What is Success? To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by
a healthy child, a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed
easier because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded.
"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again."
We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
"We are not retreating; we are advancing in another direction."
We do not keep the outward form of order, where there is deep disorder in the mind.
Do you know what astonished me most in the world? The inability of force to create anything. In the long run, the sword is always beaten by the spirit. Soldiers usually win battles and generals get credit for them. You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war. If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin pricks that proceed cannon shots. 
At the heart of each of us, whatever our imperfection, there exists a silent pulse of perfect rhythm, a complex of wave forms and resonances which is absolutely individual and unique, and yet which connects us to everything in the universe. 
We have come upon those dreary days when one just wants to sit indoors with good friends and a cup of tea. Or perhaps one would prefer to take their tea and to snuggle up in front of a fire with a good book. The Chinese have a long history of tea drinking and have much to say about the subject. I thought the I would share a page from the Chinese Tea Reader "Ch'a-Su."
Suitable Moments for Drinking Tea
...my father has given to fabulously successful females ... as told to me by a former colleague.
From Reginsmál (25):
Kembðr ok þveginn skal kœnna hverr|
Combed and washed every thoughtful man should be
ok at morni mettr; |
and fed in the morning;
þvíat ósýnt er,hvarat aptni kømr;|
for one cannot foresee where one will be by evening;
illt er fyr heill at hrapa. |
it is bad to rush headlong before one's fate.
Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lines become generations made out of pictures and words just kept 
In the restorative idleness of solitude, on the other hand, the widows discovered that the honorable way to live was at the body's bidding, eating only when one was hungry, loving without lies, sleeping without having to feign sleep in order to escape the indecency of official love, possessed at last of the right to an entire bed to themselves, where no one fought them for half of the sheet, half of the air they breathed, half of their night, until their bodies were satisfied with dreaming their own dreams, and they woke alone.
When I was growing up, my Mutti had a cleaning lady, Wilma, who came once a week. She was a good Dutch woman and an impeccable cleaner, probably the only one who has ever cleaned to my mother’s standards. This woman could make absolutely anything sparkle and shine and I am sure dust quivered in her shadow, we certainly did. She was just that kind of woman.
Thursday evenings were an inevitable stress for us kids as we had to “tidy” before Wilma came to clean, because you see, Wilma only cleaned. She was not there to pick up after us. She was very strict about that. Those were her rules. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was to get in the way of her cleaning.
The tension on Thursday nights was such that at one juncture one of my sisters, in the midst of a meltdown, took a purple wax crayon and in her scrawly grade one printing wrote, “Wilma, I just can’t take it anymore,” on the inside door panel of my mother’s antique washstand. Those were sentiments that I am sure we had all shared at one point or another, but luckily for us, my mother found this message of distress before Wilma ever happened upon it. If she would have, I am not quite sure what would have happened, but I am sure it wouldn’t have been good. We probably would have been down one good irreplaceable cleaning lady and sentenced to numerous years of cleaning penitence. But that’s not really what this story is about. You see, when Wilma started, she made it very clear to my mother that this was not a long term affair. She would only clean for my mother until her husband returned. He had left her some years previous, but she was adamant that at some point he would come to his senses, change his mind and they would be reunited. Well, weeks turned into months and months into years, but just the same, as if it were her mantra, she would say, “You know, I won’t be here for long. My husband is going to come back to me and when he does I will quit. I’m only cleaning until my husband returns.”
I know many of you are probably now thinking that this is a story of some highly delusional and probably obsessive compulsive woman, and it certainly might seem that way. Wilma was our faithful housecleaner for a good ten years or more, just as faithful to us as she was to her mantra. Then one day, just like that, out of the blue, she phoned my mother and said, “I won’t be cleaning for you any more, my husband has just come home.”
Apparently it only takes the faith of a mustard seed to move a mountain. At present, I’m working on trying to move molehills while attempting to remember that thoughts become things.
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
I do not praise the wisdom of men, said the Reverend, for that is not great wisdom. Now I rather try to praise the folly of men, because it's remarkable how far their folly has brought them.
moon rising over Kootenay Lake
Absence is to love as wind is to fire; It extinguishes the small. It enkindles the great.