Monthly Archives: July, 2023
Just outside the gate
“A Trojan Horse sits just outside the gate of your heart. Its name is bitterness. It is a monument to every attack you have endured from your fellow human beings. It is a gift left by the people who have wronged you…It is rightfully yours. But to accept the gift is to invite ruin into …
A clover, any time
The pedigree of honey Does not concern the bee; A clover, any time, to him Is aristocracy. — Emily Dickinson I am a person of simple tastes. During our lean years, I supposed this was because we couldn’t afford grand things. But the passing decades have taught me that it’s a deep-down unchanging part of …
A thin stream of fear
“Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.” — Arthur Somers Roche Waterfalls start out a lot smaller and more quiet than they end up. If you’ve ever stood at the foot of a fairly large waterfall, you know the …
The stormy present
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” –– Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862 In the years I’ve been writing …
Company enough
“I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me.” — William Hazlitt I think many of us can identify with Hazlitt. It’s almost impossible to feel lonely when the birds are chirping, the squirrels are scampering around and the rabbits hop silently from place to place. Even the flowers …
Like the sun
“They can be like the sun, words. They can do for the heart what light can for a field.” ― San Juan de la Cruz (St. John of the Cross) Two years ago I planted a couple of Asiatic lilies in front of our Alexandria porch. I read that they could tolerate partial shade, so I thought …
More important
“It’s bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children’s health than the pediatrician.” — Meryl Streep “Eat your vegetables. They’re good for you.” — almost every mother who ever lived Pediatricians are important in fighting children’s diseases, to be sure, but it might be even more bizarre that we somehow generalize their crucial responsibility …
Webbed and sustained
“Liberty is as relevant to modern Americans as it was to the men and women of 1776. We live in a world webbed and sustained by the liberties they won at terrific cost in an agonizing eight-year ordeal. The freedom to speak our minds, to worship in the churches of our faith, to vote for the …
Defeat Despair 