Look. Listen. Attend.

"To really love something you have to be willing to let it go." I don't know if anyone famous or unfamous uttered those words before as I heard something similar said by G.K. Chesterton once but am paraphrasing in the late night hour. True though, don't you think?

Some random thoughts:
I've not been able to blog much due to the hectic activity at work, my remodelling project at home, various committees, and due to life in general I suppose. I did have to take a timeout on Thursday in order to drive back to my hometown to say farewell to an old friend. Bob was my 8th grade teacher, a coach, a father to two of my best high school friends, and an all-around wonderful human being. He died last Sunday after an ugly and prolonged illness just shy of his 70th birthday...surrounded by his wife, children and grandchildren. A more honorable man I've yet to meet. Someday I'll write about him...just not now.

Unfathomable guilty pleasures:
Keanu Reeves. A more wooden man I've seldom seen outside of politics, but damned if two of my unexplainably favorite movies don't have him starring within: A Walk In The Clouds and Sweet November. One of the mysteries of this life, eh?

What to read, what to read?
Ever since finishing The Chronicles of Narnia I have been struggling to find something to start. I've begun The Return of the King, Thoreau's Walden, and was just about to begin Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, when I cracked open C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves and came across the following paragraph on page 19:

If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exactly the lessons you had already decided to learn; this is only another way of saying that nature does not teach. The tendency to take her as a teacher is obviously very easily grafted on to the experience we call "love of nature." But it is only a graft. While we are actually subjected to them, the "moods" and "spirits" of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, "Look. Listen. Attend."

I think I'll stick with Jack Lewis for awhile.......just to see where he takes me. It's just after midnight as I finish this, so I'm off for a sip of leftover New Year's Eve cognac and a few pages of my newest reading pleasure. God bless...I'll try to return more often.