This morning I’m feeling a little wistful on Caitlin Clark’s behalf. She is the college basketball player extraordinaire who has been much in the news for months. She has had such an extraordinary year, and now it is over.
Whatever her future holds, how can it compare with the attention and downright adulation she has received in 2023-2024? She seems to have her head on straight, and maybe adulation was never what she was after. For her sake, I hope so.
This whole drama of her year can be a teaching lesson. We are almost daily given instructions somewhere in the media about “letting go.” Most of these admonitions deal with past traumas or difficult choices we’ve made. But letting go applies just as well to happy times and for a very few, fame. If we have a great day, and expect that we will still have it tomorrow and the day after that, we will eventually run into one that is pretty ordinary. Followed in time by one that sucks. Good to practice letting go on all of those. What does that mean? It means recognizing that both good and bad times are transitory.
Everything changes, doesn’t it? Nothing is permanent. The mountain becomes the hill. A lake goes dry. The man I was when I wrote in this blog a week ago is not here any longer. Instead, you get a slightly different version of me, and that only for today.
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From The New Yorker
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Here are the last three signs from the El Arroyo restaurant in Austin TX. My favorite of all of them is the last one. It is dark. BTW, I think after abusing the privilege of using their signs in the blog, I should at least provide you with a link to their website, which is interesting in itself. They sell photobooks of their signs, with hundreds of pix like these in each one. (If you have a clever thought, they accept people sending them suggestions for new messages.) They sell caps and tee shirts.
And, surprise surprise, they prepare and sell food. Even ship it.
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The clown to wander with into the woods would be the one from It, I think. Madness would precede and follow.
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Back in 1956 there was a best-selling novel entitled “The Last Angry Man.” I read it at that time and can remember very little about it, but then I can’t remember most of what I did yesterday. However, today I nominate Garry Trudeau for “Last Angry Man of the Last 50 Years.” Don’t bother looking it up, I just invented the category.
Trudeau will be 76 in July of this year, and I am grateful that he continues to share his sharp eye and his even sharper tongue with us. Personally, I think he nails it in this one. The thing is with Cluck, you don’t have to make stuff up. He speaks in satire of himself.
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In his book Awakening the Buddha Within, Lama Surya Das quotes from one of his teachers, a very wise and very old Tibetan Buddhist monk. When the man was asked to sum up his life one day, he answered: “One mistake after another.”
Gotta love a guy like that.
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We were nowhere near the “eclipse zone,” but looking out our front door at 1:32 MDT Monday we saw this and snapped the pic. A ring around the sun that contained color. The colors were like a smudged rainbow (red, orange, yellow) and are not shown as well in the photo as they were to the naked eye. (That blue-green dot is a lens artifact.)
I googled it and apparently this an uncommon event. It’s formed by the sun’s rays coursing through ice crystals in a cirrus cloud. No matter, even if it happened every day at 1:30 PM it would still be a lovely and fascinating thing to see. Of course, I am still a person who will pull the car over for a rainbow. Almost any rainbow. My knowledge of the heavens is probably as deep as the average Neanderthal’s, and I am easily amazed.
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From The New Yorker
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Little Home In The Valley 