Smiles

It's not snow; it's cottonwood fluff. 

When my allergies are irritated, I am a crabass. There's enough pollen flying right now that I'm a crabass field (I kind of thought this was a real word until I realized I was thinking of crabgrass).

My tool for when I get irritated is telling myself jokes. I normally tell them out loud to myself while I'm hiking and I make myself laugh out loud. It's only awkward if people are around or if I admit to people that I do this. 

None of my jokes worked today. So I just talked to myself until I thought of  Dag Hammarskjöld.  There's nothing like a Scandinavian name with all those consonants shoved together to get me giggling and I truly love Dag Hammarskjold.

He was a UN Secretary General and it was only after he died that the public discovered what a deep philosopher and theologian he was. 

I'll go ahead and confess that I might also be irritated because it is hard to yearn for shalom in a culture that's hellbent on being crabasses. 

So I came home and reread some of his famous quotes mostly from his journal Markings and they truly were a salve so I thought I would share:

You wake from dreams of doom and--for a moment--you know: beyond all the noise and the gestures, the only real thing, love's calm unwavering flame in the half-light of an early dawn. 

It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity. It is when we all play safe that fatality (helplessness in the face of fate) will lead us to our doom. It is in the "dark shade of courage" alone that the spell can be broken.

To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. 
In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. 

It was when Lucifer first congratulated himself upon his angelic behavior he became the tool of evil.

It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.

I freaking love those quotes. They all seem like conversation starters instead of diatribe igniters. 

So I'm in a good mood now. Thank you Dag Hammarskjold and to the fellow at the store who asked if I'd heard any good jokes recently and then told me the joke, 

"What kind of music do whales like?"    
Orca-stra!!!