The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth – soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.

We are always harshest upon those foibles we see in others that we know bedevil our own natures – the ones that most gravely misbecome our self image – for blame is always easier than shame.

Those marginalized for one aspect of their nature are bound to have sympathies with those marginalized for another, but no marginalized group moves to the center solely by its own efforts – such is the paradox of power. It takes a gravitational pull by those kindred to the cause who are already in relative positions of power or privilege.

What is love, after all, if not an affectionate acceptance of the lover’s full spectrum of being, the silly along with the solemn?

Beyond any human lifetime, and often within it, what is recorded is what is remembered, the records gradually displacing the actuality of lived events. And what is recorded is a fraction of what is thought, felt, acted out, lived – a fraction at best edited by the very act of its selection, at worst warped by rationalization or fictionalized by a deliberate retelling of reality.

Memory and motive are the two edges of the blade by which we slice experience out of events and carve out history – personal, political, civilizational – from the trunk of life. Both are highly selective – memory retrospectively so and motive prospectively.

Boredom is not only an adaptive emotion but a vital one with its related faculties of contemplation, solitude, and stillness. It is essential for the life of the mind and the life of the spirit.

However divided we may feel within ourselves, it is the sum total of our warring fractions that make us who we are – fragmentary but indivisible.

What solidity of sentiment it takes not to let an awareness of the moment’s impermanence dilute its richness, its sweetness, but purify it and saturate it with the utmost “fullness of being.

We go through life seeing reality not as it really is, in its unfathomable depths of complexity and contradiction, but as we hope or fear or expect it to be. Too often, we confuse certainty for truth and the strength of our beliefs for the strength of the evidence. When we collide with the unexpected, with the antipode to our hopes, we are plunged into bewildered despair. We rise from the pit only by love. Perhaps Keats had it slightly wrong – perhaps truth is love and love is truth.