[Video from In Performance at the White House: Red, Hot, and Blues]
[Video above not working for you? In its place, I offer you the audio only:]
[mp3-jplayer title=”I’d Rather Go Blind” tracks=”idrathergoblind_tedeschitruckshaynes.mp3″ captions=”I’d Rather Go Blind / Tedeschi Trucks Band w/ Warren Haynes”][Original lyrics, by Etta James]
I first encountered the name Derek Trucks within a few years after I’d moved down here. Some kid was doing a show at a club in town — an amazing blues guitarist, said the newspaper preview, and only a teenager: 14 years old or so. How amazing? He’d toured with Buddy Guy. He’d performed with the Allman Brothers. The kid was hot.[Aside: I’ve got something like a third- or fourth-order connection to him, too. His uncle, Butch Trucks, is the drummer for the Allmans. When Butch was in elementary school, he attended a dance with my Missus-to-Be on his arm — his very first date.]
Susan Tedeschi has had some kind of career of her own, dating back to her childhood. She grew up listening to blues and gospel music, and eventually played Austin City Limits and Lilith Fair. (Her voice, says Wikipedia, has been described as a blend of Bonnie Raitt and Janis Joplin. I don’t believe even that does it justice.) She also toured with the Rolling Stones, B.B. King, Bob Dylan, and, well, the Allman Brothers.
Trucks and Tedeschi married in 2001, and continued their separate careers. Recently, wanting to minimize their kids’ exposure a typical touring-musician family’s lifestyle, they set up a studio in Jacksonville, FL, and formed their own band, the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Their first album, Revelator, came out last June; it’s a killer, and I’d intended with this post to cover a couple of tracks from it for you.
But in doing a little research about it I stumbled on the above recent performance on the PBS special In Performance at the White House: Red, White, and Blues. Tedeschi and Warren Haynes share the vocals while Trucks’s slide guitar tears up the instrumental lead, on “I’d Rather Go Blind.”
The song itself, co-written and first recorded by Etta James in 1968, holds legendary status as one of the best, most successful B-side recordings in pop-music history. The A side was an even bigger hit, “Tell Mama.” In her autobiography, Rage to Survive, James says that she never liked “Tell Mama.” (“I didn’t like being cast in the role of the Great Earth Mother, the one you come to for comfort and easy sex.”) But about “I’d Rather Go Blind,” she relates this story of label executive Leonard Chess:When Leonard heard the song the first time, he got up and left the room ’cause he started crying. That touched my heart. Other cats I know would have wanted me to see them cry, just to show me how soulful they were. I liked that Leonard did his weeping in private. […] When he came back in the room, he said, “Etta, it’s a mother… it’s a mother.”
It does no disservice to James’s memory — she died shortly before the above video was recorded — nor to the talents of Tedeschi, Trucks, and Haynes, to say that this performance lives up to the song.
Just for completeness, here’s the reference version — Etta James’s mother of a performance:
[mp3-jplayer title=”I’d Rather Go Blind” tracks=”idrathergoblind_ettajames.mp3″ captions=”I’d Rather Go Blind / Etta James”]Note: Hat tip (and a deep bow) to my little brother for introducing me to Revelator.
Laughing, Refreshed, in Its Face
[Video: scene from The Princess Bride — the Man in Black faces off against his cleverest adversary, Vizzini the nearly-inconceivable Sicilian. You can find a transcript (among other Vizzini-isms) at this IMDB page.]
From whiskey river:
To get through this life and see it realistically poses a problem. There is a dark, evil, hopeless side to life that includes suffering, death, and ultimate oblivion as our earth falls into a dying sun. Nothing really matters.
On the other hand, the best side of our humanity finds us determined to make life as meaningful as possible NOW; to defy our fate. Everything matters. Everything.
It is easy to become immobilized between these two points of view — to see them both so clearly that one cannot decide what to do or be.
Laughter is what gives me forward motion at such intersections.
We are the only creatures that both laugh and weep. I think it’s because we are the only creatures that see the difference between the way things are and the way they might be. Tears bring relief. Laughter brings release.
Some years ago I came across a phrase in Greek — asbestos gelos — unquenchable laughter. I traced it to Homer’s Iliad, where it was used to describe the laughter of the gods. That’s my kind of laughter. And he who laughs, lasts.
(Robert Fulghum [source])
…and:
I lounge on the grass, that’s all. So
simple. Then I lie back until I am
inside the cloud that is just above me
but very high, and shaped like a fish.
Or, perhaps not. Then I enter the place
of not-thinking, not-remembering, not-
wanting. When the blue jay cries out his
riddle, in his carping voice, I return.
But I go back, the threshold is always
near. Over and back, over and back. Then
I rise. Maybe I rub my face as though I
have been asleep. But I have not been
asleep. I have been, as I say, inside
the cloud, or, perhaps, the lily floating
on the water. Then I go back to town,
to my own house, my own life, which has
now become brighter and simpler, some-
where I have never been before.
(Mary Oliver [source])
Midweek Music Break: The Ramsey Lewis Trio, “The ‘In’ Crowd” and “Wade in the Water”
[Image: Ramsey Lewis, by Kagan McLeod. (Original here, at McLeod’s blog of “music-themed ink drawings” called Oooh, and I Like It.) McLeod says in the comments there that he drew this “straight to ink,” without benefit of pencil sketch; both this technique and the drawing per se, I think, parallel the experience of listening to Lewis himself.]
When we hear people refer to the 1960s, we think of upheaval: the remaking of music and politics, the overturning of what we thought we knew about family and art. But the ’60s had another side, and it’s one of the reasons why (I think) the TV show Mad Men has been such a hit: under the surface of frothing water swam small schools of fast, sleek, and, well, non-splashy fish, making their way through the culture without apparent effort…
Reportedly, it was a coffee-shop waitress who suggested that the Ramsey Lewis Trio add to their repertoire a tune called “The ‘In’ Crowd.” (It had been a recent hit for singer Dobie Gray.) The song’s chorus pretty much summed up its theme:
I’m in with the in crowd
(Do-do-do)
I go where the in crowd goes
(Do-do-do)
I’m in with the in crowd
(Do-do-do)
And I know what the in crowd knows
Lewis and his group did an instrumental take on the song while recording an album at Washington DC’s Bohemian Caverns nightclub in 1965. (None of the trio sang, really. But I understand that you can hear bassist Eldee Young vocalizing here and there as he’s transported by the music and rhythm. Can’t hear it myself, but you may be able to pick it up.) That recording, nearly six minutes long, became Lewis’s first gold record:
With the same personnel, he followed up with another pair of gold records a year later. The first covered The McCoys’ 1965 hit, “Hang On Sloopy.” The second took the spiritual classic “Wade in the Water” and turned it inside out — from an assertion of the blessings of baptism, to one of the blessings of moving through water in general: the blessings of cool:
Note: You can find another cool-jazz take on “Wade in the Water” in a whiskey river Friday post a few years ago, in a video by “Barefoot Contessa” singer-organist Rhoda Scott.
What L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries Saw Out His Window (Three-Minute Version)
A time-lapse film of the view outside James Stewart’s rear window, in Alfred Hitchcock’s film of that name:
Very, very cool!
(See the creator’s own site for additional details. And if you don’t know the film at all, you could do worse than to start with Roger Ebert’s looking-back review from 2000. Of course you could also do better, and just rent or borrow it yourself. :))
Midweek Music Break Playlist: Windows to the Soul
[Image: girl, dancing, in giant eye costume. Note the hands: one giving “thumbs-up!” sign,
one holding a cocktail. I have no idea if this is an advertising image or what; found it at a couple
of places, never with any explanation.]
(Note: The playlist goes automatically from start to finish, once you click the Play button. Total playlist length: around 31 minutes.
Though most of us don’t hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes… It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes’ elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body’s sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn’t, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.
(Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses)
Windows to the soul, right. That’s what they say about eyes, anyhow. Which, if true, is good news for everybody but (poor) liars.
I poked around to see if anyone knew, definitively (or even convincingly) who first came up with the “windows to [or of] the soul” metaphor. Best guess, as far as I can tell, seems to be that it came from Cicero, in his Tusculan Disputations. I’ve found a translation of that work (by Andrew Peabody, in an 1886 edition) at the Internet Archive. The passage there (in a chapter called “On the Contempt of Death”) reads as follows:
Therefore it is that often, when hindered by being absorbed in thought or by some morbid affection, we neither see nor hear, though both the eyes and the ears are open and in a healthy state, so that it may be readily inferred that it is the soul that sees and hears, and not those parts which are like windows of the soul, but through which the mind can perceive nothing unless it be actively present.
When you pick this apart, it’s actually pretty plain that he’s lumping the eyes in with the ears as windows of the soul. But let it pass, let it pass, and give the guy the benefit of the doubt: after all, windows are predominantly an architectural feature which serves the eyes.
Whether they’re good or bad for people facing interrogation, eyes are without question a godsend to songwriters. If, as Diane Ackerman says, 70% of our sensory wiring is given over to support of vision, it’s easy to imagine that at least 70% of our music deals with it in some form or another. It (haha) focuses on the orbs themselves, or on the things the orbs perceive; the songs are full of color, light, shadow, and of course blindness. (Let’s not forget Talking Heads’ “Cross-Eyed and Painless.”) And given the other pop-music preoccupation — love, et all the cetera that goes with it — songs often deal with the color the lover sees when he sees the beloved’s eyes. Indeed, try to substitute in a song title any other sensory organ or its sense in place of the eyes and vision and you wind up with ridiculously Daliesque imagery: “Doctor My Ears”; “I Only Have Sniffs for You”; “Taste Bud of the Tiger”…
(As a thought experiment, I turned it around: pick some other art form, and some other sense, and try to think of examples of that art’s preoccupation with that sense. It’s not easy — although I suspect you, clever readers that you are, could run off a dozen examples.)
This was a difficult mix to put together — way too many choices. We take vision very, very seriously, and the eyes are everywhere in our songs.
Better Fictions, Lesser Truths
[Image: one of various digital collages in the “Fictions” series by Flemish photographer/artist Filip Dujardin. (Click to enlarge.) These buildings and landscapes do not actually exist (although he starts with images of buildings in and around Ghent, Belgium).]
From whiskey river:
While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors.
“He doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.”
(Loren Eiseley [source])
…and:
Here and There
Here and there nightfall
without fanfare
presses down, utterly
expected, not an omen in sight.
Here and there a husband
at the usual time
goes to bed with his wife
and doesn’t dream of other women.
Occasionally a terrible sigh
is heard, the kind that is
theatrical, to be ignored.
Or a car backfires
and reminds us of a car
backfiring, not of a gunshot.
Here and there a man says
what he means and people hear him
and are not confused.
Here and there a missing teenage girl
comes home unscarred.
Sometimes dawn just brings another
day, full of minor
pleasures and small complaints.
And when the newspaper arrives
with the world,
people make kindling of it
and sit together while it burns.
(Stephen Dunn [source])
Midweek Music Break: The Animals, “The House of the Rising Sun”
[Image: The Animals (original image doctored up by Jude Kane and found on Freakoutville Xpress). And they looked like such nice boys…]
To get it out of the way right up front: no house in New Orleans called the “Rising Sun” ever existed.* Or rather, more precisely: never definitively, and no one establishment. Furthermore, it may or may not have been a brothel, which is fitting… because to find one in the song’s house of the rising sun we have to read between the lines, nudging that meaning into place with the words draped over it. (Not that we have to nudge too hard.)
I was surprised to learn that it began life as a folk song, first recorded (as far as we know) in 1934 by a Clarence “Tom” Ashley, in a version alternatively titled “Risin’ Sun Blues.” (Wikipedia does its usual brisk, reliably good job in documenting the song’s performance history, and outlines the several theories about the real (or otherwise) house in question.) My surprise is 100% Boomer-centric: You mean history happened at some time other than my own?!? Inconceivable! But yes, Eric Burdon and the Animals were pretty far down in the chronological list of performers. Nevertheless, they did succeed in putting their stamp on it; I doubt that I’m the only one who knew it first, and presumably always, as the vehicle for Eric Burdon’s howling vocals and that maddeningly relentless guitar. (The latter can likely induce motion sickness in sensitive individuals.)
To get back to the real (or otherwise) house of the title: it’s been claimed, variously, to have been a brothel, maybe a proto-casino or prison, dating back as early as 1821. That site was excavated by archaeologists within the last few years, which turned up evidence that it in fact may have been a bordello, or at least a house where “gentlemen” could “relax.”
The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, back in 2003, ran this letter on the issue:
Fact: It’s Been the Ruin of Many a Poor Myth
As a reference librarian for many years specializing in local history and lore, as well as a long-time fan of The Animals and that group’s rendition of “House of the Rising Sun,” I was very interested in Chris Rose’s Jan. 12 article, “The rising son.” I have made a study of the history of prostitution in New Orleans and have often confronted the perennial question, “Where is the House of the Rising Sun?” without finding a satisfactory answer. Although it is generally assumed that the singer is referring to a brothel, there is actually nothing in the lyrics that indicate that the “house” is a brothel. Many knowledgeable persons have conjectured that a better case can be made for either a gambling hall or a prison; however, to paraphrase Freud: sometimes lyrics are just lyrics.
After having discussed the “rising sun,” a popular decorative device, with a colleague who has just completed her doctoral work on the history of prostitution in New Orleans and a historian who has written about Shreveport’s red-light district, as well as being personally familiar with a number of general works on the “oldest profession,” there is no evidence or even a mention of the use of a rising sun as a universally recognized symbol of prostitution.
In examining property records for 826-832 St. Louis Street and numerous other resources on prominent pre-Storyville madams and prostitution in the Crescent City, I find it interesting, too, that any reference at all to the “notorious” House of the Rising Sun is conspicuously missing. Public records simply don’t confirm it.
Pamela D. Arceneaux
(“Sometimes lyrics are just lyrics”: love it. That whooshing you hear is a collective sigh of relief of from a thousand songwriters.)
If you’re interested in the definitive answers to the song’s mysteries, you might find them in Ted Anthony’s 2007 book, Chasing the Rising Sun [Amazon / Google Books]. Disclaimer: I haven’t read it myself! However, he does include this little item towards the end of the book (from “January 27, 1821, on page two of a New Orleans newspaper called the Louisiana Gazette“):
Rising Sun
Hotel,
Conti Street,
Nearly Opposite the State Bank.
The undersigned inform their friends and the public that they have bought out the interest of JOHN HULL & CO. in the above establishment. No pains or expence will be spared by the new proprietors to give general satisfaction, and maintain the character of giving the best entertainment, which this house has enjoyed for twenty years past.
Gentlemen may here rely upon finding attentive Servants. The bar will be supplied with genuine good Liquors; and at the Table, the fare will be of the best the market or the season will afford.
The business will be carried on under the firm of L.S. Hotchkiss & Co.
Jan.27
“Attentive Servants”; “general satisfaction” and “best entertainment”… Mmm-hmm.
[Below, click Play button to begin The House of the Rising Sun. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:24 long.]
[Lyrics]
One interesting thing about the song’s lyrics over time: they’ve switched genders. Early versions were often sung by women, about the ruination not of “poor boys” but “poor girls.” I don’t want to guess what it says about our culture — even in the “enlightened” world of 1960s rock — that in the song’s most successful version the real victims of such places can be found among the patrons.
_______________________________
* Well, as it happens, there is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun: it’s a bed-and-breakfast (apparently quite nice) which opened its doors in 1999. (WARNING: Before following that link, you should know that the song will start playing, unbidden and fairly loudly; it took me a while to find the little audio-control widget which controls it, but it’s over in the left-hand sidebar, close to the top.) Their site includes a good page of information on the various legends about the “real” (or otherwise) Rising Sun, and the song which commemorates it. And I had to laugh when I read this:
We named our former bed & breakfast the “House of the Rising Sun” for the obvious reason… the way the song starts. What else could we call it… “Dunroamin”?
I’m not sure what they mean by “former” — as far as I can tell, it’s getting along just fine — but you’ve gotta give credit to business owners who poke fun at their own naked commercial moxie. :)
The Calm at the Core of Disorder
[Lyrics]
[Video: “Saints & Liars,” by Pony Boy. See the note at the foot of this post for more information.]
From whiskey river:
There is tremendous power in unearthing, in recognizing distracted, scattered mind, the mind which would rather be anywhere but here, and spending some time there, with that mind. Rather than being an anonymous voice from the dark bossing you around, scattered mind is someone you can sit down and hang out with.
(Jusan Ed Brown)
…and:
A Settlement
Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned
into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come
up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their
curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come
home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow,
happiness, music, ambition.And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to
go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of
this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.* * *
Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive youfor everything.
(Mary Oliver [source])
…and:
It’s all a show, a deception. Your urges scream and bluster at you; they cajole; they coax; they threaten; but they really carry no stick at all. You give in out of habit. You give in because you never really bother to look beyond the threat. It is all empty back there. There is only one way to learn this lesson, though. The words on this page won’t do it. But look within and watch the stuff coming up — restlessness, anxiety, impatience, pain — just watch it come up and don’t get involved. Much to your surprise, it will simply go away. It rises, it passes away. As simple as that. There is another word for self-discipline. It is patience.
(Henepola Gunaratana [source])
Midweek Music Break: Collins H. Driggs (on the Novachord), “Estudiantina,” and… Beer
 |
 |
[The Novachord, closed and open (click either photo for an enlargement); both photos per Wikipedia]
When you grew up in the US during a certain window of time (and maybe in certain geographic areas, within certain socioeconomic strata), the culture you could absorb from the adult world was this weird amalgam of past and present. The mass media hadn’t quite figured out what “mass media” might mean. Television still felt like an extravagance. Pop-culture artifacts from the early decades of the 20th century could still be found lying around in basements and attics, waiting for (re)discovery by kids with maybe a little too much time on their hands.
One such sort of artifact in our household was 78rpm record albums. I have no idea from which side of the family most of these things might have come to us — or, rather, to the cardboard boxes in the second-floor “storage room” and in dark back corners of the basement. If they were Big Band-related, odds were good that they’d arrived trailing in Dad’s wake. But the others…?
We had a couple of records by Arthur Godfrey, for instance, including one on which he and a would-be comic country-singin’ group sang an embarrassing number called “Slap Her Down Again, Paw.” (That was the refrain, in a narrative about an adolescent girl who’d stayed out later than her parents allowed — but finally came in at sunrise.)
And we also had a collection of recordings on a musical instrument called the Novachord.
Like the Mellotron (covered here in a Midweek Music Break some time ago), the Novachord was an experimental keyboard instrument straddling the analog/digital divide. Wikipedia says only about a thousand were manufactured by Hammond (the organ company) between 1939 and 1942; production lapsed during World War II because of the shortage of parts, and never resumed afterwards because, apparently, the thing just hadn’t caught on anyway.
I don’t ever remember Mom or Dad playing the Novachord records on the family hi-fi (or later, stereo). But I listened to them myself, for some reason, and often enough that one song really lodged in my head. The label identified it as “Estudiantina,” a waltz by a composer named Émile Waldteufel. Although (as Wikipedia says) Waldteufel is considered a French composer, he was born in Strasbourg — as German a city as a French city may be, right down to the geography. (And his surname is German, meaning — I love this — forest devil.)
Given all that, maybe it should not surprise that “Estudiantina” — certainly as rendered by the Novachord, in the hands of someone named Collins H. Driggs — has so much a lilting, oomp-pa-pah beer-hall quality:
Maybe the main reason why this performance struck me with such force was that I recognized the tune well before I heard it from the Novachord recording — and even then, when I must’ve been only ten or twelve years old or so, I recognized it for an unlikely reason: it provided the melody to the advertising jingle for (yes!) a Germanic-sounding brand of beer, Rheingold. That’s Miss Rheingold* of 1949 in the ad over there on the right. I can almost hear “Estudiantina” tootling from her concertina, which perhaps sounded much like the Novachord: thin, reedy, and rather, well, burbly. I can even almost hear her singing the jingle — whose words, indeed, included the announcement: My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer…!
Background: When I set out a couple days ago on this general topic, for no reason that I can put my finger on, I had exactly two facts at my disposal:
- The word “Novachord.”
- The remembered connection between that old 78rpm record, and the Rheingold jingle.
I certainly couldn’t remember the song title, “Estudiantina.” And I don’t think I’d ever even registered the name of Émile Waldteufel.
But as I continued to think about the recording, I vaguely remembered that the overall album title coupled Novachord somehow with the word magic. It wasn’t Novachord Magic… nor The Magical Novachord… it was… was… was it The Magic of the Novachord?
And folks, I wanna tell you: I just about fell out of my chair when a quick check of Google led me to that very album on iTunes.
I love the Internet.
________________________
* The very first Miss Rheingold, in 1940, was Jinx Falkenburg. (I might have been able to invent that name, but I’d never have had the nerve to use it in a story. Too implausible.) Her autobiography, Jinx, came out in 1951, but apparently went out of print long ago. (Hers, I’d wager, is a potential best-selling story in search of the right biographer or filmmaker, especially in our beautiful-celebrity culture.) There are many pictures of her online (and yes, Jinx appears to have been something of a minx), but one of my favorites is the one at the right. She is here not signing the accordion, as it appears. She’s signing a short snorter. You can be forgiven for not knowing what a short snorter is; according to the site of The Short Snorter Project (where I found the photo), it is:
…a banknote which was signed by various persons traveling together or meeting up at different events and records who was met. The tradition was started by bush pilots in Alaska in the 1920’s and subsequently spread through the growth of military and commercial aviation. If you signed a short snorter and that person could not produce it upon request, they owed you a dollar or a drink (a “short snort”, aviation and alcohol do not mix!).
Did I say, I love the Internet?
Conversations, Sacred and Profane
[Image: photograph of a massive (115″ x 53″) jigsaw puzzle, by Clementoni, of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love (also known as Venus and the Bride, but subject to various other interpretations as well). The puzzle contains over 13,000 pieces. I almost used this image instead, for no other reason than (a) the title and (b) its depiction, at the lower right, of the Polish Saint Maximilian Kolbe, canonized in 1982 as the patron saint of drug addicts, political prisoners, families, journalists, prisoners, the pro-life movement, and in general — get this — “Our Difficult Century.”]
From whiskey river:
The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God. Afterward he will stay near the entrance so that he can gently push all those who come near into the opening.
(Simone Weil [source])
…and:
Transience is the most general phenomenon of the cosmos. Change is the only changeless reality. Seasons, livelihoods, personal relationships — all of these will change. Our experiences in life are transient and relative. Only death is certain, completing the cycle of life that begins with birth. By meditating upon this truth, we recognize that we, too, are manifestations of transience.
When we understand this teaching deeply, we become humble and sincere. We treasure each moment and endeavor to do our best. We feel less stress and become more accepting of the diverse phenomena of life. If something good happens we can feel the joy and be thankful. But we know that the conditions for the situation will not last forever, and we do not become attached to the feeling.
We will simply consider every moment and every experience as a blessing.
(Ilchi Lee [source])
…and:
I asked the river
About its destination
And came out lucky:
It babbled about nothing
And never came to a point
(Gyosen [source])
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