“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” Mark Twain ©Jeff Guess 2017
What you have is His gift to you; what you do with what you have is your gift to Him. Swami Chinmayananda (1916 - 1993) Vedic scholar and mystic, founder Chinmaya mission ©Jeff Guess 2017
For it is in giving that we receive. St. Francis of Assisi (1181 - 1226) Saint, mystic, founder of the Franciscan order. ©Jeff Guess 2017
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) British statesman ©Jeff Guess 2017
Solutions? This morning I am driven by the human urge to follow clues, and they are legion. Connecting them in any semblance of a pattern or solving them as a puzzle is only an end in itself. The fluorescent blue of the jacaranda reflected in wet suburban streets; the woman on the train who asks me for directions in German; the scent of Russian sobranie pipe tobacco smoke in the station underground – don’t call for answers. They are simply ciphers trying to resolve questions of the heart. Jeff Guess ©Jeff Guess 2017
Know yourself and others, and the ways of the world, so as to have a peaceful body and mind. Recognise, cherish, and nurture your blessings, and seize every chance to be of service. Sheng Yen (1930-2009) Chan Buddhist ©Jeff Guess 2017
Jacaranda Tree in Grote Street, Adelaide, South Australia. ©Jeff Guess 2017
Mountain Stream after the painting by John Singer Sargent c. 1912-14. How the cool pastel colours, wet-on-wet waves his nakedness into the short slide of freezing froth and clear green water. Nothing can prepare the body for this tide of shock and cold. It is both delicious and vexatious. Impossible to be too careful here where all the elements wash towards his harm. The odds like strewn blue river stones are stacked against him. He considers the small rapids at his feet; a waterfall of perfect purple spin.. Then slips beneath snow-melt down and deep. Gasps at the smallest sudden clutch of breath feels it only now as such a little death. Jeff Guess ©Jeff Guess 2017
Hundred Years Anniversary of the Russian Revolution 1917-2017 Day at the Beach after Joseph Stalin circa 1952 - aged 72 To purge that last terrible winter at any hour and more and more frequently he would order the entourage out of ice-bound Moscow southwest to warm country dachas and then on to the ocean in five black closed limousines armour-plated each time he would choose a different car confusing the growing tide of assassins along the treeless roads hedged with thousands of armed guards on full combat alert. There he would lie above the freezing sand buried in coats and blankets in a modified chaise longue and for hours watch the waves unlike Canute he never spoke to them aloud and wou
Does it Matter? after Martin Luther who launched the Reformation on 31st October 1517 Does it matter that Martin didn’t nail his Ninety-five Theses on the church door at Wittenberg 500 years ago? But actually went out and bought a book of stamps and posted them to all his friends? Does it matter that Martin didn’t say ‘Here I stand I can do no other!’ when demanded by the Pope to recant? But actually asked the Holy Roman Emperor ‘Can I come back tomorrow?’ Does it matter that Martin wasn’t a pure, flawless, devoted priest but one whose three passions were food wine and sex and not necessarily in that order? Does it matter that Martin was an obscene anti-Semite who gave Hitler the imprimatur
That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful. Rumi (1207 - 1273) Jalalud-din Rumi, Persian saint and mystic, Sufi poet. ©Jeff Guess 2017
