Thoughts in a Garden (Reprise)

Perhaps optimism is a rosy interpretation of the facts -- or perhaps optimism is a factual interpretation of the rose.

I sit in my garden, gazing upon a beauty that cannot gaze upon itself, and I find sufficient purpose for my day.

Overnight it rained, and the wind shifted into the west, and this morning my garden is fresh in the sun, and its scent wafts through my window.  But if I sit in my garden, who will keep my appointment in town?  But if I keep my appointment in town, who will sit in my garden?

In every gardener there is a child who believes in The Seed Fairy.

I cultivate my garden, and my garden cultivates me.

It pleases me to take amateur photographs of my garden, and it pleases my garden to make my photographs look professional.

Why try to explain miracles to your kids when you can just have them plant a garden?

Words once heard:  "Many times Death has come for me, but finds me always in my beautiful garden, and leaves me there, I believe, as an excuse to return."

A child's garden is a triumph of hope over too much watering.

What is a gardener but a magician's assistant?

If you've never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden.

As a gardener, I am among those who believe that much of the evidence of God's existence has been planted.

If you believe that God is everywhere, then you might well look for Him in a church, but if you wonder if God is anywhere, then you might better look for Him in a garden.

Afterthoughts #1

 A milestone in life is the day the challenge of discovering who you really are is replaced by the challenge of being the person someone thinks they married.

The most basic strategy is to get time on your side.  The most basic tactic is to sit and wait.

Evidence: a body of facts insufficient to prove anything you don't already believe.

Truth: whatever justifies your advantage in life.  If you have no advantage in life, then everything is a lie. 

Reality: a set of default perceptions for people with no imagination

Nothing unites people in a tighter bond than denying the same obvious truth.

The painter has this in common with the golfer -- that both know how hard it is to apply a proper stroke to a still object.

First Love

From somewhere there came a harmony

Of trumpets and strings and saxes, 

And the planet seemed to be standng still.

'Twas I spinning on my axis.

Parting Wisdom {That's All Folks)

"Fate is a fancy name we give to the absence of a plan."

 Nothing strains a relationship like revealing a secret that is past its "best-if-revealed-by" date.

A domestic spat is a saga of streaming episodes without, unfortunately, a "Skip Recap" button.

"Maybe you're not the best person you can be, but you have the best shot at it."


"Life is a continuing attempt to overcome the personal shortcomings that make us likable."

"You can break up a marriage and remain friends.  It's a harder thing to break up a friendship and remain married."

"If you never eat a ripe banana until you finish the overripe ones, you will spend your life eating overripe bananas."

"The problem with living happily ever after is that it means the story's over."

Reflections Before A Mirror

Who be this stranger in my glass

This ghost from yesterday,

Whose battle scars I carry still,

Whose debts I must repay,

Whose trinkets fill my attic space,

Whose idle thoughts my brain,

Whose sins reside upon my soul,

Will someone please explain

How came this mortal coil to be

My final residence,

This house forever haunted by

Its previous occupant(s)? 

More From The Miscellany Bucket

What makes the daily moral clash between mind and body so challenging is that the body actually has no morals. 

It is hard to change someone's mind who believes it in their head bone. 

The intangibles of life not only bring the greater happiness, they require less closet space.

It is often wise, before giving up on a relationship, to try one more degree of separation.

Perhaps worse than never realizing your dream is never enjoying your consolations.

One of life's harder calls is whether someone who understands you is ready to hear the rest.

We Stayed Together For The Kids

We stayed together for the kids,

Two kids we barely knew,

Who once upon a moonlit night

Back when the world was new,

Resolved to love forevermore 

And stay forever true.

 

Wait...Say That Again

If you can remember it without tears, it wasn't happiness.

Ever wonder what history would look like if we stopped trying to force everything into chronological order?

 

It is probably true that everything we were taught as a child would be thrown out of a court of law as leading the witness. 

If today the world were perfect, with what aching nostalgia would we look back on the Age of Possibility. 

If God is an illusion, then I have this question -- can you have an illusion without an Illusionist? 

You can't look at the night sky without wondering how this tiny enterprise called Planet Earth will ever justify its overhead.

Thoughts on Hope, Old and New

You might, perhaps, give up on yourself, but would you so easily give up on others in your life you care deeply about? And might that be the secret to sustaining hope -- each of us being another's hope? I will not give up on you if you will not give up on me.  

Hope is not a plan, but without hope, nothing else is a plan, either.

Why would you chase a hopeless dream?  Perhaps for the dream. Perhaps for the chase.  Perhaps to meet another hopeless dreamer.

What does a lifetime of hope give you?  It gives you a hopeful life, and in the end, what more can you hope for?

And No One The Wiser

 It is now 65 years since I published my first "aphorism," thus striking off on the tangent that became a life's journey. I had, at the start, a high opinion of the aphorism as an art form, characterizing it as 

"A single sentence that totally exhausts its subject."  

In later years, I became a bit less reverent of the genre, offering the following observation:

"The aphorist finds in every truth a wise saying and in every contradiction -- two wise sayings."

And today, in the clarity of old age, I offer two candid assessments, including a definition of the word  "aphorism" that I suspect will prove definitive:

"One is more apt to become wise by doing fool things than by reading wise sayings."

"Aphorism:  a truth trivialized by cleverness."

Don't say you weren't warned. (smile)

Sunday Sermonettes

There resides in the human soul a sense of unworthiness, which, if you deny the existence of a Higher Good, raises the question,, "Compared to what?"

What you know for sure about someone qualified to speak for God is that you are equally qualified.

It is always the good who judge themselves.  The wicked know enough to ask for a jury.

 

A religious belief can be true although all who proclaim it publicly privately doubt it; indeed when all who proclaim it publicly are hypocrites. 

There are the truths you try to live by and the lies that make it possible.

Mind Droppings

 If there is a lesson to be learned from reading biographies, it is that no one enters this life with a plan.

To know all the facts about anyone is to be considerably more informed on the subject than they are.

It is always the member last admitted who believes that standards for membership should now be raised.

Many a high school drop-out believes in a God who is all-knowing, but few believe in a God who is better educated.

You will never change someone's mind who regards everything you tell them as a nefarious plot to change their mind.

If you believe that there is only so much wealth to go around, you will eventually believe that there is only so much freedom to go around.

If there's one thing evil does well, and good not so well, it is to establish societies for its preservation. 

It is the goal of the unjust not to defy the law but to become the law.

Thoughts at Age 86+

 "To be beautiful, you need only be beautiful in someone's eyes, and it continually amazes how little actual beauty that requires."

"It is hard, when you discover that someone can't handle the truth, not to keep telling it to them."


"There is a point in getting to know you when people come to understand you, but how do you tell them to stop right there?"


"I shudder to think...which is why I have largely given up the practice."


"Sometimes it seems like you've spent your whole life preparing for an inspection that never happened."

"Life never tires of testing the proposition that life must go on."


"It always surprises how much of any human emotion is just time that needs to go by."

The Daily Battle

 "Remember this -- that you are exceptional, no matter how hard the requirements of everyday living try to make you average."

I, My Shadow

This Sun you speak of, my shadow asks,

This invisible light in the skies,

Why does it never reveal itself?

Why does it hide from my eyes?

This Heavenly Thing that created me,

This lantern somewhere above,

Why do I never feel its warmth?

Where, for me, is its love?

And what to a shadow does it mean

 To be born of some mystical Light,

If only to fade at the end of the day

And vanish into the night?

Monday's Child

A poem written in the final days of the 2nd Iraq War

"Monday's child is fair of face..."

She cradled in her soft embrace
her Monday's child, fair of face,
a winsome brown-eyed baby boy,
in all her life no greater joy.

She watched him grow, a handsome lad,
so much the image of his dad
that neighbors called him little Bill,
but he, he could not wait until --

-- the day he turned a bare eighteen
to march away, a proud Marine
to follow his commander's voice
and fight the latest war of choice.

They brought him home, his face disguised.
To glance beneath was not advised.
She smothered in a last embrace
her Monday's child, fair of face.

-- Robert Brault

Immortality

Would you really want to be immortal -- to live forever in this life with no chance of escape? Is it even possible to remain sane before such a prospect?  Besides which, what crime did you commit that you should be sentenced to life with no possibility of parole?  

More Common Sense From Mom

O, how much wiser I would be

If I could sit me on my knee

And pat myself upon the head

And say the words my mother said.

"My son," she said, so lovingly,

"You mustn't sit you on your knee.

You'll dislocate your lower back

And strain your sacroiliac."

Mental Maunderings

 "If every individual on earth were perfectly objective, would there be such a thing as an individual?"

"What if instead of a parallel universe, there were a perpendicular universe?  Discuss."

Did you know that the Washington Monument was named after Abraham Lincoln? That's right -- Lincoln was named in 1809; the Washington Monument wasn't named until 1888.  

"Why does every person now living think they are going to die when no person now living ever has?"

If you can say, "She sells seashells by the seashore," why is it so hard to say, "I'm sorry." 

Just Saying

  "Most sinners know who their forgivers will be, and that, more than anything, is what makes it a sin."

Nothing is more difficult, after you say, "I love you," than explaining what you didn't mean by it.

Yours Truly in The Quote Garden

The Quote Garden website contains hundreds of my quotes.  Here are a few I especially like.

"Gratitude, friendship, respect -- funny how it's never called loyalty when there's actually a reason for it."

"When you are one of the pieces, it doesn't seem like a game."

"It is easier to be the hero of the moment than the hero of every drudging hour and every grinding day."

"When everybody knows the shortcut, the long way around is the shortcut."

"In the best of relationships you have two people who cannot think of anything that was not part of the deal."

That Daily Grind Again

It's a tricky thing -- knowing the life you want to live, knowing what makes it possible and not letting what makes it possible keep you from living it.

 

There are people who, if they chased a butterfly, it would take them to the office.

A good thing to remember is that it's not usually your employer who writes your obituary.

Never postpone taking a vacation thinking you won't get another chance to postpone taking  a vacation.

The City of Happiness

"Most of us, in our life's journey, never reach the City of Happiness, not because its environs are forbidding but because they are inviting, and so we settle in East Happiness or West Happiness." 

~~ from A Few For The Road 

Bumper Stickers

"This vehicle decelerates in the passing lane."

"Turn signal not a guarantee of future performance."


"I stop for flashing blue lights."

"Driver of the Month -- August 1956"


"My son is an honor student at Ed's Online University."


"This car climbed Death Valley."



 
A Bonus Thought 
 

"Having a monthly subscription payment taken directly from your bank account is not only a convenience but, after death, a form of immortality."

Best Friend

You were always the person I'd run to

To tell of some news that I'd heard,

The person I'd always turn to

When life started getting absurd.

You were the one I could run to,

You were the friend  'round the  bend

Who'd always come up with a reason 

Why all would be well in the end.

 You were the person I'd run to,

You were the place I could hide,

Until that day you were suddenly gone...

 ...And I ran to tell you who died.

 

https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/

Time

Time -- that which reveals all lies, revises all forecasts and renders inadequate all excuses.

 

No matter how you rush about, you will notice at the end of the day that you traveled at the speed of time.

  

Nothing lasts forever, although we often underestimate how long it will last in the meantime.

I live on a tiny planet orbiting a minor star.  Each time the planet completes an orbit, I count off a segment of my life.  Why do I do this?  I dunno, it passes the time.

~~ from Short Thoughts For The Long Haul

The Daily Grind

 "There are days when you feel that if you walked down the street in a clown costume, no one would recall seeing anyone in a clown costume."

 

"There is no actual law that says you can't get locked into a daily routine that makes you happy."

"Whatever you're trying to prove, it's good occasionally to spend a day not trying to prove it."

"Never let anything ruin your day that is not on the list of things you will let ruin your day."

~~ from Reflections 

Ah, Contentment!

"If you would find a truly contented person in this world, it would likely be someone no one thinks to envy, who seeks no attention, invites no comparison, whose contentment is their own private business."

 

"Is it surrender, or is it to find contentment -- to be happy with your consolations."

"The key to contentment is the same as the key to worry and anxiety -- you must learn to make a big deal out of nothing."

"Contentment is that rare moment when you forget what you deserve and let what you have be enough."

~~ from A Few For The Road

Memories

 "We speak of creating happy memories, only to discover that all memories are sad.  It is only a question of whether the sadness is bitter or sweet."

 

"What we envy about the folks in an old family photo is not so much the life they lived as the future they imagined."

"The hardest thing about reliving the past

Is reassembling the original cast."

~~ from A Few For The Road