… those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travelers. C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, chpt. 4.

Neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase. …Paul is telling folks at the Corinthian church not to place too much faith in their own abilities or too little in God’s. Some were praising Paul’s seed planting ministry, and others favored the seed-watering ministry of Apollo’s. Here Paul is reminding them that it’s God who brings the seeds to fruition.  … Paul is not saying the efforts to plant and water were wasted. They’re part of God’s plan, too.  … You can have faith and you can pray … but God won’t do your work for you. You’ve got to plant and water and weed and mind the insects. Then trust Our Heavenly Father for the crop. Pp. 183-184, Julie Cannon, Those Pearly Gates.

God’s will is God’s will. It sits there like Stone Mountain. You can’t move it, you can’t change it, and you can’t even question it. P109, Ferrell Sams, when all the world was young

P.S.  I am sorry about Fritz and I am sorry to have to tell you. I have been where you are, however, and I remember that it is hard to trust someone after you once found out he with held information from you When that happens your imagination takes over and that is always more dreadful than truth. That’s a sword that cuts two ways… p. 483 Ferrell Sams, When all the world was young

“Faith is believing something in the face of doubt… if you don’t ever doubt, you can’t have faith.” P. 605 Ferrell Sams

A garden is never finished, much as it may evolve. In the end, we never complete our own growth, we just keep growing, if we are lucky, until we stop. We don’t grow continuously or smoothly or even noticeably at times, but stumblingly, glacially, or at a gallop, without meaning to, or after great effort. We grow because life is growth and we love life not only as an idea, but compulsively, anonymously, in every cell and membrane. Our curiosity is a kind of membrane, too, as are love, ambition, belief, and the many tissues of desire, which lead us from one season to the next and define us in the end. We grow. Pp. 240-241, Cultivating Delight, Diane Ackerman.

There is a dreaminess to childhood, a moving slowly from one thing to another, that gets torn away under the pressure of time.
P. 224, Everyday Blessings, Kabat-Zinn

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters

Rita Smilkstein
The brain is the Learning organ
When a person experiences, processes, practices a specific skill or concept or area of knowledge, specific dendrites, which look like twigs on a tree (dendrite, in fact means “tree-like”), grow on specific neurons. These neurons then connect with other specific neurons when specific dendrites connect at specific synapses to create a specific neural network that is that specific concept, skill, or area of knowledge.
The more their brains’ dendrites grow, connect, and create larger, more complex neural networks, the more learners know: The more they grow, the more they know; the more they know, the more they grow. In other words, the brain’s learning process, as researched and as described here, is that specific learning occurs when and because the brain constructs specific connections and thus reconstructs itself.
Just as each higher twig on a tree needs to grow on a twig that is already there, each new, higher level of knowledge and skill (I.e., larger neural network) needs to be constructed on a lower-level, foundational, prerequisite, preliminary neural network that is already there. A gap occurs when the prerequisite, lower-level neural network is missing and there is nothing the learner can connect to-nothing the learner can grow on-in order to make sense of and understand the new knowledge, concept, or skill.

Since we never return it, we do not borrow time but have to steal it, snatch it from whatever takes time. P. 126, A Natural sense of wonder, Rick Van Noy