slip-slidin away

(Note: Each week, the “description” line under the blog headline will change. It will be a line from a song, a quote, or maybe just nonsense from The Office. But, each week, we’ll memorialize the line that is leaving while installing the new one.)

“The nearer your destination, the more you’re slip-slidin’ away.” - Paul Simon

I really like Paul Simon. Ol’ man Garfunkel wasn’t too bad either. And maybe it’s because I have childhood memories of sitting in the backseat of a car on a vacation with the whole family listening to “The Concert in Central Park”, but that album always resonated with me.

The idea that the nearer we get to where we’re going, the further we actually are from it is a strange one, but one that I would subscribe to (if I could figure it out).

I take it to say that life is a journey, not a pursuit of a destination. And the nearer you get to making it a pursuit of a destination (be that a possession or a relationship or a heaven in the sky), the greater loss it is for you, as you are missing all of the roses along the path that deserved to have someone stop and smell them.

ben franklin on the nba

(My original intention was to run this quote, one of my favorites, along with Jason Kidd's photo. We'll give it a week and rerun it all if necessary. For now, Shaq in his Suns jersey works just as well...)

"Necessity never made a good bargain."

- Benjamin Franklin, US author, diplomat, inventor, physicist, politician, & printer

the little things: of toothaches and achilles' heel

Have you ever noticed how it is always the little things that really nail you?

The other day, my lovely Stefani got this look on her face she seldom gets. Something was wrong.

I didn’t get to ask too many probing questions before she alerted me to the problem specifically – a severe toothache. Oh. Ow. You know those bad toothaches, where cool air and liquid and breathing are all excruciatingly painful? One of those...

And it struck me just how vulnerable we are. It occurred to me just how every little facet of our being is in fact paramount to the existence of that being in the first place.

Little things...

Consider Achilles, among the greatest heroes of Greek mythology. He was the most handsome and quickest of all of the Greeks assembled to battle Troy. He was physically invulnerable on all of his body except for his heel. The legends state that he was killed in battle by an arrow – to the heel.

Oh. Ow. The little things...

tolstoy on faith and hypocrisy

"Attack me, I do this myself, but attack me rather than the path I follow and which I point out to anyone who asks me where I think it lies. If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!"

- Leo Tolstoy, 19th-century Russian writer

the post-karmic stream

Well, here it is...the beginning of something else.

Obviously, I have been away for awhile. And I may be away for awhile longer yet...

Nonetheless, this will be the place that I reappear one day in the not too distant future. I loved filling in the margins using the "darkness into light" idea. Still, everything has an end. Recognizing the transition that we are making, and recognizing that there were certain things about blogging that bothered me on a deep (metaphorical?) level, I decided to keep the same site with a new, open purpose: to record and share the things that, for whatever reason, I cannot shake without putting them on paper, no matter what they are, as they flow in this post-karmic stream that we find ourselves.