Gerard, thank you for the fertilizer with which to help cultivate, as the gentleman speaking notes must be done daily, this day.
DennyOctober 28, 2017, 10:55 AM
Yes, Gerard, more more more please. Is there any more? I could spend my whole life (what’s left of it) listening and being inspired…..
Cryogenics, I hear they have had some success.
DeAnnOctober 28, 2017, 6:48 PM
excellent – my thanks
KMMOctober 28, 2017, 9:48 PM
Beautiful! Thank you!
MMinLamesaOctober 29, 2017, 4:58 AM
You’re too much man. That was fabulous.
Every night I thank…whomever, for the gift I was given. Every morning I do the same for getting another chance to put my feet on the ground. It’s so beautiful here on earth. I’ll miss it but for now, you haven’t caught me sitting in front of a TV for 30 years-except when there’s a Grand Slam! Hell no one is perfect, who needs that?
DavidOctober 29, 2017, 6:31 AM
Open your heart to the world, to your fellow man, to your fellow human beings.
The cost of growing older, is to grow more cynical, less trusting in others. You’ve been betrayed, you’ve been hurt by someone else, by many others, by the world. You’re not going to be taken advantage of again, I’m not that naive. Won’t get fooled again!
Yet, to open your heart to the world and to each other, is to truly live. It is just today, that’s all we have. Next week is just a promise, and last week is just a memory. Close your heart to the world, and begin dying inside.
“Go, thoughts, on wings of gold.
Go, settle on slopes and hills of Earth
where warm and soft and fragrant are
the breezes of our sweet land of birth.”
h/t Giuseppe Verdi’s opera ‘Nabucco’
Island GirlOctober 29, 2017, 9:24 PM
Most excellent as always.
Island GirlOctober 29, 2017, 9:27 PM
Wonderful
AbigailAdamsOctober 31, 2017, 10:51 AM
Gerard — that young RFD girl I was trying to describe to you? You found her — she’s at the beginning of the video. Something more “beautiful-er.”
PA CatAugust 14, 2021, 1:00 PM
Thank you for posting this one, Gerard– it’s a keeper.
Mike SeyleAugust 14, 2021, 2:23 PM
Ah, thank you for this, Gerard. Grandkids will be here Monday. They’re young and thoughtful; I’m going to call them over to see it. Hope I have the inspiration to lead a conversation about it.
Mike AustinAugust 14, 2021, 6:20 PM
Thank you, Gerard. If I would watch this first thing every morning, I would be a better man.
I would very much like to be a better man.
KristinAugust 14, 2021, 9:15 PM
So beautiful. Very. Thank you Gerard! Appropriate to end the day with gratitude. It’s like a prayer.
Why do we forget to appreciate the rare wonderful miracles we have? A medical student was telling us about the human body yesterday- he described the incredible intricacies of the body, the millions of cells all working in harmony. It’s just a miracle. I vowed to take better care of my body after listening to his descriptions. I wish I could remember what he said so I could share it here.
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
Comments on this entry are closed.
Gerard, thank you for the fertilizer with which to help cultivate, as the gentleman speaking notes must be done daily, this day.
Yes, Gerard, more more more please. Is there any more? I could spend my whole life (what’s left of it) listening and being inspired…..
Cryogenics, I hear they have had some success.
excellent – my thanks
Beautiful! Thank you!
You’re too much man. That was fabulous.
Every night I thank…whomever, for the gift I was given. Every morning I do the same for getting another chance to put my feet on the ground. It’s so beautiful here on earth. I’ll miss it but for now, you haven’t caught me sitting in front of a TV for 30 years-except when there’s a Grand Slam! Hell no one is perfect, who needs that?
Open your heart to the world, to your fellow man, to your fellow human beings.
The cost of growing older, is to grow more cynical, less trusting in others. You’ve been betrayed, you’ve been hurt by someone else, by many others, by the world. You’re not going to be taken advantage of again, I’m not that naive. Won’t get fooled again!
Yet, to open your heart to the world and to each other, is to truly live. It is just today, that’s all we have. Next week is just a promise, and last week is just a memory. Close your heart to the world, and begin dying inside.
“Go, thoughts, on wings of gold.
Go, settle on slopes and hills of Earth
where warm and soft and fragrant are
the breezes of our sweet land of birth.”
h/t Giuseppe Verdi’s opera ‘Nabucco’
Most excellent as always.
Wonderful
Gerard — that young RFD girl I was trying to describe to you? You found her — she’s at the beginning of the video. Something more “beautiful-er.”
Thank you for posting this one, Gerard– it’s a keeper.
Ah, thank you for this, Gerard. Grandkids will be here Monday. They’re young and thoughtful; I’m going to call them over to see it. Hope I have the inspiration to lead a conversation about it.
Thank you, Gerard. If I would watch this first thing every morning, I would be a better man.
I would very much like to be a better man.
So beautiful. Very. Thank you Gerard! Appropriate to end the day with gratitude. It’s like a prayer.
Truth! Danka GV.
VI
Why do we forget to appreciate the rare wonderful miracles we have? A medical student was telling us about the human body yesterday- he described the incredible intricacies of the body, the millions of cells all working in harmony. It’s just a miracle. I vowed to take better care of my body after listening to his descriptions. I wish I could remember what he said so I could share it here.