Live in beauty in the sea breeze.

Live in the beauty under the trees.

Live in beauty where the mountain meets the air.

… in the meadows of the dead

there are whitesome daisies grow

There are roses climbing red

And the spirits sighing go …

16 years ago my little daughter died of cancer. This is what I wrote on the birthday she never quite made it to that year, with slight updates since.

Today would be your 20th birthday, Betsey. The full flower of young womanhood!  Instead you are always not-quite 4.

Happy Birthday, Betsey Pearl.

We miss you. We want to see you.

We are a society now where people say, “sort of,”, “kind of,” “in a way,” “I mean ,” “I mean to say,” “you see,” all those things — over and over and over again — like the gossiping women who say, “She said, she said, she said …” They’re a kind of stuttering, a kind of self-imposed idiocy, a kind of pretense very often found in people trying to show that they are just like everybody else — quite stupid really. Stupidity in a democratic society as a whole produces pseudo-stupidity in its leaders, with appalling results. Once there is television in the House of Commons — and I hope it will never happen — everybody there will be pretending to be as stupid  as their electorates. This kind of manipulative pretense at being more stupid than the other person was first noticed by Wyndham Lewis in the twenties and documented in the speech of Bertie Wooster.

–Arthur Henry King, The Abundance of the Heart

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