Each Tomorrow

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Julia Cain

A Psalm of Life

Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today. […]

Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

— American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, born today in 1807

My Bounty is as Boundless

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Julia Cain

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Still making your evening plans? Look through out Cultural nonprofits for some great, local offerings of music, theater, dance, and art.

First, rehearse your song by rote
To each word a warbling note:
Hand in hand, with fairy grace,
Will we sing, and bless this place.

— Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

And yet I wish but for the thing I have:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.

— Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Asking, Knowing

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Julia Cain

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions.

— anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, born today in 1908

As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences.

— poet William Blake, born today in 1757

Openness

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Julia Cain

It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.

Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.

— American poet Sylvia Plath, born today in 1932

We Will Go Farther

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Julia Cain

The people rest on land and weather, on time and the changing winds.
The people have come far and can look back and say,
‘We will go farther yet.’ […]

The people, yes.
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas. […]

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march:
‘Where to? what next?’

— Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes, 1936

Quotes for Today

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Julia Cain

A few choice words from post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, who was born today in 1848:

“Go on working, freely and furiously, and you will make progress.”

“Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.”

“Art: a mad search for individualism.”

In that spirit, take a moment today to learn more about our visual arts non-profits — who recognize how color, creation, and canvas indeed spark progress, personal and societal.

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