To find his own salvation, a man must first find the fool locked inside himself and set it free.
The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes.
In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.
If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.
Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives.
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.
…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
From arts, to literature, to science, to the founding of Christian institutions, all of that has its roots in a biblical worldview, but when you fail to recognize that it's the systemic reality of the greatest civilization in the history of humanity, you can become apathetic about what you actually now have. We have something that generations of people did not have.
Our mistake, you see, was to write interminable large operas, which had to fill an entire evening. And now along comes someone with a one or two-act opera without all that pompous nonsense - that was a happy reform.
One cannot step twice in the same river