Poetry Sunday

Sometimes, amid the hectic pace of modern life and the demands of work, family, and political chicanery, it's good to just chill and think about the simple things, as Henry David Thoreau would encourage you to do ...

Simplicity 

by Henry David Thoreau 

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as
two or three, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail …
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome
and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the
companion that was so companionable as solitude …
If one advances confidently in the direction of his
dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has
imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hour …

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener.
So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts.
We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and
took advantage of every accident that befell us. Sometimes, in
a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my
sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the
pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and
stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through
the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the
noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was
reminded of the lapse of time.


The line in this poem that speaks of "a single gentle rain (that) makes the grass many shades greener" reminds me of one of my most vivid memories: we were all very young, it had been raining, and we were piled into the car to go with my father to visit one of his friends who had been making a very specialized prop he needed for an advertising picture*. This fellow lived in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, and as we turned down his street, lined with trees and hedges and flowers, I was amazed at the tremendously vivid, sharp colors of everything in the damp left by the morning rain. I can still see that picture today, many years later.

Have a good day, and enjoy what remains of your weekend. Simply.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

*An interesting story in itself.