hey jud

The fog that crept along with us all the way down Route 100 made it seem like we were in an unknown place on an unfamiliar road. Nothing looked exactly familiar, and certainly not like the road we've travelled many times over the past forty years. Finally just before the shortcut at Ted Green's Ford, we pulled over to take some photos. The darker, eerier ones are from my camera; the brighter one is Peter's. What it really felt like was somewhere in between.

Marcia and Jay got a nice writeup in today's Burlington Free Press. How I wish I was there to sample some of their new pastries and their bread, which I don't hesitate to classify as 'best bread in the world'.

Finally, Pizza on Earth goes live. Read it and weep over the yummy goodies you'll be missing unless you get up to Charlotte, VT.

Not only does this guy make juggling look blissfully easy, his name is Chris Bliss. It's juggling like you've never seen before, totally unique and choreographed to perfectly match the music. Watch and marvel.

Photo by Eliot Shepard immediately following this reading for Meg and Jason adapted from Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindberg.

"For marriage, which is always spoken of as a bond, is more truly many bonds, many strands, of different texture and strength, making up a web that is taut and firm. The web is fashioned of love. Yes, but many kinds of love: romantic love first, then a slow-growing devotion and, playing through these, a constantly rippling companionship. It is made of loyalties, and interdependencies, and shared experiences. It is woven of memories of meetings and conflicts; of triumphs and disappointments. It is a web of communication, a common language, and the acceptance of lack of language, too; a knowledge of likes and dislikes, of habits and reactions, both physical and mental. It is a web of instincts and intuitions, and known and unknown exchanges. The web of marriage is made in the day to day living side by side, looking outward and working outward in the same direction. It is woven in space and in time of the substance of life itself.

A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back -- it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it.

When the heart is flooded with love there is no room in it for fear, for doubt, for hesitation. And it is this lack of fear that makes for the dance. When each partner loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether or not he is loved in return; when he only knows that he loves and is moving to its music--then, and then only, are two people able to dance perfectly in tune to the same rhythm.

When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity--in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. The light shed by any good relationship illuminates all relationships. And one perfect day can give clues for a more perfect life."

bites,
originally uploaded by david.

Though I wasn't a part of this bite comparison, I believe it happened at the wedding cocktail party on Friday night. The mini burgers and small paper cones of pommes frites were two of my party food favorites.

Though I didn't expect to like it, this interview with designer Karim Rashid was wonderful and gave me a new and unexpected appreciation for him and his work. Two things I especially liked: his comments on what's wrong with nostalgia - it holds us back from evolving, the more time you spend on memories the less you are here, and how to design your own death. I'm seriously considering the option he mentions for taking your ashes and compressing them under super high-pressure into a diamond. Wearing me on a ring finger would be much less expensive and time consuming than traveling to all the special places I'd like to have my ashes scattered. But would the skinny me result in a diamond of sufficent size? Perhaps being heavier would make for a more substantial stone. Should I be giving up the South Beach diet? I await the response of my family.