Daily Archives: July 7, 2013

Free Play Lightning

Free Play july 7

I’m taking the photo, so we added up to 22 free play players Sunday. Six new players have joined us. Yes! For the second week in a row Mark Jr. and I picked teams in schoolyard fashion. Unlike last week’s one run game, this tilted intensely in the last two innings. Mark and I debriefed our disparate picking strategies after the game and he saw the risk involved in putting four brawny first basemen on his team.

In row two, fourth player in is Vincent. He is eleven. Without any comment he is being allowed to play even if he’s a few year’s shy of the lower age limit. He’s around forty years shy of the average age of our participants! He made the play of the game at second base, backhanding a looping drive while moving to his left. It occurred to me he may well be our most serious player. He’s the only one of us who has a chance to make the big leagues.

Our average age, Vincent, and my appreciation of Richard Thompson compel me to end on a musical note. (Free Play Softball league: Sundays, 9:45am, Field #8, Forest Hills Park, Cleveland Heights, Ohio.)

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R O S E

A Yellow Rose
A Yellow Rose – 2013
S. Calhoun; from a photograph


Do you know a word that doesn’t refer to something? Have you ever picked and held a rose from R O S E ? You say the NAME. Now try to find the reality it names. Look at the moon in the sky, not the one in the lake. If you want to be free of your obsession with words and beautiful lettering, make one stroke down. There’s no self, no characteristics, but a bright center where you have the knowledge the Prophets have, without books or interpreter.

When you are with everyone but me, you’re with no one. When you are with no one but me, you’re with everyone. Instead of being so bound up with everyone, be everyone! When you become that many, you’re nothing. Empty.

Rumi, ra

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