An Extra Day to the Year

Have to post on this extra day of 2008.
Did you know that ladies can ask men
to marry them in Feb. in a leap year?
Really! Dates back to St. Patrick.

I started a wonderful new book that
I had seen this summer in a book store.
A dear friend's letter arrived this week
commending this book.
I bought it yesterday: The Art of the Commonplace
by Wendell Berry. I had tears this afternoon
as the quiet in my house came about me
and I was on his land in Kentucky:

"My language increased and strengthened
and sent my mind in to a place like a live
root system.....I saw my body and my daily
motions as brief coherences and
articulations of the energy of the place,
which would fall back into it like
the leaves in autumn."

"Perhaps it is to prepare to hear someday
the music of the spheres that I am
always training my ears to the music
of the streams. There is indeed a music
in the streams, but it is not for the hurried.
It has to be loitered by and imagined. "

I was changed by his worldview,
his mind that changed because of the place.
Kentucky for him. The beauty. He knows
what we've lost.

"The ear must imagine an impossible
patience in order to grasp even the
unimaginableness of such music."