If you would make a man happy, do not add to his possessions but subtract from the sum of his desires.

     Seneca

 

 

Stephen Wilder

Mary McDowell Center for Learning

20 Bergen St.

Brooklyn, NY 11201

stephenw@mmcl.net

718 625-3939

 

P

Autumn Quince

How sad they are,
the promises we never return to.
They stay in our mouths,
roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.
Houses built and unwittingly lived in;
a succession of milk bottles brought to the door
every morning and taken inside.

And which one is real?
The music in the composer's ear
or the lapsed piece the orchestra plays?
The world is a blurred version of itself --
marred, lovely, and flawed.
It is enough.

~ Jane Hirschfield ~

 

 

 

One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence. Lewis Mumford

THAT LIVES IN US If you put your hands on this oar with me, they will never harm another, and they will come to find they hold everything you want. If you put your hands on this oar with me, they would no longer lift anything to your mouth that might wound your precious land - that sacred earth that is your body. If you put your soul against this oar with me, the power that made the universe will enter your sinew from a source not outside your limbs, but from a holy realm that lives in us. Exuberant is existence, time a husk. When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space; love goes mad with the blessings, like my words give. Why lay yourself on the torturer's rack of the past and the future? The mind that tries to shape tomorrow beyond its capacities will find no rest. Be kind to yourself, dear - to our innocent follies. Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance. You will come to see that all evolves us. ~ Rumi ~ (Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West by Daniel Ladinsky)

Quote

Without a doubt, there is such a thing as too much order.

Arnold Loebel (author of children's books)

Q

I said to my children, "I'm going to work and do everything that I can do to see that you get a good education. I don't ever want you to forget that there are millions of God's children who will not and cannot get a good education, and I don't want you feeling that you are better than they are. For you will never be what you ought to be until they are what they ought to be." - Martin Luther King Jr.,