Now I Do Despise A Straight Line

Sitting here feeling a bit reflective this morning--Jason Isbell, Brittany Howard, Gram Parsons, Townes Van Zandt, A.P. Carter and Ralph Stanley all been sitting here with me for the past few hours--eating Kim Chee and fried chicken for breakfast and thinking about how our program got where it is.

Thinking about how those who see how we do things fall into two camps--those who wonder how we get as much done as we do and those who wonder how much more successful we would be if I would just be more conventional in my outlook.

My favorite flower is the one that people try their best to kill, only to find it sprouting back no matter how much poison they heap on it.

I don't find any beauty in a flower's appearance. Real beauty is in its resilience.

Can't deal with pretending. Things are true or they are not. Can't put something in my mouth called "false teeth" and can't feel a bit better about such dishonesty by calling them "dentures" either. Music is to be judged only by how it sounds instead of how difficult it is to play. The test of whether or not a horse is well designed for endurance is to go ride him for 50 miles. The test is not to look up conformation and breed standards to make sure that you and your horse are appropriately clothed in Moa suits and marching in perfect step with what ever the established horse world has decreed.

Something fundamentally wrong with having a brain and refusing to use it. We must all be born the same and we must all die the same but we do not have to live the same. Speaking clichés inevitably leads to living them.

To lose the respect of a horse in order to gain the respect of a person is  strong proof of a fundamental lack of self respect. Gaining the respect of the powerful by failing to place the interest of the powerless above all else is to live a failed life.

Appearances do not matter. Reality does. That is why a blind man often has truest vision.
We have a lot of guests and visitors come out for the first time.. Some people say, "This place looks so beautiful."  Others say, "This place is so beautiful."

There is a big difference between those two statements that too few people recognize.