Maggie's Farm

Brockton, MA, 1940, by Jack Delano, from the Library of Congress collection

Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude - with lots of Parrotheads in evidence.

Newport Mountain, Mount Desert Island, Maine. 1851. The fellow in the foreground seems to be pulling in a mast from a wreck.

If there is no self, whose flu is this? 

Be here now.  Be someplace else later.  Is that so complicated? 

Drink tea and nourish life; with the first sip, joy; with the second sip, satisfaction; with the third sip, peace; with the fourth, a muffin. 

Wherever you go, there you are.  Your luggage is another story. 

Accept misfortune as a blessing.  Do not wish for perfect health, or a life without problems.  What would you talk about? 

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single Oy. 

There is no escaping karma.  In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited.  And whose fault was that? 

Zen is not easy.  It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have?  Bupkis. 

The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao is not Jewish.  

Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems. 

Let your mind be as a floating cloud.  Let your stillness be as a wooded glen.  And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders. 

Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist. 

Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions; Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness. 

The Torah says, Love your neighbor as yourself. The Buddha says “There is no self.”  So, maybe we're off the hook.

Elizabeth Samet teaches Literature at West Point. A quote from a review of her book, Soldier's Heart, in Newsweek:

It's hard for any good teacher of English to get away from war; great literature is soaked in it. Along with love, war supplies us with the greatest human drama. And war, like love, seems to somehow be essential to the human condition. "You may not be interested in war," Leon Trotsky once wrote, "but war is certainly interested in you." For Samet, teaching these young cadets, the trick is to reconcile romantic notions of honor and glory with harsher realities, the randomness of death by IED or the savagery of bombing civilians—all the great and terrible things that humans do when fighting for their lives against other humans. In her new book, "Soldier's Heart," she does it beautifully. The book, named after an archaic term for combat fatigue or, to use the modern acronym, PTSD, is a recollection of her 10 years of teaching English at West Point, but it is much more than that: a meditation on the need for both myth and reality in preparing young officers for war.

From Sipp:

Moon Over Peacham (VT), by Larry Miller. Available at Silver Print Press.

We reach down to the Gold Coast of suburban Fairfield County, CT for today's New England house for sale.

This 1920 4-bedroom house, with 4800 sq. feet, sits in the Tokeneke area of Darien's Long Island Sound waterfront in what realtors still call "Aryan Darien."

Darien: Cheaper and more homey than Greenwich, more pleasant than Stamford, and less than an hour from NYC by train. Average house price in town: over one million, and every kid in town is above average and plays hockey and lacrosse.

House looks modest and civilized enough to me. Asking $3,995,000, which seems quite reasonable for the area. More photos of the charming place here. 

But can I farm it, and shoot on it?

h/t, Theo

h/t, Dust My Broom

Our morning links today reported the growing ogling crisis in the UK. Men are pigs: the government must do something. We hope this sign will contribute something useful to the discussion of the crisis, if not offer a simple solution. Why ogle, after all, if you can just stare?

We like the healthy, wholesome NSFW barmaid on the continuation page.

Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882). MFA, Boston.

The remarkable Sylvie Guillem with Laurent Hillaire in a short excerpt from Forsythe's In the Middle Somewhat Elevated:

Sheffield, MA, in the southern Berkshires, is one of the loveliest villages in New England. It has well-kept horse farms, a few dairy farms, a bunch of quaint bed-and-breakfasts, wooded hills, a 250 year-old Congregational Church, and a population of around 3000.

It isn't too far from Maggie's Farm, and it isn't too far from where Alice's Restaurant used to be (in Stockbridge).

The only problem with this fine 1880 carriage barn-home is that it comes with only 6 acres. I would need ten or twenty times that to do what I want to do. The only other downside is all of the Subarus with Obama stickers in the area. (Asking price $740,000).

The workshop and office space on the ground level are an appealing feature.

(No, we are not in the real estate business: we just like a break from politics.)

Tis Issat is the Smoke of the Nile - the falls of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia (map). The Blue Nile, arising in Lake Tana, provides most of the water to the Nile proper.

Here's a better photo of the falls.

You can learn a lot about 19th C. Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in Flashman on the March (he survives a tumble down the falls - and then a tumble with an obese Queen). The subject comes up today because, after church yesterday, friends were discussing their upcoming mission trip to Ethiopia and I regret that I cannot join their group.

On the other hand, maybe Ethiopia ought to be sending some missions to the USA and Europe. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church (previously the Coptic Orthodox Church) has been around since about 300, and has taken its own path. Note the outfits of the Deacons.

I would love to see that country.

This is the 28' Alerion Express day sailer, at Cape Yachts. Nice boat.