Beautiful Things

I am over-caffeinated, still holding my coffee cup, watching the sun shine down on California mountains and sunburned from yesterday. I'm filled with gratitude and wonder, and humbled by the grace and faith of a friend.

In honor of the above, I'd like to share the following beautiful things.

1. Josh Garrel's Love, War, and the Sea in Between

2. The following poem by Wendell Berry

Sabbath Poem X

• Tanya. Now that I am getting old,
  I feel I must hurry against time to tell you
  (as long ago I started out to do) everything,
  
  though I know that really there can be no end
  to all there is for me to say to you even of this,
  our temporary life. Sometimes it seems to me
  
  that I am divided from you by a shadow
  of incomprehension, mine or yours, or mind and yours;
  or that I am caught in the misery of selfhood
  
  forever. And I think that this must be
  the lot (may God help us) of all mortals who love
  each other: to know by truth that they do so,
  
  but also by error. Often now I am reminded
  that the time may come (for this is our pledge)
  when you will stand by me and know
  
  that I, though "living" still, have gone beyond
  all remembering, as my father went in time
  before me; or that I have gone, like my mother,
  
  into a time of pain, drugs, and still sleep.
  But I know now that in that great distance
  on the edge or beyond the edge of this world
  
  I will be growing alight with being. And (listen!)
  I will be longing to come back. This
  came to me in a dream, near morning,
  
  after I had labored through the night under
  this weight of earthly love. On time's edge, wakened,
  shaken, light and free, I will be longing
  
  to return, to seek you through the world,
  to find you (recognizing you by you beauty),
  to marry you, to make a place to live,
  
  to have children and grandchildren. The light
  of that place beyond time will show me the world
  as perhaps Christ saw it before His birth
  
  in the stable at Bethlehem. I will see that it is
  imperfect. It will be imperfect. (To whom would love
  appear but to those in most desperate need?) Yes,
  
  we would err again. Yes, we would suffer
  again. Yes, provided you would have it
  so, I would do it all again.

3. (I wish I could share with you) the dancing light of dew of leaves on trees on the sunrise side of the mountain (I would kill a student for putting that many prepositional phrases back-to-back), or the sound of snow slushing down to the creek, down the mountain, on a journey who knows where.