It is said in the old Bohemia that a bond between souls is ancient – older than the planet ...

“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soulmate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert

If I could sit across the porch from God, I’d thank Him for lending me you ;-)

In a church of my own we’re perfect together I recognize you in the stained glass. In Anna Karenina, the Slavic student of human souls, Leo Tolstoy, once observed ... "Where do you end and where do I begin ..."

"He felt now that he was not simply close to her but that he did not know where he ended and where she began." Leo Tolstoy

You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly...

Immature love says, I love you because I need you. Mature love says, I need you because I love you.

A Bucket List of Designer Bookstores

The website 99U offers a rundown of many of the world's best bookstores focusing on art and design.

9 Signs You've Found Your Soulmate (If You Believe In That Sort Of Thing)

New study shows how birds work to sing together Phys.org

HOW TO: Grow an Avocado Tree from an Avocado Pit

A day filled with wrapping with Malchkeon, age is no barrier to enjoying those magic moments before the feasts at The Polish family CLKO and the Antipodean June where traditions still rule on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day ... Christmas Cards Repurposed

Glow-in-the-dark plants put green energy in a whole new light NBC

#Workshop Envy

Two DIY Floral Arrangements Inspired By Autumn

A Show-stopping Apple Pie for the Holidays

“As full of fun as a pair of glazed tap shoes”, was how the Australian poet Les Murray described the poems of John Whitworth (b. 1945). A committed formalist, Whitworth’s work is firmly in a tradition that runs from G. K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling and W. S. Gilbert to John Betjeman, Gavin Ewart and Kit Wright (whom Whitworth describes as “a small genius”). But Whitworth sees light-hearted verse not so much as a genre in itself as a stylistic choice sometimes made by more serious poets (Philip Larkin and W. H. Auden, for example) keen to exploit its insistent music and often heavy rhymes for ironic effect. And what may look light – or even nonsensical – is often just the result of letting the language have its head. “Rhyme and metre have the function of getting you to work on the form and letting the content creep up on you unawares”, Whitworth says. “Poems are made up of words, not ideas.”

“The Examiners”, which won second prize in the 2007TLS Poetry Competition and appears in Whitworth’s most recent collection Girlie Gangs (2012), is about the various enemies of energy and imagination which, if you let them, “will desiccate your passion, then eviscerate your soul”. Hardly the stuff of light verse, you might say. But the rhythmic bounce and sheer glee of the poem lift the reader far above all that is, in the end, no match for this delirious, bravura display of the seriously silly.

The Examiners

Where the house is cold and empty and the garden’s overgrown, They are there.Where the letters lie unopened by a disconnected phone, They are there.
Where your footsteps echo strangely on each moonlit cobblestone,Where a shadow streams behind you but the shadow’s not your own,You may think the world’s your oyster but it’s bone, bone, bone: They are there, they are there, they are there.

They can parse a Latin sentence; they’re as learned as Plotinus, They are there.
They’re as sharp as Ockham’s razor, they’re as subtle as Aquinas, They are there.
They define us and refine us with their beta-query-minus,They’re the wall-constructing emperors of undiscovered Chinas,They confine us, then malign us, in the end they undermine us, They are there, they are there, they are there.

They assume it as an impost or they take it as a toll, They are there.The contractors grant them all that they incontinently stole, They are there.
They will shrivel your ambition with their quality control,They will desiccate your passion, then eviscerate your soul,Wring your life out like a sponge and stuff your body down a hole, They are there, they are there, they are there.

In the desert of your dreaming they are humped behind the dunes, They are there.
On the undiscovered planet with its seven circling moons, They are there.
They are ticking all the boxes, making sure you eat your prunes,They are sending secret messages by helium balloons,They are humming Bach cantatas, they are playing looney tunes, They are there, they are there, they are there.

They are there, they are there, like a whisper on the air, They are there.
They are slippery and soapy with our hope and our despair, They are there.
So it’s idle if we bridle or pretend we never care,If the questions are superfluous and the marking isn’t fair,For we know they’re going to get us, we just don’t know when or where, They are there, they are there, they are there. ~JOHN WHITWORTH (2007)

The 2-Ingredient Handmade Gift That's As Beautiful As It Is Easy

10 Natural Cleaning Recipes Everyone Should Know by Heart

Passive solar home stays naturally cool without AC in Australia