ode to the spoon

The Spoon

Some days I think I need nothing more in life than a spoon.
With a spoon I can eat oatmeal or take the medicine doctors prescribe.
I can swat a fly sleeping on the sill or pound the table to get attention.
I can point accusingly at God or stab the empty air repeatedly.
Looking into the spoon’s mirror, I can study my face in its shiny bowl, or cover one eye to make half the world disappear.

With a spoon I can dig a tunnel to freedom, spoonful by spoonful of dirt, or waste life catching moonlight and flinging it into the blackest night.

-- Richard Jones

take YOUR self to a place ...

Take yourself to a place where tourists do not go.
Leave behind umbrellas, luggage, your address book, ID.
Take only what you can carry on your back.
If you are lucky, you will not return or, failing that, you will not return unchanged.
Take yourself into the woods where maps fail and there is no sound but the promising of rain.
Let your feet carry you to the entrance of a cave.
Sit there and listen, to what the cave will say.
Sit there. Listen.
It is for this moment that you were born.
It is for this moment that Life has called you to this place.
Sit. Listen.
Know your presence as your prayer.

-- Poet: Maureen Killoran

lest we forget :)

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
-- Aldous Huxley

believing is seeing :)

There is proof that God exists ...
who pops up the next Kleenex?

the story of the starfish [recently retold by my son to a group of students in the Phillipines]

A father found his son by the sea, where the tide had washed ashore hundreds of starfish. They would soon die of exposure.

His son was tossing the starfish, one at a time, back into the ocean. “Why do you bother?” the father asked his son, overwhelmed by the sheer number of starfish dying. “It won’t make any difference.”

His son stopped for a moment, looked at the starfish in his hand, and replied, “It will to this one.”

to be, or too busy to be

"Are you busy?" This is the standard work question I hear people asking one another. Or, to reverse it, the standard work answer to the question "How's it going?" is "Busy".

But it's not enough to be busy. So are ants, bees, and snails. The important questions are: What are you busy about? Who are you busy being?