To thine own self be true

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
–Lin Yutang

The simplest things are often the truest.
–Richard Bach

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.
–Albert Einstein

If one’s life is simple, contentment will come.
–Dalai Lama (saw him once in Calgary)

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
–Frank Lloyd Wright

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
–Albert Camus

Forever is composed of nows.
–Emily Dickinson

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
–Albert Camus

Come forth into the light of things, let Nature be your teacher.
–William Wordsworth

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
–Henri Matisse

It is never too late to be what you might have been.
–George Eliot

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
–Camille Pissarro

Happiness resides not in possessions and not in gold; the feeling of happiness dwells in the soul.
–Democritus

There is enchantment right in front of you, waiting for you to notice.
–Janet Luhrs

Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.
–John Ruskin

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
–Franz Kafka

You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind.
–Henry David Thoreau

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
–Charles Mingus

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The simplest things give me ideas.”

English Bay, Vancouver

(first grandson and stacking cups)

(evening; canoes at Jasper Park Lodge)

(illuminated Xmas decoration reflected eerily in patio window)

(box ride for grandson 1)

(tea service at Emily Carr’s house, Vancouver)

(the symbolism of the open hand)

(trompe l’oeil effects: grandson 1 with couch-throw’s photograph)

(rock installation at U of A outdoor geosciences garden)

(Margaret Laurence’s Stone Angel in Neepawa, MB cemetery)

(Morley in 1960–a well-known popular Canadian author)

Morley Callaghan, famous Canadian short story writer and novelist of the 1920s to 2000. The man who knew and famously knocked out Ernest Hemingway in a boxing match mistimed by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Callaghan’s work was often praised in the U.S. and he remained Canada’s best-known novelist (along with Hugh MacLennan) from the 1920s to the 1960s.

These literary dreams often take the form of quasi-interviews and time spent together chatting about the artist and their works. Callaghan identified his late great novel as The Loved and the Lost which won the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction in 1951. He was harder pressed to name his best early book though I suggested to him that 1936’s Now That April’s Here, a collection of his most famous stories, would be a contender.
In fact, it was through Callaghan’s stories that I first came to read him in 1969-70 in a CanLit course at U of W. “All the Years of His Life” impressed me as a realistic study of being caught shoplifting, showing how a parent might react. The collection of stories used for the course was Morley Callaghan’s Stories (1959) which is still a good introduction to his accessible style and ordinary-people story-subjects.

From 1980 to 2002, I often drew on his stories for several grade 10-12 educational text anthologies. He was still that relevant and accessible for teens then. (Since then, he has vanished from mass Canadian consciousness like so many other famous Canadian writers including the great Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies, W.O. Mitchell, Margaret Avison, Earle Birney, Stephen Leacock, Farley Mowat, and Gabrielle Roy–people who are, incidentally, kept alive by/on my perpetual CanLit books blog.

Anyway, Callaghan was his usual slightly pontificating self smoking his familiar author-pipe in the dream. Chatty, cordial, and friendly. Glad to be sought out and still appreciated by one of his olde fans after all this e-mediaization, Netflicking, and nonprint paradigm-change revolution.

Otherwise, wrong messages and miscommunication become acceptable by the masses.
Today:
Edmonton Journal and CTV News calling a motorized wheelchair a scooter. Conjures up quite a different picture and scenario, eh? Especially when that motorized wheelchair got hit by a concrete-carrying truck. (not concrete truck).

Empathy or identification with something, someone.

To empathize with the other is to acquire vital or significant information, often knowledge.

If one wants to know someone or something, one has to have the imaginative capacity of empathy.

But no empathy or knowledge would be possible sans imagination.

Hence, the importance of Northrop Frye’s term and concept–The Educated Imagination.

Imagination is a process–it can be developed and also has the potential to be educated.

That perception (and fuller consciousness) are dependent on empathy. That we actually only perceive, acquire information about or know someone or something via degrees of empathy–by identifying with the object, person, or process–by putting ourselves into it/him/her, and allowing our imagination and consciousness to be filled with what we behold. Something alluded to in Harper Lee’s book To Kill a Mockingbird, and in John Keats’ writing about poetry, the poet, and poetic process. In Keats’ sense and understanding–imagination, empathy, perception, consciousness, nature, beauty, truth, and great poetry are all one. In that, great engagement, richness, connectedness, transcendence, and sublime pleasure on all experiential levels.

“We fear the thing we want the most.”–Dr. Robert Anthony

“Fear is the prison of the heart.”–Anon

“Of all the passions, fear weakens judgement most.”–Cardinal De Retz

There is no greater self-imposed limitation than fear itself. Fear limits us from truly living and loving fully and freely. No question. I have watched others limit themselves this way time and time again. As I have said earlier elsewhere, we truly do it to ourselves by limiting ourselves from the fulfilled lives and loves we might otherwise have. These would be the most needlessly damaging and inhibiting manacles we put on our own lives. We and no one else. Ironically, this, in an otherwise world of beautiful limitless possibilities

He was a light
they had wanted to be
close to, even briefly
in passing.
A certain remoteness
and glow they had
hoped to ‘reel in’
like some precious catch.

In those ephemeral seconds
they had, indeed, connected
or seen a glimpse
of their other possibilities,
their own imagined lives.
They had sensed a music
of the spheres from afar,
the pleasure of presence
and the splashy warmth
of intimacy.

It was all that he was
and had been to
many a passing boat or craft:
a beacon by which to gauge
their own relative depths,
light, desires and love.
Their own best gifts
of self.

(Risk as exemplified in Snakes and Ladders)

Well, ain’t that the truth, from birth to death.

Think of how vulnerable to injury or death babies and preschoolers are.

Ponder the risks built into one’s day, whether this be stepping off a curb, riding in a car, eating toxic food, falling in the bathtub or on ice, falling down stairs, being admitted to a hospital with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, etc.

Consider the many unexpected things that can blind-side one such as suddenly getting a cancer diagnosis, losing one’s job, losing use of a leg or an eye, failing an exam, having parents who divorce, getting an unexpected electric shock, being stranded in a foreign country, etc.

Think about the risks built into friendships and relationships we think will last forever. (People change, grow, quarrel, separate, divorce. Often these days.)

Consider all the people who like to live on or ‘at the edge’ like gamblers, druggies, exhibition-ride-fanatics, parachutists.

Recall all the performers you like and have known and meditate on the many risks they take each time they perform.

Contemplate all the projects and plans you have shied away from because you thought them too risky in some way.

Writers, such as those who are honest and truthful, also take various risks as well, as in the case of writers who base fictional characters on real people who may then take umbrage if those people recognize themselves.

For that matter, watch birds and animals taking risks all the time as they go about their lives, something reflected in most nature tv programming.

Keep in mind, too, all that flying debris in space flying Earth’s way. In the long run, we here are most likely living on borrowed time. Lives of risk.

For me, it seems very clear, then. Life is risk for everyone and everything on the planet.

…………………………………………….

“And you all know security
Is mortals’ chiefest enemy.”
–Hecate, Macbeth (Shakespeare)

I sought for The Key for many years, and finally found it at Ellerslie Gift and Garden! It now hangs on the wall outside my room so I see it a number of times each day and am reminded of what it represents to me. I will say this much more–The Key is very much a personal experience, sense, or realization of inner fulfillment and completion, with no significant missing pieces. It is also a sense of satisfaction with one’s many significant choices in life, especially at key turning points or moments of opportunity. The Key has to do with knowing oneself quite well and accepting who and what one is, as well as letting go, something I’ve previously alluded to in any mention of Keats’ “Negative capability”. It is also the privilege of having lived and chosen to live in the 10% zone of fuller, ongoing consciousness, self-actualization, and transcendence–a zone not chosen or lived in, to a large extent, by 90% of the population (more concerned with umbilical smartphones, daily survival, limiting frivolity, absurd penny-pinching or mindlessly making money, and being ruled by materialism and surface appearances). Finally, and most importantly, The Key is in the awareness and consciousness that one has been significantly known, understood, wanted, appreciated, and savoured closely by at least one other person and that one has willingly, happily, and completely reciprocated.