I borrowed a new quote for the top of my sidebar last evening as I wandered the twisting trails of the blogs I read. I though the quote about the weather fit quite well with the way this blog has evolved. So here is todays outlook...
Here in SE Texas it's clear and what we call cold. 40 degrees and headed up to the 60's again today. As I look out the back door into our backyard field I see that old man Frost has been by again. Blue skys and sunshine for today and the rest of the week and I will be sitting in a back room cubbyhole with no windows at work. I am beginning to think I am developing an allergy to my work or at the very least my place of work. Everyday I go in and by midday my voice is pretty much gone. It only started about the time they moved me from my original office on the second floor to the first floor. Oh well, I m sure my daughter jut loves my lack of volume...I think I am beginning to look forward to the "New and Improved" Daylight Savings Time. What an oxymoronic name...Where is the bank all of this daylight is saved in? How much of your daily daylight do you put back for a rainy day? Where are the government accounting office figures that show how Americans are not saving as much daylight now as they were ten years ago so we must increase the number of days to allow for a longer savings period in the hopes Americas will put away more daylight? How much interest does your daylight earn when it's not consumed on the day it arrives? No, really I am looking forward to the spring forward, it should aloow me a bit more time after the commute to enjoy a bit of sunshine.
In my emails I caught a headline from the Washington Post on a Eugene Robinson column that just screamed "Read Me", I did you should...
This administration's nonchalance about its most grievous transgressions has been stunning, and the only inference that fits the facts is that the people running our government don't really believe in government at all. They certainly haven't taken it seriously.Source: Eugene Robinson - Unaccountably Called to Account - washingtonpost.com
From the Writer's Almanac for today we have "Dishwater" by Ted Kooser from Delights and Shadows. © Copper Canyon Press.
Dishwater
Slap of the screen door, flat knock
of my grandmother's boxy black shoes
on the wooden stoop, the hush and sweep
of her knob-kneed, cotton-aproned stride
out to the edge and then, toed in
with a furious twist and heave,
a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands
and hangs there shining for fifty years
over the mystified chickens,
over the swaying nettles, the ragweed,
the clay slope down to the creek,
over the redwing blackbirds in the tops
of the willows, a glorious rainbow
with an empty dishpan swinging at one end.
(Sorry but the link goes to the home page 'cause the permanent link doesn't seem to work now.)
Do you not feel like you are sitting in the old swing under the elm tree just off the back of the house as she comes out backlit by the light in the kitchen...You can feel the wind and the sway of the swing. maybe you are hanging head down looking at her upside down as the water arches out and down/up.
I received this "Thought for the Day" from the Blue Mountain Meditation Center...
In those moments when we forget ourselves – not thinking, “Am I happy?” but completely oblivious to our little ego – we spend a brief but beautiful holiday in heaven. The joy we experience in these moments of self-forgetting is our true nature, our native state. To regain it, we have simply to empty ourselves of what hides this joy: that is, to stop dwelling on ourselves. To the extent that we are not full of ourselves, God can fill us. “If you go out of yourself,” says Johannes Tauler, “without doubt he shall go in, and there will be much or little of his entering in according to how much or little you go out.”
Source: The Thought for the Day is today's entry from Eknath Easwaran's Words to Live By.
(Copyright 1999 and 2005 by The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation.)
Time to get on down the road...Later
