Last evening I had the pleasure of attending a wonderful surprise 60th birthday party hosted by friends of mine in honor of a man who is deeply loved and respected by his friends and whose life has been shaped by his evolving relationship with the most tenderhearted of nature's creatures, horses. It's rare these days …
Tag: Henry David Thoreau
Branches and Roots
Every once in a while you hear of unusually creative friendships. Such friendships have the dual effect on my consciousness of restoring my faith in humanity and sparking my imagination relative to our collective future. I stumbled across a lovely passage which describes one such friendship between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in …
The Inclination of Expectation
March is the Month of Expectation by Emily Dickinson March is the Month of Expectation. The things we do not know - The Persons of prognostication Are coming now - We try to show becoming firmness - But pompous Joy Betrays us, as his first Betrothal Betrays a Boy. March is here, which means that …
Simplify, simplify.
“Our life is frittered away by detail...simplify, simplify.” ~ Henry David Thoreau I had an impromptu meeting the other day that brought to my attention the importance of simplification. The fellow I was meeting with and I were discussing how best to train another person on a particular system we had developed many years ago …
The Struggles of Man
"Religion, Society, and Nature—these are the three struggles of man." ~ Victor Hugo If all the human activity undertaken in the course of a day, month or year were put in a pot still and reduced to its fractions, there would be but three fundamental components: religion, society and nature. Every man who has ever …
Improve the Silence
"Do not speak unless you can improve the silence." I've often wondered what Twitter feed, the blogosphere and Facebook would look like were there to be a filter that removed any content that did not improve the silence. Take Twitter, for example. Users post roughly 1,200 Tweets per second. Facebook has 500,000,000 active users - …
Fahrenheit 451
"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience." ~ Henry David Thoreau You may recall Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, which tells the tale of a hedonistic …
Your Purpose in Life
"It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?" ~ Henry David Thoreau How many of your daily activities are devoted to honestly purposeful, generative activity? Like ants, we move around busily from place to place and activity to activity, but how often do you …
Truth and Goodness
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." ~ Albert Einstein I've often marveled at the ingenuity of those standouts in history who dedicated their lives to the restoration of goodness and truth to their rightful place at the apex human understanding and function. It hasn't been easy. Human beings …
Tilting at Windmills
Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other. Not only individuals but states have thus a confirmed dyspepsia. ~ Henry David Thoreau One of the microphones came on prematurely during a performance …
Gregory Hake 