Ben Howard - "Old Pine"

Take a Risk

"I waited at home in my own comfort zone. Thought my life was planned out already set in stone. I ran from love with no goodbyes not even trying. So I crossed an ocean. Climbed the mountains. Quit some things in life and threw pennies in fountains. I fell in love. Told some goodbyes. Oh, now I'm trying.
 
Tell me you tried. Tell me you dropped out. Tell me your lies. Tell me you left town. Tell me you fell in love with a girl and you don't know why. Tell me you gave risk a try.

Now, I'm gonna travel all over. Play my love songs for her. Hold my child close to me while he weeps on my shoulder. So baby boy, please don't cry. You're the reason why I am giving risk a try.

Tell me you tried. Tell me you dropped out. Tell me your lies. Tell me you left town. Tell me you fell in love with a girl and you don't know why. Tell me you gave risk a try.

'So take the rocky road,
that leads you far from home.
The comforts now in life will only upset your soul.
Live your dream. Change your life.
Take a risk and try.'"

"Take a Risk"
by Sean Bruce
from his album Daytime Hopes

Lawyer -->Wilderness Instructor

"On New year's Day 2010, my two-year old son broke his femur in a skiing accident while we were vacationing in Lander. I spent eight weeks there while he recovered, thinking about life. For a decade, I'd been moving up the law-firm ladder in California and relegating what I really love - climbing - to the weekends. My husband and I decided to just stay in Wyoming, and I started looking for work with an organization whose mission matched my core values. I applied for a n internship with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) as a blogger. Within a few months I was hired as a writer, and this summer I became the diversity-and-inclusion manager and trained to lead wilderness courses. NOLS is flexible with schedules, and we're encouraged to spend nice days skiing, climbing, or running. Some meetings happen on bycycles. I make a fifth of what I made as a lawyer, but I'm at least five times happier. I'm climbing four days a week, and I play with my son outside every day."

-Aparna Rajagopal-Durbin - as told to Michael Roberts
Outside Magazine (September 2011)

In Music...

Super 8

Experiences vs. Possessions

"The cheapskate next door knows something that numerous social scientists have confirmed, including Ryan Howell, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University. Howell’s research not only supports the idea that spending to create life experiences, as opposed to accumulating more possessions, makes us happier; his findings also show that the relative amount we spend on those experiences doesn’t directly impact the level of happiness they provide. A $27 dinner, for example, can bring the same amount of happiness as a $400 weekend getaway.

So the important thing is not how much we spend on an experience – assuming it costs anything at all – but rather that we make the effort to have them. For that, of course, we need time. That’s why, as discussed before, the cheapskate next door values his time and what he can do with it more than money and the stuff he can buy with it.

When I speak to groups about the virtues of the cheapskate lifestyle, I like to ask the adults in the audience how many birthday and holiday gifts from their childhood they remember, and how many of those gifts they still own today. The answer is usually just a couple, at most, of the countless gifts most of us were showered with when we were kids.

Then I ask them how many memories from those same special occasions they remember and cherish even more with each passing year. You can see the light bulbs coming on. As the cheapskates next door know, possessions tend to disappoint and become less valuable over time, while experiences often retain or even increase in value with age."

Jeff Yeager
The Cheapskate Next Door

being human

But there does need to be a new realization that being human is something great, a great challenge, to which the banality of just drifting along doesn't do justice. Any more than the attitude that comfort is the best way to live, that feeling healthy is the sum and substance of happiness. There needs to be a new sense that being human is subject to a higher set of standards, indeed, that it is precisely these demands that make a greater happiness possible in the first place. There needs to be a sense that being human is like a mountain-climbing expedition that includes some arduous slopes. But it is by them that we reach the summit and are able to experience for the first time how beautiful it is to be. Emphasizing this is a particular concern to me."

-Pope Benedict XVI
Light of the World

Full Moon

"I wish to be like the moon . . .

A beautiful reflection of the Son."

Photo and Quote by Janenne deClouet

Reality of Progress

"Q: 'God saw everything that he had made,' the Book of Genesis says, 'and behold, it was very good.' It is frightening , then, what has meanwhile become of this dream of a planet. The question is this: Is the earth quite simply not sustaining the enormous developmental potential of our species? Is it perhaps not designed at all for us to remain here in the long run? Or are we doing something wrong here?
Answer:

Light of the World

Family Matters

“The home is (or should be) the primary and the most natural environment in which love is given and received. The love and unity of the family serves as the foundation for the growth of the children, providing a sense of identity, peace, trust, openness, and joy that will prepare them to take their place in society. Small acts of thoughtfulness to those closest to us make them feel welcome, accepted, worthy, and appreciated. The home offers ample opportunities for sharing joys, bearing hardships together, providing support in suffering, putting oneself at the disposal of others, seeking not to be served but rather to serve – all expressions of love. Where ‘tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule,’ the family, both parents and children, will grow in holiness.”

Where There is Love There is God

If i ever get the nerve to say hello in this cafe...

Black Rice

Getting your antioxidants from fresh berries can be pricey. A new report from scientists at Louisiana State University shows black rice is higher than blueberries in the powerful free-radical buster anthocyanin – while supplying more vitamin E and fiber. SWAP IT FOR: instant rice, white rice, or brown rice.  

Gethsemane

Every soul can at least dimly understand the nature of the struggle that took place on the moonlit night in the garden of Gethsemane. Every heart knows something about it. No one has ever come to the twenties – let alone to the forties, or the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies of life – without reflecting with some degree of seriousness on himself and the world round about him, and without knowing the terrible tension that has been caused in his soul by sin. Faults and follies do not efface themselves from the record of memory; sleeping tablets do not silence them; psychoanalysts cannot explain them away. The brightness of youth may make them fade into some dim outline, but there are times of silence – on a sick bed, sleepless nights, the open seas, a moment of quiet, the innocence in the face of a child – when these sins, like specters or phantoms, blaze their unrelenting characters of fire upon our consciences. Their force might not have been realized in a moment of passion, but conscience is biding its time and will bear its stern uncompromising witness sometime, somewhere, and force a dread upon the soul that ought to make it cast itself back again to God. Terrible though the agonies and tortures of a single soul be, they were only a drop in the ocean of humanity’s guilt which the Savior felt as his own in the Garden.

Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ

Style

“Stylish men move just a heartbeat more slowly than the ho-hum majority. Your Uncle Ned is fidgety; Cary Grant was graceful and at ease. Woody Allen is frantic; Johnny Depp, even as the gaudy Captain Jack, seems to have a private cadence in his head. Style moves with dispatch, but never rushes. It doesn’t scurry or blurt things out. Its wisdom won’t wilt while waiting. The wile known as style may require a barely-there across-the-board deceleration. Walk just a little less quickly. Talk as though people will give your thoughts some time. Never hurry wine into a glass, or beer into a mug.  Even loosen your tie with a languor. Style savors the journey, not just the destination. Remember the age-old wisdom: He who has command of others is powerful, but he who has command of himself is mighty.”

-Hugh O’Neill

...making the world more human and more fraternal.

"It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal."

Pope John Paul II, World Youth Day, Rome 2000

Awake My Soul

Morning Prayer

O, Holy Spirit, beloved of my soul, I adore You. Enlighten me, guide me, strengthen me, console me. Tell me what I should do. Give me your orders. I promise to submit myself to all that You desire of me and to accept all that you permit to happen to me. Let me only know Your will.