Music as an Avenue of Beauty

©Greg Ferrell

I could not blog about Beauty without spending some time thinking about the moral power of beautiful music.

As another of the God-gifts, music can inspire, music can soothe, music can heal, music can remind us of who and what we were created to be.

If the shortest distance between a human being and Truth is a story, let me illustrate with a bit from The Shawshank Redemption.

Andy DuFresne is an educated man, a banker, condemned to life in prison because he was wrongly convicted of a crime.  In the film the prison environment, including that of its overseers, is seemingly hopelessly corrupt, a situation in which it would be very easy to lose one's integrity, even one's soul.

After he is assigned to work in the prison library, Andy begins writing a barrage of letters asking for donations for the library to keep his mind alive.  Although this angers the corrupt warden and guards, who are  not interested in rehabilitating the prisoners but rather using many of them in their own corrupt schemes, Andy persists.  In one shipment of books, he finds a recording of Mozart, which reminds him of the missing beauty in his life.  Because of his position of trust, he has access to the warden's record player and loudspeaker.  The brief clip below will tell the next part of the story better than I can.

Red, an inmate who narrates the story, remembers the effect it had on the men:

"I have no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about.  Truth is, I don't want to know.  Some things are best left unsaid.  I like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words and makes your heart ache because of it.

"I tell you, those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream of.  It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those drab walls dissolve away.  And for the briefest of moments every man at Shawshank felt free."

Andy played the music to the others even though he knew that he would be placed into solitary confinement as punishment.  When he got out, he explained to a fellow prisoner that it wasn't as bad as he thought it would be because, "I had Mister Mozart to keep me company."  When they expressed surprise that he would be allowed to have the record player in solitary, he pointed to his head, "It was in here, and in here," pointing to his heart.

"That's the beauty of music, " he said.  "They can't take that from you. . . . You need it so you don't forget.  Forget that there are places in the world that aren't made of stone, that there's something inside that they can't get to, that they can't touch, that's yours."

"What are you talking about" one of the men asked."

"Hope,"  he replied.

". . . In the night His song shall be with me,
My prayer unto the God of my life." (Psalm 42:8)

Spending my life working with teenagers, I have been a first-hand observer of the ability of music to have an influence on behavior and character.

Click HERE to see if this would have had the same effect.  I'm sure you will get my point.

Of course, you may have to click HERE now to get that "bad taste" out of your mind.
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Sabbath Thoughts

photo ©A.Rutherford

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases strength.
Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint. 

                                            - Isaiah 40:28-31

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The Beauty We Do

The garden of my 90 year old mother

"Let the Beauty you love be what you do."  -Rumi

Below are some more thoughts from Joe Paquet, the contemporary traditional landscape painter from yesterday’s post.  But of course, few of us are painters.  However, that doesn’t preclude us from working to develop our sense of awareness of the beauty that lies around us, what Joe calls “a personal sense of vision that is authentic and individual.”

He explains in an interview that “there are certain aspects to making art that are germane to all of us.” 

And I agree . . . I think that his thoughts in this interview do indeed pertain to us all.  Why?

Because each of us is participating in a culture that is exerting an influence on us, and on our children, and we need to be aware of what those motivational impulses and influences are, and what kinds of subtle effects they are having on us.  And we need to be tirelessly vigilant in that regard.

Thus, if Art is a mirror that is reflecting what is going on in the culture, then how can we not pay attention to what is going on in the world of the Fine Arts and in the so-called art, music, literature and film of the general culture.

And how can we not pay attention to our responsibility to provide a counterbalance with the intentional beauty and integrity of the things we do or make, the activities in which we engage, and the choices or decisions we make.  People of Faith especially have a responsibility to be authentic representations of the Creator.

To develop his point, Paquet uses the analogy of language, explaining that the ability to use language well should not be an end in itself:

“Language is a beautiful thing, but language should be in service of the thing being said.

And very often in the 20th century, Art has been where the artist creates their own vocabulary, and I have always found that curious, because you don’t have to create a new English language to say something special.  You just have to have command of the language and you have to have something to say.   The language of Art, the beauty of Art, is very exquisite, and requires time, and we live in a time when people are not terribly interested in an organic growth process.  

We have a pretty severe epidemic of self-esteem out there artistically speaking, and we’ve been told that we are fabulous just because we draw a breath on this planet, And as people we may be, but as artists it’s up to us to bring something of estimable worth to the world, and you do that by having exquisite command of the language [of art].  And you do that by digging deeper and having something to say that’s meaningful.  And it takes risk, and it takes courage, and it takes time.  And very often that’s a very individual choice for everyone.” 

Here Paquet is talking about the discipline and courage it takes for any of us to do anything that we do with integrity and beauty.  We need to examine our motivations and our intentions for our efforts and our choices, and determine that we will take the time and make the effort to be as authentic as is possible.

Paquet:

“External motivation ....... money, fame, awareness, the idea that you want to be noticed.  There’s a vast difference between having something to say and wanting to be heard.  And in the 20th century we’ve swung very largely towards wanting to be heard.  Everybody wants their 15 minutes of fame.  Reality TV is a perfect example, of that.”

Paquet quotes Rainer Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet.  The young poet has sent some of his poems to Rilke for critique and writing advice.  Of course, the aspiring poet has not spent the requisite time in “paying his dues” so to speak and perhaps wants some easy answers, a quick fix.  Rilke kindly declines to critique his actual poems, but over the course of time writes the young man ten letters about how to learn to look at life so that he becomes a person who has something worthwhile to say.  These letters have become a classic for teaching writers, but have good advice on several topics for anyone.

Rilke tells the young man, 

“If your daily life [your environment] seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place.”  

Paquet explains:  “If your craft [your effort, your discipline] is insufficient, no matter how wonderful your vision may be, you are always going to be something less than what you could have been. “

He further explains why he doesn’t let the world spirit discourage him in his own artistic efforts, although his work runs counter to the "philosophy" of the current art world:  

“We live in a world now where people don’t pay too much attention for more than five or six seconds at a time, and to ask someone to look at a painting or to read a book seems to be getting harder and harder to do.  But I can’t think too much about that, all I can think about is what’s meaningful to me . . . and do what will leave something behind of the time that I was here.  

The beauty is what you bring to something, and the subject is secondary.

. . .

Art in the 20th century has been very psychological . . . there’s a lot of concepts out there . . . but ideas don’t keep you warm at night.   

Love and Grace and Beauty are things that have been horribly maligned in the last hundred years in the Arts, considered trite even, but the very sad fact is that the very people who are saying that do not live their lives without love, they don’t live their lives without Beauty . . . but irony and all those things have become paramount in the Arts. You know, the more edgy, the more salacious, the more harsh, the more shocking. . . .”  

However, when we witness something or someone authentic, it resonates with everyone, doesn't?  Authentic living is creating a life of purpose, and living that life with intentionality so that it is an actuality not a dream.  And this is the life God has called us to live.

“…prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves.”

—James 1:22, NAS 

That verse is a challenge to us all, isn't it?

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Art as an Avenue of Beauty

Silent Lake, Ontario, watercolor ©A. Rutherford

Today I am thinking about the strong desire I have now to paint, probably because I just received some new art materials through UPS.  For the longest time, while I was heavily involved in my teaching career, my painting had to be kept to the margin of my life, and it was a narrow margin at that.  But still my early training in art had given me the artist’s eye through which to look at the world around me, and that was a wonderful gift, even if I couldn’t practice my art-making.  [more about the artist’s eye in a later post]

The modernist view of art is that it has no necessary relationship to Beauty, as we learned in the lectures by Roger Scruton in this post.  [And I would encourage anyone to take the time to view Scruton's program on BBC, Why Beauty Matters, especially people of Faith.]


However, the primary reason I think I am attracted to painting is because it is an avenue to appreciating, participating in, and communicating the beauty I see around me.

Beauty is a God-gift to us humans, and seeing it in any form it takes gives us pleasure, if our spirits are in harmony with it, and it is so various in the forms that it takes that we have many avenues for pleasure and delight.

"Beauty in art is the delicious notes of color one against the other. It is just as fine as music and it is just the same thing, one tone in relation to another tone. Real sentiment in art comes as it does in music from the way one tone comes against another independently of the literary quality of the subject - the way spots of color come together produces painting. . . . . . There are just so many tones in music and just so many colors but it's the beautiful combination that makes a masterpiece."

taken from Hawthorne On Painting, Charles Hawthorne

Kalil Gibran, writing about Beauty in The Prophet, describes a dream of meeting a muse in the forest:

After a deep silence, mingled with sweet dreams, I asked, "Speak to me of that beauty which the people interpret and define, each one according to his own conception; I have seen her honored and worshipped in different ways and manners."

She answered, "Beauty is that which attracts your soul, and that which loves to give and not to receive. When you meet Beauty, you feel that the hands deep within your inner self are stretched forth to bring her into the domain of your heart. It is the magnificence combined of sorrow and joy; it is the Unseen which you see, and the Vague which you understand, and the Mute which you hear - it is the Holy of Holies that begins in yourself and ends vastly beyond your earthly imagination."

Then she approached me and laid her scented hands upon my eyes. And as she withdrew, I found myself alone in the valley. When I returned to the city, whose turbulence no longer vexed me, I repeated her words:

"Beauty is that which attracts your soul, and that which loves to give and not to receive."

So yes . . . Beauty attracts my soul . . . in poetry, in music, in painting, in Nature, in relationships, in Solitude . . . my spirit is constructed that way, and I do not want to lose sight of it, which is easy to do in modern society.

Seeking Beauty

Cold winds can never freeze, nor thunder sour

The cup of cheer that Beauty draws for me

Out of those Azure heavens and this green earth --

I drink and drink, and thirst the more I see.

To see the dewdrops thrill the blades of grass,

Makes my whole body shake; for here's my choice

Of either sun or shade, and both are green --

A Chaffinch laughs in his melodious voice.

The banks are stormed by Speedwell, that blue flower

So like a little heaven with one star out;

I see an amber lake of buttercups,

And Hawthorn foams the hedges round about.

The old Oak tree looks now so green and young,

That even swallows perch awhile and sing:

This is that time of year, so sweet and warm,

When bats wait not for stars ere they take wing.

As long as I love Beauty I am young,

Am young or old as I love more or less;

When Beauty is not heeded or seems stale,

My life's a cheat, let Death end my distress.

by William Henry Davies


Joe Paquet is a contemporary traditional landscape painter who does not share the "modern" sensibility that art has no relationship to beauty.  Here's a short video in which he shares his thoughts about his goals in the creation of his paintings.  You begin the day with Joe in his home town of St. Paul, Minnesota, as he stops to pick up his requisite cup of coffee to get his juices flowing.  Then on to the studio, where he explains that he views his work as a "tapestry of color and value, and what I'm trying to do is to intuitively orchestrate it in a beautiful way, and create a harmony with it . . . and when you combine the beauty of observation and the differences in each day, the beautiful things that make everything so exquisitely different, and do it in a way that you feel it intensely, then you have a chance to leave something behind. . . . Everything we are for better or worse is in our work.  Part of getting better as a painter is developing as a human being."


Of course, those are wise words whether the "art" you are practicing is painting or homemaking or accounting or educating or being a friend.  But getting more in tune with your creative nature, as I hope continuing posts in my cyber-journal will illustrate, can aid you in developing your ability to see . . . no matter where you are looking . . . and increase the joy of sight.

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What does it mean to Savor?

photo ©A.Rutherford

Even though it was snowing, today in the flower shop at the Kroger, I looked eagerly to see if there were daffodils.  January is a little early, but usually about this time of the month or a little later, there will be small bunches of cut daffodils at a very inexpensive price.  And there were—five bundled together for $2.99!  So much brightness for such a small amount!

I’ve done this for years, looked for those early harbingers that Spring is indeed around the corner.  And they “come up” in the grocery store long before they emerge in my yard.  Is that cheating to buy a bit of Spring?

Anyway I brought them home and put them in a crystal vase to place in front of the stained glass window in my small library room where I could savor them.   They are sitting there beside me as I type this. 

savor |ˈsāvər| ( Brit. savour)

verb [ trans. ] taste (good food or drink) and enjoy it completely 

• figurative enjoy or appreciate (something pleasant) completely, esp. by dwelling on it : I wanted to savor every moment.

How do we activate the ability to savor in our lives? How do we make the most of the good things that happen to us or that we see or experience?

How do we take in the wonder of the owl as it sits high in the tree branch out in our yard . . . the inexplicable exchange that occurs at the very moment that we become aware that the owl is aware of us,  and that it is experiencing us as we are experiencing it.

Or when as on that early morning last summer, the beauty of the way the fawn turned his neck in the dappled sunlight at the edge of my lawn, and then looked at me, made me hold my breath.

Is there more to savoring the experience than just seeing it?

Does it have something to do with being Present to the moment or to the experience in a way that most people who have the same experience are not present to it? And is that very being Present—or savoring it—what impels the poet to write about it, the musician to create a song or a symphony expressing it,  the artist to paint it, or the photographer to record it?

The poet William Wordsworth had the gift of taking ordinary moments and experiences and turning them into timeless moments in time simply by savoring them, by paying attention to their beauty or significance.  He wrote one of the most famous poems in the English language one day when he and his sister Dorothy were on a walk, and they came upon a large drift of daffodils along their path. 

I wander’d lonely as a cloud

  That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

  A host of golden daffodils,

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

   And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line

  Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

  

The waves beside them danced, but they

  Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:—

A poet could not but be gay

  In such a jocund company!

I gazed, and gazed, but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

   In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

  Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills, 

And dances with the daffodils.

Wordsworth also understood the inroads that the materialistic world around us can make into our peace of mind and our spiritual joy, when we give it too much of our attention:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.--

We would have thought that living in the Lake District of England in the 1800s, a materialist culture would not have been a problem of Wordsworth’s times, but apparently human nature was the same then as now.  We humans long for “stuff” and activities to fill up our lives, rather than paying attention to the bright gifts of Nature around us, and by savoring them thus magnify their ability to give us contentment.  And we can become far too invested in the comings and goings of the movers, shakers, and entertainers of our society than in making the most of our relationships with our friends and families.

A good prayer might be, “Lord, grant me ability to see and savor the daily gifts You place along my path.”

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Sabbath Thought: The Blessing of Good Work to Do

    Connemara Mowers, County Mayo, Ireland ©A. Rutherford

                                      
In Ireland every time you go around a new bend in the road, there is something which takes your breath away.  And the people, too, seem to be filled with it, a sensitivity to wonder and delight.  Not so jaded as most Americans who are so intrenched in the material world, most of the Irish still seem able to connect in some deep way with the world around them, above their heads and under their feet, the same connection as the mower in Frost's poem from Thursday felt with his world and his work.

The day I took the photo above I was walking on a graveled path above these fields with a local artist who was guiding me to find some ancient Celtic ruins, a burial dolmen on a hill beyond the farmer's field.  As we walked along, we came upon these men scything their fields, working away in a scene of incredible beauty.

As we passed by close enough, my fellow artist raised her hand in greeting to them, and her voice sang out across the field in a lovely lilt, "God bless the work," which she explained to me was the traditional Irish greeting to those engaged in their daily chores.

I loved it, and I thought how wonderful to have someone pass by you who didn't even know you and sing out to you, "God bless the work!"  How affirming that would be!  How it would connect you to your fellow man, to your work, and to God . . .  how very real . . . and what a blessing to feel connected to God in the labor of your work week as well as in your Sabbath worship and rest.

The One

Green, blue, yellow, and red—

God is down in the swamps and marshes

Sensational as April and almost as incredible

the flowering of our catharsis.

A humble scene in a backward place

Where no one ever looked

The raving flowers looked up in the face

Of the One and the Endless, the Mind that has baulked

The profoundest of mortals. A primrose, a violet,

A violent wild iris—but mostly anonymous performers

Yet an important occasion as the Muse at her toilet

Prepared to inform the local farmers

That beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God

Was breathing his love by a cut-away bog.

-Patrick Kavanagh, Irish poet

There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?  

                                                                                   -Ecclesiastes 2:24-25
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"That grand old poem called Winter"

Watercolor - © A. Rutherford

            

This morning I woke up "smack-dab" in the middle of another Robert Frost poem . . .

"Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow." 
-   Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Henry David Thoreau was right to call Winter that "grand old poem."   The fairy land outside my window today is poetic indeed.

But the Beauty of winter comes in many forms.  Not just the fairy forms outside my window, there is Beauty in the bleakness of a frozen wetland area, if we allow ourselves to attend to its special quality.

As Mrs. William Starr Dana, an American botanist (1861–1952) explains:

"An important part in the winter landscape is played by the dead grasses and other herbaceous plants, especially by various members of the composite family, such as the asters, golden rods, and sunflowers.  Wreathed in snow or encased in ice, they present a singularly graceful and fantastic appearance.  Or perhaps, the slender stalks and branches armed with naked seed pods trace intricate and delicate shadows on the smooth snow."

My brother, who is a professional photographer, found this bleak beauty in a recent visit to a local wetland area.  In the summer it is an area of isolated but lush beauty with acres and acres of water lotus blooming and large fields of naturalized sunflowers whose seeds feed the flocks of red-winged blackbirds and other fowl.

© Greg Ferrell
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The Wisdom of Delight

      Click for larger image- ©A. Rutherford

Still reflecting on the "music of what happens," I read this sonnet below by Robert Frost last night, and I was struck by the fact that of all the poetry by Frost I've read in the course of all my study and teaching, I don't remember paying any attention to this one, if indeed I had  read it at some point in time.

Perhaps it's like certain verses or passages in the Bible that jump out at you at certain times in your life and you think, "Hmmm, I've never noticed that verse before." And yet you know, because of where it is in the book or chapter, you know your eyes must have seen it dozens of times, but your mind or your spirit or your heart never noticed it before. It didn't speak to you then because of where you were in your life or who you were . . . but now it says something that causes a response in you or answers a burning question of your "now," or comforts a sorrow you didn't have before— all of a sudden there it is.

I'm not sure why all of a sudden this poem spoke to me last night.  I'm not even really sure what it is saying to me now . . . it is so understated . . . as Frost often is.  He usually doesn't come right out and tell you what the message of a poem is to the extent he does in his poems "Wild Grapes" or "Birches."

But after reading the poem and reflecting on it this phrase popped in my head, so it must have something to do with the poem, or where the poem meets me—the “wisdom of delight.”

But now it's like a puzzle that I have to figure out, although I’m sure it’s connected with our talking about learning to become musicians of the everyday.

Mowing

There was never a sound beside the wood but one, 

And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. 

What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself; 

Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, 

Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound— 

And that was why it whispered and did not speak. 

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, 

Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: 

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak 

To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, 

Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers 

(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. 

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. 

My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

As I wrote yesterday . . . “As musicians of the everyday, we would be more attentive to the ways of nature and of our own emotions.  We would bring a musician's or an artist's sensitivity to all issues of daily living.  We would always have a sense of the beautiful or the harmonic in everything we do.”

Is that why the mower seems to feel the rhythm of the scythe?

Is that why he notices (attends to) the flowers amongst the grasses even though they are "feeble-pointed" and don't stand out in the environment?  He even tells us that they are "pale orchises."  

He notes the snake, and he goes on to describe it (bright green) which seems to indicate a deeper visual awareness . . . 

He seems to delight both in his everyday work (the earnest love that laid the swale in rows) and in the environment.

. . . . Has the mower tuned his heart to the music of what happens? . . .

His scythe whispers . . .
not a "dream" (false promise) of the easy life ("idle hours")
or easy money ("gold") coming out of nowhere by magic ("fay or elf")

but it whispers the “truth” (line 9)

His conclusion seems to be “The fact (truth? reality?) is the sweetest dream that labor knows.”

But, says she scratching her head, exactly what is the “fact” that “is the sweetest dream that labor knows.”

Frost makes it seem like a secret or lesson that is important to know!

Yes, I think that's what I sense in the mower in Frost's poem . . . he is doing a very mundane task, repetitive and tiring, but he is so in tune, in the present moment, with the rhythm of what he is doing and where he is that the material world around him fades away, leaving him to see the minutiae of the environment . . .  flowers . . . the snake . . . and to delight in them and to hear the music of his scythe and the hum of the earth, even as he is laboring.

Come, Thou fount of every blessing, 

Tune my heart to sing Thy grace. 

Streams of mercy, never ceasing, 

Call for songs of loudest praise.

            -Robert Robinson

©A.Rutherford

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Being Present in the Moment

                                               ©A.Rutherford

the Present - the period of time now occurring

There's one or two in every class or crowd . . . invariably at the beginning of the school year, whenever I would call the class roll for the first time, amongst the consecutive chorus of "Here!" responses, there would always be one or two students who answered "Present!" It would always seem to evoke a response of a few giggles or chuckles from the rest of the class, but I would always give an attentive look of inspection to that student or students because usually I found these were the students who would indeed prove to be "present" in the class, not merely "here." They attended to the class, in the old sense of attend . . . pay attention to . . . they were very much "present" in the class.  They paid attention to its (and my as their teacher's) presence in their lives . . . they lent their full presence to the class with their attention and participation.

Through the years by the examples provided by my students, I too learned important lessons about the value of being present to one's experiences. The ones who were truly and fully "present" in class were the ones who had the most success and who enjoyed the process of their education the most, and who took the most from it of lasting value.

I always want to be the one who can answer "Present!" to even the most mundane experiences of my daily life and find the value and Joy in them.  But of course, being Present to the moment must be practiced as a discipline.

Thinking about this sort of attentiveness made me remember a very old Celtic legend about the Fianna, an ancient Celtic group of people who lived apart from society.

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     Once, as the Fianna were sitting around resting, a debate arose among them as to what was the finest music in the world.

     "Tell us that," said Fionn, turning to Oisin.

     "The cuckoo call from the tree that is highest in the hedge," cried his merry son.

     "Indeed, that is a good sound," said Fionn. "And you, Oscar," he asked, "What is to your mind the finest of music?"

     "Ah, the best of music is the ring of a spear on a shield," cried the stout lad.

     "It is a good sound," said Fionn.

     And the other champions told their delight: the bellowing of a stag across water, the baying of a tuneful pack heard in the distance, the song of a lark, the laughter of a gleeful girl, or the whisper of a loved one.

     "They are good sounds all," said Fionn.

     "Tell us, chief," one ventured, "what do you think?"

     "The music of what happens," said great Fionn, "that is the finest music in the world."

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I suppose this is a metaphor for the way we view the world and our life in it.  As musicians of the everyday, we would be more attentive to the ways of nature and of our own emotions.  We would bring a musician's or an artist's sensitivity to all issues of daily living.  We would always try to cultivate a sense of the beautiful or the harmonic in everything we do.

. . . . makes me want to tune my heart to the music of what happens . . .

"If you cannot find joy and peace in these very moments of sitting...

you will be incapable of living the future when it has become the present.

Joy and peace are the joy and peace present in this very hour of sitting.

If you cannot find it here, you won't find it anywhere.

Don't chase after your thoughts as a shadow runs after its object....

Find the joy and peace in this very moment."

                                                                                                  -Thich Nhat Hanh 

And finally a bit of wisdom from a source which always straightens my head and my heart out:

"Yet he has not left himself without testimony:

He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons;  he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy."

                                                                                    - Acts 14:17

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