A Quote by Will Durant
The dog that buried the bone which even a canine appetite could not manage, the squirrel that gathered nuts for a later feast, the bees that filled the comb with honey, the ants that laid up stores for a rainy day - these were among the first creators of civilization. It was they....who taught our ancestors the art of providing for tomorrow out of the surplus of today, or of preparing for winter in summer's time of plenty.
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In the summer we lay up a stock of experiences for the winter, as the squirrel of nuts?something for conversation in winter evenings.
On the first day of May the people of the crofter townland are up betimes and busy as bees about to swarm. This is the day of migrating, bho baile gu beinn (from townland to moorland), from the winter homestead to the summer sheiling. The summer of their joy is come, the summer of the sheiling, the song, the pipe and the dance, when the people ascend the hill to the clustered bothies, overlooking the distant sea from among the fronded ferns and fragrant heather, where neighbour meets neighbour, and lover meets lover.
?Our ancestors took this land. They took it and made it and held it. We do not give up what our ancestors gave us. They came across the sea and they fought here, and they built here and they're buried here. This is our land, mixed with our blood, strengthened with our bone. Ours!
First, a gorgeous breakfast: just everything you can imagine from flapjacks and fried squirrel to hominy grits and honey in the comb...we're so impatient to get at the presents we can't eat a mouthful.
I might cry tomorrow, but I may be smiling the day after. That's enough. That's the way life is. If I don't lose hope - tomorrow will come. Tomorrow will come if we don't lose hope... I learned that from Nana. But rainy days still make my cheeks wet with tears, even now. It was pouring, on that rainy day.
He is not worthy of the honey-comb, that shuns the hives because the bees have stings.
For the poets tell us, don't they, that the melodies they bring us are gathered from rills that run with honey, out of glens and gardens of the Muses, and they bring them as bees do honey, flying like the bees? And what they say is true, for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him. So long as he has this in his possession, no man is able to make poetry or to chant in prophecy.
It is not the high summer alone that is God's. The winter also is His. And into His winter He came to visit us. And all man's winters are His - the winter of our poverty, the winter of our sorrow, the winter of our unhappiness - even 'the winter of our discontent.
Our ancestors went to the woods to find fuel; they set snares there for birds and gathered nuts and fungi.
I compare the troubles which we have to undergo in the course of the year to a great bundle of sticks, far too large for us to lift. But God does not require us to carry the whole at once. He mercifully unties the bundle, and gives us first one stick, which we are to carry today, and then another, which we are to carry tomorrow, and so on. This we might easily manage, if we would only take the burden appointed for us each day; but we choose to increase our troubles by carrying yesterday's stick over again today, and adding tomorrow's burden to our load, before we are required to bear it.
The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.
It is my firm belief that all our lives we are preparing to be somebody or something, even if we don't do it consciously. And the time comes one morning when you wake up and find that you have become irrevocably what you were preparing all this time to be.
We may not know what each day has in store for us. We could be gone tomorrow. Any minute could truly be our goodbye. But we do have this moment. This time. Today. Right now. It takes way more effort to shell out hate then it does to allow love to flow freely in our lives. After all, it's what we were born to do.
A dog came to my door, so I gave him a bone, the dog took the bone into the back yard and buried it. I'm going to go plant a tree there, with bones on it, then the dog will come back and say, "Shoot! It worked! I must distribute these bones equally for I have a green paw!"
Long ago Apollo called to Aristæus, youngest of the shepherds, Saying, "I will make you keeper of my bees." Golden were the hives, and golden was the honey; golden, too, the music, Where the honey-makers hummed among the trees.
If a dog happens to catch a rabbit or another animal, it can very easily remove the hide. If a cat catches a squirrel, they have no trouble with that. But if a person does that, they will work all day and all night to get the skin off of an animal, because they don't have long canine teeth anymore.
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