Love is not measured
in leaps and bounds
in a halfway house
nor on common ground
but the vastness that lies
between He and we
is incomprehensible
as between
You and me
The vastness above and under the sea won’t sever our unity.
Whatever you want me to do or say, I will do it… just say the Word.
בת daughter
“… here is one day from his life, a day in every respect like all his other days, and from it let the reader form his own opinion as to his character and the way in which his life corresponded with the beauty of his environment.”
– Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls.
Picture of St Luke’s Anglican cemetary overlooking Richmond Village, Tasmania.
“A pointed word, once it is spoken or written, cannot be cut away with an axe.”
– Nikolai Gogol in Dead Souls
“I like birthdays. I like them more for other people, but I’m glad we celebrate them. At the heart of it is the opportunity to tell someone “I’m glad that you were born,” which is also to say “I’m glad that you’re alive.” Those are powerful statements. The world would be a different place if we lived that way, if we said and expressed these things, more than once a year.”
– jamie tworkowski If You Feel Too Much (TWLOHA)
“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume;
when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book,
but translated into a better language;
and every chapter must be so translated;
God employs several translators;
some pieces are translated by age,
some by sickness, some by war, some by justice;
but God’s hand is in every translation,
and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves
again for that library where every book
shall lie open to one another.
No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main…
any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind,
and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
No man hath affliction enough
that is not matured and ripened by it,
and made fit for God by that affliction.”
Meditation #17 By John Donne From Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623), XVII:
Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris (Now this bell, tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.)
A quote from Dubliners by James Joyce in “A Little Cloud”
“A light began to tremble on the horizon of his mind…
He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy.”
Quote from Dubliners by James Joyce in “A Little Cloud”
“He picked his way deftly through all that minute verminlike life and under the shadow of the gaunt spectral mansions in which the old nobility of Dublin had roistered.
No memory of the past touched him, for his mind was full of a present joy.”
Count the stars of heaven 