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september

  • “Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible
    thing: no one to blame.” -Erica Jong
  • “Simplicity is the peak of civilization.” - Jessie Sampter
  • “Paradise is where I am.” - Voltaire
  • “I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.” - Antonio Porchia
  • “… death and life are not serious alternatives.” - Robinson Jeffers
  • “Begin at once to live.”- Seneca
  • “Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.” - Charles Dudley Warner
  • “Being is what it is.” - Jean-Paul Sartre
  • “The whole moon and sky come to rest in a single dewdrop on a blade of grass.” - Dôgen
  • “If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted with pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It’s that simple. What you see is what you get.” - Annie Dillard
  • “The trouble is that you think you have time.” - Jack Kornfield
  • “The moment one gives close attention to anythin, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.” - Henry Miller
  • “Each day is a little life; every waking and rising a little birth; every fresh morning a little youth; every going to rest and sleep a little death.” - Arthur Schopenhauer
  • “Look and you will find it - what is unsought will go undetected.” - Sophocles
  • Hillbilly Savants: Poetry: Arthur Lloyd Mitchell

    Before an Autumn Maple

    I stood today before a tree
    All red aflame with autumn fire;
    And now I know how Moses felt
    Before the bush in flame attire.

  • “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” - Meister Eckhart
    from ZEN Habits
  • Appalachian Treks: Our abundance
    “Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.”–Epicurus (341-270 BC), Greek philosopher
  • Post to the Host from Prairie Home Companion and American Public Media
    Your students won’t appreciate it, Shawna, they’re too young and they probably don’t know A.E. Housman’s “Loveliest of trees the cherry now is hung with bloom along the bough” which is all about the sense of time passing when one is twenty. (”Now of my three-score years and ten, twenty will not come again.”) This is a poem I wrote when I turned sixty.

    Loveliest of trees, the maple now
    Is turning yellow on the bough.
    It stands among the trees of green,
    All dressed up for Halloween.
    Now of my three score years and ten,
    Sixty will not come again.
    Subtract from seventy, three score.
    It means I don’t have many more.
    And since to look at things sublime,
    Ten years is not a lot of time.
    It’s rather sobering for a fellow
    To see the maples turning yellow.