Monday, December 31, 2018

Life Inside The Sane Asylum...last post 2018


Window of Life

“I stand before the window of life,
Tall & strong, chin held high.
Stripped of my defenses,
Clothed in my pride.
Naked to all,
Revealed to none.”

”Where new friends come,
And old friends stay
To listen to my tales of
adventure and strife.
While i stand my post
at the window of life...”

May all your journeys in 2019 bring you ease...if by chance it should take you in the wrong direction, don’t forget to adjust your sails...Doc

Sunday, December 23, 2018

Inside The Sane Asylum...Jeffery’s Asylum

Journal Entry: 12/22/18
Jeffery’s  Asylum

I think most people like the idea of The Sane Asylum. I’ve never really asked that question out right, but when I tell people my hobby is my Blog, writing about life Inside The Sane Asylum, they nod and smile. When I tell them that the author of the blog is Dr. Ego Prozac, they nod and smile.

So I can tell, from their demeanor, they like the idea, they just don’t know what to say...so they just nod and smile. And all of that is fine with me, I just nod and smile back and say, “look me up sometimes”. They nod and smile. It came to me the other day that I am doing nothing more than entertaining myself with some nods and smiles. And that’s also ok with me.

There is this theory going around, that one day Sane behaviors will be considered Insane behaviors...as in... no one does that anymore. So the thought came to me that one day we may be locked away for our Sane behaviors. Locked away in a Sane Asylum.

Nothing like being proactive, so I just went ahead and established my Sane Asylum. The Asylum itself has no form but it has no boundaries either. No description really, other than what I might give it. “Then what is it” you say?

It is nothing more than the preservation of distinctions I make about  living. Perhaps it extends into my beliefs.  I’m quiet sure it does, for through the past three score and twelve years, many of my beliefs have changed and they continue changing as I make more distinctions about living, about relationships, peace, war, gods, demons and the like.

So I guess you could say that my Sane Asylum is nothing more than my consciousness, just as it is yours. That place where one can go to observe themselves in this world and give behaviors meaning...The Observer of  behavior in this world...called, consciously living.

Christopher Bryson, tells a story of one man’s Asylum. His name was Jeffery, as I recall.

”A man that has been everywhere, as he starts his story...a man that knows everything about music and about food. He’ll ask you what you like as you pass him by, then he’ll ask you why? He’s not always good with eye contact, but he’s friendly, humorous, and engaging. He sings to himself. Sometimes, he talks to himself. Sometimes he is loud. He minds his own business. He hurts nobody...

I see Jeffery almost every morning. He hangs at the corner bodega, or paces the block to the bar. It's a short stretch, but you'll usually find him on it, or sitting a stoop, or the bench at Buffa's. I hadn't seen him in a few days and found out this morning that he had been beaten to death by three men-unrecognizable. It was bad.

Sometimes, Jeffery scolds himself. Loudly. My hunch is that the men thought he was talking to them, and didn't take the time to get any answers before they engaged him, before they beat him.”

He's been everywhere, man. He's been everywhere. That's how it is this morning in The Sane Asylum...Doc

Footnote: Maybe  The Sane Asylum is nothing more than a preservation site for those of Sound Mind. It's not so much that this Blog Spot creates the preservation site, but it is you making the distinction, that there are a lot of characters out there like you and I, just trying to make peace with ourselves  and get along with it all. It is important that we keep making that distinction!

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Entry Note To Self...2018

Last Entry Note To Self...2018
Journal Entry:  12/19/18



It’s hard to believe another year is pulling down It’s evening shades. Looking back, I have wandered about in adventure, and wondered with adventure in my mind. I have Scribbled in my personal journal, of sorts, and along the journey I have captured a few pictures that still frame my mind. Especially those that captured the essence in a special moment.

New friends I have been blessed with and ole friends I have loved. I have stood up for beliefs when I felt it right to do so. I have seen things that took my breath away and others that troubled me well into the night. I have stopped and asked questions to strangers, and not at all a surprise, their answers changed my life. I saw Goodness in so many that it has lead me to believe, that deep down, there must be a little shred of good in us all.

We are simple joy, we are unashamed laughter. Will we stay this way? Seems some dances may never end...

Thank you for this strong veil of friendship we have created, if nothing more than the shear validation that we are here.  Some say we are just imaginary friends in a grand social experiment, but just to see another take in the good for being cared about or the goodness in your thought word or deed, reflects positive intentions of kindness no matter what we call ourselves. Maybe there needs to be a new word for these connections?

Each person I met along the way became a part of me and in a sense will always be a part of each of us. Knowing our own goodness, we are more able to recognize it in others. Seeing the good in ourselves and others, we are more likely to do what we can to build the good in the world we share together.

Because I know that I don't always get it right, and that not everything I pen is great, I just wanted to quite genuinely say: thank you. Whether you read everything or almost nothing, it all means more than you know.

I'm not sure why I started writing almost four years ago, and I still don't know where I'm going. But it's all been strange. And interesting. And meaningful. And humbling. I may not have known why I wanted to scribble back then but I definitely thought I had something to say. I now know that I don't. And I guess that's progress.

So I make my final entry and close my Personal Journal, Of Sorts, and push it aside until the morning breaks a new... wishing you and yours a spirit of ease.

”Once we fly in our dreams, our walk in life will never be the same...thank you! Best wishes” ...Doc

Monday, December 17, 2018

Entry Note To Self... enlightenment

"It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go."


Thursday, December 13, 2018

Inside The Sane Asylum...waiting

Waiting
Journal Entry: 12/13/18

Today, I had to wait for 45 minutes for something in a waiting room full of people. To most people, that may sound quite tedious. However, I didn’t mind. I like waiting. I know... that is strange. But I really do.

Why do I like waiting? Older people are just good at waiting. We don’t mind, or we don’t show that we mind, to a point. If we do mind or get to the point when we start minding, we complain, but only in a very jolly sarcastic way. We complain with humor. We complain apologetically. That is, if we complain at all. Mostly, we just put up and shut up.

Now I have my reasons. Firstly, if I am waiting then I am not engaged in real life. This is especially so if I have no phone signal (as was the case today). Nobody can get hold of me while I am waiting. They can wait. Bliss.

Secondly, waiting gives me thinking space. All I can do is think while I wait. Thinking is healthy. We all should stop and just think now and then. It’s amazing what your mind can come up with if left with it’s own vices.

Thirdly, I love reading really old copies of Women’s Weekly. Who doesn’t? I wonder what happen to all the old Readers Digest?

Fourthly, I love reading the random signs and notices that are always present in places of waiting: the adverts for coping with dementia, what to do if you think you have an STD, how much water you should drink a day, where the local support group for people with random unusual disease meet or the signs that tell you ‘please be patient if you have been waiting a long time’.

Finally, and most importantly, I love people watching and eavesdropping on those people. So for me, waiting is like being in the Frozen Frog Yogurt shop.

Today, while waiting, I heard all about one woman’s issues renovating her house and what happened when a curtain rod fell down on her sleeping husband during the night. I helped an elderly lady of 85 work out what day it was. I amused a random man with my desperate need to know more about a ‘Tilt Test’. He asked the receptionist for me, she wasn’t sure. I exchanged mutual society horror stories with a lady called Julie . I watched as a doddery old man with a thatched head of pure white hair called John, (the man, not the hair) as he was called into his appointment. I observed a lady called Florence amble past to her appointment shortly after John. I created a life for her in my head, (lives in the country, higgldy piggldy house, too many books and cats, loves Walmart, eats a lot of potato chips). I saw a youngish man called Paul with a funny hat get called into his appointment. I amused a random couple with my grammatical pedantry.

If only I had my sketch pad today. The adventures my pen and I would have told. As it were, I decided that an hour in a random waiting room would make for a great Broadway play or a Samuel Beckett story. It was an existentialist’s dream- waiting for something you don’t want to experience, and waiting patiently at that, and more importantly, being forced to consider your mortality and meaning on this planet while waiting for that thing you don’t want to happen. Arguably, there isn’t anything more existential than that.

When my time waiting came to an end, 45 minutes after it began, I hate to admit it but I was sad. For I will miss my new friends: John, Julie, Florence and Paul to name but a few. Perhaps our paths will cross again, in another waiting room somewhere else?

P.S. hope you like my Andy Warhol selfie???
Waiting Patiently...Doc


Entry Note To Self...the offering


Once upon a time men took into your temple the first fruits of their harvests, the flower of their flocks. But the offering you really want, the offering you mysteriously need every day to appease your hunger, to shake your thirst is nothing less than the growth of the world borne ever onwards in the stream of universal becoming. Teilhard de Chardin, “Mass on the World”

Journal Entry: 12/12/18

Wishing you peace and joy this special time of year. Enjoy your adventure...Doc

Entry Note To Self...the art of living

Journal Entry: 12/12/18
The Art Of Living

How we choose what we do, and how we approach it…will determine whether the sum of our days adds up to a formless blur, or to something resembling a work of art.
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi


All of us must make fundamental life choices and decide what is most valuable to us. We may opt for a life of reason and knowledge; one of faith and discipline; one of nature and freedom; one of community and altruism; or one of originality and style. We may even choose to live our lives as though they were works of art. In every case, hard work is required: Our lives are not just given to us, but need to be made. To live well is, in fact, to practice an art of living. The ways in which we find meaning, make fundamental life choices, and construct beautiful and well-lived lives for ourselves is an art form just as much as any beautiful painting.

We know what it means for a painting to be beautiful. But what about a life? Like great works of art, great people exhibit style, originality, and creativity. Maybe, then, to live well is just to practice an ART of living. But what should the values be that are important to a good life? Experiencing joyful moments, moral goodness, or friendship, for example – Are these not qualities of aesthetic beauty? Are the qualities that make a work of art good, that different from the qualities that make a life good? Is there really such thing as a "beautiful" life?

Image by: Dado

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Reflections From The World

“I’m feeling rather cynical this morning.”


Strasser was the art critic for a small public radio station in upstate New York. He always arrived at the gallery early to avoid the annoying pretentious crowds that he felt always came to these openings. He looked at the white on white that was the interior of the gallery and wondered if perhaps there was something he was not getting. Was it art? While standing there contemplating the work, it hit him. My god, he thought, it is the nature of unlimited possibilities, the unwritten future, the blank slate of a newborn baby. It is genius. Sadly, Phillip Strasser had misread the invitation and arrived the day before the art was installed. He was after all the very same critic who once mistakenly took a power failure for a performance piece on the darkness of the human soul.

Entry Note To Self...gratitude

Gratitude
 entry note-12/7/any year 

”When each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises.”

Gratitude is the practice of finding the good in each day. Life can easily become stagnant, mundane, and monotonous, but that changes depending on what we choose to see. There’s always a silver lining, if you look for it...Pablo Coelho 


HAPPY HOLIDAYS...See you soon...Doc

Reflections From The World

The Christopher Bryson Series...



There are times when, in your zeal to rediscover the mythology of a place, you create your own fresh mythology. It may be known only to you, maybe to your dog, the people you meet during your travels. It may straddle the partition between real, and unreal—the brittle crust between night and day, right and wrong. The margins, the gradients. It may buttress ancient notions, or create a whole new visual architecture. You may subvert the dominant paradigm. You never know until you get out there and expose yourself to some unknowns, unfamiliars. Or, at the very least, look at something familiar in a different way. Stay curious. That's how it is for me.

Buttresses, not flying
Pirate Alley
French Quarter
New Orleans
2018

#architecture

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Entry Note To Self...the edge

Journal Entry: 12/11/18

The Ecology of the Mind...where the sky meets the sea


On my morning walk I noticed the beauty of the the sea meeting the shore. The ecotone, that defined space where two habitats merge. That threshold where water meets the shore, where the forest comes to meadow, or where woodland ends at a cultivated lawn. It is the edge habitat where everything — soil content, vegetation, moisture, humidity, light, pollination — changes. It’s also where species from both sides converge, rendering it a place of complex interaction and diversity. The edge...

Things are always happening there. The small sea birds as they scramble from the edge of the waves, poking their beaks in the sand looking for that bite size crustacean. The Osprey as they break the edge of the water then towers to the sky with their next meal. Life just seems to happen on the edge.

It is a place of constant change and unexpected appearances. Such a distinction can be helpful when you are trying to distill a nebulous idea into a handful of words, or just in reflecting on a memory from our past. It is nothing more than noticing that space where broken sea shells become the sandy shore... just a glance is enough to remind us of the intensity and yet simple complexity in these places of transition, where one thing manages to become another. Edge walking with our mind and bodies.

We are all edge walkers when you really think about it. Always looking at the edge for our inspiration, our thrill our transition. Looking outward at the horizon or inward trying to discern the edge of our soul. That edge between depression and happiness, between control and freedom. The edge between love and hate, compassion and resentment. Life happens on the edge and we all are just edge walkers between life and death...make your distinctions well my friends...Doc

From Inside The Sane Asylum...Give me a break

From Inside The Sane Asylum...give me a break

Every language has its own collection of wise sayings. They offer advice about how to live and also transfer some underlying ideas, principles and values of a given culture / society. These sayings are called "idioms" - or proverbs if they are longer. These combinations of words have (rarely complete sentences) a "figurative meaning" meaning, they basically work with "pictures". Like "birds of a feather flock together."

I don't want to pull any wool over your eyes, but to make a long story short and  please take this with a grain of sand, since it comes from the horses mouth and not hearing this through the grape vine. At times I don't play with a full deck of cards. Off my rocker you could say. There are times I go barking up the wrong tree and at the drop of a hat will beat around the bush. I don't think I have ever cried over spilled milk, but I am guilty of adding insult to injury and I have been known to put all my eggs in one basket...

Enough of this bull shit, I need a break before I taste a dose of my own medicine. I don't want to ever be caught dead...what a visual that is...be back soon...your guess is good as mine. Just experienced a blooming idiom...Doc

Entry Note To Self...goodness perhaps?

Journal Entry: 12/11/18
Let me say this about Goodness.

It may be that in goodness we may see, not a reason for life nor an explanation of it, but an extenuation. In this indifferent universe, with its inevitable evils that surround us from the cradle to the grave, it may serve, not as a challenge or a reply, but as an affirmation of our own independence. It is the retort that humour makes to the tragic absurdity of fate.

Unlike beauty, it can be perfect without being tedious, and, greater than love, time does not wither its delight. But goodness is shown in right action and who can tell in this meaningless world what right action is? It is not action that aims at happiness; it is a happy chance if happiness results.

Plato, as I best understand it, enjoined upon the wise men of his day, to abandon the serene life of contemplation for the turmoil of practical affairs and thereby set the claim of duty above the desire for happiness; and all of us, I suppose, on occasion we all have adopted a certain course because we thought it right even though we well knew that it may never bring us happiness, neither then nor in the future.

What then is right action? For my own part the best answer I know is that one given by Fray Luis de Leon. ”To follow it does not look so difficult that human weakness quails before it as beyond its strength. With it I can end my book.” The beauty of life, he says, is nothing but this, that each should act in conformity with his nature and his business.

As I ponder it today, it seems that way to me...Doc

Monday, December 10, 2018

From Inside The Sane Asylum...emoting

Journal Entry: 12/1018
Emoting

✍️
I stop near the playground and watch this child about three years old as he throws a temper tantrum all curled up at his mothers feet...and think he just has been handed what he thinks is a bad deal.

How does one react when life hands us a bum deal? It’s learned behavior. But from whom do we learn these adjustments?

If the world changing Genie dropped down beside me this morning and offered me a change to the world. Would it be world peace or some grand economic, political, or social revolution? I think I would go for something more simple and fundamental. Maybe I would just want to teach people, from a very young age what their emotions mean. Maybe it would be the first thing I would teach a person at all.

It strikes me that we spend most of our lives, from the day we are born, in a kind of haze: consumed with, and overwhelmed by, these mysterious things called emotions — but rarely do we understand what they are trying to say. And perhaps if we did, the world would be a little less tribal, fractured, angry, because we would be less reactive, nervous, conflicted. The first and last thing we are ignorant of is ourselves.

Perhaps that is hoping for too much. Maybe it’s enough just to say that we should know ourselves as more than consumers, rational beings, little calculators of desire. So first I will explain a little what emotions mean — and then I will encourage you to ignore everything I have said.

Happiness, when you think about it, is the most mysterious thing of all. It is not just pleasure, satisfaction, gratification, or delight. So what is it? I read a paper today finding that generosity is linked with happiness — and then it tried to trace the neural mechanisms thereof.

Ah, there we go again — eliding what our emotions mean. So in my mind: happiness just means that we are growing. A moment of happiness is an instant in which we are maturing and developing. That is why generosity is linked with happiness — we are giving, but we are also receiving the message that by giving, we are growing.

But what is it in us that is growing? Well, it is just me — my truer self? my self-expression? or maybe my natural faculties ?  

The truth is we do not have a good word for it, because we have not thought well about it. We are born with a certain nature. A tiny baby possesses the capacities for empathy, for love, for closeness, for intimacy, for truth. And as adults, somehow, these are precisely the things we lose. And so growing means that those capacities are able to be expressed in more sophisticated and powerful ways — not suffocated and denied. That is our possibility — and when it is realized, even in small ways, there is happiness.

Babies are of course also hungry, needy things. They get angry and cry. Anger is the frustration of possibility. It means that there is an opportunity for growth that has been stifled or thwarted. The baby wails when the bottle is not given on time. And so do you, when you are rejected, ignored, denied.

Anger, then, is a message of deprivation. In just this way, anger is also a cry — for all that is missing in the expression of possibility: intimacy, closeness, respect, truth. It means that you have come close to having it, and then, somehow, it was taken away. It is only natural to cry out for it. But if you understand all this, then anger, too serves a worthy purpose: it reminds us both that there is always another chance for possibility to be realized, and that we are meant to realize ourselves.

The meaning of anger is that we are being deprived of fullness, just like a little child — and once we understand it, we can surrender the hot, bitter fury of going empty a little, and choose, instead, to focus on finding, creating, giving, sharing fullness.

Sadness is the loss of possibility. You grieve when a relationship ends, when a loved one dies. What has really happened? We say that “a part of us has died”. We are precisely right. It is a part of our possibility that has died. If possibility contains intimacy, closeness, respect, love, truth, then the curious fact is that our possibility is not really our own — it is more like a conjoint interdependence. And that is the message of sadness — its beauty, its power, its strength: that we are never really alone, because it is precisely through our loneliness that we learn possibility can never only be realized by ourselves at all.

The meaning of sadness is to remind us of our fragility — not just our own, but all life’s — and if we really hear that message, then a little miracle happens: fragility becomes the source of all our strength. We grow gentle, merciful, empathetic, graceful, light, free. Then we are maturing into fullness at last.

So...Happiness means realizing possibility, which teaches us about our nature, and challenges us to respect, support, and nurture it, not just in ourselves, but in all.

Anger means the deprivation of possibility, which teaches us emptiness, and orients us towards fullness. And sadness means losing possibility, which teaches us fragility, and gives us strength. And each of these messages teach us great secrets about life. But we must learn from these messages.

Now. I told you that I would end with asking you to ignore me. Here is why. It it not just because I cannot do justice to emotions in a few words, only scratch their rippling surface. It is not even because I have used a kind of framework of possibility to explain emotions, and there are many theories we could choose. It is because there is a deeper message inside all these messages your emotions are telling you still.

What is an emotion, when you think about it. Perhaps emotions are just messages. Not a single human being since the dawn of time has been able to define what they really are, and so we are stuck with this strange word, that we still cannot pin down.

What are they, then? They are something more like the self inside and beyond all selves. If I say “sadness”, the strangest thing of all is that you know precisely what I mean. I don’t need to define it at all. Even a little puppy can sense it. In this way, that our emotions are the common fundamental elements, the hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon of our existence, life is something universal. Isn’t that strange and fascinating? A little beautiful?

Emotions, then, are messages. But not just from your unconscious to your conscious, or your child self to your adult self. They are messages from life to you, about what life really is. Something more impossible than you suppose. You are in every life, and every life is in you. And in that way, even your wounds are as beautiful as the burning stars...you are the web of LIFE!...Doc

Saturday, December 8, 2018

Inside The Sane Asylum...

From The Road Series...The Maestro

It's strange the people we pass and yet not experience...if only we look in their silence we might hear the echoes of their life. Such was a time on this cold and gray autumn day...

As I passed his fingers were pressing the silver keys with loving art, 
and the flute he was caressing with the silence of his heart. 

"Play something for me maestro"...

In his fading eyes was a story of life that was written fair. 
The morning sun glowing and warmed the winter in his hair.
There was a glow of un extinguished embers deep in his eyes,
as he nodded and begin to smile.

A youthful smile. Strange how all the silver marrows still have a golden yesterday.

Now the flutist, bowed and slender no longer marks the time to the baton's lead, but he begin to breathe a message tender through his mind and that mellow reed.

The melody came with the wisdom of the ages,
pulsing with the ebb and flow.
It was a sage's song 
from a land so long ago.

In his fading eyes was a story of sanctified days of youthful yore, and yes, tender reverence for a glorious score.

The sound strolled down the street through the flute's narrow ally, as he pressed the silver keys with loving art, deep from the silence of his heart. A melody laden with a life that was written fair. Every movement he rendered from the slender instrument echoed again where love and youth once strolled, breathing out his soul through his fingers and the flute he was caressing... a silence from the heart.

May you and the silence of your heart never part...Doc

Friday, December 7, 2018

Entry Note To Self...invisible paths

Journal Entry: 12/6/18
Invisible Paths

"You are here because you know something. You don't
 know what it is, but you can feel it. Something is wrong with the world."
— Morpheus, The Matrix

✍️
As the age turns, millions of people are pioneering a transition from the old world to the new, are we not? It is a journey fraught with peril and hardship and breathtaking discovery, a journey irreducibly unique for each of us.

Because we are stepping out into the new, (or at least it feels that way to me), it is also profoundly uncertain and at times lonely. I cannot map out the details of my path, but I can fortify myself as I walk it and and maybe just illuminate some of its universal features.

So a few years ago I started to make Entry Notes to myself. My purpose, I suppose, was to give some voice to what I have always known (without knowing it) and always believed (without believing it).

Maybe in some grand way I was hoping that someone might stubble across my thoughts and symbols, and just for a second, breathe a sigh of relief and say, "Ah, I was right all along."

In a sense I am not describing a path at all, since there isn't one in the new territory of the new pioneer. Indeed, what I am describing is a departure from a path, the ready-made paths laid out before us, and the creation of a new one.

You know the ready-made path I'm talking about. Typified by that odious board game "Life," it begins with school, traverses the territory of marriage, kids, and career, and, if all goes well, ends in a long and comfortable retirement. This program has been crumbling for decades now. I, for one, am not planning for a retirement for my journey; the very concept feels alien to me, as does the notion that my Golden Years are to be any time other than right now.

Just a pioneer, like you...Be well, Doc

Entry Note To Self... rhythm of life

Journal Entry: 10/13/18
Sensing Beauty

My rhythm of life in recent weeks has been different. Not difficult, or taxing, but certainly not mind blowing either. Except for the crap I see on TV news entertainment. I really don't pay that much mind as I have more need of my mind for other things that capture my interest. It is one of those periods I am just not in sync.

I don't even know how to define it, because it does not require defining. Just one of those periods with a different intensity, frequency and duration of thoughts.

Duration of thoughts? What is my mind dwelling on? Different are the thoughts from others periods in my life and other rhythms? Maybe, but that is how it is this morning...

The tide ebbs and flows daily, without end.
Four times a day it will ebb and flow.
Breathing new life along the way and destorying others in it's path.
The rhythm of tides.

The Moon waxes and wanes, changing its face daily as It moves from Full to New and Full again. A wanning and waxing gibbous or crescent It becomes. The dark side of the moon becomes light again and nothing is static as it changes again and again. The rhythm it becomes.

In the morning dark, on the porch with coffee, just above the treetops, no fewer than seven squadrons of geese just flew over. They were speeding, honking like crosstown New York traffic. Migrants. This scene, this music, allows me to feel more human, like I'm connected to something larger than my own thoughts, or my own small reality. Good morning, friends.

Wishing you ease...Doc

Reflections From The World...a new day

Journal Entry:12/1/18
A new day...a new month...a new thought, perhaps.

Just being there, she was a sort of music, perhaps a garden canticle. Half-painted and never moving, she gripped her urn like a victory cup, waiting. Watching the garden forever, for the entirety of her life, the ancient South American staghorns, magnolia, jasmine, sweet olive, the iron gate, and masonry of the place were always safe. But she never went inside the garden itself. I never saw her inside. That is how it was for her, for me.

"Walked for half an hour in the garden. A fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn. The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant green of a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all sides like the last illusions of youth under the tears of irremediable grief. A brood of chattering birds were chasing each other through the shrubberies, and playing games among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail."

Featured Post

Entry Note To Self...the art of living

Journal Entry: 12/12/18 The Art Of Living How we choose what we do, and how we approach it…will determine whether the sum of our days ...