“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.”
—Goethe

Any parent understands the frustration of having a child who is making a preventable mistake with their life, who refuses to listen to helpful advice. All the while we are thinking “Why must you make life so hard for yourself? All you need to do is follow my guidance – after all, I was your age once and made the same mistakes. I also suffered the consequences. If I could only go back, I would make different choices, yet here you are, with every ability to save yourself from so much heartache, yet you are so unwilling to listen and learn”.

Right?

Well that’s why I love history and philosophy.

Most people (yes, I do know that) roll their eyes and say “Oh no, not another talk about long dead people!”. The trouble is, schools make history boring and kids have a short span of attention anyway.

What’s missing is flesh and blood. What’s missing is a sense of a real person who lived a real life with all of the hopes and fears and needs and longings as anyone living now. Many more so.

When I read history and philosophy, I start with biography. Who are they? Were they young or old? What experiences shaped them? What did they want?

Only when I see that man or woman open their eyes and look at me do I go on.

With all of the books and knowledge we have at our fingertips and key clicks, I will never understand why so many don’t devour this wealth. Yet even with all we have, so much has perished.

How many wise old people have died without any written legacy? How many books have been destroyed or lost?

The great Roman historian Livy arrived in Rome by 29 BC with the intention of writing what was then the city’s 750 year old history. The project eventually encompassed 142 books – all hand written – of which only 35 have survived. Almost all of what we know Aristotle wrote is gone. Furthermore, you will never know half of what your great grandmother knew and lived and thought, no matter how long you might have sat at her knee.

Listen here young man, and young lady.

Yep, they said that a lot.

This has been a stress-filled week, but that’s not the same as a stressful week. There’s something calming about knowing that all is fundamentally right in your core that allows you to deal with issues without being swallowed by them.

Ernest Hemingway said

“There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.”

My dad used to say there is a difference between learning something and knowing it.

You learn it in your head but you know it in your heart.

I was a very young man when I became a father of four, and even then, at the beginning of knowing, I understood that this was different. This mattered.

As I watch my own children begin the process of knowing, I whisper thanks to God. The precious gift of their children will sustain them through storm and invader, even as they have themselves have sustained me.

She’s known for her writing, but she was a bit of an artist too. Like everyone, I met Sylvia Path in school when I read The Bell Jar in an English class. Such a waste of life. As you know, she gassed herself to death in her kitchen oven.

Ironically, she said “by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

That quote came immediately to mind when I saw this drawing. I think one of the reasons her fame has endured and why she resonates still is because so many people (women in particular) are just like her. By that I mean she was awake in life and could clearly see its possibilities through wanting and curious eyes, yet for reasons even she could never quite define, she simply could not make a choice and find peace in her decision.

She wrote

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

Tragic

Friendship isn’t about having all of the answers.

It’s staying by a person’s side until the answers come.

I’ve had a lot of titles in my day, but the one I’m proudest of is Writer.  It’s not unusual for a Texan to hold an aquifer of pathos in his soul, but it rare for us to be able to get it out in an intelligent way (especially in politics, but I digress).  Anyway, when I finally manage to say something meaningful, I hold my own little mental party.  When someone else agrees with me – well, that glow just lasts all day. This weekend I get to hang out with Lee Duffy and some of the finest writers around these parts.

I can’t wait to learn (steal) from these amazing poets.

“One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.”
― Joan of Arc

“The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn’t indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn’t detect.”
― Mark Twain, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

“If Joan of Arc could turn the tide of an entire war before her 18th birthday, you can get out of bed.”
― E. Jean Carroll

————

Hard to imagine. Young, obscure French girl of about 12 claims to hear voices and see visions of national success based on military action, is believed by the politicians and thereafter successfully leads battle campaigns. All of this while still a teenager until she is captured and sold to the enemy. The story would be remarkable enough if it ended there, but it would still be a mere footnote in history.

What lifts the story to grandeur is her trial and execution. Anyone would have understood if this young lady would have wilted under duress having been hauled off to a foreign country and set upon in court by a bunch of powerful and downright mean old men.

Read the transcripts from the trial. She not only refused to recant, she died a horrible death by being burned alive.

I know she was made iconic, even then by those who would manipulate the populace by invoking her story (politicians have always done this), but even with the varnish stripped off, the child was remarkable.

We get a lot of grief in south Texas every August when it’s 100 degrees in the shade. The other seasons are the payoff though. Right now it’s about 70 degrees in early January when much of the country is in a deep freeze. We rarely see snow in Houston.

One of my favorite photos is the one above. It was taken when Lindsay and Ricky were both little. Early one Sunday morning as we were getting ready for church, a light snow began to fall. When they ran outside to celebrate, I was lucky to have a camera nearby.

I think the thing I love the most is the capture of pure joy. Isn’t it instructive that the two critical ingredients are (1) a gift from God (2) received with childlike wonder?

Yep, that equals joy every time.

I have been blessed with two owls that have nested in the trees just outside my study. They begin their wonderful conversation at dark and are there to greet me in the otherwise silent early morning hours of my quiet time. I don’t know how long they will reside with me, but for now they are among my most treasured friends.

The holidays are now behind with festivities boxed up for another year. Almost everyone I talk to feels optimistic about 2012, and just about as many say they are glad to put 2011 in the rear view mirror. It was tough.

 
My first life lesson of the new year was taught courtesy of my grandson. While the family was celebrating midnight with cheers around our annual bonfire, he was peacefully asleep in his daddy’s arms. Yes, Gannon, I want to stay very close to my Father this year too. 


 That’s where peace is.