Life
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Seeing
I dropped my cell into the cup holder and jumped into the great unknown – untethered, unplugged. Suddenly face to face with the human crossword puzzle of an American Mall. And without my phone (and not being too dramatic), it had a radically different feel – a 1970s vibe, just people with people, walking and…
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Our Deeper Natures
You see it in the tattoos: arms and legs and necks inked with a chaotic array of snakes, crosses, dragons, roman numerals, hearts – the usual symbols screaming: “I am unique, dammit! And virile! Daring, sexy and intense!” But, no. Not really. You are, in fact, just one of billions looking for affirmation: “I have a reason…
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Summer, 1990
What I saw was this: Across the room, her body draped across his, bed sheets wrapped around legs. Her face smiling, defiant. His sheepish, triumphant. I wasn’t shocked or embarrassed, this was my summer on the Left Bank after all. Naked bodies lolling in old apartments was why I crossed the Atlantic. These things happened in…
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Knock on Wood
I have socks with an L and R on them. I don’t really understand the difference. L on the R, or R on the L feels about the same. Still, I want the left sock, the L, to unroll first in the morning. My superstition: if the L presents first, it will be a lucky…
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Bucket List
our end timesa noisy bar or concertcraft beer in handsnake tatted armsselfies posted to the ether. here, then gonenot fixed, justsplayed, surfaceghosts riding barrelsin muck grey waterbuttocks upturnedfaces strained, redyelling into windbobbing, bobbing drowning – by MJB
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Inspiration
Inspiration comes unexpectedly. Something causes a stir, and life – the potential of life – seems unbounded. It is limbic, not planned or purchased; raw at its origin. What we do with it is up to us. Neil Young was once asked: how do you create a song, how do you get the idea for something?…
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Granite
A time, a trip: My 1968 red VW Bug, metal bumper askew, cassette tape wedged into the glove compartment, Zepplin growling from back speakers. I’m winding my way 120 East, up Old Priest Grade, through Big Oak Flat, Groveland, Buck Meadows and into Yosemite. The hills broadening, trees larger and greener – sugar pines fragrant.…
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Natural Value
As the world becomes more virtual, and thereby less real, our physical world gains in stature. I reflected on this as I walked through my neighborhood today. Spring was – literally – in full bloom. Purple and yellow, ruby and orange, white, black, pink, blue and green were painting the sidewalks in a thousand different…
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Voices
The rise of schizophrenia on the streets. Here’s one: walking bow-legged down the sidewalk, compressed torso, broad grin; making slow progress, step by lurching step, mumbling to the (at the moment) friendly voice. And another: white painted face, not the clean lines of the professional mime, but roughly splotched about the face, like an abstract…
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Speaking Out
I travel constantly. And in my travels (the regional airline now Greyhound Bus for the masses), I see many things, not least of which the shifting norms of human behavior. For example, the notion of privacy has changed dramatically in the last decade. Previously, you’d take a call privately – i.e., you’d hold a phone…
Words to Live By
One evening I saw a red sunset, its rays falling on the trunks and foliage of pines growing among a tumble of rocks, coloring the trunks and foliage with orange fire. It was superb.
— Vincent van Gogh
Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation . . .
— Albert Einstein
Learning is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
— T. H. White
It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute.
— Thomas Wolfe
I’m not saying ability doesn’t matter. It certainly helps. But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself — that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability.
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
— Simone de Beauvoir
Learning is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
— T. H. White
We read to know we are not alone.
— C.S. Lewis
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
— Albert Camus
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
— Simone Weil
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
— Simone de Beauvoir
There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now; And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
— Walt Whitman
Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
The process: sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the flow of the narrative on track — requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine.
— Haruki Murakami
Man is nothing other than his own project. He exists only to the extent that he realizes himself, therefore he is nothing more than the sum of his actions, nothing more than his life.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe