Peregrinations

TO A GOD UNKNOWN
He is the giver of breath, and strength is his gift.
The high Gods revere his commandments. 
His shadow is life, his shadow is death;
Who is He to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?

Through His might He became lord of the living
 and glittering world
And he rules the world and the men and the beasts
Who is He to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?

From His strength the mountains take being, and
the sea, they say,
And the distant river;
And these are his body and his two arms. 
Who is He to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?

He looked over the waters which stored His power
and gendered the sacrifice. 
He is God over Gods. 
Who is He to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?

May He not hurt us, He who made earth, 
Who made the sky and the shining sea?
Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice?

-Veda

Santa De Los Hombres brought me this for Christmas. In the words of my father – a great tiempo de los hombres read.

Yep. I read it. I will be honest, I wanted to see what it was all about. And it was good. Not life changing good. More interesting than anything else. Women still baffle me…

I am sure you have already read it and this is old news but Confessions of an Economic Hit Man really is a must read for anyone who consumes. I can’t tell you how startling and eye-opening this book was. Even if only half of it is true (which sometimes is the case with these dramatized accounts of the evil corpratocracy or fundamentalist) it is still quite a lot to think about.

Why do we do the things we do…

 

Afterwards, we go back to being who we were before – frightened people trying to be more important than we actually believe we are.

1. I love Paulo Coelho

2. Some of this book takes place in The Balkans. I live there. I can relate to that. Kind of.

3. This book makes me want to dance. How can it not be good?

I love Paulo Coelho. I love the way he writes and paints pictures with words. He says things without ever really saying them. I wish I could do that. And he makes me think. Not just about the world around me but about the things I can not see. Spiritual things. I think we could all stand to think on these things a lot more than we do. But that is just what I think…

I am moving to Paris. Who’s coming?

I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Do you eat food? Read this book. Seriously. Blew my mind. Especially if you are a self proclaimed “Healthy” eater. Scary…

This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.

Before I knowed it, I was sayin’ out loud, ‘The hell with it! There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing.’ . . . . I says, ‘What’s this call, this sperit?’ An’ I says, ‘It’s love. I love people so much I’m fit to bust, sometimes.’ . . . . I figgered, ‘Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,’ I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit-the human sperit-the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.’ Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a suddent-I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.

You should read this. Really.

 

Dear Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Thank you for picking up the pen.

Honestly, this one took me a little while to get into. I don’t know if it was his style of writing or just the way the plot materialized. But somewhere about halfway through it became memorizing. And I am not spoiling anything but it doesn’t really resolve. I like books like that. Because life doesn’t really resolve.

If you haven’t read Thee Cups of Tea then you should! This picks up where Three Cups of Tea left off and I am more than excited to hear about what Greg Mortenson has been up these past few years. Dropping books as opposed to bombs is always a refreshing alternative.

You would think that reading about Ted Turner would make you want to start a business or get rich. It just makes me want to go sailing. Real sailing. Big sailing.

I want to climb Everest. Anyone down?

This one is not good for my ability to sit on one place. It is making me think and dream of all kinds of stupid adventures…

 

Thanks to Abianne for this one. Super interesting. I desperately wish I was right-brained but sadly this is just not true. Numbers and processes are my friends and that sucks.

Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. ‘Once upon a time’ is how all the best children’s stories begin and ‘prostitute’ is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradictions? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let’s keep that beginning.

I still don’t really have words for this one. I just finished reading it and my head is spinning. He definitely opened up my mind to a lot of things I think I have been ignorant of in the past when it comes to sexuality. I am grateful that he decided to write this book and decided to talk about the subject of sex in such a frank and open manner. I think where I am from the subject is avoided at all cost and is only really joked about or hinted at. I can’t tell you how detrimental that has been for me. I can’t tell you how detrimental I think that is for our society as a whole. 11 minutes opened up a dialogue in my mind that has been yearning to break the surface for some time now.  All told it was an amazing book and you really should read it.

I have this secret desire to be Gatsby…

I think that Holden Caulfield was before his time and if I knew that the books all those AP English kids complained about all the time were like this I might just have stepped up and tried in English class… Well that is probably not true but I suppose the benefits of academic english classes is that when you finally do get around to reading these sort of things it is on your time and much more enjoyable!

This one has taken me a little while to get into. It hasn’t been the quickest or most enthralling read but I would have to say that on the whole I am a fan.

In the time that I am given to hope and dream over here this has proven to be a dangerous companion. The book has been a great read but the plans I have formulated in my head while reading are whimsical at best. I would like to stand on the top of the world…

I have read this over and over again and it continues to teach me from the depths of Mr. C. S. Lewis’s pool of gifted wisdom. I think it is well worth your time…

You better believe that I spend my evenings living vicariously through the adventures of a young officer in the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I started them not to long ago and am already almost done with book two. I am a huge dork and completely okay with it.

Fantastic! I found this book enthralling from the beginning and was consumed by Captain Slocum’s casual and whitty accounts of his adventures as he sailed around the globe. Leaving Boston in April of 1985 at the age of 51 Slocum spent the following three years sailing alone into history and into the hearts and minds of boys and men for generations thereafter. His accounts of his circumnavigation trip have got me thinking about planning my own! Who wants in?

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning towards dynamite… Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and the trees of him dark and somber. The events, even important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then – the glory – so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and the number of his glories.

Easily the most visceral book I have ever read. Never have I been more effected by the imagry an author paints between pages and never have I identified more with a literary character than with Tom Hamilton. Samuel Hamilton is a man’s man and would be an honored guest of Tiempo de los Hombres.  I didn’t read the classics in high school so I am trying my best to catch up and finding that they are much more enjoyable with the freedom the enjoy them at your leasure. A must read.