Tell me...

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

Gazelles win State Cross Country

Boys and girls swept state cross country. That's my lil baby sis!!

http://www.yankton.net/stories/102505/sports_20051025025.shtml

Dangers

The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety.

Goethe

Verdi Requiem

Tim at The Red Cup in Oklahoma City

Quotes about being true to yourself

"I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have." -Abraham Lincoln

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium. It will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive." - Martha Graham to Agnes De Mille

Religion

"Religion is a defense against the experience of God."
- Jung

My object in living

My object in living is to unite,
My avocation and my vocation,
As my two eyes make one in sight
--Robert Frost

75 Reasons to be an Entrepreneur - Now

Go Entrepreneurship!

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20051001/75-reasons.html

Worth the agony and the sweat

From Faulkner's 1950 Nobel Acceptance speech
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/faulkner/faulkner.html

"Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands."

Grace

"Grace is the expression of the power of aesthetic sensitivity, and power is always manifested with grace, whether in beauty of line, style, or expression. We associate grace with elegance, refinement, and economy of effort. We marvel at the grace of the Olympic athlete, just as we're uplifted by the grace of the Gothic vault. Gracious power patterns acknowledge and support life, and respect and uphold the dignity of others. In addition, grace is an aspect of unconditional love. Graciousness also implies generosity - not merely material generostiy, but generosity of spirit, such as the willingness to express thanks or acknolwedge the importance of others in our lives. Grace is associated with modesty and humility, for power doesn't need to flaunt itself; force always must show off, because it originates in self-doubt. Great artists are thankful for their power, whatever its expression, because they know it's a gift that benefits all of mankind."

Dr. David Hawkins

Synopsis - from the Greek words συν (syn = together) and οψις (opsis = seeing)

"Liberal education should give the student the sense that learning must and can be both synoptic and precise. For this, a very small, detailed problem can be the best way, if it is framed so as to open out on the whole. Unless the course has the specific intention to lead to the permanent questions, to make the student aware of them and give him some competience in the important works that treat of them, it tends to be a pleasant diversion and a dead end - because it has nothing to do with any program of further study he can image.

If such programs engage the best energies of the best people in the unviersity, they can be beneficial and provide some of the missing intellectual excitement for both professors and students.

...

To repeat, the crisis of liberal education is a reflection of a crisis at the peaks of learning, an incoherence and incompatibility among the first priniciples with which we interpret the world, an intellectual crisis of the greatest magnitude, which constitutes the crisis of our civilization. But perhaps it would be true to say that the crisis consists not so much in this incoherence but in our incapacity to discuss or even recognize it. Liberal education flourished when it prepared the way for the discussion of a unified view of nature and man's place in it, which the best minds debated on the highest level. It decayed when what lay beyond it were only specialities, the premises of which do not lead to any such vision. The highest is the partial intellect; there is no synopsis."

The Closing of the American Mind
Allan Bloom
1987

Caveat: This quotation is highly out of context as I just received this book today and have not read the whole thing. Nevertheless, it's something to chew on for now.

Dim sum for Michelle's birthday - belated post.

For the weary travellers...

"My greatest wish --- other than salvation --- was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One I could read again and again, with new eyes and a fresh understanding each time. Alas, there was no scripture in the lifeboat. I was a disconsolate Arjuna in a battered chariot without the benefit of Krishna's words. The first time I came upon a Bible in the bedside table of a hotel room in Canada, I burst into tears. I send a contribution to the Gideons the very next day, with a note urging them to spread the range of their activity to all places where worn and weary travellers might lay down their heads, not just to hotel rooms, and that they should leave not only Bibles, but other sacred writings as well. I cannot think of a better way to spread the faith. No thundering from a pulpit, no condemnation from bad churches, no peer pressure, just a book of scripture quietly waiting to say hello, as gentle and powerful as a little girl's kiss on your cheek."

From The Life of Pi
Yann Martel

"Sing it if you understand"

2 AM and i'm still awake
writing a song if I
get it all down on paper it's
no longer inside of me
threatening the life it belongs to.

And i feel like I'm naked in
front of the crowd
cuz these words are my diaries
screaming out loud and i
know you will use them
however you want to

but you can't jump the track
we're like cars on a cable
and life's like an hour glass
glued to the table
no one can find the rewind button now

sing it if you understand

and breathe...just breathe
and breathe...just breathe

From Anna Nalick's 2 AM (Breathe)
Album: Wreck of the Day
She's performing in KC on November 3rd.

Trenton, Nadine, and moi at F212¤.

Millenium Park.

Navy Pier

Fair Trade and pizza in Chicago