A week at the lake”: this is a Minnesota phrase denoting a retreat into mystery, indisposition, vacation, or retreat. It’s our all-purpose excuse and explanation. We have no missing persons in this state, they’re pressured to be “at the the lake.” People from outside may puzzle about it: “What lake? Where?” We don’t even know how to process these questions, which interrupt our retreat into mist, otherness, wrensong, somewhere “up north.
Quotes
Self-discovery comes when a man measures himself against an obstacle.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Don’t pretend that difficulties don’t concern you. Other people need to know that while you find the good in virtually every situation, you are not naïve. Recognize challenges, and communicate the reasons for your optimism. Your positive approach will be most powerful when others realize it is grounded in reality.
My Daily Muse for today.
There’s something about the night,” Mr. Keenan said, reflecting on his boss’s use of the time. “It’s smaller. It lets you think.
Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
To hell with dignity. I’ll leave when the job’s done.
M (played by Dame Judi Dench) in Skyfall
Love itself is a kind of knowing.
Gregory the Great
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a letter to his daughter
The recording shows the truck careening to a stop immediately in front of the two Marines. In all of the instantaneous violence Yale and Haerter never hesitated. By all reports and by the recording, they never stepped back. They never even started to step aside. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet spread shoulder width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as they could work their weapons. They had only one second left to live.
The truck explodes. The camera goes blank. Two young men go to their God.
Six seconds.
Not enough time to think about their families, their country, their flag, or about their lives or their deaths, but more than enough time for two very brave young men to do their duty … into eternity. That is the kind of people who are on watch all over the world tonight—for you.
John Kelly’s speech. (via ufridman)
Never forget that right now, all over the world, there are men and women in service to this country doing the same. They have offered their lives, should the heavens want them, in defense of an ideal. An imperfect one. An experiment. Sometimes denied or delivered far short of the goal. Yet, one worth dying to achieve and defend. An ideal called Freedom.
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.
John Muir