One Will Never Experience Or Know Everything

Life Encompassed

How often I have said,
“This will never do,”
Of ways of feeling that now
I trust in, and pursue!

Do traverses tramped in the past,
My own, criss-crossed as I forge
Across from another quarter
Speak of a life encompassed?

Well, life is not research.
No one asks you to map the terrain,
Only to get across it
In new ways, time and again.

How many such, even now,
I dismiss out of hand
As not to my purpose, not
Unknown, just unexamined.

Donald Davie from Collected Poems

Mark Jarman, in Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry, comments: This poem reminds me of the limitations of critical understanding and opinion, and also of the importance and necessity of growth in the life of the mind.

Happiness Is In The Heart, Not In The Circumstances.

Happiness is in the heart, not in the circumstances.

It’s Not a Slam at You

It’s not a slam at you when people are rude—it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.

Some people grin and bear it; others smile and do it.

Some people grin and bear it; others smile and do it.

Annie Lamott on Hate

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

--Annie Lamott Traveling Mercies; although on page 22 of Bird by Bird she attributes this quote to "my priest friend Tom"

The Car Salesman's Story

Jesus had only one face. When we show different sides of ourselves to different people, we become two-faced at the very least. When we lack integrity, we find ourselves being several people, depending on the circumstance. We subdivide our lives and justify our differing value systems based on the context. Our character becomes a product to be sold. We become personality salesmen rather than people of substance.

Once Kim was considering buying a red car. It was amazing how quickly the salesman began to share with us his story of how his wife was at first apprehensive when he bought her a red car, but overnight she came to love it. Kim, in her unflappable way, looked at him and said, “If I was considering a blue car, would it have been a blue car your wife had come to love?” (p. 72)

--From Uprising: A Revolution of the Soul by Erwin Raphael McManus