Thomas Traherne and Cat Power have some things in common. I’ve had rather spiritual experiences with the both of them in the past couple of weeks. You’ll see their expressions and tones are quite different, but the ideas are pretty similar. Hopeful and nostalgic. Poignant and inspirational. I didn’t find these gems so much as they found me: Traherne is from a class, and Cat Power is from a friend.

This is an excerpt from Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations. He’s just uber-optimistic, but he lived right smack-dab at the beginning of the 17th Century when religion and science were about to really-really clash,  and politics and philosophy and individual thought were emerging. He’s very … light, compared to Donne and Bacon and Hobbes and Herbert.

This is a winter song, and of course it’s rather melancholy. The simple piano and the lyrics are especially powerful.

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Cat Power- Colors and the kids (pics and lyrics), posted with vodpod

It must be the colors
And the kids
That keep me alive
‘Cause the music is boring me to death

It must just be the colors
And the kids that keep me alive
‘Cause I’d wanna go right away
To a January night
I built a shack with an old friend
He was someone I could learn from
Someone I could become

Will you meet me down
On a sandy beach
We can roll up our jeans
So the tide won’t get us
below the knees

Yellow hair
You are a funny bear
Yellow hair
You are such a funny bear
Slender fingers
Would hold me slender
limbs would hold me
And you could say my name
Like you knew my name

I could stay here
Become someone different
I could stay here
Become someone better

It’s so hard to go in the city
‘Cause you wanna say
hello to everybody
It’s so hard to go into the city
‘Cause you wanna say hey I
love you to everybody
When we were teenagers we
wanted to be the sky
Now all we wanna do is
go to red places
And try to stay outta hell

It must be the colors
And the kids
That keep me alive
‘Cause the music is boring me to death

it must just be the colors
And it must just be the kids
That keep me alive on
this January night.

Yellow hair
You are a funny bear
Yellow hair
You are such a funny bear