"Sometimes it's necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness"**

From Sunday's edition of Brain Pickings comes this book released last week, which insinuates its garden tools into soil I continually try to cultivate.  Being inclined to snarl at greatly delayed gratification but also being quite familiar with that as the way things work, I want it now.  Instead, I've added it to my wish list.

Marcel is a soulful old elephant who sets out to write an encyclopedia as his legacy. Having seen the Eiffel Tower built in 1889 and the first iMac introduced in 1998, and having filled the century between with a long lifetime of adventures and successes of his own, he undertakes “the enormous task of listing — in an enormous, illustrated encyclopedia — everything he’s learned throughout his long and exceptional life.”


The question might be, "What do I know for sure?" From another article in this BP edition comes the quote, “Knowledge,” Emerson wrote, “is the knowing that we can not know."  And, if I am any example, we don't.  With a few exceptions.

I think at times of a manifesto, never to be written for what cheek would that require?  It is the imaginary place where I store what I do know for sure, my own very personal truths that may have wider applications but not necessarily.  The possibility that I am doing nothing but blowing smoke remains real.  I am a stumbling human on a long road.  No two paths are identical.  Likely none of what I've collected would belong in an encyclopedia.  Notes to self:

- The high road is never a wrong choice.
- Being still is not being lazy, it is being wise.
- What appears to be the doing of nothing is actually the doing of quite a lot.
- An unraveled exterior may disguise unique order.
- When in doubt, sit.  Sleep as often as the opportunity appears.
- Since any destination only exists in this moment, you are in exactly the right place.
- Fall in love with as much as you can.
- Your soul knows what will nourish it.  Pay attention, no matter how odd the choice seems.
- Become soft and what you may consider foolish.  You will survive it.
- You don't need to explain.
- Magic is real.

**One further Brain Pickings link from this week, their Literary Jukebox and a poem by Galway Kinnell.