Me, James, Taylor, and Clive

James Taylor's Pandora station makes me wish I was 24 in the 70's. It makes me wish I were a better guitar player and it's the station that most frequently accompanies me on a car trip longer than 20 minutes. Well, it shares a spot with Taylor Swift's new album Red to be perfectly honest. And I'll admit, the idea for a James Taylor station came from a line in Taylor Swift's new song Begin Again. And, can I just say, James Taylor and his music making friends make for a fail proof, dinner party kind of Spotify playlist. I'm kind of excited about it.

I started a new book. It was an impulse buy that had been mulled over many times beforehand, somewhat justifying the purchase. The Weight of Glory is a compilation of CS Lewis. It includes this quote from his speech Learning In War-Time I wanted to share in light of the current political loyalties...

There is therefore this analogy between the claims of our religion and the claims of war: neither of them, for most of us, will simply cancel or remove from the slate the merely human life which we were leading before we entered them. But they will operate in this way for different reasons. The war will fail to absorb our whole attention because it is a finite object and, therefore, intrinsically unfitted to support the whole attention of the human soul. In order to avoid misunderstanding I must here make a few distinctions. I believe our cause to be, as humans go, very righteous, and I therefore believe it to be a duty to participate in this war. And every duty is a religious duty, and our obligation to perform every duty is therefore absolute. Thus we may have a duty to rescue a drowning man and, perhaps, if we live on a dangerous coast, to learn lifesaving so as to be ready for any drowning man when he turns up. It may be our duty to lose our own lives in saving him. But if anyone devoted himself to lifesaving in the sense of giving it his total attention--so that he thought and spoke of nothing else and demanded the cessation of all other human activities until everyone learned to swim--he would be a monomaniac. The rescue of drowning men is, then, a duty worth dying for, but not living for. It seems to me that all political duties (among which I include military duties) are of this kind. A man may have to die for our country, but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself. 

And here are some photos from a recent trip to Mackinac Island with the Maxwells and Erin for a half marathon...probably my most favorite course to date.