I’d really like to see some real Rembrandt someday.

i was told to find jesus
in a stained glass church
where the light shines red like blood

but the eyes of his children
were so bitterly burned
that i could not stand to look at them

when he finally came to visit me
he was dressed in the rags of poverty

and it came as no surpass
it came as no surprise

hey
i am looking for freedom …

- Noah Gundersen, ‘Fire’

[reposted from here]

The irony is that we avoid… it’s like in great film-making, right, you talk to great actors and they’ll say, “Ugh, this one piece got cut out of the film and ended up on the cutting room floor and I was heart broken.” Well it’s like we all have an editor living inside of our heads or our hearts who is cutting scenes out of our lives that we don’t want as part of the narrative. Or, we’re telling the sound guy to turn up the volume of the soundtrack in those sections of our memory where we don’t want to hear the words that we said or someone else said. You know what I mean? It makes for a really choppy film, you know, and a dishonest film.  And it never ends well, because there are big chunks of it missing that people can’t understand… 

We all know that we have these sort of reservoir of grief, and here’s how you know you have one. You’re watching a film or reading a book and you have this disproportionate amount of grief that comes out. You’re watching In America – the Irish, beautiful film, In America – um, Schindler’s List, I don’t know, and something within you completely breaks forth, and you’re like “Where did all this energy and grief come from?” Well, the artist, the filmmaker, the writer – whatever it is – they just, they found a puddle, and they just threw a little pebble in it. And they found your puddle…

- Ian Morgan Cron, Interviewed by Work of the People

“When gratitude is the source of our actions, our giving becomes receiving and those to whom we minister become our ministers.”

- Henri Nouwen, Compassion

“And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”

- John Steinbeck to His Son Thom