Thoughts and Prayers

"More Tears Are Shed Over Answered Prayers Than Unanswered Ones"

- The epigraph to Truman Capote's last (unfinished and untitled) work

Sweet Dreams

"We are such stuff, as dreams are made of,
And our little life is rounded,
With a sleep."

-From William Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Pretty is What Changes

"Changing
It keeps changing
I see towers where there were trees.
Going, all the stillness,
the solitude, Georgie!
Sundays disappearing, all the time,
when things were beautiful.

All things are beautiful, Mother.
All trees, all towers, beautiful.
That tower beautiful, Mother.
See? A perfect tree.
Pretty isn't beautiful, Mother.
Pretty is what changes.
What the eye arranges
is what is beautiful!"

- Lyrics from Sunday in the Park with George

by Stephen Sondheim, 1984

The Red Cross

-Digital Composition by Randal E. Culbreth, 2008

On Over Achievement

"They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm."

-Dorothy Parker, 'Fair Weather,' Sunset Gun, 1928

Get Real

"Daylight falls and I'm lost in the big parade.
Hold my hand, darling, I'm afraid of the daylight.
Shade is dark.
Cool and languid for life or love.
Safe in shadows; never stark as the daylight.

When I was just knee high,
My Momma told me, never try,
To be someone that I am not.
Yet over time I had forgot,
The wandering child, so lost at play:
He's found himself but he can't find his way,
In the daylight.

Life is short, and there's no turning back the time.
Fragrant meadows and rocks to climb in the daylight.
In my mind, there's a corner I need to turn.
Lessons lived is a lesson learned in the daylight.

I miss the forest shade,
You took me there, the promise I made,
To never leave the dark so deep.
Safe and soothing, yet I fear,
As I recall and now reflect,
I see it's safer to connect,
To the daylight."

Lyrics from Daylight by Alison Krauss & Union Station

from the album Home on the Highways

In How We Speak

"Brave men tell the truth, 
A wise man's tools are analogies and puzzles,
A woman holds her tongue,
Knowing silence will speak for her."

From "Remind Me" by Royksopp (2007)

Live to Love

"There was a boy
A very strange enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far, very far
Over land and sea
A little shy and sad of eye
But very wise was he

And then one day
A magic day he passed my way
And while we spoke of many things
Fools and kings
This he said to me
'The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return'"

-Nature Boy by Nat King Cole (Greatest Hits, 1948)

Heart Beats

"And if I need rhythm, it'll be to my heart I listen."

- Roison Murphy in "Ramalama"

Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love caries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

-Donald Hall from The Painted Bed (Houghton Mifflin Company)