Three things from DAH.

 

 

After some confusing times with a baby or a pig, Alice (as in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll) addresses the Duchess's cat.

 

There's no time like the present! Wait just a second and the present has changed. That previous second is past, never to return. I've long been fascinated by time. Fascinated by our human experience of it rather than it's scientific properties. I have a lingering memory from a college extension course titled "The Meaning of Time." I was in my 30s and part of the course had us illustrating our personal perception of time. Mine was linear, obviously (I thought), singular in direction, with the past slowed or stopped and the future accelerating from the now as an omni-directional arrow. The woman next to me had drawn (and colored) a pattern of interlocking clouds. It wasn't linear at all. Now was surrounded by the time clouds. Other students (varying age, ethnicity, and background) created other images of time. I was amazed and bewildered (like poor old Alice down the rabbit hole). I eventually developed my own sense of time: Just Visiting.

 

My wine interest was inspired during my college years. There was usually something cheap at parties, an alternative to the keg of beer. Then, visiting my girlfriend's house (she shared with several other students) she offered me a glass of wine from the refrigerator. It wasn't anything super-special, just something one of her roommates (an enology student) bought, but it sure tasted different from the plonk I'd knocked back once the beer keg was dry. And I wondered why. So, I began trying different wines and eventually bought a book about wine. And the connection between the land, different places and parcels of land, and how they could produce wines from the pedestrian to the prestige … I was hooked and I continue to explore.  

 

And a bit more:

 

by Mary Oliver

 

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?  

 

And that's all for this week.

From Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes …  

Instructions for living a life:

 

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