Author: itoccurstocp

From Leisure, by W. H. Davies, a more poetic version of “stop and smell the roses:”

“A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.”

Indeed, I don’t “stand and stare” enough.  I find a camera in hand helps.  Well, in any event, here’s to standing and staring.  And as a bonus, have you ever noticed that if you stand still and stare at something (and especially if you do so with a camera at the ready) people will do the same to see what you are staring at.  It’s as if we are all eager to find something to “stand and stare” at, but perhaps a bit lazy, so we want to take our prompts from others – which, circles back to Davies’ poem.

In Deep Is The Hunger Howard Thurman delves into knowledge and wisdom, causing me, it seems, to really consider for the first time the distinction between the two.  [Okay, I may be a little slow to the class.]

Thurman notes this reality:

“It is a simple but terrible truth that, in most fundamental decisions we make, we must act on the basis of evidence that is not quite conclusive.  We must decide and act on our decision without having complete knowledge even of the facts that are involved.  What we do is postpone decisions as long as we can, getting before us as many relevant facts as possible.  Then there comes the moment of decision and we act.  Our hope is that the future will reveal the rightness of our decision but we are never quite sure.”

What Thurman is talking about there is knowledge, facts.  But he continues:

“Since, at our best, we must act again and again on the basis of inadequate evidence, it is quite unworthy of our responsibility as human beings to use less than our highest wisdom in making up our minds.”

There it is, the subtle shift from knowledge to wisdom.  He continues:

“There is no guarantee that the decision I make will not, in the end, form a mistake, a bad judgment, a movement in error.  But I shall bring to bear upon it the fruits of my cumulative wisdom in living, the light from as many lamps along the way as I can see, and the greatest spiritual resources available to me.”

I love that phrase – “the light from as many lamps along the way as I can see….” 

It occurs to me that the “fruits of my cumulative wisdom,” those lights from the “lamps along the way” come from many sources — our past experience, from other folks, from something we read, some song we have heard, from something in nature….  Sometimes those fruits, those lights just appear without us knowing the source (“the greatest spiritual resources”?).  It is when we mix what we know with those life experiences, that fruit and light from within, from without, and from who knows where, that we start to have some sense of the word “wisdom.”

Photo taken recently in Galveston. Text is an excerpt from a Mary Oliver favorite.

Recently pondering the effects of the pandemic while looking down at my desk.

Photo taken in the front yard on a recent full moon night.

Photo taken of the newly painted wall at Curra’s on Duval.

Going through some things this morning I ran across this sent to me by my late friend, Jim Mulford, and it hung with me as it does each time I read it.  I’ve never really been able to comment on it because it seems that it says everything that need be said on the issue, and while that often doesn’t keep me from commenting on something, here it always has:

“I blinked and I am nearing the end.

Sometimes I just want to shout: ‘Pay attention to now, exercise some discipline in your life, love somebody hard, keep yourself fit.’

It seems we think that way only when it is too late to do anything about it, or maybe that’s too self-revealing.

And yet, we carry on and do some good.”

From my friend Steve Kinney:

“It is indeed better to give than receive, but before we can give, we have to receive.”

Easy to forget that absent receipt we got nothin’.  We arrive on and depart this mortal coil empty handed, which strongly suggests that the focus should be on what we receive, not what we have; not on what we got, but how we got it, from whom.  Of course, what can be the uncomfortable aspect of that line of thinking is that (we get circular here) it is easy to forget that absent receipt, we got nothin’.  In short: “In everything give thanks.” 1 Thessalonians 5:18

Another of those accidental photos, though this one I can identify as the fabric on a chair i regularly sit at in my room at home. I ran across the quote recently and haven’t been able to convince myself otherwise.

Photo taken some years back at an exhibit at the Houston Museum of Art, can’t recall the artist’s name. It seemed to fit the Wendell Berry quote I recently ran across.