Words, Music, & Outdoor Adventures

There’s never gonna be a moment of truth for you
While the world is watching,
All you need is the thing you’ve forgotten
And that’s to learn to live with what you are

Some will strut and some will fret* See this an hour on the stage*Others will not but theyill sweat* In their hopelessness and their rage*Were all the same the men of anger* And women of the page* They published your diary* And thatis how I got to know you*The key to the room of your own and a mind without end* And hereis a young girl*On a kind of a telephone line through time* And the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend*So I know Iim all right* Life will come and life will go*Still I feel itis all right* Cause I just got a letter to my soul*And when my whole life is on the tip of my tongue* Empty pages for the no longer young*The apathy of time laughs in my face* You say each life has its place**

The place where you hold me* Dark in a pocket of truth*The moon had swallowed the sun and the light of the earth* And so it was for you*When the river eclipsed your life* And sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me*And it was my rebirth* So we know were all right**

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
…Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.

Woolf believed that the problem with 19th-century literature was that novelists had focused entirely on the clothing people wore and the food they ate and the things they did. She believed that the most mysterious and essential aspects of human beings were not their possessions or their habits, but their interior emotions and thoughts.

“There’s no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.”

In her long essay about women and literature, A Room of One’s Own (1929), she wrote: “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.”

…”Let’s go Jack, almost home,” that man this is good stuff. Man I love this dog. Running today, at a not-particularly-fast pace and during a not-particularly-great run, I had one of those moments where you realize, then and there, that there is nothing else in the universe you’d rather be doing than this, right here, right now.

So five miles ticked by, and I slowed to a walk and Jack looked back to make sure all was well, and I told him he was a good dog, good dog Jackie you’re a good dog, and he looked ahead again, content that the run was over, we could cool-down and walk to the house. At home he gets a big drink of water and a shot of recovery food, like real runners do. …When I came out of the shower he was crashed, hard, in the beginnings of a great nap. The kind of nap you have after lots of fresh air and a good, solid run. Like a real runner.

I’m proud of him. He’s getting into shape. He’s going to run a lot with me this year.*… Now, he’s my running buddy. My never-late, never-not-interested, never too-tired, no-excuses running buddy.

Man. Good stuff.

Traveling Through the Dark (1962), was published when Stafford was 48. It won the National Book Award for poetry in 1963. He said, “At the moment of writing … the poet does sometimes feel that he is accomplishing an exhilarating, a wonderful, a stupendous job; he glimpses at such times how it might be to overwhelm the universe by rightness, to do something peculiarly difficult to such a perfection that something like a revelation comes. For that instant, conceiving is knowing; the secret life in language reveals the very self of things.”

*

While in high school William went on what he described as an Indian vision quest, camping out in the breaks above the Cimarron River: “That encounter with the size and serenity of the earth and its neighbors in the sky has never left me. The earth was my home; I would never feel lost while it held me.” Or as he said in his poem “One Home:” “Wherever we looked the land would hold us up.” You can see where his steadiness comes from.

ifind a quiet place near the best companionsi*

The simplest questions are the most profound.

- from “Illusions, The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah”

*

http://www.summitdaily.com/article/200661222011

Running: 82 hours 13 minutes. 499.50 miles

Biking: 79 hrs and 31 minutes 986.50 miles

Swimming: 22 hours 52975 yards.