A Time for Everything

 

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8


(New Living Translation)

For everything there is a season,


A time for every activity under heaven.


A time to be born and a time to die.


A time to plant and a time to harvest.


A time to kill and a time to heal.


A time to tear down and a time to build up

.
A time to cry and a time to laugh.


A time to grieve and a time to dance.


A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones.


A time to embrace and a time to turn away

.
A time to search and a time to quit searching

.
A time to keep and a time to throw away.


A time to tear and a time to mend.


A time to be quiet and a time to speak

.
A time to love and a time to hate

.
A time for war and a time for peace.

New Living Translation

solitude

Solitude


by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;


Weep, and you weep alone;


For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,


But has trouble enough of its own.


Sing, and the hills will answer;


Sigh, it is lost on the air;


The echoes bound to a joyful sound,


But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;


Grieve, and they turn and go;


They want full measure of all your pleasure,


But they do not need your woe.


Be glad, and your friends are many;


Be sad, and you lose them all,

—
There are none to decline your nectared wine,


But alone you must drink life’s gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;


Fast, and the world goes by.


Succeed and give, and it helps you live

But no man can help you die.


There is room in the halls of pleasure


For a large and lordly train,


But one by one we must all file on


Through the narrow aisles of pain.

 
“Solitude” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Public Domain

Taming Grief

illustration by Yamamoto (Look Alike)

On Ellen DeGeneres
Ellen wanted to be a veterinarian. But when she was 13 and her parents divorced, she found that her jokes cheered up her grieving mother: “My mother was going through some really hard times and I could see when she was really getting down, and I would start to make fun of her dancing,” DeGeneres later said. “Then she’d start to laugh and I’d make fun of her laughing. And she’d laugh so hard she’d start to cry, and then I’d make fun of that. So I would totally bring her from where I’d seen her start going into depression to all the way out of it.” She began to see the healing power of humor.
When DeGeneres was 21, she fell in love with Kathy Perkoff, a 23-year-old poet. Perkoff was killed in a car accident, and Ellen turned once again to comedy as a coping strategy. She wrote a monologue called “A Phone Call to God,” and performed it at her first stand-up gig in New Orleans. It was a big hit and launched her comedic career. A booking agent from The Tonight Show caught her act at the Improv in Hollywood, and host Johnny Carson invited her to appear on the late-night talk show in 1986. This led to appearances on the talk show circuit and, in the mid-1990s, her own eponymous sitcom.

Riddle#20 Fickle Spring

it
was
vernal
equinox:
snow in Austerlitz:
blue flakes laugh at crocus shoots, blue
with cold, not dew; fickle Spring, fickle earth, fickle moon.