Brian’s Reflection: Wednesday, July 11, 2007


This mortal body of a thousand days
Now fills, O Burns, a space in thine own room,
Where thou didst dream alone on budded bays,
Happy and thoughtless of thy day of doom!
My pulse is warm with thine old Barley-bree,
My head is light with pledging a great soul,
My eyes are wandering, and I cannot see,
Fancy is dead and drunken at its goal;
Yet can I stamp my foot upon thy floor,
Yet can I ope thy window-sash to find
The meadow thou hast tramped o'er and o'er,
Yet can I think of thee till thought is blind,
Yet can I gulp a bumper to thy name,
O smile among the shades, for this is fame!

- Poet John Keats, age 22, on visiting Robbie Burns
cottage on this day, 1818

In the following January, in a nine-month burst, Keats would write his virtually all his best poems. In February a year later, he would first cough blood - consumption. He was dead on Feb 23. I sat for a long time - hard though it was with the crush of tourists and the wildnesses of hoards of youth - on the Spanish Steps facing the apartment where Keats died. Frankly, I was having a wonderful time! I was about 30. I felt great, and young, and ageless. I fairly luxuriated in the romanticism of it all - Rome, Keats, wandering the World, a dreamer - and then to meet a California friend quite by accident at the Trevi Fountain and have a very late dinner in Trastevere - does Life get any better??

It is transient, but it offers many opportunities if we are willing to answer the call. You know, Life for most of us is too circumscribed, too bound by rules that others have made, usually out of their own disappointment. When Jesus, or any other Great Spirit, says, “Follow me”, do. Joy is something most often to be found (as we say today) “out of the box”.

Brian+