No regrets.

December 30, 2020

‘I regret nothing.’ Edith Piaf

From Alexandra Stoddard, as we ready for another journey around the sun:

‘Ive learned a great deal this year. I feel it has been productive and also enjoyable day to day. What a wonderful thought to live our lives with as few regrets as possible.

What kind of year did you have? How would you rate it? No matter how many challenges you’ve had, no matter what pain you’ve endured, did you do your very best? 

Then have no regrets.’

Alexandra wrote these words in 1993.

peace

A true renaissance man…and modern-day Forrest Gump.

John Perry Barlow, My Life in Crazy Times. Writing for Wired magazine, he traveled to Sarajevo to write about information and the Serbo-Croatian war in the early 90’s. He writes in his book:

“They wanted me to write about the relationship between information and the war and the way in which the mass media had created a hallucination that was destroying the ability of each side to see the other’s humanity.”

If he would have stayed well, what would he be writing now, about the United States of America.

[…]

“The truth is we come into the world from the other side, which is entirely made of love, where it’s all open and could not be more open, into this place of constriction and containment and closure and dogma and terror.”

[…]

“Love forgives everything.”

October 3, 1947- February 7, 2018

Barlow died right after he finished his memoir.

“In Cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance.”

Barlow was also a lyricist for The Grateful Dead.

Ketchum Idaho’s Community Library

Knitting Yarns and Years

Nancy’s Christmas stocking was the biggest. When we three little girls hung our stockings from small hooks in the fireplace mantel each December, my middle sister’s stocking unfurled an extra turn – it was at least two inches longer and wider than either my own or my youngest sister’s – and it therefore always stirred some controversy. Everything else was equal across all three: each woven of the same green, red, and white yarns; each with a Santa dancing on the front; each with our own name stitched in block letters at the top. But Nancy’s stocking was undeniably bigger, and the other two of us fretted that Santa would be tricked into giving her more. (And we worried that this proved she was the favorite.)
My great-aunt Gloria had knitted each of our stockings, from the same bundles of yarn, following the same pattern for each. She had five children of her own; she knew the necessity of equal measures.
But life does not unfurl in equal measures, and Gloria knitted each stocking at a different time, as each one of her grand-nieces was born. She cast-on Nancy’s stocking in a hospital waiting room while her husband had open heart surgery. I imagine her tiny four-feet-some-inches frame, perched in a straight-back chair, her dark bob of hair falling alongside her tilted head, and her hands clicking wooden needles, again and again, giving shape to her waiting as the yarn unspooled. I imagine the release of her fingers when he awoke.
That stocking made our Christmas row uneven, but it had steadied Gloria’s mind while she created it. I did not recognize as a child that stocking’s true outsized capacity. It has room for heartache, and for hope.
We need this capacity, and stories offer it beyond any stocking: Each turn of a book’s pages can help knit the messiness of our days into a pattern. A string of words can help hold the weight of waiting as another year unfurls. A story stretches our capacity to hold more than we could hold alone.
Jenny Emery Davidson, Ph.D.
Executive Director

www.comlib.org

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