Author: itoccurstocp

Photo taken in my front yard — the sunflower I “have to” pass by to make it from the front door to the street. Text from Jane Steger – Leaves From a Secret Journal

Photo taken in Galveston earlier this year. Sometimes the words just clutter up a good photo.

Photo taken of the outdoor sculpture at the newly rennovated grounds outside the Blanton Museum in Austin. Text from Parker J. Palmer on The Growing Edge podcast.

“We know that God is constantly touching our hearts, and we realize with our minds that as He speaks to us so He must speak also to other people. If we would not only realize this with your minds, but take it into our very hearts and live it passionately, it might teach us how, in deed and in truth, to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

“…as he speaks to us so He must speak also to other people.”

Wait, He speaks to them too!

Photo taken on yesterday’s run. Even grey skies can have some photographic appeal.

One line today jumped out of a poem I was reading – Minor Seventh by Jeffrey Bean:

“The wheeze of progress.”

Indeed, “wheeze” seems to be the correct word.  Not “flow” or even the more neutral “occur.”  Progress seems, by nature, to be full of fits and starts, of frenetic activity that results in the “wheeze.”

From Jane Steger, Leaves From A Secret Journal:

There is a wide other world within, deep harbors of thought, marvelous seas from contemplation, waiting to be explored. It is well that someone should explore in this cheap and surface age, when most people are running over the ground as fast as they can in motors, listening over radio, and rarely take time to think about anything for themselves.”

In the “the more things change, the more they remain the same” category, Steger wrote that around 100 years ago (the publication date is 1926).  Well, okay, we aren’t “listening over radio” so much anymore. But beyond that…

From Jane Steger, Leaves From a Secret Journal. That this book (1926) is nearly 100 years old is of no significance – it passes along wisdomm for the ages.

“…something pleasant happens every day, something to make one really happy…. All the years of my life I have let this fact blow about, as it were, on the dust heap of my mind, unnoticed, and now suddenly it has risen up as a thing which is amazing…. [O]ften it {is} not one treasure ship, but a whole lovely fleet of them sailing in….

Life is full of these pleasant truths, which we all really know, but which are so common that the wonder of them has worn off them, and so we do not take them in. I suppose we fail in this respect becuase we let ourselves become encased in a sort of dull hard shell of everydayness, through which it is hard for the “gift of wonder” to penetrate.”

Just while typing this I noticed that the potted yellow lantana outside my window has survived the winter freeze. And while taking in that resurection a squirrel jumped onto the patio and looked in at me while I at it, and somehow, there was a connection.

And as I write this it isn’t even 8:00.

Photo recently takenn on a run. Text from Pema Chodron.

Photo taken of an interesting light pattern on a wall in my home office.