“Where there is great love, there are always wishes.”
“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
But what really came out of the blue was...
“Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can happen to one again.”
And all I could say was...
Oh wow, just an awefull (as opposed to awful, so perhaps awefilled is a better word, if it is a word, but before I digress to far from the point filled with awe and oh wow), oh wow. This morning I wrote this letter and when I get to my office I the wind blow the desk calendar to the quote on today’s calendar page.
“Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can happen to one again.”
I know a few people who might actually really get that (perhaps deeper than they want to go). Hello out there, if you do. It is a quote I’ve lived in this life and the oh wow comes because I do not believe I ever read the words in that quote before. Thank you Willa Cather. From what I read, I probably would never pick up one of your books based purely on the subject matter, but I will be looking for your letters that were published in the last few years, with great respect, in case your really did not want them published as I read in a Publisher’s Weekly article.
Whenever I read about someone who lived long before I lived I wonder what their life might have been like and usually, I shudder at the thought of living in their times. The level of ignorance, repression, and delusion around me today is way higher than anything I want to be around, or in. I find it challenging to imagine the past human cultures as any more enlightened or willing to expand the possibilities of thought and perspective than we are today and as I said, today is stifling outside of my mind. Maybe you just had to be there.
Or maybe you just have to read the letter to feel it.
I could be wrong. The age of instant global information may actually create more oppression of thought, or at least more openly voiced (and often violent) conflict and oppression of thought than the age when information took months to travel the globe and much of one’s life was never known outside of a very small circle in their own lifetime. Still, being insulated by lack of communication in smaller bubbles would not be conducive to a world I want to live in any more than this world today.
“Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can happen to one again.”
Some memories are not even memories, but they are more real than anything that can ever happen.
The mind is an amazing entity, experience, and place to be once we remove the shackles of fear, stop defending ignorance, stop pretending knowledge (no less fighting over theories), and open it to the relatively infinite possibilities.
And then…. play with the connections without spending too much time or energy wondering (or debating) whether they are coincidence or not. Like a six letter last name starting with C, for instance lol lam laa).
Just days before The First of May
