The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need — not all the time, surely, but from time to time — to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember — the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(Frederick Buechner [source: quoted many places online<\/em>])<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\nPatience<\/strong>
\nFor Max Rojas<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nOnce a month
\nwhen the moon loses everything,
\nDon Max takes a chair
\nto the edge of the sea.
\nBlack sand beach & green-backed heron.
\nThe moon
\ncasts off her milkglass earrings.
\nI am nothing, she says, but black & white.
\nI keep losing my face.
\nDon Max feels for his pipe in his pocket.
\nTakes it, knocks it against his palm.
\nI am old! She cries. I get gooseflesh
\nin the dark. Don Max is looking for his tobacco.
\nDon Max has found a match.
\nYou don\u2019t know how hard it is
\nto come back from nothing.
\nDon Max smiles & lights up.
\nI keep making the same mistakes, she says.
\nI think you should leave me, she says.
\nThrough smoke, she watches Don Max
\nfold a strip of seaweed into a grasshopper.
\nLeave me for your own good! She demands.
\nDon Max has set the grasshopper in the sand.
\nBesides, I am too beautiful.
\nShe speaks it as though it makes her sad.
\nI\u2019ll find other lovers. I will
\nforget you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(Katherine Larson [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n…and:<\/p>\n
Ten men waiting for me at the door? Send one of them home, I’m tired.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(Mae West )<\/p>\n
…and finally, Stephen Colbert (with Feist’s help) urges us to just hold on for a few seconds more — because even the technology of Heaven may have its glitches\u00a0 (lyrics below). It’s a bit early in the season, sure, but some reminders just can’t wait.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/gotpatience_sm.jpg?ssl=1\" "\\"Frequent")
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