To thine own self be true

“Nothing can take the place of live in-person presence. It is always in terms of others that we ultimately define ourselves and leave whatever creative makings or ephemeral love to show that we were actually here.”
-RD

“Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.”

“Each one has to find his peace from within.
And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.”

Tommy Kirk, 79.
Star of Old Yeller and other Disney films.
Fired by Walt in 1964 for being gay.

matters of the soul and spirit.

Harry Bertoia‘s collected audio works have done much to create calm and spiritual peace and rest of late.

Donovan is delightfully different from cerebral Dylan and always has been. He focuses on feelings, spirit, and soul via his learnings from The Beats and Buddhism. I find his voice, music, and songs to be, naturally, very innerly relaxing.

Early this morning I returned to Ravi Shankar and his deep spiritual oeuvre. Ravi initially plays feelings and moods and then moves into musical action and transcendence. His tabla player’s parts either complement or counter-point the sitar melodies. The tamboura player, likewise, with harmonies or second melody lines as appropriate/fit. Shankar’s ragas are like jazz or classical pieces–pure music, and pure music= feelings, mind, spirit, and soul. I saw him here with his daughter Anoushka when they played the Winspear: a totally sublime, transcendent evening. I remember when I bought my first Shankar album (Ravi Shankar in New York) back around 1967 and had whole new spiritual worlds and Eastern music opened up to me.

(The only other players who have done this for/to me have been jazzers  Kenny Barron, Stan Getz, and Miles Davis.)

And so it is, I find, these days, the inner nourishment I most need from music and some of these great past sources still so powerfully connective, relevant, and resonant today.

(“Dads, impress your impressionable sons on what’s really important! Buy a Pathfinder now and drive like hell over different terrains to show him what a Man you are! Have him worship you for your own innate abilities, strengths, and powers! Show him what a Real Man does!”)

O’Toole the election, now 5 thousand Albertans are leaving the province this year. They’ve see the UCP ‘light’ and don’t like/choose Kenney’s Alberta.

stabbing innocent people in public.

Nutcase here wandered up from the river valley to stab an innocent man walking with his family on Victoria Promenade.

(T.S. Eliot famously predicted that Civilization would end with people killing each other on the streets.)

(patio table evening owl-light)

Yup, university, reading, thinking, teaching, ideas, then writing books and poems. But it all began with reading and resultant mind/consciousness development.