ClimbingSky

Why Baseball, Books, and the Grateful Dead matter

December 2024

  • A New Day & A New Year

    Growth is about letting go and forgiveness, forgiving others and especially ourselves. May your days and the year ahead be one of letting go and forgiveness. Happy New Year! “Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.”– Herman Hesse “Finish each day and be done with it. You Read more

  • Gertrude Stein on Coffee

    “Coffee gives you time to think. It’s a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like Read more

  • Rickey

    Last week, a text from my friend Bob alerted me to the sad and surprising news that Rickey Henderson, “The Man of Steal,” was dead just a few days short of his 66th birthday. Here is my post from earlier this year occasioned by the death of another G.O.A.T. Read more

  • Poetry Review: “Consolation” by Wislawa Szymborska

    Wislawa Szymborska won the Noble Prize for literature in 1996 “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” The irony of such an academic description of Szmborska’s poetry, that is anything but academic and imprecise is, I am guessing, completely lost on the Read more

  • Friday’s Food For Thought: Auden on Poetry

    [Those who complain about the ambiguity or obscurity of modern poetry] “should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.” ~ W. H. Auden Read more

  • Christmas Card

    I wish you all the peace and joy of the season. Merry Christmas! Artist:El GrecoYear:1603-1605Medium:oil on canvasDimensions:128 cm diameter (50 in)Location: Santuario de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad, Illescas Read more

  • Poetry Review: “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” by John Milton

    Milton wrote this poem in 1629 at the age of 21. It is often considered his first great poem in English. It is poetically and theologically pure Milton. It is also the best Christmas poem ever written. For 40 years now, I have re-read this poem on Christmas Eve. It is as close to a Read more

  • Poetry Review: “Christmas Party at South Danbury Church” by Donald Hall

    I have not gone to many poetry readings. Those few I have attend have left me cold. Bothered invariably by the demeanor of the poet and/or of the audience. Poetry should be read aloud, but poets and audiences should be matched carefully. Only those who know the poet for the bag-of-gas he or she truly Read more

  • Some Quotes from Thoreau

    Thoreau is one the our most quotable writers. It is one of the reasons that those of us who are Thoreau fans re-read him so regularly. Reading “Walking” again I have underlined the following lines (there are many, many more I could include): In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. * * Read more

  • Friday’s Food for Thought: On Dashiell Hammett

    In his famous 1944 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler openly acknowledged Hammett’s genius. He properly credited him as “the ace performer,” the one writer responsible for the creation and development of the hard-boiled school of literature, the genre’s revolutionary realist. “He took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into Read more