We've got no money but we've got heart

This song has long been a favorite at our house. I just found this live acoustic version and just look how happy that guy is while he's singing.

Great beginnings

Blue foxes are so curiously like stones that it is a matter for wonder. When they lie beside them in winter there is no hope of telling them apart from the rocks themselves; indeed, they're far trickier than white foxes, which always cast a shadow or look yellow like the snow.
-- From The Blue Fox by Sjon

On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.
-- From A Constellation of a Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents' house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog. Because she had been born in May, and because she had a mole on her left cheek, and because her feet were very large and ungainly, the Green Wind took pity on her and flew to her window one evening just after her twelfth birthday.
-- From The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland on a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente

Once upon a time, a girl named September had a secret. Now, secrets are delicate things. They can fill you up with sweetness and leave you like a cat who has found a particularly fat sparrow to eat and did not get clawed or bitten even once while she was about it. But they can also get stuck inside you, and very slowly boil up your bones for their bitter soup.

-- From The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne Valente

It began with my father not wanting to see the Last Rabbit and ended up with my being eaten by a carnivorous plant.

-- From Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

You are the broken world and the act of changing it.

"So here’s the thing about changing the world. It turns out that’s not even the question, because you don’t have a choice. You are going to change the world, because that is actually what the world is. You do not pass through this life, it passes through you. You experience it, you interpret it, you act, and then it is different. That happens constantly. You are changing the world. You always have been, and now, it becomes real on a level that it hasn’t been before.

And that’s why I’ve been talking only about you and the tension within you, because you are—not in a clichéd sense, but in a weirdly literal sense—the future. After you walk up here and walk back down, you’re going to be the present. You will be the broken world and the act of changing it, in a way that you haven’t been before. You will be so many things, and the one thing that I wish I’d known and want to say is, don’t just be yourself. Be all of yourselves. Don’t just live. Be that other thing connected to death. Be life. Live all of your life. Understand it, see it, appreciate it. And have fun."

(From Joss Whedon's commencement address at Wesleyan University)

Everything I love is out to sea.

"It's so clear that our afterlife is how we are to the people around us: how we raise our children, how we are to our loved ones and friends. How we treat each other is how we affect life beyond our personal and specific and very small existence. The idea that it's just us, it's just us, and that's all there is, is true -- that one we know is true. The rest is hypothetical maybes. Why don't we act accordingly? How we affect each other is the real religion." -- Matt Berninger, here.

to return to the river
is easier than you'd think
the green water rises up to drape your shoulders
and with little fanfare pull you under

you'd let go of breath so quickly.
it would become the breath of all things.

and in the bottom of the water
you'd tend the reedy garden of
pebbles, plants, fish, and trash

with your moon-white hands extended,
more graceful than on land.

The obvious, most important realities are often the hardest to see and talk about.

"If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who or what is really important...if you want to operate on your default settings, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be in your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow consumer hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred. On fire with the same force that made the stars. Love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down."

So sing your song I'm listening out where the stars are glistening

Oh my gosh, this video has me crying. Sometimes the world (the whole entire UNIVERSE) is just completely and undeniably wonderful.


[UPDATE] I think this article in Time Magazine explains it perfectly well: "It’s about transcendence, it’s about experience, it’s about going to a place where otherworldly is a literal term, where you see things that are otherwise utterly impossible to see, where the simple rules of physics don’t even apply the same way. That place is both excruciatingly close — just beyond an onionskin of atmosphere — and unreachably distant. All of Hadfield’s videos capture that idea in one way or another, but the last one, which combines the alien nature of the place he was living at the time with the deeply personal power of a song that has private associations for anyone who’s familiar with it, was a masterstroke. It mainlined meaning directly into our emotional centers. Whether you care about space or not, once you watch Hadfield’s video, you’re very glad that humanity as a whole — and Hadfield in particular — can go there."

The "last one" the author references is Hadfield's cover of Bowie's "Space Oddity."

How am I gonna pick up all these stars, I said

I got to see James Wallace and the Naked Light last night in Fort Worth, and oh, they were tremendous. Here's their video for "To the River," which is beautiful.

"Death may not be the end, but it's no excuse for denying life."

This Russia Today interview with Brian May is so, so interesting. I want journalism to be more like this in America.