In Memory of the Lad Charlie B.

The tree isn’t much to look at. Spindly, bare, pushing up from mud at the bottom of a swale. Spindly due to its location. Bare due to an exhausting combination of highway wind and oncoming autumn. These are unavoidable facts of existence.

Humor resides in this tree. After all, who willingly decides to sink its roots to grow up bracketed by galvanized guard rails, in the middle of a nondescript median? That is a black sense of humor or bad luck for the seeds, depending on the lens that receives the image.

Admire the tenacity of the leaves as the cars rush by, flailing in the watery light of a dying sun. The leaves work for it. They hang on. Soon they will probably fall. That is life.

A Feast for St. Crispin, Part 4

The wisp reels him in. Its ethereal gravity was far stronger than blue-grey gauziness would suggest. He spirals in towards the lowering fire, dropping the wood beside it. He was confident the pile would allow completion of the ceremony. Sticks fed into the expanding maw of flames, the heat grows. The sun was disappearing behind the leaves.

A Feast for St. Crispin, Part 3

It begins with small things. Branch tips. Twigs, if necessary. Slabs of bark. Wind and weather have strewn the forest floor with them all. “Chop wood, carry water” the unspoken mantra of the amble, the stoop, and the grasp. Embraced by the nave of trees he finds hushed joy in the rasp of dried wood against his fingertips grasping the first stick showing promise. At the moment of contact, from deep in the trees comes the toktoktok-toktoktok of a woodpecker hammering on a tree. The patchwork canopy diffracts the staccato tapping into a call to prayer. He stops, sinking to his knees. Not much of a religious man, he nonetheless succumbed to the first devotion of the day.

The shock that hit him had been years in the brewing. The garden was no longer the refuge it once had been, its silence amplified by the disappearance of those who had accompanied him through the gates. There was no one with whom to keep watch. Peace of mind had become moonlight on broken water. Try as he might the pieces were ever slipping from his grasp, a prelude to the terror and confusion that would grip him later. He knew this now from the benefit of the scanning microscope that is hindsight.

The woodpecker hammers anew. A zephyr stirs leaves dampened by new-fallen tears. Of regret or sadness or loss, he did not know. That they fell brought solace as proof of life. To be alive is to feel, emotion as real as the crumbling leaves that disintegrated under his fingertips. Questions arose from the crackling litter.

To whom do you listen? Whose will do you obey? Who is your master?

Breeze ripples through the trees, feeling for all the world like whispers on his ears. The effect startled him. Spooked, he sprang to his feet with a racing heart. There was no way, he hoped, that someone or something could have followed him out here. The last people he had seen was a pair of hikers heading in the opposite direction, over three hours ago. They would most likely be at the trail head, he thought. More hammering from the woodpecker. The burst ends with a solitary, emphatic knock reminiscent of a gunshot. He took it as a sign to return to the fire. The sticks he gathered in his arms before turning to the thread of smoke winding through the trunks.

A Feast for St. Crispin, Part 2

He rose to his feet. Crackling in his joints echoed the crackling flames. To his ears the sound was another stitch in the universal fabric into which his existence was woven. The body, like fire, consumes to live. The price of existence includes the toll it takes on both. The flames offered themselves up as temporary axis mundi for this feast day in the woods. Ephemeral, fluttering, but temporal and true.

Metaphysical indulges aside, there was work to do. He stepped out in a languid amble spiraling anchored by the volute spring of the fire. Leaf litter crumbled underfoot, little brown mosaics shattered by the high notes of his tread. Fire warmth in the limbs fades into the coolth of October air seeping through shirt, jacket, and jeans. He amused himself with the folly of the forest as a Roman bathhouse. Leaving the fire behind on a foliate passage from caldarium to frigidarium, minus the shock of a dousing with water.

Having recently dropped the stones, his hands were empty. They tingled. The time had come to fill them with new fuel.

To be continued

A Feast for St. Crispin

The smoke rose to meet Heaven on October 25th, in the fifty-fifth year of his tenure on Earth. A warm beast of a campfire lay just beyond his feet. Sparks threatened his socks, but the therapy of the flames was too good to resist. Hard days of hiking had etched tattoos on his lower legs, in the form of bruises and blisters. Cramps, too. He considered that as he absent-mindedly massaged his left ankle and arch. New, not quite broken-in boots sat on the ground by his side. To the front firelight dappled a pair of old shoes that very nearly were in the embers. The proximity of fire to footwear did not bother him. Indeed, the closeness made him happy, seeing as it was integral to the point of sitting fireside on this Saint Crispin’s Day.

October seeped into his bones. Afternoon sunlight filtering through the trees striped the forest with honeyed gold and slices of dusk. Leaf litter tanged the air, undergirded with the memory of petrichor. He reveled in the boon of communion with earth, air, fire, and water. Modern science may have moved on to greater accuracy in classifying the world and loosening the grip of things elemental but they still held sway on his imagination. Balance was restored through the arboreal embrace of the forest. The proof was here and now.

More walking awaited. There was still wood to gather, provisions to secure. He reached for the boots, slipping them on. While lacing up, motion by the fire caught his eye. Faint threads of smoke were spiraling up from the toes of the shoes. “Whoah!” he barked, startling himself with the volume shattering the quiet of the woods. He snatched the shoes away. It was too soon to end the celebration. That would have to wait, when the sun was down and the belly was full. He finished lacing the boots, and stood. The fire needed the depth of the night to reach its full flower. Time to gather the fuel.

To Be Continued

Setting Stones

The singular coldness of basalt, agleam with the residue of maritime fog, seeps into fingers stiff from work and winter air. The greyness itself seems to transfer to the flesh as if the rock itself is exacting a toll for having been quarried for use by the hands that dared disturb the earth. Fair exchange, perhaps. There is no escaping that in the material world creation incurs disruption, if not outright destruction. We do well to acknowledge that condition through respect for the resources consumed and environments affected. Our destiny is to sleep in the beds we make, and our descendants should not look upon our legacies with disappointment and disdain. They should know we laid the stones with respect for the past and for stewardship of the future.

The head and the heart began collecting stones long before the hands. This last day of the year I sit on a small boulder, chin resting on palms, meditating on coming days of slow and steady work. Even through scuffed leather the skin of the fingers has picked up a faint aroma of iodine and minerals. That scent itself a legacy of the sea just yards away, exhaling its spirit over the beach grass and stones. The cottage itself has been banked with samphire and laver around the base. An old tradition that still has its use even if only to comfort the mind with thoughts of stopping the wind. The waves whisper up the strand. Reaching out, I pick a stone and kneel to the new foundation.

This is what happens when the mind is given pause by deep shadows and short days. Human perception and language creates this border, this separation, this arbitrary terminus est at which the old gives way to the new. Things turn with the year. The hands grip stones, the weights of which inform the heart of desires and directions to feed and nurture through the passage of winter. Our foundations start here, setting stones on the last day of the year.

The Fire Behind

Seeker knelt at the edge of the prairie, retching his guts out with volcanic intensity. Slow poison and spiritual exhaustion had taken their toll. His arms trembling with the violence of the possessed, sheer force of will kept his head from dipping forward into the foulness polluting the ground. Behind him, roiling smoke besmirched the horizon of the sea of grass that once held his heart. Seeker could feel the heat even at the miles he had put between he and it. He spat. Pain radiated from the stone behind his breastbone.

The heaves subsided. Seeker rocked back on his haunches with hands on his hips. Hot, it was under that furnace sun. He sucked in grateful lungfuls as a cooling breeze sprang up. He thought maybe the wind spirits still held affection for him if they deigned to grant such a mercy. There had been precious little of that in the many moons of running from a hole that had opened in the sea.

Ticking in the grass. Cricket choruses bidding him farewell, or perhaps composing a dirge. Seeker did not know. The high keening of a red-tailed hawk broke the symphony of crickets. Crusty eyes opened and he could see the hawk circling a short distance away. Towards the east a sprinkling of trees congealed into a dusty forest crowding the terrain that stretched out before him. Green. The color made his heart twitch, memories of who he once was crowding to the fore of a kaleidoscopic hallucination that tumbled like the ocean he remembered lay far beyond those trees.

Seeker made to go, gathering up a sweat-stained hat, a battered backpack, and a heavy walking stick burnished by months of use, sweat, and tears. The backpack bowed his back under its weight. The hat he settled down over his filthy brow. His trembling hands gripped the stick tightly as he willed motion into legs that ached like the throb of an earthquake.

Sunlight like molten copper beat down on Seeker's neck. He resigned himself to the burn, it was nothing new when he compared it to the tannings of his youth. A few hundred steps onward a raspy mewling caught his ear. "The cat!" he muttered to himself. He stopped to unload the pack. Sitting on top of some rags and an iron pot was a small bobcat. Seeker had found him in the grass by a stream crossed miles ago. The mother was nowhere in sight. Little ribs poking through a matted robe of fur had given him pause. Even through the despair and fatigue, Seeker felt the gravity of the feline.

Small paws grasped at his finger. A raspy little tongue licked at the tips. Seeker scratched the animal behind its ears, then rested it on his left forearm as he stood to go. He spat again to rid his mouth of the bile and spite. He looked back one last time. The horizon writhed and curled, the smoke a giant serpent in his garden of Eden. It was closer than he realized. He turned away from the setting sun and the heat. The sea of grass would hold him no longer. There was walking, nothing more under a gargantuan sky to keep him moving towards the unseen ocean he hoped would buoy his sinking heart.

The Fracture

Chasm, by Kevin Shea, May 2017

No one tells you that little drama would have a huge part in the fracture of life, in the foot bones of the soul while it slams the brake pedal to the floor in a bid for control. That cliff edge is close and getting closer.

No one tells you that of course this is not your beautiful house, this is not your beautiful wife, because they never belonged to you in the first place. Of course, this is what the imps in your head whisper to you as you try to fall asleep.  No point in asking through sobs "How did I get here?" because you truly don't grasp it all. And sometimes the shittiness of life means you will not be told by those who swing the hammer.

No one tells you that the cleavage plane of mid-life won't be rewarded with that supermodel armcandy in the leather bucket seat. No, you won't get that as comfort, cold or otherwise. What you get is waking up in what feels like a down-at-the-heels luxury hotel, unsure of where you are, and cursing at the asshole cat who can't leave the mini-blinds alone.

You ask yourself, if this is a hotel, why is there a cat here?

Because right now, it isn't a hotel, it is a hiding place. The cat is along for the ride, and you can't help but be thankful for a companion with whom to gaze into the chasm you have to cross.

Magpie Tales 238: Made For Walkin'

Image via Tess Kincaid at Magpie Tales

boots brogans mukluks

not 'wellies' her look said

I said which do you wear

quick shy smile

under chestnut tresses 

she didn't answer

from over here

now that the rain stopped

looks to me a mismatched pair

at that she stopped

tucked a strand 

behind the shell of her ear

polar blue eyes

with a touch of crow

that mona lisa shone

I wear what I wear

because it suits me

why do yours match?

Magpie Tale 213: His Other Life

Image via Magpie Tales

Shaking hand opened the drawer

Wormy chestnut, waxy blackened 

angsty scrawls of sun-faded youth 

Burden of years constricts the heart

that sees the tarot of inks it never wore 

Never will, not in this life, nevermore,

Change has come, blood spilled

in a different river from passion's run

Tide

The old soul wearing a middle ground body sat in preternatural calm, on warm rocks with the cold sea lapping at his feet. He thought of currents, the Gulf Stream and Humboldts of the world caressing his legs with soft whispers of presences in the deep. His jeans were three shade of indigo dissolving into the restless water. There were barnacles, scratchy.

For the first time in his life the gelatinous fingers of seaweed entwined about his toes failed to make him shudder. This was new. Perhaps a sign of new things to come. A sea change, he thought. The idea brought a smile to his sunburned cheeks.

Sea change. Yes. The old soul reached up to adjust the salt-rimed hat that crowned his head. The hat was old, its fabric soaked with memory, and with pretensions to being green. He snugged it down, and pulled his windbreaker a little closer in. The argentine sun was high up in a sky that defined cerulean yet it offered little real warmth. Wind and water saw to that.

Still, he kept his feet where the breakers could touch them. The water was cold, but felt good. In its own aqueous way it felt like a blanket the old soul used to have, back when he was a boy and the world was new. The water rose and fell, inducing the tide in his veins that swelled to spring tide in his heart.

He sighed. waves gurgled and hissed among the rocks. The leading edge of the water slowly edged backwards away from him, and quiet fell along the shore. The old soul looked up. He expected that seventh wave to come roaring out of the sea, and if his eyes didn't deceive him, there was a big swell eating the horizon. His teeth flashed in the sun. Salt air filled his lungs, and he knew.

Sea change, yes. It was there. It was coming. As a younger man, the sight of such a swell would have sent him running up the beach. But not now. He laid his hands in his lap, mind filling with nothing, waiting to embrace the wave that would surely sweep him off the rocks.

Boundary Conditions (Sunday Meditation #21)

September 22nd, 2012. 7:31 PM. On the front patio, in the company of a dog. Serenaded by crickets, wind and faint barks from a few yard over. It is reflection.

Well. I see that it has been almost a week since I have administered the purge to my brain. There is no surprise here, but there is a tinge of melancholy. To write sometimes to me is to live. It is to feel. Feel in ways I occasionally have difficulty in allowing myself to experience, or perhaps, understand is the better term. The page or the screen, like the camera lens, affords me a shield and a filter on the world. It allows the parsing of what often seems unparsable. 

I find I am in a bit of a fugue state. Weariness, of the mind and the heart, is blurring my edges and smearing me over the landscape of my existence. Four solid days of work have shored me up and worn me out. This has kept me from the page, from the keyboard. Not for lack of ideas, mind you; I've had quite many. The lack of...ambition? desire? energy? has forestalled my getting them out of my head.

I am bored, fed up with current events, with politics, yet those things have been the fuel for the fires of my mind in overdrive. There has been much to consider, much to say, but two things have (wisely) reeled me in: a desire to free my mind from the attachments of righteous anger, and a loss of appetite for 'pig wrestling' in the social sphere. If I may crib from The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy in "Music and Politics":

If ever I would stop thinking about music and politics
I might be able to listen in silence to your concerns
Rather than hearing everything as an accusation
Or an indictment against me

That sort of describes my state of mind since the beginning of September. My attachments to certain beliefs and states of being had begun to mislead me, down a path of anxiety and negative emotions. And when I say 'current events' I include events not only in the world external to my life, but the one internal to it. Two events in particular have become signal bells in the cluttered temple of my mind.

The first was my visit back east for a long weekend with my daughter. The second was an evening stroll through an arts fair in my new, nearby, adopted hometown of Kansas City. Both made me rejoice, admire and celebrate. Both made me near to weep in humility and inadequacy. It was not until my afternoon break today that I had an inkling of why.

First thing: My daughter is beautiful, smart and luminous. She tests me, pushes me, exalts me. All that without guile or pretense or even true self-awareness. She is a mirror to my soul. It is one I gaze into frequently, when we are together and when apart. In that reflection I see the radiant joy and vampiric doubts that are peculiar to my fatherhood. The total of things I know about being a father is far outweighed by the total of things I don't know about being a father. On this last visit I wondered how I could be so lucky to have her as my daughter, and I hoped that someday she might think herself lucky that I am her dad.

Second thing: I have finally admitted to myself that perhaps, after all, I do have a modicum of skill and talent when it comes to photography. This led me to spend an evening, in good company, strolling amongst the light and sound and creative outpouring that was my first Plaza Art Fair in KCMO. So much wonder, so much beauty, so much expression of the creative urge. My encounters with two photographers induced the same exaltation and humiliation. Both had prints of photos I wish I had taken, from an artistic and a technical perspective. Both demonstrated to me that I have so much to learn about photography. I left the art fair in a slight brown study, which I hadn't quite left this morning.

So it was I found myself on break, leaning back on a bench, swaddled in shade with my head thrown back. I felt myself falling upward, pressured into a state of elastic resistance by the realities of myself and my circumstances. My daughter, those photographers, have shown me I am hemmed in by the knowledge I possess and the knowledge I wish to possess.  

I stared up between the gold-tinged leaves overhead, reveling in the electric blue sky tinged with its dreams of the coming fall. Thus was I illuminated: let go of the fear, embrace the unknown, and step through the boundary conditions of my soul.

The Fields Are Ripe With Grain

As a testament to my distraction, I finally noticed today that, in the month of May, I had only posted twice to this here soapbox I call Irish Gumbo. A pity, really. Judging by the torrent of thoughts and ideas rushing through my noggin these past twenty-nine days I would have guessed my real output to have been much higher. Alas, that is not the case.

I haven't met my usual standard, methinks. Much of my writing occurs in my head, long before it hits the page, digital or otherwise, but it still makes it to some form of reality. The month of May has been for my writing self a mirage. A phantom. A figment. There has been much to say. I have created fiction, non-fiction and that intersection of the two called real life. Short stories, novellas, novels, anthologies, all have been cranked out in my Gutenberg mind.

Sadly, dear readers, as you can tell this fecundity has not made it to the page. The noise and clatter of the world has pulled me away from my explorations, and I regret that I have not set aside more time to the transcription of the stories in my overheated mind.

There has been intense and prolonged change in my world, stretched out over months. I have moved long distances physically, emotionally and spiritually. I have questioned many things in my life, seeking right answers to very hard questions. I have sought to overcome a stretch of unemployment that has now run close to eight months. Mentally, I am in a high state of attenuation, my mind and heart strings over the fretboard.

A chance encounter with a local bookstore/small printing house owner delivered unto me the opportunity to perhaps have some of my work professionally edited and printed, ideally in a small run. The past two days, I have had the good fortune to devote long stretches to editing my own writing.The effort I have been blessed to expend has left me with a sense of nervous excitement at the possibilities that may open up before me. This is a good thing, and perhaps the closest I have come yet to really being published. 


What I need is time. I need more time. I haven't thought this big in a long time, and I don't want to stop. But time is crucial. It is not an infinite resource for those of us fated to walk this mortal coil; the imperative is to make the most of the moment before us. This I want to do, dear ones. I have to make the most of this moment of 'compilation' even if it means 'creation' must temporarily rest.


I want to make beautiful things, my lovelies. Creation is sustenance. Never in my life has it come so clear to me that now is the time to make what I want to do and what I need to do coincide. Wish me luck.

Sea of Grass, Heart of Light

I am not a child of the sun, I am a creature of the light.

So Seeker told himself whilst waiting patiently under the argentine refulgence of the new sun in his sky. Insects hummed in the sea of grass surrounding his place of repose atop a low hummock, perhaps the highest spot for what could have been miles. Dry whispers rose to his ears from the wind rustling in amongst the stalks encircling him. The sounds made him smile. They reminded him of home, long ago and miles away beside the great ocean that had nurtured him in his days as a younger man.

The sea. His heart stirred. The sea was far away now, and would be for months or perhaps years. Seeker’s eyes drooped, drowsy in heat. He made himself draw in a deep lungful or two of air in an effort to maintain awareness. The wind carried no salt tang here, only the wheaty burn of sun-drenched grass and trees. He considered that for the space of ten heartbeats. Exhaling slowly, the aroma of the grass sea permeated his body, his aura. His vision began to blur. The jade-green waves in his blood were fading into an ebb tide, while on the horizon of his consciousness a new swell appeared. The color of red gold, millions of tasseled stalks replacing the foam-spattered breakers he used to know.

Seeker stared into the middle distance. The threadbare sleeves of his camouflage shirt rasped over his sun-brown arms. The fingers of his hands traced over the outline of the chevrons he had ripped off long ago, tossed into the wind. The stitch marks plowed little divots in the faded olive-drab fabric.

 A keening filled the sky. It was no gull he heard, it was a hawk. The red-tinged bird looped in a slow figure-eight while riding the wind. The bird traced infinity against the cerulean sky. Seeker’s face split into a smile.  The warmth rising in his chest matched that pouring down from the sun.

“I am not a child of the sun, I am a creature of the light”, he said to the hawk. “I was not born of the sun but I seek it in shadows cast and the passage of a star that has brought me here to the shores of a new sea.”

Seeker found himself light, feeling as if he might be swept away by the prairie wind. The wind and the light had brought him here, and inscrutable though they might be, they had good reasons for doing so.

Seeker stood, watching the hawk. The bird kept silent counsel, watching with diamond eyes as the man turned into the sun. His shadow lay long on the grass behind. Seeker placed a hand over his heart, knowing the warmth within would serve as compass over this new sea upon which he sailed.

903 Views Of Mt. Gumbo

Following my own "narrow road to the deep north"*, through the countryside of my mind...

This is a time of particular reflection, as I contemplate change in my life, and a path that unfolds a step at a time. The jottings here have mapped out parts of the peculiar terrain of my mind. I have been unable to shake the notion put forth in the work of Japanese artist Hokusai, in his famous series of woodblock prints 36 Views of Mount Fuji. The art being a manifestation of explorations into a central idea, I realized that I have been engaging in the same thing with words.

The problem is I am still chasing Mount Fuji.

My nine-hundred and third post. 903 different maps in just over three-and-a-half years of journeying. I'm still looking for that point about which this world of mine revolves. My own personal axis mundi. Perhaps it is there. There have been glimpses. Sometimes the fog burns off and I can just see something there, something that might be a mountain, a tree, a post the size of Fuji.

I don't know. Ideas are funny that way. Our heads are full of them, universes contained in the perimeter of our minds. I have many. What I don't know is the one that functions as the anchor of my internal universe, and by extension, my external universe. I've come close, at times, I think. Lately "Love" seems to be central to the mental eructations I call my writing. You, dear readers, may better able to tell me.

Gripping smoke. Herding cats. Embracing a waterfall. The tasks I set for myself, because if I have learned anything from writing, getting a handle on truth, authenticity, and the "real" means chasing something I may never fully grasp. Yet something keeps me on the path, searching for that one view in my head that finally makes me say "I have seen the mountain".

I will see it. I know it. All I need to do is keep looking.

---
*The Narrow Road to the Deep North (and Other Travel Sketches), by Matsuo Basho, is a book I would love to write for today, and one I wish I had written.

Patuxent River Meditation #8

Early twilight, I watched the silver sky diffract and ripple in the gunmetal sheen of the river below my feet. In front of me a pollen-encrusted spiderweb fluttered in a gentle breeze that felt like a lover's whispers. Worn wood, pitted iron bracing and the smell of sun-warmed creosote fading in my nostrils. The chuckle of water over rocks soothed me. Ten heartbeats of reflection took me back to my youth, and those spring evenings hanging out on the train trestle down the road from my house.

I tarried only briefly in that pool of memory. Traffic noise and passers-by broke my reverie. To my credit, I felt no irritation, only gentle joy. A river flows, far from the waters of my boyhood home, and carries me back and forth through time. Change is constant, the saying goes, and the river is an exemplar of the proverb. I leaned on the rail of the bridge to look closer at the water. I don't know what I was looking for, exactly. Maybe a way to divine the future, tell my fortune in the patterns on the surface.

The river said nothing. Not that I could hear with my ears, anyway. No, what it said was meant to be heard by the heart and the soul. The water flows to be broken up by stones and roll over sand. It rejoins itself. It cannot know clearly its true path, only that it flows ever onward to someday join the sea. Not unlike myself.

This I learned from the river, when it spoke to me.

Making Omelets

Sitting down at the battered companion he called a dining table, fork in hand, slow tears seeped into his vision. He gulped another mouthful of tea and wept in thanks at the savor of the eggs.

Sunlight waned outside in the deepening evening.  The lamp on the table flickered in argentine lambency. He watched the flame dance in conversation with a breeze slinking through the open window.  The omelet disappeared under the insistent bulldozer of his appetite.

Wiping his face on the linen napkin he had carefully placed on the scarred wood, the old man finished the dinner.  His breath scraped over his teeth to fill his lungs.  Holding it, he counted ten slow exhales and grieved over the inescapable violence of needing to live.

Axial Shift

She missed the solstice,
days growing long, blue to gold,
Winter stays her heart

Winter Embers

Orange coals burning low
ahead of chilly solstice,
longer days await

Sunday Meditation #4: On Giving Up What Is Wanted To Get What Is Wanted

How I wonder how it is we can do all that we think we can!  This consumer culture, this unrelenting atmosphere in which we are raised to compete, to always win, win, win and thereby be validated in the eyes of all the others who wish to win.  The pressure is intense, and it leads us to believe there is nothing we cannot do, nothing we should not do, and that we will always be able to do all, have all.

This troubles me to no end.  Personally, I could do without the constant pressure of competition.  This is not to say I think we should never compete at anything or for anything; rather, it is that ultimately competition for the sake of winning alone interests me very little.  In reality, it bores me and turns me away.  It tends to bring out the bad in people, when the cornerstone of their validation is to "win", whatever that means.

It leads me to believe that in the end, if we buy into the do all/have all/win all myth too heavily we will always end up frustrated, sad and wracked with stress.  Because to believe you can have it all is a false promise.  No one person can do all things, have all things and expect to do them all well and have all the best.  There are limits to human endurance, attention and propriety.

I read somewhere recently that to have a tranquil life, one must limit ones interests.  That phrase struck a gong deep in my head, and I was entranced by the reverberations.  It crystallized a core idea I have been struggling with the past few months, this idea of limiting my involvements so that I may gain peace of mind.  This will matter in the near future, as I consider my life's path and the manner and direction in which it seems to be unfolding now.  I will have choices to make, and interests to consider.  Not all interests will be equally served, as this is an impossibility.  I will have to look deep within my heart and soul, and decide just how much peace and tranquility mean to me, and to my life.

Would that we all do this.