Tag Archives: Rock & Sling

parenting, personal

This Too Shall Pass

Yet again I’ve written a short piece over at the Rock & Sling blog about sleep patterns and adapting as a parent.  Each kid is different and unique, and the circumstances change and development occurs so rapidly: I have to be ready for anything.  I can never think I have it all figured out as a parent.

As I say in the essay, my wife reminds me again and again that “this too shall pass.”  The evergreen saying comes from Abraham Lincoln, who was passing along ancient wisdom.

From Lincoln’s Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, September 30, 1859.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! — how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.”

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faith, music, personal

Remembered Sounds

I wrote another short piece for the Rock & Sling blog for their Remembered Sounds series.  It’s about the first cassette tape I ever purchased: Michael W. Smith’s Go West Young Man.  The name Remembered Sounds comes from a line in a Wallace Stevens poem: “The self is a cloister full of remembered sounds.”  I like that, and I like it as a unifying theme for significant music in my life.  A lot of my memories are bound up with music in a sort of soundtrack to my life.

At the end of the essay, itself a meditation on music and faith in my life, I listed five spiritual songs I listen to now.  Whereas I used to expect explicit answers and easy messages, now I live with questions and doubt.  I plan to write about these songs in the future, but I’ll put them down here so they can provide a soundtrack to the essay.

Sinead O’Connor “Take Me to Church”

Vampire Weekend “Ya Hey”

Cat Power “Say”

David Bowie “Where Are We Now”

Phosphorescent “Song for Zula”

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