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Jacob's Pillow

@jacobspillow-blog / jacobspillow-blog.tumblr.com

ascending and descending, we are climbing jacob's ladder
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Sloth does not at first glance seem the deadliest of the seven deadly sins, yet Under one aspect it can fairly be reckoned such. The others may consist with energy, and energy may always be turned to good account. Sloth precludes energy. Sloth may accompany a great many amiable tempers and skin-deep charms: But sloth runs no race. And a race is the one thing set before us. We are not summoned to pose Picturesquely in tableaux vivants, or die away gracefully like dissolving views. We are called to run a race, and woe is us if we run it not lawfully, and with Patience and with pressing toward the mark. Sloth tends to paralyse the will. Blessed are the merciful who labour to help The self-helpless slothful , and betimes to arouse him. It is never too early to fight against sloth in one committed to my charge—or In myself. It is never too early, but ere long it may be too late.

Christina Rossetti 1830-1894

Sloth

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I am a little world made cunningly Of elements and an angelic sprite, But black sin hath betray'd to endless night My world's both parts, and oh both parts must die. You which beyond that heaven which was most high Have found new spheres, and of new lands can write, Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might Drown my world with my weeping earnestly, Or wash it, if it must be drown'd no more. But oh it must be burnt; alas the fire Of lust and envy have burnt it heretofore, And made it fouler; let their flames retire, And burn me O Lord, with a fiery zeal Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal.

John Donne

Holy Sonnet V

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Charles Penzel to a Civil War Widow

Beyond the flight of Time,

Beyond the reign of Death,

There surely is some better clime,

Where life is not a breath

_______

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THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came. Í say móre: the just man justices; Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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"Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

~William Wordsworth, Ode Intimations of Immortality

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‎"But the essential advantage for a poet is not, to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory." —T. S. Eliot
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“I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?” ― C.S. Lewis
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We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words-to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it... -C.S. Lewis
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They longed for the absolute, they caught glimpses of the infinite realisations; the absolute, by it's very rigidity, pushes the mind towards the boundless, and makes it float in the illimitable. -Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
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―When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilizations when left to themselves, there seems but one source of its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the PERSONAL ENERGY of Jehovah and with the RATIONALITY of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality. Remember that I am not talking about the explicit beliefs of a few individuals. What I mean is the impress on the European mind arising from the unquestioned faith of centuries. By this I mean the instinctive tone of thought and not a mere creed of words.

Alfred North Whitehead

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Suppose we stop short of imagination, initiative, enthusiasm, inspiration and originality—dread words. Suppose we don’t mark in such things at all. There are still two minimal things, that we have got to take care of, taste and judgment. Americans are supposed to have more judgment than taste, but taste is there to be dealt with. That is what poetry, the only art in the colleges of arts, is there for. I for my part would not be afraid to go in for enthusiasm. There is the enthusiasm like a blinding light, or the enthusiasm of the deafening shout, the crude enthusiasm that you get uneducated by poetry, outside of poetry. It is exemplified in what I might call "sunset raving." You look westward toward the sunset, or if you get up early enough, eastward toward the sunrise, and you rave. It is oh’s and ah’s with you and no more.

Robert Frost, Education by Poetry

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"When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"

-C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

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"It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from."

-C. S. Lewis (Till We Have Faces)

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THE NIGHT LIFE OF TREES: HANDMADE BOOKS BY INDIAN ARTISANS

by Maria Popova

What ancient Indian mythology has to do with fair-trade entrepreneurship and the timeless love of books.

If there ever was a project that reclaimed “authenticity” and “innovation” from their present status of fluff-lined buzzwords and into a genuine ethos, it would be South Indian independent publisher Tara Books, who for the past 16 years has been giving voice to marginalized art and literature through a commune of artists, writers and designers collaborating on remarkable handmade books. Crafted by local artisans in their fair trade workshop in Chennai, the books are hand-bound and each page is painstakingly screen-printed by hand using traditional Indian dyes, whose fresh earthy scent gently oozes from the gorgeous pages of the finished book.

Tara’s crown jewel is the magnificent The Night Life of Trees — the kind of large-format tactile treasure you take into your hands and never want to let go. It’s based on the ancient mythology of India’s Gond tribe, who believe that during the day trees serve to nourish and protect the Earth’s creatures, but it’s at night when they come into a life of their own. The breathtakingly beautiful illustrations, screen-printed on thick and textured black paper, come from three renowned Gond artists and blend the whimsical stories about the spirits of the Sambar tree with the practical uses of trees in Indian life, woven together into a delicate lace of magic and mundanity that poetically captures the duality of existence.

A multisensory delight with a soul-warming story, The Night Life of Trees is a pinnacle of breathing new life into ancient traditions and timeless storytelling with a modern entrepreneurial ethos. Above all, it’s a moving manifesto for the mesmerism of the paper page in the age of e-everything.

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Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.

William Barclay

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