pardon my texting

On a recent evening the Art Walk downtown cast its perspectives, in cafes and on corners, on subjects of nature, nurture, music, magic, lust, and love. People roamed and snacked and appreciated.

Someone commented on their smart phone's capabilities. I responded, "I have a dumb phone." Which is true. Or maybe it's my phone that has the dumb one. But, perspective, it's all a matter of.

Anyway. I don't text or applicate. What I have done, forever (hm, as I grow longer in years that's less an exaggeration), is appreciate and be nurtured by books, those texts which are somewhat longer lived. This has become my new thought for the current year, a very old and lovely thought, that still rings in my self like music (and magic): Which book shall I read today?

Here is a taste of my findings, relating to artful stuff, from C.S. Lewis's wonderful Surprised by Joy:

To compare and to prefer [is] an operation that does little good even when dealing with works of art and endless harm when dealing with nature. Total surrender is the first step toward the fruition of either. Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. Take in what is there and give no thought to what might have been there or what is somewhere else. That can come later, if it must come at all. (And notice here how the true training for anything whatever that is good always prefigures and, if submitted to, will always help us in, the true training for the Christian life. That is a school where they can always use your previous work whatever subject it was on.)

A little later in the same volume is a smidge that inspires me with desire to start a whole new blog. (In fact, I did):

What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.