Death is Nature's master stroke, albeit a cruel one

This is a passage I have returned to many many times in the past years.


"It is one of Nature's great insults that she should prefer to put ALL her eggs in the basket of a defenseless, incompetent neonate rather than in the tried and tested custody of our own superb minds. But as our neurofibrils begin to tangle, and that neonate walks to a wisdom that eludes us, we are forced to give Nature credit for her daring ideas. Of course, Nature, in her careless way, can get it wrong: people often die in the wrong order."


"Whenever you find yourself thinking 'it is better for him not to know', suspect you mean 'it is easier for me not to tell'."


"...giving a piece of yourself, some real sympathy, is worth more than allthe drugs in your pharmacopoeia to patients who are frightened, bereaved or weary of life."


~ Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine

First Rain

"In the words of Terry Pratchett - Leopards don't change their shorts."


Bah, life is good!


Good life holler to all kindred spirits out there :)

We Become our Choices

'When will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.'

When indeed?


Rebus


By
Jane Hirshfield


You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.


Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.


This rebus - slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life -
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.


As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.


The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.


How can I enter this question the clay has asked?


(Rebus -- "A representation of words in the form of pictures or symbols, often presented as a puzzle.")

Via Asha's blog

A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted

...You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

~ John O’Donohue

We owe so much to certain people, of those - the greatest are the ones that offer us healing. And that such people exist, are allowed to exist...brings faith. There is something to love on for, yet.