Alexei Navalny: “If your convictions are worth anything, you should be ready to stand up for them, and if necessary, make some sacrifices. And if you’re not ready, then you have no convictions at all, you just think you do. But those are not convictions and principles, just thoughts in your head.”

This one always gets me

Instant friends • A very low tide at Higgins Beach yesterday

Kitchen Chalk Talk

There’s a fern in the frost

“I see many squirrels, and treats, and belly rubs in my… I mean your future.”

“Patient Trust,” a prayer from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything

to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress

that it is made by passing through

some stages of instability – and that it may take a very long time.

And so, I think it is with you;

your ideas mature gradually – let them grow,

let them shape themselves, without undue haste.

Don’t try to force them on,

as though you could be today what time

(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)

will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.

Give Our Lord the benefit of believing

that his hand is leading you,

and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself

in suspense and incomplete.

Looking out from Bunker Hill onto Damariscotta Lake

I recently stumbled on a quote/clip from Austin Kleon, one of those grand simplicities that wonderfully pulls more than its apparent weight:

YOU WILL NEED:

• CURIOSITY
• KINDNESS
• STAMINA
• A WILLINGNESS 
TO LOOK STUPID