Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they woul...
I had zero idea of what I was doing.. I honestly had no idea where to start. All I knew was I had something I craved to say.. I wanted to create art that lived on longer than I do. Perseverance and teaching yourself, every day through stress and hard...
We put our children through their paces in school not so that they will learn something, or master something, or meet any standards. No. We give them tools so that they can experience the joy, the passion, of creating. All we are doing is saying, “...
I want to be a woman who lives totally abandoned to the first commandment: to love my Lord, my God, with all my heart. I don’t want the reputation that I love God, I don’t want to write songs about loving God, I don’t want to talk about loving ...
Destiny set up our meeting at that party,the band playing a slow song at that moment was fate,asking you to dance was my choice,becoming a prisoner of your beautiful eyes was something I couldn't control. My life was never the same since that moment,...
When my female friends are left By horrid spouses and lovers, I commiserate. I send gifts- Powwow songs and poems- and wonder Why my gorgeous friends cannot find Someone who knows them as I do. Is the whole world dead and blind? I tell my friends, �...
Dogfish I wanted The past to go away, I wanted To leave it, like another country; I wanted My life to close, and open Like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song Where it falls Down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted To hurr...
Last night I heard a robin singing in the rain, And the raindrop's patter made a sweet refrain, Making all the sweeter the music of the strain. So, I thought, when trouble comes, as trouble will, Why should I stop singing? Just beyond the hill It may...
...Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the r...
It's the smell of him in the bathroom, all I need to get ready for the day. Watching him get dressed, and the sound in the kitchen; a slow hum of a song and his movements, picking things to eat. The way I could observe him, for hours, just go on with...
They always loved my sense of humor. There used to be a light switch inside one of the nurseries that was a cutout of Jesus putting his arm around two children on each side of him as he towered above them. The switch was ironically located in the spo...
Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but i...
Dory: Hey there, Mr. Grumpy Gills. When life gets you down do you wanna know what you've gotta do? Marlin: No I don't wanna know. Dory: [singing] Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming. What do we do? We swim, ...
Parky: This must be a very exciting moment for you, fighting for the Christmas Number One. How's it looking so far? Billy Mack: Very bad indeed... Blue are outselling me five to one. But I'm hoping for a late surge. And if I reach Number One, I promi...
Gretta: I told you, I write songs from time to time. Dan: What do you write them for? Gretta: What do you mean what for? For my pleasure. And for my cat. Dan: Oh really? Does he like them? Gretta: She. Yes, she seems to. Dan: How do you know? Gretta:...
The burden God places on each of us is to become who we are meant to be. We are most fully ourselves when Christ most fully lives in us and through us. The mother shines brightest with her child in her arms, the father when he forgives his wandering ...
I write a lot of songs about love and I think that’s because to me love seems like this huge complicated thing. But it seems like every once in a while, two people get it figured out, two people get it right. And so I think the rest of us, we walk ...
Some pasts exist as a fog that rolls in and out of the present, formed not by air that condenses into mist but memories that condense into tiny doors that open to forgotten moments. Maybe you glance at a stranger on a crowded street who reminds you o...
If you're putting that energy into performance," he said, "you're also getting it back out again, right? You're giving so you can receive." He spread his arms wide. "If you were writing songs with it, you'd be holed up in your room in the middle of t...
We are social beings who make communities with an urgency, and it is a stern charge to make us take refuge in the lonely world of oneself. ...Racism attempts to occlude our cosmopolitanism (of the songs in and out of our bones), and it often appropri...
Back then he'd hammered out rags as rough as the planks that made up that schoolhouse stage. Over the years he's taken a saw and rasp to those tunes and smoothed them at the edges, sanded them slowly over time with finer and finer grit paper, and app...
