"These I Have Loved"

. .Valley towns silent and luminous under a full moon. . .And rolling moonlit seas. . .And desert skies radiant with starlight. . .

I appreciate my online friends at Suite101 for whom I feel a growing affection and respect. I find that I often have more in common with online friends that I have never met in “real life” than with many of my usual friends. You truly have to like someone to chat with them for hours and maintain continual friendships for months and years.

Perhaps just as important in this essay are the favorite things that I left out:

• The kindness of people to each other sometimes.
• The opportunities that arise everyday to say an encouraging word, help someone or lend a sympathetic ear.
• The wonderful magic and happy therapy of writing regularly.

Finally, as I have grown older I have come to realize (in my more lucid moments) how much I enjoy breathing. Drawing breath may be the greatest joy of all. Beyond all philosophies and theosophies, there is that simple act of breathing. When I am aware of my breath, I am in the moment, not worrying about the failures of the past or possibilities in the future. Only in present can I truly appreciate my life.

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Editor's Note: Some of you may wish to read the entire poem, The Great Lover, by early 20th century British poet, Rupert Brooke. He was one of a number of brilliant writers and poets who died in the Great War (WW I). Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen are perhaps the best known of the British War Poets.

Close to the end of "The Great Lover," Brooke--in a foreshadowing of his death at a young age--leaves us with this summation of the transitory nature of life:

But the best I've known,
Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
About the winds of the world, and fades from brains
Of living men, and dies.
Nothing remains.

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