#gr

In a world where thrushes sing and willow trees are golden in the spring, boredom should have been included among the seven deadly sins. ↗

— Elizabeth Goudge

#gratefulness #gratitude #musings #nature #seasons

Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazard from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first sentence I knew it wasn't the thing to read to a dying man: The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. The words disturbed both of us immediately, and I stopped. With music it was the same -- Chopin's Piano Concerto — he asked me to turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank little, while the tumors briskly appropriated what was left of him. But to return to the cradle rocking. I think Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss. That's why babies howl at birth, and why the dying so often reach for something only they can apprehend. At the end they don't want their hands to be under the covers, and if you should put your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free; and you must honor that desire, and let them pull it free. ↗

— Jane Kenyon

#daughters #dying #fathers #grief #music

To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #grimace #impersonal #impossible #light

but the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there was none in his spade ↗

— Herman Melville

#herman-melville #moby-dick #spade #music

I just want to be someone, to mean something to anyone… ↗

— Charlotte Eriksson

#confused #empty-roads-broken-bottles #finding-yourself #lost #lyrics

We start our lives with blues . . . with music. It's our first language. It's the rhythm of the womb. It's your mama's heartbeat inside your head. ↗

— David Mutti Clark

#god #griot #music #spirituality #troubadour

And here's to the blues, the real blues— where there's a hint of hope in every cry of desperation. ↗

— David Mutti Clark

#griot #music #race-relations #spirituality #troubadour

There’s something lyrical about an eternal truth. It’s a graceful riff. A free-flowing melody. Light and airy, it floats all around you. And when it lands on your ears, when you hear it for the first time, you instantly recognize it― because it’s like bumping into an ageless, best friend. ↗

— David Mutti Clark

#griot #music #race-relations #spirituality #troubadour

Ludwig’s enormous, awe-inspiring genius, his productivity, his prescient modernism were all contained in music. Beside that, the letters to the Immortal Beloved looked no more impressive to her than bathroom stall graffiti: L.V.B. luvs his I.B. Wishes she wuz here. ↗

— Magnus Flyte

#inspirational

And then it was, that grief and pain made themselves known to me as never before. Note this, because I knew the full absurdity of Fate and Fortune and Nature more truly than a human can bear to know it. And perhaps the description of this, brief as it is, may give consolation to another. The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass. The truth is, you cannot prepare anyone for this, nor convey an understanding of it through language. It must be known. And this I would wish on no one in the world. ↗

— Anne Rice

#pain #nature