Vineyards Life Quotes

Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

Edward had once felt that a vineyard rolling up a mountainside over which the sun was setting was the most glorious thing he’d ever seen, but now that memory paled in comparison to the transcendent garden of life bursting forth down below.

One of life's gifts is that each of us, no matter how tired and downtrodden, finds reasons for thankfulness: for the crops carried in from the fields and the grapes from the vineyard.

She might not have felt everything she had felt in those lives, but she had the capability. She might have missed those particular opportunities that led her to become an Olympic swimmer, or traveller, or a vineyard owner, or a rock star, or a planet-saving glaciologist, or a Cambridge graduate, or a mother, or million other things, but she was still in in some way all of those people. They were all her. She could of been all those amazing people, and that wasn't depressing, as she had thought. Not at all. It was inspiring. Because now she saw the kinds of things she could do when she put herself to work.

EPITAPH Now I'm not the brightest knife in the drawer, but I know a couple things about this life: poverty silence, impermanence discipline and mystery The world is not illusory, we are From crimson thread to toe tag If you are not disturbed there is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorry And I know who I am I'll be a voice coming from nowhere, inside-- be glad for me.

~“She likes my dog, doesn’t take my crap, and looks at me like I can be the kind of man Dad was. When she cooks…she wears this apron…And I love her so damn much that I have no idea how I’m suppose to wake up tomorrow and pretend like my life hasn’t just fucking ended” Marco Delucca

Edward sat down on the bench and looked at the horses grazing behind the pasture fence. Even though horses weren’t needed at the vineyard anymore, he’d insisted that a team be kept here and work as they had done when he was the foreman of the vineyard. This affected the productivity of the farm, but he didn’t care. The horses had been a source of comfort for him, and he’d kept them here for this very moment.

You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of - of all things - an "idea for a story," and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard.

It’s like being offered lemonade after having something really sweet. The lemonade was wonderful before, but it just tastes sour after.

The Poem" It was like getting a love letter from a tree Eyes closed forever to find you– There is a life which if I could have it I would have chosen for myself from the beginning

The vine needs to suffer. Going down into this earth-fighting to survive among the stones, among the lime rock-this is what gives it its aroma. Its taste. Its unique character. These grapes will create a wine few other vineyards can compare with not because their life was easy, but because they had to struggle to survive.

And yet surely to alchemy this right is due, that it may be compared to the husbandman whereof Aesop makes the fable, that when he died he told his sons that he had left unto them gold buried under the ground in his vineyard: and they digged over the ground, gold they found none, but by reason of their stirring and digging the mould about the roots of their vines, they had a great vintage the year following: so assuredly the search and stir to make gold hath brought to light a great number of good and fruitful inventions and experiments, as well for the disclosing of nature as for the use of man's life.

There are, I know, those who prefer not to go beyond the impression, however accidental, which an old work makes on a mind that brings to it a purely modern sensibility and modern conceptions; just as there are travellers who carry their resolute Englishry with them all over the Continent, mix only with other English tourists, enjoy all they see for its ‘quaintness’, and have no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives. They have their reward. I have no quarrel with people who approach the past in that spirit. I hope they will pick none with me. But I was writing for the other sort. C.

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on. Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever. Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, that same messy life seems full of hope. Potential. The impossible, I suppose, happens via living. Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No. But do I want to live? Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.

I stood back up and looked down at my feces. A lovely snail-shell architecture, still steaming. Borromini. My bowels must be in good shape, because everyone knows you have nothing to worry about unless your feces are to soft or downright liquid. I was seeing my shit for the first time (in the city you sit on the bowl, then flush right away, without looking). I was now calling it shit, which I think is what people call it. Shit is the most personal and private thing we have. Anyone can get to know the rest - your facial expression, your gaze, your gestures. Even your naked body: at the beach, at the doctor's, making love. Even your thoughts, since usually you express them, or else others guess them from the way you look at them or appear embarrassed. Of course, there are such things as secret thoughts... but in general thoughts too are revealed. Shit, however, is not. Except for an extremely brief period of your life, when your mother is still changing your diapers, it is all yours. And since my shit at that moment must not have been all that different from what I had produced over the course of my past life, I was in that instant reuniting with my old, forgotten self, undergoing the first experience capable of merging with countless previous experiences, even those from when I did my business in the vineyards as a boy. Perhaps if I took a god look around, I would find the remains of those shits past, and then, triangulating properly, Clarabelle's treasure. But I stopped there. Shit was not my linden-blossom tea, of course not, how could I have expected to conduct my recherche with my sphincter? In order to rediscover lost time, one should have not diarrhea but asthma. Asthma is pneumatic, it is the breath (however labored) of the spirit: it is for the rich, who can afford cork-lined rooms. The poor, in the fields, attend less to spiritual than to bodily functions. And yet I felt not disinherited but content, and I mean truly content, in a way I had not felt since reawakening. The ways of the Lord are infinite, I said to myself, they go even through the butthole.

That insane asshole is dead I drowned him and he’s not coming back. Look he has a new life a new name now which no one knows except the one who gave it.

Your words are spirit and life. Only say one and he will be healed.

All things considered, I’ve learned more from talking to painters than talking to writers. Not that painters are smarter than writers, such is seldom the case, but in conversation writers are inclined to waste an inordinate amount of time either bragging or bellyaching about reviews and royalties, complaining about their publishers, or dissing other authors. Painters, being equally insecure, can likewise come across as boring and bitchy -- it’s tough being creative in a materialistic society -- but since they labor not in vineyards of verbiage but upon ice floes of visual images, they tend to function with fewer inhibitions than the wordsmiths when it comes to vocally exploring and expressing ideas. Since no one judges their speech, comparing it to their written work, they don’t feel so acutely the weight of language.

Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

Today I begin a new life. Today I shed my old skin which hath, too long, suffered the bruises of failure and the wounds of mediocrity. Today I am born anew and my birthplace is a vineyard where there is fruit for all. — OG MANDINO

Moments when I had started to believe that maybe our mutual love of the valley, the vineyards, the history, the Port—that maybe we could build a decent life together. But that was a pipe dream of the little girl who once believed you were the brightest star in the sky.

We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. ... We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

Leave all the ‘wise men to mock it or tolerate.’ Let them reach the moon or the stars, they are all dead. Nothing lives outside of man. Man is the living soul, turning slowly into a life-giving Spirit. But you cannot tell it except in a parable or metaphor to excite the mind of man to get him to go out and prove it. Leave the good and evil and eat of the Tree of Life. Nothing in the world is untrue if you want it to be true. You are the truth of everything that you perceive. ‘I am the truth, and the way, the life revealed.’ If I have physically nothing in my pocket, then in Imagination I have MUCH. But that is a lie based on fact, but truth is based on the intensity of my imagination and then I will create it in my world. Should I accept facts and use them as to what I should imagine? No. It is told us in the story of the fig tree. It did not bear for three years. One said, ‘Cut it down, and throw it away.’ But the keeper of the vineyard pleaded NO’! Who is the tree? I am the tree; you are the tree. We bear or we do not. But the Keeper said he would dig around the tree and feed it ‘or manure it, as we would say today’ and see if it will not bear. Well I do that here every week and try to get the tree ‘you’ me to bear. You should bear whatever you desire. If you want to be happily married, you should be. The world is only response. If you want money, get it. Everything is a dream anyway. When you awake and know what you are creating and that you are creating it that is a different thing. The greatest book is the Bible, but it has been taken from a moral basis and it is all weeping and tears. It seems almost ruthless as given to us in the Gospel, if taken literally. The New Testament interprets the Old Testament, and it has nothing to do with morals. You change your mind and stay in that changed state until it unfolds. Man thinks he has to work himself out of something, but it is God asleep in you as a living soul, and then we are reborn as a life-giving spirit. We do it here in this little classroom called Earth or beyond the grave, for you cannot die. You can be just as asleep beyond the grave. I meet them constantly, and they are just like this. Same loves and same hates. No change. They will go through it until they finally awake, until they cease to re-act and begin to act. Do not take this story lightly which I have told you tonight. Take it to heart. Tonight when you are driving home enact a scene. No matter what it is. Forget good and evil. Enact a scene that implies you have what you desire, and to the degree that you are faithful to that state, it will unfold in your world and no power can stop it, for there is no other power. Nothing is independent of your perception of it, and this goes for that great philosopher among us who is still claiming that everything is independent of the perceiver, but that the perceiver has certain powers. It is not so. Nothing is independent of the perceiver. Everything is ‘burned up’ when I cease to behold it. It may exist for another, but not for me. Let us make our dream a noble one, for the world is infinite response to you, the being you want to be. Now let us go into the silence.

All the great biographies of the Bible involve suffering. The great souls grown in the Lord’s vineyard all know what it is to suffer. American Christianity, on the other hand, is conditioned to avoid suffering at all cost. But what a cost it is! Grape juice Christianity is what is produced by the purveyors of the motivational-seminar, you-can-have-it-all, success-in-life, pop-psychology Christianity. It’s a children’s drink. It comes with a straw and is served in a little cardboard box. I don’t want to drink that anymore. I don’t want to serve that anymore. I want the vintage wine. The kind of faith marked by mystery, grace, and authenticity.

Finally, we should note that in the Song, the Bridegroom is sometimes called a king and the bride a queen. Sometimes he is a shepherd; sometimes they are workers in the vineyard. Sometimes they are in a palace; sometimes in the field. This teaches that people of all social classes are called to participate in spiritual life at the highest level.

Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But ifyou look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy. Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live. If you accept death, it is altogether like a frosty night and an anxious misgiving, but a frosty night in a vineyard full of sweet grapes.76 You will soon take pleasure in your wealth. Death ripens. One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being. reminds me of heidegger

They no longer felt desolate, hungry outcasts; unloved and unwanted, despised of the world. They were lovers who walked in the vineyard of life, plucking the warm, sweet fruits of that vineyard. Love had lifted them up as on wings of fire, had made them courageous, invincible, enduring. Nothing could be lacking to those who loved—the very earth gave of her fullest bounty. The earth seemed to come alive in response to the touch of their healthful and eager bodies—nothing could be lacking to those who loved.

For a moment, he seemed to be falling into an abyss, on the verge of an unprecedented inner collapse. All his life he had been persuaded that what a man appeared to be was more important than what he was. This was the principle, on which he had based his whole existence, both his outward career and his secret thoughts. It was not what one admitted to oneself that mattered, but what one expressed in public; not the money one actually possessed, but the money one spent when others were there to see one spend it. The ideals a man carried in his hearth were of no account compared with those he acknowledged to the world. That had been Pierre´s credo.

Moyers: What happened to the mythic imagination as humans beings turned from the hunting of animals to the planting of seeds? Campbell: There is a dramatic and total transformation, not just of the myths but of the psyche itself, I think. You see, an animal is a total entity, he is within a skin. When you kill that animal, he's dead – that's the end of him. There is no such think as a self-contained individual in the vegetal world. You cut a plant, and another sprout comes. Pruning is helpful to a plant. The whole thing is just a continuing inbeingness. Another idea associated with the tropical forests is that out of rot comes life. I have seen wonderful redwood forests with great, huge stumps from enormous trees that were cut down decades ago. Out of them are coming these bright new little children who are part of the same plant. Also, if you cut off the limb of a plant, another one comes. Tear off the limb of an animal, and unless it is a certain kind of lizard, it doesn't grow again. So in the forest and planting cultures, there is sense of death as not death somehow, that death is required for new life. And the individual isn't quite an individual, he is a branch of a plant. Jese uses this image when he says, "I am the vine, and you are the branches." That vineyard image is a totally different one from the separate animals. When you have a planting culture, there is a fostering of thee plant that is going to be eaten.

The Kingdom of Heaven,” said the Lord Christ, “is among you.” But what, precisely, is the Kingdom of Heaven? You cannot point to existing specimens, saying, “Lo, here!” or “Lo, there!” You can only experience it. But what is it like, so that when we experience it we may recognize it? Well, it is a change, like being born again and relearning everything from the start. It is secret, living power—like yeast. It is something that grows, like seed. It is precious like buried treasure, like a rich pearl, and you have to pay for it. It is a sharp cleavage through the rich jumble of things which life presents: like fish and rubbish in a draw-net, like wheat and tares; like wisdom and folly; and it carries with it a kind of menacing finality; it is new, yet in a sense it was always there—like turning out a cupboard and finding there your own childhood as well as your present self; it makes demands, it is like an invitation to a royal banquet—gratifying, but not to be disregarded, and you have to live up to it; where it is equal, it seems unjust; where it is just it is clearly not equal—as with the single pound, the diverse talents, the labourers in the vineyard, you have what you bargained for; it knows no compromise between an uncalculating mercy and a terrible justice—like the unmerciful servant, you get what you give; it is helpless in your hands like the King’s Son, but if you slay it, it will judge you; it was from the foundations of the world; it is to come; it is here and now; it is within you. It is recorded that the multitudes sometimes failed to understand. (from The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement,)

Such is the lot of the knight that even though my patrimony were ample and adequate for my support, nevertheless here are the disturbances which give me no quiet. We live in fields, forests, and fortresses. Those by whose labors we exist are poverty-stricken peasants, to whom we lease our fields, vineyards, pastures, and woods. The return is exceedingly sparse in proportion to the labor expended. Nevertheless the utmost effort is put forth that it may be bountiful and plentiful, for we must be diligent stewards. I must attach myself to some prince in the hope of protection. Otherwise every one will look upon me as fair plunder. But even if I do make such an attachment hope is beclouded by danger and daily anxiety. If I go away from home I am in peril lest I fall in with those who are at war or feud with my overlord, no matter who he is, and for that reason fall upon me and carry me away. If fortune is adverse, the half of my estates will be forfeit as ransom. Where I looked for protection I was ensnared. We cannot go unarmed beyond to yokes of land. On that account, we must have a large equipage of horses, arms, and followers, and all at great expense. We cannot visit a neighboring village or go hunting or fishing save in iron. Then there are frequently quarrels between our retainers and others, and scarcely a day passes but some squabble is referred to us which we must compose as discreetly as possible, for if I push my claim to uncompromisingly war arises, but if I am too yielding I am immediately the subject of extortion. One concession unlooses a clamor of demands. And among whom does all this take place? Not among strangers, my friend, but among neighbors, relatives, and those of the same household, even brothers. These are our rural delights, our peace and tranquility. The castle, whether on plain or mountain, must be not fair but firm, surrounded by moat and wall, narrow within, crowded with stalls for the cattle, and arsenals for guns, pitch, and powder. Then there are dogs and their dung, a sweet savor I assure you. The horsemen come and go, among them robbers, thieves, and bandits. Our doors are open to practically all comers, either because we do not know who they are or do not make too diligent inquiry. One hears the bleating of sheep, the lowing of cattle, the barking of dogs, the shouts of men working in the fields, the squeaks or barrows and wagons, yes, and even the howling of wolves from nearby woods. The day is full of thought for the morrow, constant disturbance, continual storms. The fields must be ploughed and spaded, the vines tended, trees planted, meadows irrigated. There is harrowing, sowing, fertilizing, reaping, threshing: harvest and vintage. If the harvest fails in any year, then follow dire poverty, unrest, and turbulence.

Very good. I can fancy what you saw. Yes; it is horrible enough; but after all, it is an old story, an old mystery played in our day, and in dim London streets instead of amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens. We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form. Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?

He mailed me a Christmas card every year, one of those newsletters that foreigners send to their friends with domestic news and photos of triumphant families. They only tell of their successes in these collective missives: travels, births and marriages. No one ever goes bankrupt, is sent to prison, or has cancer, no one commits suicide or gets divorced. Luckily that stupid tradition doesn’t exist in our culture. Harald Fiske’s newsletters were even worse than the idyllic families’: birds, birds, and more birds, birds from Borneo, birds from Guatemala, birds from the Arctic. Yes, apparently there are even birds in the Arctic. I think I already told you that the man was in love with our country, which he said was the most beautiful place in the world since we had every type of landscape: a lunar desert, long coastline, tall mountains, pristine lakes, valleys of orchards and vineyards, fjords and glaciers. He thought we were friendly and welcoming people because he judged us with his romantic heart and little real-life experience. However odd his reasons, he decided he was going to live out his final days here. I never understood it, Camilo, because if you can live legally in Norway, you’d have to be demented to move to this catastrophic country.

One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion and poetry which seemed to deaden one's senses and veil the horror. Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will. Adams being mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting with mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian joy of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft shadows; even the dying women shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fulness of Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure.

SECTION XI.--The Strength of Simplicity. The soul in the state of abandonment knows how to see God even in the proud who oppose His action. All creatures, good or evil, reveal Him to it. __________________________________________________________________ The whole practice of the simple soul is in the accomplishment of the will of God. This it respects even in those unruly actions by which the proud attempt to depreciate it. The proud soul despises one in whose sight it is as nothing, who beholds only God in it, and in all its actions. Often it imagines that the modesty of the simple soul is a mark of appreciation for itself; when, all the time, it is only a sign of that loving fear of God and of His holy will as shown to it in the person of the proud. No, poor fool, the simple soul fears you not at all. You excite its compassion; it is answering God when you think it is speaking to you: it is with Him that it believes it has to do; it regards you only as one of His slaves, or rather as a mask with which He disguises Himself. Therefore the more you take a high tone, the lower you become in its estimation; and when you think to take it by surprise, it surprises you. Your wiles and violence are just favours from Heaven. The proud soul cannot comprehend itself, but the simple soul, with the light of faith, can very clearly see through it. The finding of the divine action in all that occurs at each moment, in and around us, is true science, a continuous revelation of truth, and an unceasingly renewed intercourse with God. It is a rejoicing with the Spouse, not in secret, nor by stealth, in the cellar, or the vineyard, but openly, and in public, without any human respect. It is a fund of peace, of joy, of love, and of satisfaction with God who is seen, known, or rather, believed in, living and operating in the most perfect manner in everything that happens. It is the beginning of eternal happiness not yet perfectly realised and tasted, except in an incomplete and hidden manner. The Holy Spirit, who arranges all the pieces on the board of life, will, by this fruitful and continual presence of His action, say at the hour of death, "fiat lux," "let there be light" (Gen. i, 14), and then will be seen the treasures which faith hides in this abyss of peace and contentment with God, and which will be found in those things that have been every moment done, or suffered for Him. When God gives Himself thus, all that is common becomes wonderful; and it is on this account that nothing seems to be so, because this way is, in itself, extraordinary. Consequently it is unnecessary to make it full of strange and unsuitable marvels. It is, in itself, a miracle, a revelation, a constant joy even with the prevalence of minor faults. But it is a miracle which, while rendering all common and sensible things wonderful, has nothing in itself that is sensibly marvellous.

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy. We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on. Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we feel in any other life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savor the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays.

November 22   |   Matthew 21:33–44 In a parable, Jesus tells the story of a landowner who plants a vineyard, leases it to tenants, and then goes to another country. After a time, he sends servants to the vineyard to collect the fruit. Rather than give the master his profit, the tenants beat one servant, stone another, and kill a third. In response, the landowner sends more servants, only to see the same thing happen to them. Finally, thinking surely they will respect his son, the landowner sends his heir to the vineyard. Believing they will be able to keep the vineyard for themselves, the tenants kill the son. At that point, Jesus asks the Pharisees what the landowner will do in this situation. The Pharisees say what we would all say; they suggest doing what we would all want to do: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death” (v. 41 ESV). In other words, he’s going to turn that place into an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie: no survivors. You see, the Pharisees, like us, are tuned in to the law. They’re thinking in terms of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. They can’t see Jesus’s underlying point: they’re the tenants. Jesus quotes them Psalm 118, saying that the stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. The son sent to the vineyard was rejected by the tenants … but that’s not the end of our story. Jesus says that anyone who comes into contact with this stone will be broken. All of our efforts, whether aimed at rebellion or at righteousness, will cease. The chief cornerstone will break us. There’s one important difference between the heir in the parable and Jesus. Jesus didn’t stay dead! And because Jesus was raised to new life and has given that new life to us, we can leave all our striving behind.

Dear Mother, . . . We have been putting in our time here at very hard drilling, and are supposed to have learned in six weeks what the ordinary recruit, in times of peace, takes all his two years at. We rise at 5, and work stops in the afternoon at 5. A twelve hours day at one sou a day. I hope to earn higher wages than this in time to come, but I never expect to work harder. The early rising hour is splendid for it gives one the chance to see the most beautiful part of these beautiful autumn days in the South. We march up to a lovely open field on the end of the ridge behind the barracks, walking right into the rising sun. From this panorama, spread about on three sides is incomparably fine—yellow cornfields, vineyards, harvest-fields where the workers and their teams can be seen moving about in tiny figures—poplars, little hamlets and church-towers, and far away to the south the blue line of the Pyrenees, the high peaks capped with snow. It makes one in love with life, it is all so peaceful and beautiful. But Nature to me is not only hills and blue skies and flowers, but the Universe, the totality of things, reality as it most obviously presents itself to us; and in this universe strife and sternness play as big a part as love and tenderness, and cannot be shirked by one whose will it is to rule his life in accordance with the cosmic forces he sees in play about him. I hope you see the thing as I do, and think that I have done well, being without responsibilities and with no one to suffer materially by my decision, in taking upon my shoulders, too, the burden that so much of humanity is suffering under, and, rather than stand ingloriously aside when the opportunity was given me, doing my share for the side that I think right. . . .

[Nero] castrated the boy Sporus and actually tried to make a woman of him; and he married him with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil, took him to his house attended by a great throng, and treated him as his wife. This Sporus, decked out with the finery of the empresses and riding in a litter, he took with him to the assizes and marts of Greece, and later at Rome through the Street of the Images,​ fondly kissing him from time to time. That he even desired illicit relations with his own mother, and was kept from it by her enemies, who feared that such a help might give the reckless and insolent woman too great influence, was notorious, especially after he added to his concubines a courtesan who was said to look very like Agrippina. Even before that, so they say, whenever he rode in a litter with his mother, he had incestuous relations with her, which were betrayed by the stains on his clothing. He so prostituted his own chastity that after defiling almost every part of his body, he at last devised a kind of game, in which, covered with the skin of some wild animal, he was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women, who were bound to stakes, and when he had sated his mad lust, was dispatched​ by his freedman Doryphorus; for he was even married to this man in the same way that he himself had married Sporus, going so far as to imitate the cries and lamentations of a maiden being deflowered. He made a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which at first he called the House of Passage, but when it was burned shortly after its completion and rebuilt, the Golden House. Its size and splendour will be sufficiently indicated by the following details. Its vestibule was large enough to contain a colossal statue of the emperor a hundred and twenty feet high; and it was so extensive that it had a triple colonnade​ a mile long. There was a pond too, like a sea, surrounded with buildings to represent cities,​ besides tracts of country, varied by tilled fields, vineyards, pastures and woods, with great numbers of wild and domestic animals. In the rest of the house all parts were overlaid with gold and adorned with gems and mother-of‑pearl. There were dining-rooms with fretted ceils of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens. His mother offended him by too strict surveillance and criticism of his words and acts. At last terrified by her violence and threats, he determined to have her life, and after thrice attempting it by poison and finding that she had made herself immune by antidotes, he tampered with the ceiling of her bedroom, contriving a mechanical device for loosening its panels and dropping them upon her while she slept. When this leaked out through some of those connected with the plot, he devised a collapsible boat,​ to destroy her by shipwreck or by the falling in of its cabin. ...[He] offered her his contrivance, escorting her to it in high spirits and even kissing her breasts as they parted. The rest of the night he passed sleepless in intense anxiety, awaiting the outcome of his design. On learning that everything had gone wrong and that she had escaped by swimming, driven to desperation he secretly had a dagger thrown down beside her freedman Lucius Agermus, when he joyfully brought word that she was safe and sound, and then ordered that the freedman be seized and bound, on the charge of being hired to kill the emperor; that his mother be put to death, and the pretence made that she had escaped the consequences of her detected guilt by suicide.

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on. Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.

One morning, a farmer knocked loudly on the door of a monastery. When Brother Porter opened the door, the farmer held out to him a magnificent bunch of grapes. “Dear Brother Porter, these are the finest grapes from my vineyard. Please accept them as a gift from me.” “Why, thank you! I’ll take them straight to the Abbot, who will be thrilled with such a gift.” “No, no. I brought them for you.” “For me? But I don’t deserve such a beautiful gift from nature.” “Whenever I knocked on the door, you opened it. When the harvest had been ruined by drought, you gave me a piece of bread and a glass of wine every day. I want this bunch of grapes to bring you a little of the sun’s love, the rain’s beauty and God’s miraculous power.” Brother Porter put the grapes down where he could see them and spent the whole morning admiring them: they really were lovely. Because of this, he decided to give the present to the Abbot, whose words of wisdom had always been such a boon to him. The Abbot was very pleased with the grapes, but then he remembered that one of the other monks was ill and thought: “I’ll give him the grapes. Who knows, they might bring a little joy into his life.” But the grapes did not remain for very long in the room of the ailing monk, for he in turn thought: “Brother Cook has taken such good care of me, giving me only the very best food to eat. I’m sure these grapes will bring him great happiness.” And when Brother Cook brought him his lunch, the monk gave him the grapes. “These are for you. You are in close touch with the gifts Nature gives us and will know what to do with this, God’s produce.” Brother Cook was amazed at the beauty of the grapes and drew his assistant’s attention to their perfection. They were so perfect that no one could possibly appreciate them more than Brother Sacristan, who had charge of the Holy Sacrament, and whom many in the monastery considered to be a truly saintly man. Brother Sacristan, in turn, gave the grapes to the youngest of the novices in order to help him understand that God’s work is to be found in the smallest details of the Creation. When the novice received them, his heart was filled with the Glory of God, because he had never before seen such a beautiful bunch of grapes. At the same time, he remembered the day he had arrived at the monastery and the person who had opened the door to him; that gesture of opening the door had allowed him to be there now in that community of people who knew the value of miracles. Shortly before dark, he took the bunch of grapes to Brother Porter. “Eat and enjoy. You spend most of your time here all alone, and these grapes will do you good.” Brother Porter understood then that the gift really was intended for him; he savoured every grape and went to sleep a happy man. In this way, the circle was closed; the circle of happiness and joy which always wraps around those who are in contact with the energy of love.

But the man who owned the vineyard said to one of those workers, ‘Friend, I am being fair to you. You agreed to work for one coin. So take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same pay that I gave you. I can do what I want with my own money. Are you jealous because I am good to those people?’ “So those who are last now will someday be first, and those who are first now will someday be last.” (20:1–16 NCV) “Do you begrudge my generosity?” the landowner is saying. The answer, of course, is yes, they do. They begrudge it quite a bit. Even though it has no impact on them whatsoever, it offends them. We hate it when we are trying so hard to earn something, and then someone else gets the same thing without trying as hard. Think about this for a moment, in real, “today” terms. Someone gives you a backbreaking job, and you’re happy for it, but at the end of the day, when you’re getting paid, the guys who came in with five minutes left get the same amount you just got. Seriously? It’s imbalanced, unfair, maddening . . . and it’s also exactly what Jesus just said the kingdom of God is like. Not only is it maddening; it’s maddening to the “good” people! Common sense says you don’t do this. You don’t pay latecomers who came in a few minutes ago the same amount that you paid the hardworking folks you hired first. Jesus tells this story, knowing full well that the conscientious ones listening would find this hardest to take. And, as a matter of fact, as a conscientious one, I find this hard to take. I’m just being honest. This story does not fit my style. I’m all about people getting what they deserve. Oh, it’s offensive, too, when Jesus turns to a guy who’s being executed next to Him, and tells him, “Today, you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). What did the guy do to deserve that? He did nothing. If you call yourself a Christian, and you want things to be fair, and you want God’s rewards given out only to the deserving and the upstanding and the religious, well, honestly, Jesus has got to be a complete embarrassment to you. In fact, to so many upstanding Christians, He is. He has always been offensive, and remains offensive, to those who seek to achieve “righteousness” through what they do. Always. People who’ve grown up in church (like me) are well acquainted with the idea that Jesus is our “cornerstone.” He’s the solid rock of our faith. Got it. Not controversial. It’s well-known. But what’s not so talked about: That stone, Jesus, causes religious people to stumble. And that rock is offensive to “good” people: So what does all this mean? Those who are not Jews were not trying to make themselves right with God, but they were made right with God because of their faith. The people of Israel tried to follow a law to make themselves right with God. But they did not succeed, because they tried to make themselves right by the things they did instead of trusting in God to make them right. They stumbled over the stone that causes people to stumble. (Rom. 9:30–32 NCV) And then Paul says something a couple verses later that angers “good Christians” to this day: Because they did not know the way that God makes people right with him, they tried to make themselves right in their own way. So they did not accept God’s way of making people right. Christ ended the law so that everyone who believes in him may be right with God. (Rom. 10:3–4 NCV) It’s not subtle, what Paul’s writing here. For anyone who believes in Him, Jesus ended the law as a means to righteousness. Yet so many think they can achieve—even have achieved—some kind of “good Christian” status on the basis of the rule-keeping work they’ve done. They suspect they’ll do good things and God will owe them for it, like payment for a job well done. Paul says, in effect, if you think you should get what you earn, you will . . . and you don’t want that.

Near a stone house, bleached and weathered from salt and the sun, stood an old abandoned school. At its foot, before the house and the school, a rolling vineyard spread out. The boy walked through the vineyard every day on his way back from the school. That day, when Antonio ran to his father, not suspecting the upheaval in his young life, he’d learned from the village teacher about the crusades, religion, ethnicity, and some wicked people, as his classmate had called them. The little boy ran, full of questions, and shouted from a distance: − Father, I’m happy that we live in Sicily! − Why, my son? − We have no wars, no fighting, and if someone attacks us, we have many dangerous people who will protect us from all evils! Aldo took a long stick with a cloth on top, which he used to cool the fruits in the vineyard, turned it on end and drew two circles in the dry soil. He drew a flower in one circle and a sword in the other. Looking at the boy, he asked: − These are the heads of two rivals. Which adversary is good and which is evil? − I don’t know ‒ the little boy replied, knowing that his father was presenting him with a new riddle. − Both opponents are good. One knows his power and the other doesn’t. − But how can a good adversary wield a sword? − One day you’ll understand.

We are all masters of our own destiny, my mother used to tell me. Even though we can’t always choose what happens to us, we can choose how we respond. In the end, she said, the way we handle the tough things life throws at us—adversity, loss, hardship, rejection—is what defines each of us as a human being. Whether we face them with courage and grace and honesty or choose to feel sorry for ourselves, blame someone else, lash out at life’s injustices with anger and cruelty—that’s what makes us who we are.

city – from the beach to the Olympic hillside. For tourists who don’t want to grapple with public transport, there is the Barcelona Bus Turistic made up of three bus lines – blue, red and green routes that explore different parts of the city. You can get on and off at any point. Normally, I stay away from these double‐decker tourist explorers, but for a city as large as Barcelona, the system makes getting from beach to cathedrals to hillside parks very easy. There are also walking tours for those with very comfortable shoes. Barcelona offers so much to visitors that I couldn’t possibly tell you what to visit. But items not to miss are, in my opinion, the architecture of Antoni Gaudi which includes his unique cathedral, La Sagrada Familia which remains unfinished, his apartment building, La Pedrera which has no straight lines on its exterior, and his idealistic Parc Guell, a colourful complex on a high hillside. Within the city of Barcelona you could spend a day or more walking Los Ramblas, a wide pedestrian tree‐lined promenade that is a wonderful place to watch people, taste great food, wine and enjoy life. Nearby is the Placa de Catalunya, the main square with fountains, street artists and restaurants. The Gothic Quarter is walking distance with its network of squares that stretch back to Medieval and Roman times. This city offers so much – a medieval city, art museums, flamenco dancing, cable car to the top of Montjuïc, need I go on? Tours to local vineyards are available as are boat trips that will show you the local coastline. And let’s not forget that Barcelona is a city with beautiful beaches – all relaxed, lined with cafes and restaurants. The

All things considered, I’ve learned more from talking to painters than talking to writers. Not that painters are smarter than writers, such is seldom the case, but in conversation writers are inclined to waste an inordinate amount of time either bragging or bellyaching about reviews and royalties, complaining about their publishers, or dissing other authors. Painters, being equally insecure, can likewise come across as boring and bitchy -- it’s tough being creative in a materialistic society -- but since they labor not in vineyards of verbiage but upon ice floes of visual images, they tend to function with fewer inhibitions than the wordsmiths when it comes to vocally exploring and expressing ideas. Since no one judges their speech, comparing it to their written work, they don’t feel so acutely the weight of language. The

Life is to be tended like these trees and those vines.' He pointed across the field to the vineyard hanging with ripened fruit. 'Be mindful of the words and deeds you plant, for they will root and grow whatever you intend. It can be a blessing or a curse. And prune away the dead and sick from your life, making way for new.

Page 36-38: Many, perhaps most, biblical verses prescribing religious acts and obligations are ‘understood’ by classical Judaism, and by present-day Orthodoxy, in a sense which is quite distinct from, or even contrary to, their literal meaning as understood by Christian or other readers of the Old Testament, who only see the plain text. … Apologetics of Judaism claim that the interpretation of the Bible, originated by the Pharisees and fixed in the Talmud, is always more liberal than the literal sense. But some of the examples below show that this is far from being the case. … In numerous cases general terms such as ‘thy fellow’, ‘stranger’, or even ‘man’ are taken to have an exclusivist chauvinistic meaning. The famous verse ‘thou shalt love thy fellow as thyself’ (Leviticus, 19:18) is understood by classical (and present-day Orthodox) Judaism as an injunction to love one’s fellow Jew, not any fellow human. Similarly, the verse ‘neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy fellow’ (ibid., 16) is supposed to mean that one must not stand idly by when the life (‘blood’) of a fellow Jew is in danger; but, as will be seen in Chapter 5, a Jew is in general forbidden to save the life of a Gentile, because ‘he is not thy fellow’. The generous injunction to leave the gleanings of one’s field and vineyard ‘for the poor and the stranger’ (ibid., 9-10) is interpreted as referring exclusively to the Jewish poor and to converts to Judaism. … It is quite clear even from these examples that when Orthodox Jews today (or all Jews before about 1780) read the Bible, they are reading a very different book, with a totally different meaning, from the Bible as read by non-Jews or non-Orthodox Jews. … If such a communication gap exists in Israel, where people read Hebrew and can readily obtain correct information if they wish, one can imagine how deep is the misconception abroad, say among people educated in the Christian tradition. In fact, the more such a person reads the Bible, the less he or she knows about Orthodox Judaism.

Leeda looked straight out of Martha’s Vineyard---all perfect cheekbones and alabaster skin with a smattering of sun-induced freckles and clothes that were totally season-appropriate. Even loose and sloppy like she was today, she looked like the kind of loose and sloppy you saw in People magazine when they caught a celebrity all tired and mussed up at the airport. Birdie, on the other hand, was curved and rosy and Renoir soft. She looked like the milk-fed farm girl that she was. The two were second cousins but nothing alike. Leeda was straight up and down, and Birdie was as gentle and easy as the rain. Leeda had grown up wearing mostly white and exceeding everyone as the glossiest, the smilingest, and the most southern of the southern belles in Bridgewater. Birdie had grown up with dirt under her fingernails, homeschooled on the orchard, her feet planted in the earth. Before Judge Miller Abbott sentenced Murphy to time on the orchard picking peaches that summer, Murphy had pegged Leeda for uptight and Birdie for weak. But their time together---picking peaches, sweating in the dorms at night, cooling off in the lake---had been like living the fable of her life. The lesson being that when you think you know more than you do, you end up looking like an idiot.

But she thought with love of the roads and fields of Way. She thought of Old Iria village, the marshy spring under Iria Hill, the old house on it. She thought about Daisy singing ballads in the kitchen, winter evenings, beating out the time with her wooden clogs; and old Coney in the vineyards with his razor-edge knife, showing her how to prune the vine "right down to the life in it;" and Rose, her Etaudis, whispering charms to ease the pain in a child's broken arm. I have known wise people, she thought. Her mind flinched away from remembering her father, but the motion of the leaves and shadows drew it on. She saw him drunk shouting. She felt his prying, tremulous hands on her. She saw him weeping; sick, shamed; and grief rose up through her body and dissolved, like an ache that melts away in a long stretch of arms. He was less to her than the mother she had not known. She stretched, feeling the ease of her body in the warmth, and her mind drifted back to Ivory. She had had no one in her life to desire. When the young wizard first came riding by so slim and arrogant, she wished she could want him; but she didn't and couldn't, and so she had thought him spell-protected. Rose had explained to her how wizards' spells worked "so that it never enters your head nor theirs, see, because it would take from their power, they say." But Ivory, poor Ivory, had been all too unprotected. If anybody was under a spell of chastity it must have been herself, for charming and handsome as he was she had never been able to feel a thing for him but liking, and her only lust had been to learn what he could teach her.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on. Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays.

every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever. Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, that same messy life seems full of hope. Potential. The impossible, I suppose, happens via living. Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No. But do I want to live? Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.

Weil’s sense of essaying was never limited to writing; it was also about honoring the conversations she had before and after her pen touched the page. She consistently tried to learn from those who had lived the concepts. When she studied oppression, she placed herself amidst Parisian factory workers. When she studied labor, she picked grapes in French vineyards. Through a class analysis, Weil’s actions could be understood as patronizing, being that she came from a wealthy family. But when we also consider that she came from a Jewish family and lived in an anti-Semitic society, and that she was a woman living in a patriarchal society, it is our clear-cut diagnoses and categorizations of her life that become troubled. What we are left with is a philosopher who grappled seriously, rigorously, and intelligently with her responsibilities to others in a context of tremendous brutality. When she is understood that way, Simone Weil becomes our teacher in the present.

Do you ever feel like we go through life with these massive ideological suitcases, Percy?" she asks. Percy looks at her and smiles. "The kind without wheels or handles...the really heavy ones that hold all the sights and sounds of everything we are? The ones we drag in and out of all the rooms of our lives...packing and unpacking until we finally decide to put everything away from good?" he asks.

wherever I have found a worker in God’s vineyard who has lost hope, I have found a man or woman not very useful. Now, just look at these workers. Let your mind go over the past for a moment. Can you think of a man or woman whom God has used to build His kingdom who has lost hope? I don’t know of any; I never heard of such an one. It is very important to have hope in the Church; and it is the work of the Holy Ghost to impart hope. Let Him come into some of the churches where there have not been any conversions for a few years, and let Him convert a score of people, and see how hopeful the Church becomes at once. He imparts hope; a man filled with the Spirit of God will be very hopeful. He will be looking out into the future, and he knows that it is all bright, because the God of all grace is able to do great things. So it is very important that we have hope.

Spring And Autumn. Every season hath its pleasures; Spring may boast her flowery prime, Yet the vineyard's ruby treasures Brighten Autumn's soberer time. So Life's year begins and closes; Days tho' shortening still can shine; What tho' youth gave love and roses, Age still leaves us friends and wine. Phillis, when she might have caught me, All the Spring looked coy and shy, Yet herself in Autumn sought me, When the flowers were all gone by. Ah, too late;--she found her lover Calm and free beneath his vine, Drinking to the Spring-time over, In his best autumnal wine. Thus may we, as years are flying, To their flight our pleasures suit, Nor regret the blossoms dying, While we still may taste the fruit, Oh, while days like this are ours, Where's the lip that dares repine? Spring may take our loves and flowers, So Autumn leaves us friends and wine.

When anyone from seaboard or country caught leprosy, they left relatives and friends and went to Pratofungo to spend the rest of their lives waiting for the disease to devour them. There were rumours of great jollifications to greet each new arrival; from afar songs and music were to be heard coming from the lepers' houses till night-fall. Many things were said of Pratofungo, although no healthy person had ever been there; but all rumours were agreed in saying that life there was a perpetual party. Before becoming a leper colony the village had been a great place for prostitutes and visited by sailors of every race and religion; and the women there, it seemed, still kept the licentious habits of those times. The lepers did no work on the land. except for a vine-yard of strawberry grapes whose juice kept them the whole year round in a state of simmering tipsiness. The lepers spent most of their time playing strange instruments of their own invention, such as harps with little bells attached to the string, and singing in falsetto, and painting eggs with daubs of every colour as if for a perpetual Easter.

Why should you care about fine wine?” Kramer wrote. “The answer is surprisingly simple: Fine wine can—and indeed will—expand your world. It broadens and deepens the reach of your senses. It can help soften the rough edges of daily life and even remind you that beauty exists in moments when it seems least likely to penetrate your daily life.

Terroir D'être In youth be light, lightness, unencumbered, intimate with the wind. Let your self be used, swallowed, as long as it is you doing the letting. Dispense with possessions, sell your shit on Craigslist, eBay the rest. Stuff is a synonym for anchor. You are a seed nurtured by flight, embraced by the wind. In adulthood, land, taste the soil like a Benedictine monk, and if it is good, lay down roots, become intimate with the earth. Be a vineyard, let your life become fine wine, as long as it is you doing the letting.

Do we need a man to get a tree, Mommy?” Holly whispered, looking up at Regan as if her answer could forever change the course of her little five-year-old life. “Are you kidding? Just look at these guns.” She flexed her arms. When Holly didn’t look so confident, Regan dropped to her knees and cupped her daughter’s face with both hands. “No, baby. We just need each other.

Before she could say a word or throw herself in front of the oncoming disaster that was quickly becoming her life, a nude, Adonis-inspired statue slid down the ramp of the truck, landing gracefully on her lawn with a small thud. “Oh my,” Nora sighed with an expression of sheer appreciation. “Isn’t that an eyeful?” Eyeful indeed. Standing well over six feet tall, and except for the embellished bulge and generous amount of hair, the marble statue was a spot-on replica of her ex. Even down to the smarmy smile and trademarked wink.

Maybe I could take you out to dinner tonight.” “Maybe I can wait until you’re asleep and slit your throat.” “Or we could, you know, learn to get along with each other and live a happy life.” “Where’s the fun in that?

The others climbed into the back of the truck with the pitchforks and the pinestraw, leaving Stacy all alone in the front with the man. She sat as close to the door as she could and held the handle tight in case she had to jump out or something. Suspiciously, she looked at the big paper bag on the seat between them. The man, still frowning, put the truck into gear. With a jolt, they started off. Before they had gone very far he slammed on the brakes, throwing them all forward. He doesn’t even have seatbelts, Stacy thought. But how can you think of dumb things like that when you’re about to die? “Sorry,” he said gruffly. “I forgot. I’ve got to make one stop before we go to the dairy barns.” Throwing the truck into reverse, he backed up a few yards to a narrow road that led into the woods. A small sign that read “Private! Closed to the Public” was posted by the side of the road. Oh dear, Stacy thought, we’re doomed now. How many times did Mom ever tell me never to get into a car with a stranger? And now I’ve gone and done that and here we are heading down an off-limits road into the woods. She had a cold chill, and this time it wasn’t from her wet clothes. They bounced down the rutted road. In the mirror outside her window, she could see the kids hanging on to the side of the truck for dear life. The arms of the low pines brushed the roof of the truck with a skeletal scraping down. At least they came to an opening. Before her Stacy could see rows and rows of vines. “Vineyards,” she whispered to herself. Suddenly, the man slammed on his brakes. The truck jarred to a stop. Without a word he threw open the door and climbed out. Now we’re in for it, thought Stacy. I just know he’s coming around this side to get me. She squeezed her eyes shut tight. Over the idling hum of the motor she could hear him walking. Then there was a squeal from the kids in the back of the truck. Oh, my goodness, she thought, squinching her eyes tighter and tighter until they hurt. What is he doing to them? In a moment he slung the door of the truck open. In spite of herself she turned and looked at him. He had a big grin on his face. And his shirt was covered with a big purple stain. Blood! “Your shirt,” she stuttered, pointing a quivery finger toward him. He laughed. “Juice,” he said. “Juice from the grapes.” Stacy sniffed. Sure enough it did smell like grape juice. She got up the nerve to look in the rearview mirror. The kid’s heads bobbed in the back. Slowly she ungripped her hand from the door handle. The man waved an arm towards the vineyards. “We grow grapes for wine here. It’s just another way to use the land like Mr. Vanderbilt thought you should.” Stacy just stared at his shirt again and said, “Oh.

That sister of yours needs to own up to the fact that Richard was a cheat. She knew it and married him anyway. Can’t spend her life blaming the sheep when she watched her wolf get clothed every day.

DENVER — Some people who prosper in life choose to spend their hard-earned millions on private planes. Some buy a vineyard in Napa to indulge a love of wine. Some collect showpiece cars, or fulfill a dream of hiking Mount

Grace is part of the very nature of God, and He cannot change. He is indeed the generous landowner of the parable in Matthew 20:1-16, continually going to the marketplace of life to find those in need of a day's wages so He can bring them into His vineyard and then reward them out of all proportion to their labors.

We are all planted in God's vineyard and our lives are filled with potentials and purpose and we have all been given the hopes to anchor our lives even in the most disappointed times. So God is waiting to see what you and I will make out of the raw materials that He has given to us. He is waiting to see what we will make out of the discouragement and disappointment. I believe that in those deepest places of disappointment that the greatest grace will manifest.

Eddie’s a huge football fan.” “Fan? The man had a life-sized poster of you hanging on his door. And no, I didn’t.” Calm

Maybe it was the mood or maybe it was that kind of day, but at that moment life seemed completely perfect. I could think of nothing missing from my life. No amount of money can buy that feeling, and no amount of power can give it. That kind of feeling comes from within. It comes from being able to sort out the trivial things in life from the truly important things.

In order to leave out any doubt, I let my passport expire, without trying to extend it. I applied for an Affidavit in lieu of passport, valid for a trip out of the U.S. to Israel, dated November 30, 1949. Just as two years previously my family came to say `hello,' now they visited to say `goodbye.' Some were puzzled by my decision yet they found it interesting and idealistic, since I was going to labor in the vineyards of the newly established Jewish State. Maybe, some thought, they would have treated or approached me differently, had they known that it was only a temporary stay, a two-year visit. Of course, it made no difference any more. That stint was an interlude between life in Europe and my settling in Israel, where I remained for over seven years.

10Who can find350 a woman of worth?a Far beyond jewels is her value. 11Her husband trusts her judgment; he does not lack income. 12She brings him profit, not loss,351 all the days of her life. 13She seeks out wool and flax and weaves with skillful hands. 14Like a merchant fleet,352 she secures her provisions from afar. 15She rises while it is still night, and distributes food to her household, a portion to her maidservants. 16She picks out a field and acquires it; from her earnings she plants a vineyard. 17She girds herself with strength; she exerts her arms with vigor.353 18She enjoys the profit from her dealings; her lamp is never extinguished at night.354 19She puts her hands to the distaff, and her fingers ply the spindle.355 20She reaches out her hands to the poor, and extends her arms to the needy. 21She is not concerned for her household when it snows— all her charges are doubly clothed. 22She makes her own coverlets; fine linen and purple are her clothing. 23Her husband is prominent at the city gates as he sits with the elders of the land.356 24She makes garments and sells them, and stocks the merchants with belts. 25She is clothed with strength and dignity, and laughs at the days to come.357 26She opens her mouth in wisdom; kindly instruction is on her tongue. 27She watches over358 the affairs of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness. 28Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband, too, praises her: 29“Many are the women of proven worth, but you have excelled them all.” 30Charm is deceptive and beauty fleeting; the woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.359 31Acclaim her for the work of her hands, and let her deeds praise her at the city gates.

I’ve been a passionate adventurer in the solar industry and the sustainability movement my whole life. I try hard to walk my talk. My wife, Nantzy, and I live in an off-the-grid home (see page 70) built of recycled and green materials, powered by solar (passive and active) and hydroelectric energy, with gorgeous biodynamic gardens and fruit orchards that provide most of our food, a 15-acre biodynamic olive orchard, an 8-acre biodynamic vineyard, and a dozen beehives. I’m fortunate to benefit from the fruits of all our collective labors. As the solar industry continues to grow and mature, and as our cultural consciousness evolves, I remain hopeful that, once and for all, we will get things right in

We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savor the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything… so let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on forever.

Go to a place where you can nourish the seeds of God's vineyard in your life. If you are not living a purpose-driven life, you are simply wasting your time.

Go to a place where you can nourish the seeds of God's vineyard in your life. If you are not living a purpose-driven life, you are simply wasting your time.

There are some Keepers that should not be talked about. Much. It is as if, with each telling, they may lose some of the angel’s stardust from which they come. A tad of stardust given away with each telling until years later they no longer have the stardust they once had. Except to the story’s owner and friends whose hearts have enshrined it.

Looking back, I see that encountering that lone and revered Islander Owen Rabbitt was an omen, an announcement, a heads-up. He was telling us two things that proved to be most true: 1. Come correct. Fishing here takes knowledge. Fish the right lure the right way at the right place. 2. What you catch in this place will enrich you far more than fish. The lone elder on that rock up in Gay head made it clear: This place has the ability to show you things deeper than fishing: things seen and heard in liminal space.

There are stories that should not be told. Much. They contain stories only shared late, after most of the other things that day have been handled. Because they are too rich and righteous to waste on the fly. Because they are too wholly human, wholly memorable, wholly intimate, wholly tender. And like that. Holy. These stories should not be told. Much.

He was announcing it loud enough for the God of the Sea and the Fish and the Souls and the Universe, could hear it. .. Sometimes a moment takes your breath away, your draw drops, your eyes widen, you pause. But this was the other kind of moment. The kind of moment you inhale and take it in because it is for your soul. And the older your soul the better it gets at letting you know when to automatically take it in. I actually felt myself breathe it in. The intimate gesture of Paying Tribute.

The twilights of ancient cities, with lost traditions inscribed in the black stones of their massive buildings; tremulous dawns over inundated fields, swampy and damp like the air before the sun comes out; the narrow lanes where anything could happen; the heavy chests in age-old sitting rooms; the well behind the farmhouse on a moonlit night; the letter dating from when our grandmother whom we never met was first in love; the mildew in the rooms where the past is stored; the rifle no one knows how to use any more; the fever of hot afternoons next to the window; not a soul on the road; fitful slumber; the blight in the vineyards; church bells; the cloistral grief of living…

The grass wasn’t greener on the other side, he was sure of that. It was greener on the hills and lush vineyards that surrounded him every single day of his second chance at life.

I have been selected to design and administer these unique initiatives because of my prior experience and effectiveness. Past success breeds repeat performances. … What is important are the personality and character traits needed to stand up to criticism and stress, and to labor effectively in a very emotional vineyard—empathy and sensitivity to the plight of those singled out for special consideration; confidence and firmness towards critics. I turn the other cheek when face-to-face with distraught victims or a businessman challenging my pay decisions. Life's unfairness is usually the real source of their anger. The nature of the compensation received is secondary. But a strategic retreat is not an option when critics attack. Self-confidence and firmness become virtues. You cannot allow yourself to be bullied when you are trying to administer a complex policy experiment. The public is usually supportive, appreciative of the difficulty of the task.

Let there be light. Gen. 1:3 Let there be enlightenment; let there be understanding. Darkness. Gen. 1:4 Ignorance; lack of enlightenment and understanding. Eden. Gen. 2:8 A delightful place; temporal life. Garden. Gen. 2:8 Metaphorically—a wife; a family. Tree of life in the midst of the garden. Gen. 2:9 Sex; posterity, progeny. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Gen. 2:9 Moral law; the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of life. Gen. 2:9 Eternal life. The tree of good and evil. Gen. 2:17 Metaphorically—sexual relationship. Good. Gen. 2:17 Anything perfect. Evil. Gen. 2:17 Anything imperfect; contrary to good; immature. Naked. Gen. 2:25 Exposed; ashamed. Serpent. Gen. 3:1 An enemy; deception. Thorns and thistles. Gen. 3:18 Grievances and difficulties. Sent forth from the garden. Gen. 3:23 A loss of harmony; a lost paradise. God took him away. Gen. 5:24 He died painlessly. He had a heart attack. Sons of God. Gen. 6:2 Good men; the descendants of Seth. My spirit shall not dwell in man forever. Gen. 6:3 I have become weary and impatient. (A scribal note.) The Lord was sorry that He made man. Gen. 6:6 (A scribal note. See Old Testament Light—Lamsa.) I set my bow in the clouds. Gen. 9:13 I set the rainbow in the sky. I have lifted up my hands. Gen. 14:22 I am taking a solemn oath. Thy seed. Gen. 17:7 Your offspring; your teaching. Angels. Gen. 19:1 God’s counsel; spirits; God’s thoughts. Looking behind. Gen. 19:17 Regretting; wasting time. A pillar of salt. Gen. 19:26 Lifeless; stricken dead. As the stars of heaven. Gen. 22:17 Many in number; a great multitude. Went in at the gate. Gen. 23:18 Mature men who sat at the counsel. Hand under thigh. Gen. 24:2 Hand under girdle; a solemn oath. Tender eyed. Gen. 29:17 Attractive eyes. He hath sold us. Gen. 31:15 He has devoured our dowry. Wrestling with an angel. Gen. 32:24 Being suspicious of a pious man. Coat of many colors. Gen. 37:23 A coat with long sleeves meaning learning, honor and a high position. Spilling seed on the ground. Gen. 38:9 Spilling semen on the ground. (An ancient practice of birth control.) No man shall lift up his hand or foot. Gen. 41:44 No man shall do anything without your approval. Put his hand upon thine eyes. Gen. 46:4 Shall close your eyes upon your death bed. Laying on of hands. Gen. 48:14 Blessing and approving a person. His right hand upon the head. Gen. 48:17 A sincere blessing. Unstable as water. Gen. 49:4 Undecided; in a dilemma. The sceptre shall not depart from Judah. Gen. 49:10 There shall always be a king from the lineage of Judah. Washed his garments in wine. Gen. 49:11 He will become an owner of many vineyards. His teeth white with milk. Gen. 49:12 He will have abundant flocks of sheep. His bow abode in strength. Gen. 49:24 He will become a valiant warrior. The stone of Israel. Gen. 49:24 The strong race of Israel. He gathered up his feet. Gen. 49:33 He stretched out his feet—He breathed his last breathe; he died.

You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of—of all things—an “idea for a story,” and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard.

But, though the Doctor tried hard, and never ceased trying, to get Charles Darnay set at liberty, or at least to get him brought to trial, the public current of the time set too strong and fast for him. The new era began; the king was tried, doomed, and beheaded; the Republic of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, declared for victory or death against the world in arms; the black flag waved night and day from the great towers of Notre Dame; three hundred thousand men, summoned to rise against the tyrants of the earth, rose from all the varying soils of France, as if the dragon’s teeth had been sown broadcast, and had yielded fruit equally on hill and plain, on rock, in gravel, and alluvial mud, under the bright sky of the South and under the clouds of the North, in fell and forest, in the vineyards and the olive-grounds and among the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn, along the fruitful banks of the broad rivers, and in the sand of the sea-shore. What private solicitude could rear itself against the deluge of the Year One of Liberty—the deluge rising from below, not falling from above, and with the windows of Heaven shut, not opened! There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no measurement of time. Though days and nights circled as regularly as when time was young, and the evening and morning were the first day, other count of time there was none. Hold of it was lost in the raging fever of a nation, as it is in the fever of one patient. Now, breaking the unnatural silence of a whole city, the executioner showed the people the head of the king—and now, it seemed almost in the same breath, the head of his fair wife which had had eight weary months of imprisoned widowhood and misery, to turn it grey. And yet, observing the strange law of contradiction which obtains in all such cases, the time was long, while it flamed by so fast. A revolutionary tribunal in the capital, and forty or fifty thousand revolutionary committees all over the land; a law of the Suspected, which struck away all security for liberty or life, and delivered over any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty one; prisons gorged with people who had committed no offence, and could obtain no hearing; these things became the established order and nature of appointed things, and seemed to be ancient usage before they were many weeks old. Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before the general gaze from the foundations of the world—the figure of the sharp female called La Guillotine.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on. Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savor the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

for me when I’m sick; that we’ll fight over money troubles and then find a way through; that we’ll ache with sadness and longing as we grow older and develop wrinkles and find new and interesting ways to love one another.  “For this is what I believe a marriage truly is: I believe it means opening your eyes every day to a person who is also in the midst of ever-constant change. And it means loving the bits that are still there, along with the bits that they’ve left behind, along with the bits that they’re headed towards. Time isn’t linear; love is complex. And I am so open to the concept of loving Wesley Sheridan completely, for all the days of my life.

She had to try harder. She had to want the life she always thought she didn’t. Because just as this library was a part of her, so too were all the other lives. She might not have felt everything she had felt in those lives, but she had the capability. She might have missed those particular opportunities that led her to become an Olympic swimmer, or a traveller, or a vineyard owner, or a rock star, or a planet-saving glaciologist, or a Cambridge graduate, or a mother, or the million other things, but she was still in some way all those people. They were all her. She could have been all those amazing things, and that wasn’t depressing, as she had once thought. Not at all. It was inspiring. Because now she saw the kinds of things she could do when she put herself to work. And that, actually, the life she had been living had its own logic to it. Her brother was alive. Izzy was alive. And she had helped a young boy stay out of trouble. What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. She didn’t need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn’t even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before.

His mind wanders to faraway lands, to the glimmering sea under the midday sun, to the cultivated vineyards ready for harvest, to lush forest covering the hills of his home. He sees the past, with his ancestors living this same life, sleeping under the same tree, running behind their own sweethearts, just like he does. He sees the future, the many sunsets to come, the olives he will eat and the wine he will drink, and Rosalia is always there, beside him, smiling to him, in his future.

The antithesis of giving thanks is grumbling. The grumblers live in a state of self-induced stress. Like the crew of vineyard workers who had labored from dawn to dusk and felt cheated when latecomers received the same wage (Matt. 20:1–16), they bellyache about the unfairness of life, the paucity of their gifts, the insensitivity of their spouse and employer, the liberals who are destroying the church and the conservatives who have deserted their post, the hot weather and the cold pizza, the greedy rich and the shiftless poor, and their victimization at the hands of the IRS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the manufacturers of Viagra. (Small wonder that the stressed-out grumblers are two and a half times more susceptible to colds than grateful people, according to Ohio State virologist Ronald Glaser.) In his Rule for monasteries, St. Benedict considered grumbling a serious offense against community life. He wrote, “If a disciple grumbles, not only aloud but in his heart … his action will not be accepted with favor by God, who sees that he is grumbling in his heart.” Indicating his fierce opposition to this behavior, he added, “First and foremost, there must be

There were five of these commandments. The First Commandment (Matthew v, 21-6) was that man must not only refrain from killing, he must not become angry with his brother, must not consider anyone to be raca, of no consequence, and if he should quarrel he must first be reconciled before bringing a gift to God, that is before praying. The Second Commandment (Matthew v, 27-32) was that man must not only refrain from adultery, he must avoid lusting after womanly beauty, and one joined to a woman he never be unfaithful to her. The Third Commandment (Matthew v, 33-7) was that man must swear no oaths. The Fourth Commandment (Matthew v, 38-42) was that man must not only refrain from taking an eye for an eye, but must turn the other cheek when smitten on one, must forgive injuries and humbly bear them and never refuse people that which they desire of him. The Fifth Commandment (Matthew v, 43-8) was that man must not only refrain from hating his enemies, and waging war against them, but must love, help and serve them. Nekhlyudov fixed his gaze on the light coming from the burning lamp, and his heart stopped. Recalling all the ugliness of our lives, he started to imagine what this life could be like if only people were educated in the principles, and his soul was filled with the kind of rapture he had not known for a very long time. It was as if he had suddenly found peace and freedom after a long period of anguish and pain. He did not sleep that night, and, as so often happens with many, many people reading the Gospels for the first time, as he read he came to a full understanding of words he had heard read many times before without taking in what they said. All that was revealed to him in that book as vital, important and joyful he drank in like a sponge soaking up water. And all that he read seemed familiar, seemed to confirm and full acknowledge things he had known for a very long time without accepting or believing them. But now he accepted and believed. But more that that: as well as accepting and believing that by obeying these commandments people will attain the highest of all possible blessings, he now accepted and believed that obeying these commandments is all that a person has to do, the only thing makes sense in human life, and that any departure from this is a mistake leading to instant retribution. This emerged from the teaching as a whole but with particular strength and clarity from the parable of the vineyard. The workers in the vineyard had come to imagine that the garden where they had been sent to work for the master was their own property, and that everything in it had been put there for their benefit, and all they had to do was to enjoy life in the garden, forget all about the master and put to death anybody who reminded them of the master and their duty towards him. ‘This is just what we are doing,’ thought Nekhlyudov, ‘living in the absurd conviction that we are masters of our own lives, and that life is given to us purely for our enjoyment. Yet this is patently absurd. Surely, if we have been sent here it must be at someone’s behest and for a purpose. But we have decided that we live only for our gratification, and naturally life turns sour on us, as it turns sour on a worker who fails to follow his master’s will. And the will of the master is expressed in these commandments. People only have to obey these commandments and the kingdom of God will be established on earth, and the people will receive the highest of all possible blessings. ‘See ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and the all the rest shall be added on to you.’ And although we are seeking ‘all the rest’, we obviously cannot find it. ‘So this is what my life is all about. As one part comes to an end, another begins.

Today I begin a new life. Today I shed my old skin which hath, too long, suffered the bruises of failure and the wounds of mediocrity. Today I am born anew and my birthplace is a vineyard where there is fruit for all. Today I will pluck grapes of wisdom from the tallest and fullest vines in the vineyard, for these were planted by the wisest of my profession who have come before me, generation upon generation. Today I will savor the taste of grapes from these vines and verily I will swallow the seed of success buried in each and new life will sprout within me. The career I have chosen is laden with opportunity yet it is fraught with heartbreak and despair and the bodies of those who have failed, were they piled one atop another, would cast a shadow down upon all the pyramids of the earth. Yet I will not fail, as the others, for in my hands I now hold the charts which will guide me through perilous waters to shores which only yesterday seemed but a dream. Failure no longer will be my payment for struggle. Just as nature made no provision for my body to tolerate pain neither has it made any provision for my life to suffer failure. Failure, like pain, is alien to my life. In the past I accepted it as I accepted pain. Now I reject it and I am prepared for wisdom and principles which will guide me out of the shadows into the sunlight of wealth, position, and happiness far beyond my most extravagant dreams until even the golden apples in the Garden of Hesperides will seem no more than my just reward. Time teaches all things to him who lives forever but I have not the luxury of eternity. Yet, within my allotted time I must practice the art of patience for nature acts never in haste. To create the olive, king of all trees, a hundred years is required. An onion plant is old in nine weeks. I have lived as an onion plant.

Dusk had fallen on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a tailor’s assistant, finished her long day’s work in a large department store in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the first capital of the Confederacy. While heading for the bus stop across Court Square, which had once been a center of slave auctions, she observed the dangling Christmas lights and a bright banner reading “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” After paying her bus fare she settled down in a row between the “whites only” section and the rear seats, according to the custom that blacks could sit in the middle section if the back was filled. When a white man boarded the bus, the driver ordered Rosa Parks and three other black passengers to the rear so that the man could sit. The three other blacks stood up; Parks did not budge. Then the threats, the summoning of the police, the arrest, the quick conviction, incarceration. Through it all Rosa Parks felt little fear. She had had enough. “The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed,” she said later. “I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” Besides, her feet hurt. The time had come … Rosa Parks’s was a heroic act of defiance, an individual act of leadership. But it was not wholly spontaneous, nor did she act alone. Long active in the civil rights effort, she had taken part in an integration workshop in Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School, an important training center for southern community activists and labor organizers. There Parks “found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.” There she had gained strength “to persevere in my work for freedom.” Later she had served for years as a leader in the Montgomery and Alabama NAACP. Her bus arrest was by no means her first brush with authority; indeed, a decade earlier this same driver had ejected her for refusing to enter through the back door. Rosa Parks’s support group quickly mobilized. E. D. Nixon, long a militant leader of the local NAACP and the regional Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, rushed to the jail to bail her out. Nixon had been waiting for just such a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the bus segregation law. Three Montgomery women had been arrested for similar “crimes” in the past year, but the city, in order to avoid just such a challenge, had not pursued the charge. With Rosa Parks the city blundered, and from Nixon’s point of view, she was the ideal victim—no one commanded more respect in the black community.

After all whether boom or bust, it's a bullish market for booze.

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on. Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.

Kirkus Review: Carroll Engelhardt, By the Sweat of His Brow: The R. M. Probstfield Family at Oakport Farm (FriesenPress January 5, 2023) “Engelhardt recounts a German family’s experience living in Minnesota’s Red River Valley in the late 19th century. In 1832, Randolph Michael Probstfield was born near Koblenz in the Prussian-controlled Rhineland in western Germany, the son of devoutly Catholic parents who encouraged him to enter the priesthood and were bitterly disappointed when he did not (Probstfield observed, “If I had promised to be a priest and kept my word, today I would be . . . a feted-up, high-living hypocrite in the so-called vineyard of the Lord, and not a farmer . . . earning his bread by the sweat of his brow”). Like many other Germans before him in search of a better life, he emigrated to the United States in 1852, traveled extensively, and worked a dizzying array of jobs before he finally settled in Minnesota in 1860, a time when Germans were the state’s dominant immigrant group. In an effort to assimilate, he altered the spelling of his last name, which was originally Probstfeld. For the rest of his life he would maintain a delicate balance between his enthusiastic loyalty to the United States and pride in his German ancestry. Eventually, Probstfield’s indefatigable work ethic paid off, and he bought Oakport Farm in the Red River Valley in the 1868. He would eventually purchase thousands of acres of land and enjoy the prosperity that came with a great agricultural boom at the end of the 19th century, a period depicted with a scrupulous exactitude by the author. Engelhardt delivers much more than a family history—his book is a granular account of frontier life in America, a life of punishing toil that also held the promise of wealth and freedom. Probstfield emerges as a fascinating patriarch of his family (he married Catherine Goodman, with whom he had 13 children); a rugged, secular individualist, he held progressive political and cultural views, including a great attraction to socialism. He was exceedingly active in local political life, a contentious milieu diligently reconstructed by the author. His extraordinary rigor can be a bit overwhelming—there are minutely detailed discussions of Oakport’s small-grain production, Probstfield’s horticultural experiments, and various meat-preservation methods. However, for the reader looking for a finely detailed treatment of this period in American history, this is an edifying study. A magisterially researched work in American History.

Deep blue water and emerald green islands capped by evergreen forests. Rocky bays and serene white ferries chugging past pods of orcas. A tiny town of quaint clapboard buildings painted in a rainbow of hues. A harbor clogged with bobbing sailboats. It looked idyllic, soaked in natural beauty. Serene. It was a world away from Paris, or Texas, for that matter. Georgia took the phone and studied the photos, mesmerized. She'd never seen anything like it. She felt a longing tug in her chest, something she couldn't quite articulate. Something was calling to her there. She had to go. Phoebe took her phone back and read avidly for a few minutes. "It says here that San Juan Island is known for pods of orcas, kayaking, a lavender farm, cidery, vineyard, shellfish farm, restaurants with Pacific Northwest cuisine, and farmers markets.

The vine needs to suffer. Going down into this earth-fighting to survive among the stones, among the lime rock—this is what gives it its aroma. Its taste. Its unique character. These grapes will create a wine few other vineyards can compare with not because their life was easy, but because they had to struggle to survive.” I grew still. “The vine needs to suffer?” “To be at its best, it needs to suffer, yes. And fight.” “I’m sorry for it, then. No creature should have to bear pain.” “Pain is part of this life. No one can escape suffering. Not the vine, nor we humans, as you well know, my lady. But what if we are like the vine and that affliction only makes us better?” Bardia

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy. We can't tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on. Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. So let's be kind to the people in our existence. Let's occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever. Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, the same messy life seems full of hope. Potential. The impossible, I suppose, happens via living. Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No. But do I want to live? Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.