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https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/features/stoliker-recalls-first-shuttle-landing.html

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I Love Everything About You

Two lovers find that their affection knows no bounds.

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Just Because I Carry My Load Well, Doesn’t Mean It Is Not Heavy

“Just because I carry it well, doesn’t mean it isn’t heavy.” I read this quote the other day and it suddenly hit me. Everyone is carrying a

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12 Truths I Learned from Life and Writing, by Anne Lamott

A few days before she turned 61, author Anne Lamott wrote down everything she knew. "There's so little truth in the popular culture," she sa

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saying goodbye to new york city

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A Letter to My Mother That She Will Never Read

Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war.

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List: Unpleasant Thoughts You Had, and the Items You Purchased in Order to Stop Having Them

Unpleasant Thought: Even if war with North Korea is as imminent as the media would like you to imagine, and even if the sea levels are rising at an...

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Nobel Laurette, and the poet I included in my college personal essay.

Love after love, by Derek Walcott

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

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Winding Up Derek Walcott

I live on the water, alone. Without wife and children, I have circled every possibility to come to this:

a low house by grey water, with windows always open to the stale sea. We do not choose such things,

but we are what we have made. We suffer, the years pass, we shed freight but not our need

for encumbrances. Love is a stone that settled on the sea-bed under grey water. Now, I require nothing

from poetry but true feeling, no pity, no fame, no healing. Silent wife, we can sit watching grey water,

and in a life awash with mediocrity and trash live rock-like.

I shall unlearn feeling, unlearn my gift. That is greater and harder than what passes there for life.

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Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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If I should have a daughter ...

"If I should have a daughter, instead of Mom, she's gonna call me Point B ... " began spoken word poet Sarah Kay, in a talk that inspired two standing ovations at TED2011. She tells the story of her metamorphosis -- from a wide-eyed teenager soaking in verse at New York's Bowery Poetry Club to a teacher connecting kids with the power of self-expression through Project V.O.I.C.E. -- and gives two breathtaking performances of "B" and "Hiroshima."

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#drakeoncake (at Central Park)

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Climbing Mayan temples in the Yucatan. Thanks for all the adventures @c_rafie #tbt #roadtothirty #lobstertan #spanglish #halfmexi (at Cobá, Quintana Roo, Mexico)

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[lindsayslohan]

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Words not Munitions

In November 1946, the novelist Albert Camus published a series of essays titled “Neither Victims nor Executioners” in the Parisian newspaper Combat, to which he had begun contributing during the resistance to the Nazi occupation of France. “We are being torn apart by a logic of history which we have elaborated in every detail, a net which threatens to strangle us…. To save what can be saved so as to open up some kind of future--that is the prime mover, the passion and the sacrifice that is required. It demands only that we reflect and then decide, clearly, whether humanity's lot must be made still more miserable in order to achieve far-off and shadowy ends, whether we should accept a world bristling with arms where brother kills brother; or whether, on the contrary, we should avoid bloodshed and misery as much as possible so that we give a chance for survival to later generations better equipped than we are.... Yes, it is fear and silence and the spiritual isolation they cause that must be fought today. And it is sociability and the universal inter-communication of men that must be defended. Slavery, injustice, and lies destroy this intercourse and forbid this sociability; and so we must reject them. But these evils are today the very stuff of history, so that many consider them necessary evils. It is true that we cannot "escape history," since we are in it up to our necks.... All I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being. Since this terrible dividing line does actually exist, it will be a gain if it be clearly marked. Over the expanse of five continents throughout the coming years an endless struggle is going to be pursued between violence and friendly persuasion, a struggle in which, granted, the former has a thousand times the chances of success than that of the latter. But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions.” http://wipfandstock.com/neither-victims-nor-executioners.html

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Monday morning blues: throwback to Montauk and long walks on the beach ☀️