What I see when I get a moment to pause and make a little sense of the world
“Did she ever have a love affair? We never knew; yet how could a nature so imaginative, romantic and passionate escape it?” wondered Julian Hawthorne about his childhood friend Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832–March 6, 1888).
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Elizabeth Gould (July 18, 1804–August 15, 1841) found working as a governess “miserably-wretched dull.” Artistically and musically gifted, boundlessly curious about the world, she had grown up painting and collecting specimens.
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Being responsible for ourselves, knowing our own wants and meeting them, is difficult enough — so difficult that the notion of being responsible for anyone else, knowing anyone else’s innermost desires and slaking them, seems like a superhuman feat.
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“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” Mary Oliver wrote in one of her finest poems.
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We spend our lives yearning to be saved — from harm and heartache, from ourselves, from the inevitability of our oblivion. Religions have taught that a god saves us. Kierkegaard thought that we save ourselves. Baldwin believed that we save each other, if we are lucky.
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“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love,” the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his classic on the art of loving.
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Drive along the outer rim of the exurbs north of Nashville, past structures that might be barns or might be wedding venues, around developments called Vineyard Grove or New Hope Village, and eventually you will arrive at what is meant to be the new headquarters of the election commission of Sumner C
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We feel our way through life, then rationalize our actions, as if emotion were a shameful scar on the countenance of reason.
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“A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music,” the poet Mark Strand wrote in his ode to the enchantment of music.
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In a culture predicated on the perpetual pursuit of happiness, as if it were a fugitive on the loose, it can be hard to discern what having happiness actually feels like, how it actually lives in us.
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Front Porch Reflections 
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