Monday, September 9, 2013

Looking for the Beauty in Life (Part I)

So I received this message in my mail. Will write it down here for ya’ll to read as well.

Canadian Poet, Patrick Lane, describes an experience of beauty that changed his life. He describes his life, “There were times I lived a dissolute, irresponsible and destructive life…times, too, when I was depressed and wretched but I continued to believe in beauty in spite of my weaknesses and fears.” The following is, in part, his address to the convocation at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna, 2012.

“Back in early December of 1958, I was 19 years old, living with my wife and baby boy in a two room apple picker’s shack a few miles down the road from here. I had a job driving dump truck for a two-bit outfit that was working on a short stretch of highway…I remember leaving the shack and walking out to stand by the highway in the wind and the snow. I stood there shivering in my canvas coat as I waited to be picked up by the grader operator in his rusted pickup truck. The sky was hard and grey. Its only gift that winter day was ice disguised as a fragile, bitter snow.

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