Palace servant by Ling Jian

"I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear." ~Martin Luther King Jr.

Welcome September

My favorite season has arrived! This is the time of year I feel most alive. I think I sleep walk through Spring and Summer. There is a surge of happiness that invades me when Fall and Winter arrives, I just cannot explain it adequately. So I leave you this poem:

Autumn Fires by Robert Louis Stevenson

In the other gardens
And all up the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
See the smoke trail!

Pleasant summer over
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
The grey smoke towers.

Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all!
Flowers in the summer,
Fires in the fall!

“My mother was taught the ch'an concept of happiness, which was to find satisfaction in small things. I was taught to appreciate the fresh air in the morning, the colour of leaves turning red in autumn and the water's smoothness when I soaked my hands in the basin.” ~Anchee Min

5 yr old piano prodigy Ryan Wang performs for 101 yr old.

I have not cried like this in a while. Beautiful, profound.

The Fish

THE FISH




I caught a tremendous fish

and held him beside the boat

half out of water, with my hook

fast in a corner of his mouth.

He didn't fight.

He hadn't fought at all.

He hung a grunting weight,

battered and venerable

... and homely. Here and there

his brown skin hung in strips

like ancient wallpaper,

and its pattern of darker brown

was like wallpaper:

shapes like full-blown roses

stained and lost through age.

He was speckled and barnacles,

fine rosettes of lime,

and infested

with tiny white sea-lice,

and underneath two or three

rags of green weed hung down.

While his gills were breathing in

the terrible oxygen

—the frightening gills,

fresh and crisp with blood,

that can cut so badly—

I thought of the coarse white flesh

packed in like feathers,

the big bones and the little bones,

the dramatic reds and blacks

of his shiny entrails,

and the pink swim-bladder

like a big peony.

I looked into his eyes

which were far larger than mine

but shallower, and yellowed,

the irises backed and packed

with tarnished tinfoil

seen through the lenses

of old scratched isinglass.

They shifted a little, but not

to return my stare.

—It was more like the tipping

of an object toward the light.

I admired his sullen face,

the mechanism of his jaw,

and then I saw

that from his lower lip

—if you could call it a lip—

grim, wet, and weaponlike,

hung five old pieces of fish-line,

or four and a wire leader

with the swivel still attached,

with all their five big hooks

grown firmly in his mouth.

A green line, frayed at the end

where he broke it, two heavier lines,

and a fine black thread

still crimped from the strain and snap

when it broke and he got away.

Like medals with their ribbons

frayed and wavering,

a five-haired beard of wisdom

trailing from his aching jaw.

I stared and stared

and victory filled up

the little rented boat,

from the pool of bilge

where oil had spread a rainbow

around the rusted engine

to the bailer rusted orange,

the sun-cracked thwarts,

the oarlocks on their strings,

the gunnels—until everything

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

And I let the fish go.



~Elizabeth Bishop

*image Montery Bay Aquarium

L'Odyssée de Cartier

Came home late from work after very long hours on this New Year's Day and caught this magical commercial. I don't care for the jewels lovely as they are, however, for the amazing artistry it took to creat this commercial, I was spellbound. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did and let some magic and imagination inside your soul this coming year.