What pleases you???

I started reading Eat, Pray, Love... I have not finished yet. One of the comments she makes is about spending time in Italy and how she focused for the first time on what pleased her. She spent every waking hour of every day doing as she pleased.

This caused me pause. I started thinking about how much time I spend working, pleasing others, fulfilling obligations, and doing the every day ordinary things that make up life. What would I do if I could spend 24 hours a day doing what pleases me?

1. I would spend more time getting to know God.

2. I would cook more. And not just the dinner time cooking. The "no one is here and I don't care, but I am going to cook a feast anyway" kind of cooking

3. I would spend 6 months exploring every inch of Italy.

4. I would travel to the Holy Land.

5. I would take one of those $30k cruises around the world

6. I would spend more time with Mr. Dukie Pickles

7. I would paint more ceramics

8. I would help other people

9. I would explore the USA with Nikki in an RV

10. I would take pictures... lots and lots of pictures.

11. I would make more bath fizzies with Allie

12. I would write more poetry, blogs, etc...

13. I'd throw a LOT of parties

14. I'd hang out by the ocean a lot

What would you do?

No one is commenting on my blog. I am getting lonely and am starting to think I am talking to myself.. Please share :)

Shakespeare and words on my mind

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Amit impediments. Love is not love


Which alters when it alteration finds,


Or bends with the remover to remove:


O no! it is an ever-fixed mark


That looks on tempests and is never shaken;


It is the star to every wandering bark,


Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.


Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks


Within his bending sickle's compass come:


Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,


But bears it out even to the edge of doom.


If this be error and upon me proved,


I never writ, nor no man ever loved.





I love this poem. It's hopeful and desperate at the same time.


It is everything a poem should be. On the surface, it sounds like a great love story. Perhaps it is.


I'm impressed with it's ability to verbalize love and wanting, some 4000 plus years from when it was first written. Really, think about it....Think about how many thousands of lives have come and gone and how much culture has stayed the same and changed in 4000 years and yet the words still resonate a deep passionate wanting.


Meanwhile, below the surface, with even a small amount of research, tons of queastions rise to the surface.


Was Shakespeare gay?


Was this about his lover?


Was this a valient attempt at writing a poem 3rd person about a male?


If it is his personal writing, did he truly intend for his most personal work to get published?


Did this come from his personal and secret diary?


So delicious! Exactly what a poem should do.


On the surface, beautiful, eloquent, sensational; intertwining the simple and the complex.


Immediately below the surface, it leaves question, room for error, interpretation and mystery.


Ah, I love words... in all their splendor. BIG. small. ErRaTic, UnpRedictAble, woven together stories, moments frozen in time from a single 1 dimensional perspective.


I am so very grateful for our ability to articulate ourselves.


That's why I love Shakespeare. He knew the power of words. And I respect the hell out of him for that.