Crazy Stable

...or whimper, or clamour. Not after reading this in today's New York Times--Dan Barry's column about a young woman named Ann Nelson, whose family just discovered her "life list" of goals, great and small, profound and whimsical, on the laptop sent home to them in North Dakota after Ann's death at Cantor Fitzgerald on 9/11.  It is not often I march people by the shoulders to read something in the Times (unless to snort with hilarity over a particularly wacky bit of lifestyle coverage), but hit the link above, please. If they make you join "Times Select" to access the thing, and you're out of NYTimes newsstand range, click through the trial subscription just to get this article. [Photo at left: New York Times]

And then do something on Ann's list--today. Maybe not "Nepal" or "make a quilt," but you'll find plenty of others. Better yet, make your own list...and enjoy this gift of a day. (And if you can't get your mind off the small stuff after reading Ann's list, don't expect any sympathy from G.K. Chesterton:)

A Prayer in Darkness

This much, O heaven—if I should brood or rave,

Pity me not; but let the world be fed,

Yea, in my madness if I strike me dead,

Heed you the grass that grows upon my grave.

If I dare snarl between this sun and sod,

Whimper and clamour, give me grace to own,

In sun and rain and fruit in season shown,

The shining silence of the scorn of God.

Thank God the stars are set beyond my power,

If I must travail in a night of wrath,

Thank God my tears will never vex a moth,

Nor any curse of mine cut down a flower.

Men say the sun was darkened: yet I had

Thought it beat brightly, even on—Calvary:

And He that hung upon the Torturing Tree

Heard all the crickets singing, and was glad.