6 Months...on August 7th

I Carry Your Heart With Me

I Carry Your Heart With Me

By E. E. Cummings


i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)





How Do I Love Thee?

By Elizabeth Barrett Browning


How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Don't Go Far Off, Not Even For A Day

Don't Go Far Off, Not Even For A Day

By Pablo Neruda


Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

Dirge Without Music

By Edna St. Vincent Millay


I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.


Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.



Afternoon In February

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The day is ending,
The night is descending;
The marsh is frozen,
The river dead.

Through clouds like ashes
The red sun flashes
On village windows
That glimmer red.

The snow recommences;
The buried fences
Mark no longer
The road o'er the plain;

While through the meadows,
Like fearful shadows,
Slowly passes
A funeral train.

The bell is pealing,
And every feeling
Within me responds
To the dismal knell;

Shadows are trailing,
My heart is bewailing
And tolling within
Like a funeral bell.

Nobody Knows

Echo

By Christina Rossetti


Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low
As long ago, my love, how long ago




Nobody Knows

© Azumi Zaima

Published: May 2016


Nobody knows it's empty,
The smile that I wear.
The real one is left behind in the past
Because I left you there...

Nobody knows I am crying.
They won't even see my tears.
When they think I am laughing,
I wish you were here...

Nobody knows it's painful.
They think that I am strong.
They say it won't kill me,
But I wonder if they are wrong...

Nobody knows I miss you.
They think I am all set free,
But I feel like I am bound with chains,
Trapped in the mystery...

Nobody knows I need you.
They think I can do it on my own,
But they don't know I am crying
When I am all alone...

Animals Grieve Their Dead Too...

Knowing that other animal species suffer and have difficulty with grief is somehow comforting to me......I don't want them to suffer either.

Full story from National Geographic

This is a grieving dolphin, carrying her dead baby on her dorsal fin. Two other dolphins remain on either side of her as if to guard her, as if they are grieving with her.

Keeper of the Dreams

When a favorite person; a loved one~ dies
You get to be the keeper of their dreams
Not just one person,
But many friends can be in this role

To remember their dreams
keep the dreams,
live the dreams,
speak of the stories,
keep the dreams & stories alive
always;
Within us,
Through us.

The old paradigm of letting
the die go and moving on....
Is detramental in every way.
And it doesn't honor the loved one.
We are meant to keep our loved
ones alive.
Because they are alive.

Are we so small minded that
We believe they are only defined by skin & bones?
How limited that is, how uncreative of us all.
The ancient ones knew better...

Famous Authors on Death

“Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.” – Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist


“People living deeply have no fear of death.” – Anaïs Nin, The Diary Of Anaïs Nin, Volume Two


“Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain; a dream that was a nightmare-confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses, interspersed with long-drawn miseries, griefs, perils, horrors, disappointments, defeats, humiliations, and despairs — the heaviest curse devisable by divine ingenuity; but death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.” – Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth


“I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.” – William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying


“Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.” – Helen Keller


“For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.” – Susan Sontag

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so as long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.” – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” – Ernest Hemingway

“People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.” – Marcel Proust

“No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.” – Plato

“The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: your mother would be proud of you. Finding a way in my grief to become the woman who my mother raised me to be is the most important way I have honored my mother. It has been the greatest salve to my sorrow. The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place. I’d give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. It showed me shades and hues I couldn’t have otherwise seen. It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.” — Cheryl Strayed

“Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?” – Aldous Huxley

“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?” – Voltaire, Candide

“Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing — a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.” – George Bernard Shaw

“Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.” – Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“The fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.” – Jonathan Franzen

“To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase ‘terrible beauty.’ Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else’s body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.” — Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir

I Find You Everywhere!

1875 Blue & Gold Yearbook. UC. Found in McHenry Library

Famous Authors on Death

William Faulkner


“I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”

from the book:  As I Lay Dying


Edgar Allan Poe

"The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?"

The Premature Burial


George Eliot

"Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death--who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace 'We must all die' transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness 'I must die--and soon,' then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first."

Middlemarch


George Orwell

"A normal human being does not want the Kingdom of Heaven: he wants life on earth to continue. This is not solely because he is "weak," "sinful" and anxious for a "good time." Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life."

Lewis Carroll

death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!"

Sylvie and Bruno




William Shakespeare

"Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once."

Julius Caesar

Jack Kerouac on death....

Jack Kerouac on death.....


"I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of the wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn't die...”
~from: 'On The Road'

“When I die, put near me something that has loved the light, and had the sky above it always.” Nell. From "The Old Curiousity Shop". Charles Dickens

The description of Nell at the moment of death "She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God and waiting for the breath of life; not one who had lived and suffered death."

Mark Twain's Response Concerning the Death of His Daughter Suzy

It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their full import is mercifully lacking.

- Mark Twain's Autobiography (on daughter Suzy Clemen's death)

The Death of Jean by Mark Twain

The Death Of Jean

The death of Jean Clemens occurred early in the morning of December 24, 1909. Mr. Clemens was in great stress of mind when I first saw him, but a few hours later I found him writing steadily.

"I am setting it down," he said, "everything. It is a
relief to me to write it. It furnishes me an excuse for thinking." At intervals during that day and the next I looked in, and usually found him writing. Then on the evening of the 26th, when he knew that Jean had been laid to rest in Elmira, he came to my room with the manuscript in his hand.

"I have finished it," he said; "read it. I can form no
opinion of it myself. If you think it worthy, some day--at the
proper time--it can end my autobiography. It is the final
chapter."

Four months later--almost to the day--(April 21st) he was
with Jean.


Albert Bigelow Paine.
Stormfield, Christmas Eve, 11 A.M., 1909.

Read: 'The Death of Jean'
http://www.online-literature.com/twain/1316/

When You Died

The Setting of the Sun

Your Memory Is Made of Light

I Shall Go On Living

A Day Will Come

If I wake up crying...

No one else, Love

No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. Viktor E. Frankl

Music I heard with you was more than music....

"Bread and Music" by Conrad Aiken

Music I heard with you was more than music, 
And bread I broke with you was more than bread; 
Now that I am without you, all is desolate; 
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver, 
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass. 
These things do not remember you, belovèd, 
And yet your touch upon them will not pass. 

For it was in my heart you moved among them, 
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes; 
And in my heart they will remember always,
—They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

The "Brendan" Plant

The first thing I saw when I went into Trader Joe's Thursday, July 19th. I bumped into B's friend Sunny.
He saw the plant that morning when he arrived for his shift. We both agreed. This is definitely a Brendan plant! 

I Dream of You Bathing In Stardust & Moonbeams

The Fox & The Little Prince

Taming the Fox; from the Little Prince

“Please-tame me!' said the fox.

'I want to, very much,' the little prince replied. 'But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.'

'One only understands the things that one tames,' said the fox. 'Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me.'

'What must I do, to tame you?' asked the little prince.

'You must be very patient,' replied the fox. 'First you will sit down at a little distance from me-like that-in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day...” 

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

I did not know....

“I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him... The land of tears is so mysterious.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“People where you live," the little prince said, "grow five thousand roses in one garden... yet they don't find what they're looking for...

They don't find it," I answered.

And yet what they're looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water..."

Of course," I answered.

And the little prince added, "But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince





“You're beautiful, but you're empty...One couldn't die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass, since she's the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three butterflies). Since she's the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Brendan's Great Love For Dougie Rodrigues

Brendan talked endlessly about his buddy Dougie Rodrigues
A brilliant Chef. He so much looked forward to going back home
 to see D. R  and ask him to cook him up a meal.
 So this post is in honor of  Brendan
and Dougie's friendship.

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, by John Donne

‘Therefore, although I must physically leave you,

our souls don’t feel there’s any distance between us:

it feels more like an expansion,

much as when gold is beaten out into thin sheets

so it covers a greater area.




Or it’s like a pair of compasses,

where you are the one in the center

and I the one which circles it:

you stay on the same spot,

yet you still move, since you revolve

as I move around the perimeter.

(What’s more, the compasses are two in that they’re a pair,

but they’re really one, since they comprise the same one instrument.)




So this is how you will be to me,

as I move away from you:

you will remain here but move aslant in line with the direction I travel.

You remaining here enables me to travel in a perfect circle,

ensuring that I’ll end up right back here where I departed from –

back with you.’




Explanation of the poem ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, by John Donne

Jimmy Kent Tribute to Brendan

your one wild and precious life?

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the field,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

~ Mary Oliver (American poet, b. 1935), from “The Summer Day”