Remembering Rachel Held Evans

I returned from a lovely, leisurely brunch yesterday to learn that author/thinker Rachel Held Evans had died...at 37.  I loved reading her first two books, Evolving in Monkey Town/Faith Unraveled and A Year of Biblical Womanhood.  I am heartbroken at the loss of this gifted, thoughtful communicator.

Quote of the Day

A few years ago, I'd wake up every morning, check the headlines on my phone, and feel as if the world had gotten dumber and meaner overnight.  Meanwhile, I'd been writing and making art for more than a decade, and it didn't seem to be getting any easier.  Isn't it supposed to get easier?  Everything got better for me when I made peace with the fact that it might not ever get easier.  The world is crazy.  Creative work is hard.  Life is short and art is long.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 1

Quote of the Day

I think I need to keep being creative, not to prove anything but because it makes me happy just to do it...I think trying to be creative, keeping busy, has a lot to do with keeping you alive.

-- Willie Nelson

Quote of the Day

People will often be polite to you in person, while advancing policies that harm you and your family.  You will be polite to them in turn, but you need not stand for such harms.  Instead, you push back, honestly and emphatically.  So it goes, in the public square.

-- Pete Buttigieg

Quote of the Day

Your time in the closet and your journey to coming out belong to you.  You are not required to open healed wounds or write lengthy threads in order to explain your worth to others who aren't willing to see it themselves.

-- Chasten Buttigieg

Quote of the Day

And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

-- John Steinbeck

Jazz, Jokes and Jack

Last night, I was thrilled to attend the book release party for my poetry professor Jack Ridl's brand new book, Saint Peter and the Goldfinch, at the Douglas United Church of Christ.  It was an evening of jazz, jokes, and, of course, poetic journeys with Jack. 

Quote of the Day

In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive.  It is an ongoing sacrament -- love and forgiveness...  Like the yin/yang symbol...Here I am, and here she is, and here we are.  Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I'm not sacrificing to her, I'm sacrificing to the relationship ... That's what a marriage is -- whereas, in a love affair, you have two lives in a more or less successful relationship to each other for a certain length of time, as long as it seems agreeable.

-- Joseph Campbell

Quote of the Day

Marriage is not a love affair.  A love affair is a totally different thing.  A marriage is a commitment to that which you are.  That person is literally your other half.  And you and the other are one.  A love affair isn't that.  That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it's off.  But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life.  If marriage is not the prime concern, you're not married...

-- Joseph Campbell

Quote of the Day

Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything's OK,
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
'Till things are brighter, I'm the Man In Black

-- Johnny Cash, "Man in Black"

Quote of the Day

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

-- Joseph Campbell

Quote of the Day

You have to stop listening in categories.  The music is either good or it's bad.

-- Duke Ellington