'we had the experience but missed the meaning...'

Fr Tom Suriano - in his reflections at my mom’s funeral last Saturday  - quoted the great line from T. S. Eliot's Four quartets, which I've heard him quote before: 'we had the experience but missed the meaning...'.  

Here is the broader context from the poem - 

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence-
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness - not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfillment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination--
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.

***  

Must-See Plečnik Architecture UNESCO heritage tour in Ljubljana

This applies to everyone who voted for the orange felon.

 

Plant your garden

 “The months leading up to World War II were some of the most terrible months in the life of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, as they “helplessly and hopelessly” watched events unfold. Leonard said one of the most horrible things was listening to Hitler’s rants on the radio—“the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful.”

One afternoon, he was planting purple irises in the orchard under an apple tree. “Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window.”

Hitler was making another speech. 

But Leonard had had enough.

“I shan’t come!” he shouted back to Virginia. “I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.’”

He was right. In his memoir, Downhill All the Way, Leonard Woolf noted that twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those purple flowers still bloomed in the orchard under the apple tree.”

Keep Going, by Austin Kleon 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 "We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" ... It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers."

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawH7YWZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHRYFNgTM658gELGlJjDGc-7hwvKMERselBtbYRvAZoGPcoHDFfC11G_j9Q_aem_ZywF25EmcqNBhhdqwBWShQ

23 December 2024 - snowfall home and on the running trail.

 

 https://bsky.app/profile/thalkowski.bsky.social/post/3lceqozdy4s26

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/little-atoms/id286910253?i=1000677841666

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-favourite-beatles-song/id1583550138?i=1000669675388

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/sep/28/my-father-a-handful-of-spoons-and-his-journey-into-dementia

This author - Jeff Young - writes and talks of memory with insight and depth.  

Deer encountered on our night walk. 15 Nov 2024.