Jacob served seven years for Rachel,
and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.


~Genesis 29:20

Here's an old army phrase I just saw;

"Always spend good money on your shoes and your bed, because if you're not in one you're in the other."

*Demonstrating my deeply philosophical side*

Quietly

By Kenneth Rexroth

Lying here quietly beside you,
My cheek against your firm, quiet thighs,
The calm music of Boccherini
Washing over us in the quiet,
As the sun leaves the housetops and goes
Out over the Pacific, quiet—
So quiet the sun moves beyond us,
So quiet as the sun always goes,
So quiet, our bodies, worn with the
Times and penances of love, our
Brains curled, quiet in their shells, dormant,
Our hearts slow, quiet, reliable
In their interlocked rhythms, the pulse
In your thigh caressing my cheek. Quiet.

The thing is

by Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Certain People

by Richard Jones

My father lives by the ocean
and drinks his morning coffee
in the full sun on his deck,
talking to anyone
who walks by on the beach.
And in the afternoons he works
part-time at the golf course–
sailing the fairways like sea captain
in a white golf cart.
My father must talk
to a hundred people a day,
yet we haven't spoken in weeks.
As I get older, we hardly speak at all.
It's as if he were a stranger
and we had never met.
I wonder, if I
were a tourist on the beach
or a golfer lost in woods
and met him now for the very first time,
what we'd say to each other,
how his hand would feel in mine
as we introduced ourselves,
and if, as is the case
with certain people, I'd feel,
when I looked him in the eye,
I'd known him all my life.

"Whatever one loves most is beautiful." --Sappho

Falling Leaves and Early Snow
by Kenneth Rexroth

In the years to come they will say,
"They fell like the leaves
In the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine."
November has come to the forest,
To the meadows where we picked the cyclamen.
The year fades with the white frost
On the brown sedge in the hazy meadows,
Where the deer tracks were black in the morning.
Ice forms in the shadows;
Disheveled maples hang over the water;
Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream.
Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold.
The yellow maple leaves eddy above them,
The glittering leaves of the cottonwood,
The olive, velvety alder leaves,
The scarlet dogwood leaves,
Most poignant of all.

In the afternoon thin blades of cloud
Move over the mountains;
The storm clouds follow them;
Fine rain falls without wind.
The forest is filled with wet resonant silence.
When the rain pauses the clouds
Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls.
In the evening the wind changes;
Snow falls in the sunset.
We stand in the snowy twilight
And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud.
Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight,
Glimmering with floating snow.
An owl cries in the sifting darkness.
The moon has a sheen like a glacier.

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend - or a meaningful day.(f)

~Dalai Lama

Each time you fall into the past or jump into the future you miss what is going on right now. Right now you have the opportunity to create a fresh new start. Release the past! Receive your good now. Trust that when you reach tomorrow, there will be nothing but good waiting for you.

~Iyanla Vanzant

“Even if it is only for a matter of moments, because those moments bring with them a love so intense that it justifies the rest of our days.” ― P Cicero




“The urge to jump into his arms and feel the warmth of them surrounding me is so powerful, I wonder if it's medically possible to be addicted to another human being.”― Simone Elkeles


“Everything that happens to you matters to me.” ― Unkown

"I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it." --Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense.

--mevlana jelaluddin rumi

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle,”

~ Ernest Hemingway

"The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea."
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home." ― James Joyce, Ulysses

"Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"
― James Joyce, The Dead

"Love loves to love love."
― James Joyce, Ulysses

"And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?"
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"If you like it, you'll find a way to justify it.
But if you don't , you'll find ways to falsify it."
― Toba Beta,

If you want to leave footprints in the sands of time, don't drag your feet. Annot L Sheppard


If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door. - Milton Berle

"Most people who judge a book by it's cover have difficulty reading."


You may have to endure some people speaking against you, but if you can stay on the high road, you will prove their criticism invalid. Joel Osteen

Try to be like the turtle-at ease in your own shell. Bill Copeland

“One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not. When it isn't there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient's body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: "Do you want your belly pressed against this person's belly forever --or not?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“It is the possibility that keeps me going, and though you may call me a dreamer or a fool or any other thing, I believe that anything is possible.”
― Nicholas Sparks

“When its gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.”
― Ian McEwan