Today, I got to remembering a poem we learned in high school Latin:

LIBER I – XXXVIII THE SIMPLE MYRTLE
Horace (Q. Horatius Flaccus) trans. A. S. Kline
Persicos odi, puer, apparatus,
displicent nexae philyra coronae,
mitte sectari, rosa quo locorum
sera moretur.

Simplici myrto nihil adlabores
sedulus, curo: neque te ministrum
dedecet myrtus neque me sub arta
uite bibentem.

 My child, how I hate Persian ostentation,
garlands twined around lime-tree bark displease me:
forget your chasing, to find all the places
where late roses fade.

You’re eager, take care, that nothing enhances
the simple myrtle: it’s not only you that
it graces, the servant, but me as I drink,
beneath the dark vine.

I’ve always understood Horace to be saying that he really had no use for the fancy, for the complicated, for the trumped up things. He’d much rather, at least when he was addressing this particular youth, hang out and enjoy the simple things.

I rather like that idea.

We’re too bolluxed up with all the things going on that we rarely stop to “smell the roses” as it were. In this season of Lent, it really hasn’t felt much like lent to me; too close to Christmas, too cold, too dark, too surreal as we go through one teething session after another on sleepless nights.

Yet, enjoying the simple things, like the truth of Lent makes life have more salt, don’t you think?

Aah, the teether calls….