It's my birthday!

And I'm freaking 55 years old!!! OMG! How did this happen???

All kidding aside, I'm seriously wishing myself a happy birthday year, with many happy more to come.

I'm in Santa Rosa today, at Peet's Coffee right now, on Mendocino Ave, around 9am. I just dropped Erin off for her Chanticleer's Lab Choir performance at Santa Rosa HS. I don't have much 'planned' for today; hang out, I think I'll check out some Goodwill stores in the area, try to get down to SSU and find Goelz...

It sure seems like 10 years or so has and has not changed Santa Rosa, of which both statements are true!...It's been 17 years since I lived here?!...the JC looks bigger and has a large parking garage now; 4th street looks the same (pretty much); it's still quiet and more country-like...

OK...over and out for now...I feel like reading my current book (haven't read a book in about 6 months); Benita Eisler's O'Keeffe & Stieglitz. It's very interesting.

Just a poem...

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is a society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in it's roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel,
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
---Lord Byron

So much...

...loneliness and isolation in our culture. So much loss of a feeling of connection, and intimacy. So much depersonalization, which nearly becomes a sense of overpowering numbness.



I'm just saying.

Photo: Mary Ellen Mark

Somewhere...

"To be whole, let yourself break.
To be straight, let yourself bend.
To be full, let yourself be empty.
To be new, let yourself wear out.
To have everything, give everything up.

Knowing others is a kind of knowledge;
knowing yourself is wisdom.
Conquering others requires strength;
conquering yourself is true power.
To realize that you have enough is true wealth.
Pushing ahead may succeed,
but staying put brings endurance.
Die without perishing, and find the eternal.

To know that you do not know is strength.
Not knowing that you do not know is a sickness.
The cure begins with the recognition of the sickness.

Knowing what is permanent: enlightenment.
Not knowing what is permanent: disaster.
Knowing what is permanent opens the mind.
Open mind, open heart.
Open heart, magnanimity."

Not sure who said this, but I like it!