It takes an island… #Arran #Scotland #friendship

A most amazing community and a heartfelt tribute. Thank you, Barb for doing this. This is a celebration of life.

Barb Taub

Then catch the moments as they fly,
And use them as ye ought, man:
Believe me, happiness is shy,
And comes not aye when sought, man.
—A Bottle and a Friend, Robert Burns

A thank you letter to Arran.

Some weeks ago, I turned to Arran, the small Scottish island I call home, for help. Two friends and I had hoped to get together on Arran last April. Because of the pandemic, we postponed it to this year. But between continuing covid restrictions that left me marooned in Italy, and life-threatening health issues that came up for each of my friends, we realized that wasn’t likely either. (You can read about their personal, sad, funny, and amazingly life-affirming cancer journeys on Mary Smith’s Cancer Diaries and Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo.)

The solution, for anyone who has ever lived on Arran, was obvious. I posted a message on the island’s…

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Hard Work and the Good Life

Randall is one of my favorite bloggers. There is always beauty, inspiration, and each post filled with life. If you are not familiar with his work, give yourself a gift that is only a click away.

Global Sojourns Photography

Cool, quiet days in a small village in the middle of Bohemia come to life in a way I imagine they did centuries ago. The smell of wood stoves, sun rays making their way through the mist, and people preparing for a good day of hard work.

The work is exhausting but full of vitality. Energy created by the confidence of giving each day the best, a hallmark of a successful life. Faces of workers mapped with lines, each etched with a tale stretching back in time. One day falling into another, each story taking us to where we are now.

Days constructed with skill, hands crafting together a life of quality to stand the test of time. In the end, if everything goes right, life will be made a bit easier for those who carry on after we are gone.

Small miracles surround us daily, people who embrace the…

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L’ete

The veil between my beloved summer and autumn has once again descended. Like last year, it has tumbled earlier than in the past. I’ve learned to find delights in each season but summer is where my heart sings. The quotes below, for me, reflect that sentiment. 

 

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned  that within me there lay an invincible summer.”  –  Albert Camus

“In summer, the song sings itself.”   –  William Carlos Williams

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”   –  F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 

L’ete

Slowing down my mind

Halt the eternal quest

For tomorrow, next week

Or a favorite holiday

Even before summer’s

Waning begins, the

Yearning for it starts

Anew

*

Learning to delight in

Nuances of each season

Colors of gold, red, yellow

Then brown splashes

Across the vineyards to

Les arbres

Soups simmer once again

A late squash-corn chowder,

Black bean or hearty vegetable

Avec pois chiche

*

Le Printemps donne l’espoir

Les fleurs,

Vibrant green leaves

Sur le vigne

Life cycle

Reaffirms herself

Mother Nature bestows her gifts

*

Most difficult

Pour moi

Making peace

Avec l’hiver

Taking my breath away

Lodging its chill

Deep in my bones

Even when sunlight bounces

Across a rare snow

Longing takes over

Summer feels so far away

*

Bisous,

Léa

lumière du soleil

“I desperately want to see the day today and do the best I can not to miss a shred of sunlight. It’ll be over before I know it.”   –  Mandy Patinkin

 

“If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.   –  Napoleon Bonaparte

 

“A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.”   –  Anais Nin

*

lumière du soleil

*

playfully

she slips upon me

as I sleep

nudging me awake

filled with laughter

forcing my eyes

open

*

impishly she creeps

into corners

illuminating cobwebs

chasing shadows

yet they disappear

as she moves on

*

like a torch

her beams

warm the forest’s

thickly needled carpet

peeking between branches

and leaves

*

with a silent smirk

in her wake

she ignites starlight

*

Bisous,

Léa

What Can I Do To Drive Away…

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard, are sweeter.”  – John Keats 

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”  – John Keats

“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language, and the last, and it always tells the truth.”  – Margaret Atwood

 

What can I do to drive away

Remembrance from my eyes? For they have seen,

Aye, an hour ago, my brilliant Queen!

Touch has a memory, O say, love, say,

What can I do to kill it and be free

In my old liberty?

When every fair one that I saw was fair

Enough to catch me in but half a snare,

Not keep me there:

When, howe’er poor or particolour’d things,

My muse had wings,

And ready was to take her course

Whither I bent her force,

Unintellectual, yet divine to me;

Divine, I say! – What sea-bird o’er the sea

Is a philosopher the while he goes

Winging along where the great water throes?

How shall I do

To get anew

Those moulted feathers, and so mount once more

Above, above

The reach of fluttering Love,

And make him cower lowly while I soar?

Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism,

A heresy and schism,

Foisted into the canon law of love;

No, – wine is only sweet to happy men;

More dismal cares Seize on me unawares,

Where shall I learn to get my peace again?

To banish thoughts of that most hateful land,

Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand

Where they were wreck’d and lived a wrecked life,

That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour

Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore,

Unown’d of any weedy-haired gods;

Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods,

Iced in the great lakes, to afflict mankind;

Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind,

Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbag’d meads

Make a lean and lank the starv’d ox while he feeds;

There flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song,

And great unerring Nature once seems wrong.

O, for some sunny spell

To dissipate the shadows of this hell!

Say they are gone,-with the new dawning light

Steps forth my lady bright!

O, let me once more rest

My soul upon that dazzling breast!

Let once again these aching arms be plac’d,

The tender gaolers of thy waist!

And let me feel that warm breath here and there

To spread a rapture in my very hair,
O, the sweetness of the pain!

Give me those lips again!

Enough! Enough! It is enough for me

To dream of thee!

 

– John Keats 1795 – 1821

 

Bisous,

Léa

Those who have nothing — News from Ibonoco

CEUX QUI N’ONT RIEN Ce sont des personnes qui se plaignent le moins et qui apprennent à avancer avec peu de choses dans les mains. Ils sont partis de rien et ont bâti leur destin. Les obstacles les ont fait avancer. Ils ont compris qu’on vivait dans un monde mauvais, sans égalité où […]

via Those who have nothing — News from Ibonoco

Lies, lives lost and more blood… America’s legacy will be?

Children in cages never have a nice day.

–

“The government is literally taking kids away from their parents and leaving them in inappropriate conditions. If a parent left a child in a cage with no supervision with other 5-year-olds, they’d be held accountable.” – Michelle Brane, director of migrant rights at the Women’s Refugee Commission

Photo by Bess Hamiti from Pexels

“We will take America without firing a shot…….We will BURY YOU! We can’t expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism. We do not have to invade the United States, we will destroy you from within.” – Nikita Khrushchev

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually, they will            believe it.” – Adolf Hitler

“The man is the only animal that can remain on good terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”  – Samuel Butler

History keeps repeating itself.

 

Photo by it’s me neosiam from Pexels

 

How many more innocents must die at the hands of this fascist regime? The survivors will be forever scarred. America can no longer call itself the home of the brave. Brave people do not behave like this. They look to help and to heal. What do you see as the future for such a country? Kidnapping, bigotry and child abuse on a grand scale, is this to be the nation’s legacy?

Bisous,

Léa

 

 

Contempt

“The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.” – H.L. Mencken

“Only the contemptible fear contempt.” – François de La Rochefoucauld

 “I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.” – Og Mandino

 

Contempt

 

Swaddled at birth

In that shroud of contempt

I could not escape

With time and healing

It has become

A badge of honor

Acceptance had a high price

Selling out my mind and soul

Was never on the table

What was lost

Never belonged to me

I walk alone, never lonely

With self-acceptance there is

Always a trusted companion

At my side till the end

Contempt has no place in my life

Only pity for those who chose its path

 

Bisous,

Léa

 

Tenuous

“The skein of human continuity must often become this tenuous across the centuries (hanging by a thread, in the old cliche’), but the circle remains unbroken if I can touch the ink of Lavoisier’s own name, written by his own hand. A candle of light, nurtured by the oxygen of his greatest discovery, never burns out if we cherish the intellectual heritage of such unfractured filiation across the ages. We may also wish to contemplate the genuine physical thread of nucleic acid that ties each of us to the common bacterial ancestor of all living creatures, born on Lavoisier’s ancienne terre more than 3.5 billion years ago- and never since disrupted, not for one moment, not for one generation. Such a legacy must be worth preserving from all the guillotines of our folly.”                    – Stephen Jay Gold

 

 

Tenuous

 

The web

Insects flail

Before succumbing

Strands sticky, death grip

 

Weavers of the traps

United in the carnage

Delight in the suffering

Of those they capture

Terrorists wear a masque

 

Desperate old white men

Cling to their delusions

Obsessed with a future

They won’t see, lifting their legs

Territorial marking on the land

 

Robbing the future of the young

Stealing tomorrows of each species

Land disappearing – glaciers melt

The planet will go on – what replaces

Current species – permutation possibilities

Limitless

 

Bisous,

Léa

 

 

Verse out of time… Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz: 1911 – 2004 

Born in Seteiniai, Lithuania he made his literary debut in 1930. Among the many honors accorded to his work, The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. His works include Poetry and Prose. During the 1960s he served as Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at University California Berkeley. 

 

Song on the End of the World

 

On the day the world ends

A bee circles a clover

A Fisherman mends a glimmering net.

Happy porpoises jump in the sea,

By the rainspout young sparrows are playing

And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be

 

On the day the world ends

Women walk through fields under their umbrellas

A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn

Vegetable peddlers shout in the street

And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island.

The voice of a violin lasts in the air

And leads into a starry night

 

And those who expected lightning and thunder

Are disappointed

And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps

Do not believe it is happening now

 

Only a white-haired old man who would be a prophet

Yet is not a prophet for he’s much too busy

Repeats while he binds his tomatoes

No other end of the world there will be

No other end of the world there will be

 

– Chezlaw Milosz

 

If you are unfamiliar with his work, I do hope you will enjoy this poem and search for more. Perhaps you would prefer his prose. There is a vast number of his works I could choose from but thought this was so timely in light of Global Warming.

Bisous,

Léa