prostitutes in paddy wagons. One imagines them wandering purposefully like hunter-gatherers with the camera a sort of basket laden with the day’s spectacles, the photographers leaving us not their walks, as poets do, but the fruits of those walks.
~ Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
At any moment the fully present mind can shatter time and burst into Now.
~ David Steindl-Rast
If you follow my other blog (Bountiful Healing), where posts are rare these days, you have already seen this image. It’s a collage I created to go with the small stone (poem) that I wrote recently. I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing small stones again. It will be good practice for the Mindful Writing Challenge in January 2014.
Today’s joys: The gifts of the early morning. Frost sparkling in the sunlight. Picking out new frames for my glasses. The clear, crisp light of the stars on a cold night. Healing.
breezes at dawn 