Sit-a-while
on swinging porch
where tin-dippers and
sweet water
in cool touches
meet lips
from hand dug wells.

Good morning good people,

A mention of Ballot Box 13 rang through eyes into dopamine pleasures of yesterday and i clicked immediately to The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives by Robert A. Caro: https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/robert-a-caro
I was not disappointed.

A few excerpts: “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddam page.” He turned to some other papers on his desk, and after a while I got up and left."

“MUST HAVE $250 BY THURSDAY NIGHT FOR LAST ISSUE ADVERTISING,” for example. Or “$350 BY THURSDAY. HAVE SET UP MACHINERY TO REACH 11,000 ADDITIONAL VOTERS.” Others wanted five hundred dollars “FOR WORKERS IN SPANISH AND ITALIAN DISTRICTS” or “$1,000 ON NOVEMBER 1 TO HIRE POLL WATCHERS,” or wrote, “CHANCES BRIGHT . . . IF WE CAN GET RIGHT AWAY $14 FOR EACH OF FIVE COUNTY PAPERS AND $20 FOR TITUSVILLE HERALD.”

"And there was a third column on the page, or, rather, handwritten notations in the left-hand margin, notes dealing with each congressman’s request. The handwriting in that column was Lyndon Johnson’s. If he was arranging for the candidate to be given part or all of what
he’d asked for, he wrote, “OK—$500,” or “OK—$200,” or whatever the amount was he had decided to give. If he did not want the candidate to be given anything, he wrote, “None.” And by some names he wrote, “None—Out.” (What did “None—Out” mean? I later asked John Connally. “It meant he”—the candidate—“was never going to get anything,” Connally said. “Lyndon Johnson never forgot, and he never forgave.”)

"I said to Ina, “I’m not understanding these people and therefore I’m not understanding Lyndon Johnson. We’re going to have to move to the Hill Country and live there.” Ina asked,

“Why can’t you do a biography of Napoleon?” But Ina is always Ina: loyal and true. She said, as she always says, “Sure.” We rented a house on the edge of the Hill Country, where we lived for much of the next three years."

"There was a long pause. I can still see the scene—see the little, stunted, crippled man sitting at the long plank table, see the shadows in the room, see myself, not wanting to move lest I break the spell, sitting there against the wall with my notebook, saying, “Tell me those wonderful stories again.”

Hope you've the time and enjoy Caro's memories.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

~ Hermann Hesse, circa 1920

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,
The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth;
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.

Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow;
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below;
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.

~ Robert Burns

Art: Egon Schiele, Four Trees, 1917, Belvedere, Vienna

Wherever you are, enjoy this day; the porch is yours ...