The Softer Side Of Dignity

Dignity Lesson #1 - Don't listen to songs on the radio.

I first heard this song during my coming of age years of the 1960's in my home town of Detroit, Michigan. In those days, I would go to bed with a transistor radio next to my pillow, listening to new music out of Great Britain (aka The British Invasion) from WBZ in Boston, music that had not yet made it to the Motown-laden airwaves of Detroit. If ever a song would set a romantic path for the rest of my life, it was this one. What makes it such a remarkable piece of music is how that same sense of longing that I felt on listening to it for the first time on that anonymous night in a long forgotten 1960's Michigan, can be revisited, appreciated, and even felt, 47 years later on some soon to be forgotten summer's night in the Arizona desert, circa 2014.

Dignity

"I will never, ever give a woman my dignity. When a woman is taking advantage of my kindness, when she is taking me for granted, when she thinks that her mere presence is enough for me, I will walk away. Absolutely no woman can treat me in any other way than I believe I should be treated. No matter where I am in life, no matter whom I’m with, dignity will be a part of my spirit, until the very end."

It Doesn't Get Better Than This

Invisible

Gravity; Consciousness; Future/Past; Memories; Atoms; Light; Electricity; All But 5 Galaxies; Radio Waves; All We Don't Know; The Point Of This; The Point Of Anything.

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

W. H. Auden

On another birthday, come and gone

If You Want To Be Awe Inspired

To Be The Father Of Growing Daughters

“To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.”

― Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

Homesick

With a holy host of others standing 'round me
Still I'm on the dark side of the moon
And it seems like it goes on like this forever
You must forgive me
If I'm up and gone to Carolina in my mind

In my mind I'm goin' to Carolina
Can't you see the sunshine
Can't you just feel the moonshine
Ain't it just like a friend of mine
To hit me from behind
Yes I'm goin' to Carolina in my mind

Paul Simon & Willie Nelson

Paul Simon & George Harrison

I don't know what happens when people die
Can't seem to grasp it as hard as I try
It's like a song I can hear playing right in my ear
That I can't sing
I can't help listening
- Jackson Browne