life, beautiful life, tilting at windmills, bibliophilia, sailor mouths, blablablablabbing

decided to make the below its own post - what a lovely, moving poem, from one of my most favorite books, "earth prayers from around the world"... two more i liked last night (this morning? we were up reading & i think the blush of dawn was rising, too) were from whitman & thich nhat hanh, the latter whom i learned about while in a NM hospital 2 or so yrs ago... just spoke to a beautiful young woman who also was there & found out one of the youngest gals there died in november. so, so sad. i consoled the beautiful young woman as best i could from afar; she said she just wanted to talk to someone who "knew her." then we agreed that being married is rough at times, but that we both love it. "we are the lucky ones," i said, & she agreed, not just because we're still alive & getting past certain problemos, but that we each have the chance to have ever-more-fulfilling lives... lately, tho, my stubbornness has brought my already-generally-uncooperative mind much grouchy warring about a cell phone i purchased from walmart months back & refuse to admit is a piece of crap. the upside is, since i've been too mulish to reactivate service (weird verbiage! a phone is not a soldier!), & therefore've been unable to access facebook (our privacy settings are super-stringent), i've been reading a lot more! yes, tech deprivation has turned me back to books. thank you! at long beach's enormous $1 bookstore (housed in an old border's at the pike shopping mall), i picked up the most fascinating thing i've read in a long while, "born to run," a nimble, wild, entertaining, &, as you might guess, highly engrossing chronicle of a journalist's immersion in tarahumara & ultra-running & superathlete culture... what a treasure! one dollar! ...james told me jokingly, "don't tell anybody -- i've got a reputation to uphold," but we got our library cards recently & so now can check books out from the vast, wealthy, so, so nice huntington beach branch, which mom and dad have yet to see. when they do, they will plotz! this library has not just a gift shop & book sale the size of a small bookstore, but an eatery/study area & art gallery. when 1st i went there, i copped a resentment, as my brain is initially wont to do about things i perceive to boast "privilege," but now i just feel grateful to be able to utilize this wonderful, free, PUBLIC resource while we live in this area (sort of on this topic, here are many fine quotes from awesome author & lifelong library advocate ray bradbury)... back to the poem book, one that caused me pause was from an iroquois prayer, the 1st words of each line being "we return thanks': the flora & fauna of the natural world already have thanked us w/their bountiful beauty!... the whitman poem is about the purity & preferability of animals to humans & is from "song of myself" (it's probably easy to find, or maybe you already know it); the thich nhat hanh poem's first lines describe awakening & considering the next 24 hours, being thankful for them, reminding me of a dalai lama scroll i bought once on an ill-advised trip to berkeley: in retrospect, i see that the reassuring & lovely scroll, which now hangs in our mountain-house bedroom, is the reason i ended up going on that bad-juju disaster-misadventure at all. don't you agree that from every dark comes light, be it a stranger's smile on a blue day, a penny on the asphalt on the heels of bad news, the reassuring murmur of a familiar voice or birdsong when down-in-the-dumps, the sight of a dog playing or being walked, all of these moments of blessing/reprieve from morbid reflection reminding one in low spirits to eat, to speak one's mind, to get some rest, or to otherwise use the tools allowing return to sanity & gratitude?
from the other room just came a resoundingly bellowed f-word, making me laugh: jamesjr has died while playing one of his many video games. :) interaction around here's getting ever-cozier; how wonderful it was to hear the jameses howling w/laughter from downstairs as i wrote; they were watching jim jeffries, the foul-mouthed australian comedian-nihilist. i went down to say hello & was blasted w/such profanity from tv & from father & son, i dashed back upstairs; sh*t! what a bunch of sailors!... happy for their bonding. happy to write. to read. to love. to have yet another chance to do a better job at this thing called life.