PERFECT "They don't make men like this anymore"

Theodore Roosevelt was shot while campaigning in Milwaukee, WI. Refusing immediate medical attention, he delivered his scheduled speech with blood seeping into his shirt. He spoke for 90 minutes. His opening comments: "Ladies and Gentlemen, I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than than to kill a Bull Moose."

PERFECT 24 hours

Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.
Isak Dinesen

PERFECT Campbell

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging. Negativism to the pain and ferocity of life is negativism to life. We are not there until we can say "yea" to it all.

A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

PERFECT Aging

A man's age is something impressive, it sums up his life: maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves. A man's age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944

PERFECT Miller

The great sacrifice which we must all make, each and every one of us, is to burn away the dross. In other words, consign the living flame that which is dead. If we put off the task, if we refuse to face the issue, the day will come when "the quick and the dead" are judged. There is a day of judgment, make no mistake about it. Life is continually weighing us in the balance. The Day of Judgment is not an invention of the religious-minded but a psychic or spiritual phenomenon obedient to the moving calendar of our own conscience. It is always Hades or Easter on the day of reckoning. It has been so since the beginning. And it promises to be so eternally.

This is the cross which man carries and on which he can burn with the flame of eternal life or be pilloried like a thief. There is no escape. As it says in the Avestas: "Evil exists not, only the past. The past is past; the present is a moment; the future is all."
Henry Miller

PERFECT Sense 3

Don't be angry with the rain. It simply does not know how to fall upward.

Vladimir Nabokov



Photo by Dratch & Beringer

PERFECT Infinity

Time as we live it and as we create it embodies our progressive disappearance; we are at the same time alive and in the face of death–that is the mystery of all living beings. The consciousness of this inevitable disappearance broadens our experiences without diminishing our joy. There is always the omnipresent idea of nature, of its ebb and flow of life. This essence of reality can be universally understood; it is not only mine but can be commonly shared in our unus mundus. (Trad. Mark Selwyn)

Roman Opalka - "Rencontre par la séparation", AFAA, Paris, 1987