Buffets and More

Anna and I have been dreaming lately - specifically for our house. Consequently, we've been drooling over websites and magazines, including these dandies (the office desk and the coffee table are from modernseed.com and the buffet is from eurway.com):

New Soul - Yael Naim

Here is the song from the new Mac Air Book commercials

Giving

“If I try to be or do something noble that has nothing to do with who I am, I may look good to others and to myself for a while. But the fact that I am exceeding my limits will eventually have consequences. I will distort myself, the other, and our relationship – and may end up doing more damage than if I had never set out to do this particular ‘good.’ When I try to do something that is not in my nature or the nature of the relationship, way will close behind me …

“When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless – a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other’s need to be cared for. That kind of giving is not only loveless but faithless, based on the arrogant and mistaken notion that God has no way of channeling love to the other except through me …

“One sign that I am violating my own nature in the name of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess – the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.”
Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening to the Voice of Vocation

Comeuppance

I am so frickin' excited the Patriots lost. Elated. I think I'm more excited that New England lost this Super Bowl than I am that Indianapolis won last year. Time ... and justice cannot be skirted for ever, New England. You got your comeuppance.

Wes

For the Birds

Audobon saw things here, which I haven't seen
until now.
The drastic absence of life
the darting images of snowbirds
to wake my slumber.
Today, hundreds and hundreds of birds -
a jet stream of flyers,
not as many as once were,
still plenty.

There is a white pigeon in the bradford pear,
the lone flowering bud in desolation and trash.
I sought to photograph it,
highlighted against the dark branches and empty gray.
It flew away,
into a higher roost,
with the other birds.

The cardinals and finches.
The exposed beauties.
So cold. So bare.
What keeps them here?