“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.” Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"At first she talked. The third full day, rasping, Deary told both Lou and Pete about rocks. She was passing on a last-minute legacy. It took two hours on and off, and it was this: Frames of film comprise every rock in the world. (Have you got that?) If you slice a rock thin enough, and splice the slices serially as frames, you have a documentary film. The film displays the long history of the world from that rock's views. Together the world's rocks hold a visual record of all time. You splice the frames and store them in reels by continents and by some rough stabs at their more or less infinite subdivisions of regions and times. It all badly needed film editors...
-At any stage after splicing, one need only run the films through the projectors to see it, any of it, eventually all of it, the world from anywhere and all angles in all its times. At least up to a random cutoff point when someone wild with curiosity- called a halt and began slicing again. During and after the big work, ever-new rock would record films of the ongoing life of their sites: people showing up on the planet, and moving over it."
from The Maytrees by Annie Dillard- this passage reminded me of my friend Matthew Kern's paintings, see them at www.matthewkern.com

This weekend I suggest you get your significant other, sit on a couch or a picnic blanket and read aloud Annie Dillard's short story, 'Living like Weasels' to be found here, http://www.sheftman.com/ewrt1a/dillard/weasel.html, or in your copy of her 'Teaching a Stone to Talk'.

"I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular- shall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands?- but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel's: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will."
from the short story Living Like Weasels by Annie Dillard