A Thing to Reach For, and Something to Reach It With: Maybe the Same Thing

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[Image: “Forgotten ladders. Moon,” by DeviantArt user BergionStyle, they say, “using AI tools.”]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Proclamation of the actual mind, manifesting your mind, writing the mind, which goes back to Kerouac but also goes back to Milarepa, goes back to his original instructions: Don’t you trust your own mind? Why do you need a piece of paper?

So writing could be seen as “writing your mind,” observing your own mind, or observe what’s vivid coming to mind. For the purpose of relieving your own paranoia, and others’, revealing yourself and communicating to others. It is a blessing for other people if you can communicate and relieve their sense of isolation, confusion, bewilderment, and suffering by offering your own mind as a sample of what’s palpable, visible, and whatever little you’ve learned…

In other words, if you can show your mind it reminds people that they have got a mind. If you can catch yourself thinking, it reminds people that they can catch themselves thinking. If you have a vivid moment that’s more open and compassionate, it reminds people that they have those vivid moments.

By showing your mind as a mirror, you can make a mirror for other people to recognize their own minds and see familiarity and not feel that their minds are unworthy of affection or appreciation. It is appreciation of consciousness, appreciation of our own consciousness.

(Allen Ginsberg [source: here and here])

…and:

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician—
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above

insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,”
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

(Marianne Moore [source])

…and:

As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.

(Joseph Campbell, citing a Native American Indian saying [source: quoted widely, e.g., here])

From elsewhere:

Why Do I Write?

It’s a good question. Ask it of yourself every once in a while. No answer will make you stop writing, and over time you will find that you have given every response…

Baker Roshi from San Francisco Zen Center said, “‘Why?’ isn’t a good question.” Things just are. Hemingway has said, “Not the why, but the what.” Give the real detailed information. Leave the why for psychologists. It’s enough to know you want to write. Write.

Yet it’s a good and haunting question to explore, not so you can find the one final reason, but to see how writing permeates your life with many reasons. Writing is not therapy, though it may have a therapeutic effect. You don’t discover that you write because of lack of love and then quit, as you might in therapy discover that you eat chocolate as a love substitute and, seeing the reason, stop (if you’re lucky) eating Hershey’s chocolate bars and hot fudge. Writing is deeper than therapy. You write through your pain, and even your suffering must be written out and let go of…

We write in the moment and reflect our minds, emotions, environment in that moment. This does not mean that one is truer than the other—they are all true. When the old nag in you comes around with “Why are you wasting your time? Why do you write?,” just dive onto the page, be full of answers, but don’t try to justify yourself. You do it because you do it. You do it because you want to improve your handwriting, because you’re an idiot, because you’re mad for the smell of paper.

(Natalie Goldberg [source])

…and:

# 37: The young man — who hoped someday to become one-tenth as wise as the master under whose tutelage he had grown — was riding as a passenger in his master’s car. It should have been a brief drive, no more than a half-hour’s duration, but they had left later than planned and so they were stuck in one traffic jam after another: construction delays, stalled vehicles, the exit ramps — which were clogged at any time of any day — now, at peak rush hour, spilling back into the traffic lanes like molasses in winter.

“All this freaking traffic,” the young man said during one prolonged stop, waving his hands to either side. “Where the heck is it even coming, or going, and why? Who the heck are all these people?”

His master glanced in his direction, smiled wryly. “‘Traffic’?” he said. “‘All these people’? ‘Why’?” He gestured once at the young man, once at himself.

The two of them laughed; traffic resumed its crawl. In the distance, from over the horizon, a plume of black smoke twisted up in the sky: a fire or an explosion, a plane crash, who knew? The car came to a stop again. They sat in silence for a few minutes.

Apparently the young man had been thinking not just about traffic, but about the direction his life had been taking–about his stubborn pursuit of art, of all things, in a world saturated with so much ugliness; when not standing still, it seemed always in the process of eruption and collapse.

“What’s the point?” he said aloud. “Look at all this! Look at me! I mean, these little things I keep creating… I’m dodging the important questions of our time, I’m doing nothing to fix the world, it’s falling down around us! I’m doing nothing to help!”

Another pause as they crept slowly up to the latest obstacle, visible but still a good distance ahead: a small trailer overturned by the side of the highway. It had apparently been carrying a load of used books, perhaps bound for recycling. Whatever car or truck had been towing it had left the mess for someone else to clean up; the flashing blue lights of official vehicles had shot past the master’s car on the right shoulder, headed towards the problem.

The master glanced to his right. He smiled again — just a small smile this time. He took his hands off the steering wheel, waved them to the left and right. “The world!” he said, in a high-pitched whiny voice. “You! Me! Your work! My hands on the wheel, or waving in the air! My car, stuck in its lane just because there are stripes on the pavement and obstacles all around it! Why? Why? Why?“

They were at the mountain of scattered books now, and now they were past it. Traffic began to slacken, their speed to pick up.

The young man began to laugh to himself. A very funny story had just occurred to him, and he reached for the pen and notebook in his pocket.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

Love Yourself. Then Forget It. Then, Love the World.

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[Image: “About the Size of It,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (italicized stanzas):

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

                                             1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
    of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
    forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say—behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
    of this gritty earth gift.

                                             2.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
    are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
    thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.

                                             3.
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
   still another.

                                             4.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.

And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.

                                             5.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we
   change.
Congratulations, if
   you have changed.

                                             6.
Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
   fabulous reason?

And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—
   your life—
what would do for you?

                                             7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
   though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

(Mary Oliver [source])

From elsewhere:

Stop and listen to the ragged-edged beech leaves, pale specters of the winter forest. They are chattering ghosts, clattering amid the bare branches of the other hardwoods. Wan light pours through their evanescence and burnishes them to gleaming. Deep in the gray, sleeping forest, whole beech trees flare up into whispering creatures made of trembling gold.

Stop and consider the deep hollows of the persimmon’s bark, the way the tree has carved its own skin into neat rectangles of sturdy protection. See how the lacy lichens have found purchase in the channels, sharing space in the hollows. Tree and lichen belong to one another. Neither is causing the other any harm.

Stop and peer at the hummingbird nest, smaller than your thumb, in the crook of the farthest reach of an oak branch. Remember the whir of hummingbird wings. Remember the green flash of hummingbird light.

Stop and notice how closely the human teenagers resemble the whistling, clicking, preening starlings.

Stop and contemplate the hollow-boned ducks floating on the water like leaves. Like deadwood. Turtles, too, drift in the sunny water. See the way the bones in the turtle’s webbed foot resemble the bones in the duck’s webbed foot. Hold open your hand. Trace the outline of your fingers.

Stop and think for a time about kinship. Think for a long time about kinship.

The world lies before you, a lavish garden. However hobbled by waste, however fouled by graft and tainted by deception, it will always take your breath away.

We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed, we are only obliged to look.

(Margaret Renkle [source])

See to Your Sacraments Wherever You Find ‘Em

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[Image: “Plumbing the Divine,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Another Poem of the Gifts

I want to give thanks to the divine
Labyrinth of causes and effects
For the diversity of beings
That form this singular universe,
For Reason, that will never give up its dream
Of a map of the labyrinth,
For Helen’s face and the perseverance of Ulysses,
For love, which lets us see others
As God sees them,
For the solid diamond and the flowing water,
For Algebra, a palace of exact crystals,
For the mystic coins of Angelus Silesius,
For Schopenhauer,
Who perhaps deciphered the universe,
For the blazing of fire,
That no man can look at without an ancient wonder,
For mahogany, cedar, and sandalwood,
For bread and salt,
For the mystery of the rose
That spends all its color and can not see it,
For certain eves and days of 1955,
For the hard riders who, on the plains,
Drive on the cattle and the dawn,
For mornings in Montevideo,
For the art of friendship,
For Socrates’ last day,
For the words spoken one twilight
From one cross to another,
For that dream of Islam that embraced
A thousand nights and a night,
For that other dream of Hell,
Of the tower of cleansing fire
And of the celestial spheres,
For Swedenborg,
Who talked with the angels in London streets,
For the secret and immemorial rivers
That converge in me,
For the language that, centuries ago, I spoke in Northumberland,
For the sword and harp of the Saxons,
For the sea, which is a shining desert
And a secret code for things we do not know
And an epitaph for the Norsemen,
For the word music of England,
For the word music of Germany,
For gold, that shines in verses,
For epic winter,
For the title of a book I have not read: Gesta Dei per Francos,
For Verlaine, innocent as the birds,
For crystal prisms and bronze weights,
For the tiger’s stripes,
For the high towers of San Francisco and Manhattan Island,
For mornings in Texas,
For that Sevillian who composed the Moral Epistle
And whose name, as he would have wished, we do not know,
For Seneca and Lucan, both of Cordova,
Who, before there was Spanish, had written
All Spanish literature,
For gallant, noble, geometric chess,
For Zeno’s tortoise and Royce’s map,
For the medicinal smell of eucalyptus trees,
For speech, which can be taken for wisdom,
For forgetfulness, which annuls or modifies the past,
For habits,
Which repeat us and confirm us in our image like a mirror,
For morning, that gives us the illusion of a new beginning,
For night, its darkness and its astronomy,
For the bravery and happiness of others,
For my country, sensed in jasmine flowers
Or in an old sword,
For Whitman and Francis of Assisi, who already wrote this poem,
For the fact that the poem is inexhaustible
And becomes one with the sum of all created things
And will never reach its last verse
And varies according to its writers,
For Frances Haslam, who begged her children’s pardon
For dying so slowly,
For the minutes that precede sleep,
For sleep and death,
Those two hidden treasures,
For the intimate gifts I do not mention,
For music, that mysterious form of time.

(Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Alan Dugan [source])

From elsewhere:

As a child I memorized a short and elegant definition of a sacrament: “an outward sign signifying an inward grace.” That is, a sacrament is an ordinary thing or activity that, to a properly educated imagination, signifies or points to a deeper spiritual meaning and power. The priest sprinkles holy water on your head and calls it baptism. Thoreau takes a bath and says that for him it’s a spiritual action. As priests and theologians of our own religion, we can take almost any aspect of ordinary life and see its sacramentality, for everything can have an inward grace.

Which is what the Greeks were getting at by seeing gods, goddesses, and spirits of all kinds in every aspect of life. The philosopher Thales said, “The world is full of gods.” These figures, far from being absurd or fanciful, help us see the holiness in anything. You can find Demeter, goddess of grain, in a supermarket, and Hermes, god of crossroads, on Wall Street…

Intention and style convert the commonplace into the spiritual.

(Thomas Moore [source])

…and:

Prayer of Light

Plants only have two choices
to grow or to decay
as long as they grow more leaves
than what decays
they are still here
growing to the light
reaching up to the sun
without any deterrent
they thrive.

We are here like plants
and with every breath
We are meant to grow and thrive.

As long as there is light,
we will let it shine.
We were always meant to thrive.

Birds have a song
they sing and huddle in windows, branches,
any doorway or echoing archway
between stars and dawn
seeking just a breeze to take flight
to their future
and as they fly, we breathe.

I breathe,
Therefore I am.

As long as there is light,
we will let it shine.
We were always meant to thrive.

Bread rises with a little warmth
some of us even have a mother starter dough
to yield endless loaves
Some of us prefer rice
a little steam fattens dry seeds into many meals
if we have bread, if we have rice
we are meant to survive
with bellies that can be full
know the sun feeds us

We grow more than enough to
feed all the children.

As long as there is light,
we will let it shine.
We were always meant to thrive.

Love is ever present when we share food
Love is ever present when we see people pet a stranger’s dog
Love is ever present when we sit together and listen to each other’s stories
Love is ever present when we simply care.

Little moments promise that love will not vanish.
When love is ever present
we do not need to be afraid
because love, like light, welcomes us.

Love lets us speak and be seen.
We do not need to be silent.

As long as there is light,
we will let it shine.
We were always meant to thrive.

As long as there is light,
we will let it shine.
We were always meant to thrive.

As long as there is light,
we will let it shine.
We were always meant to thrive.

( Jen Cheng [source])

Postscript for regular visitors: No, your eyes do not deceive you — this edition of the RAMH “Whiskey River Fridays” series is indeed coming to you on a Thursday. Because, well, reasons: I won’t be able to post it tomorrow. And probably not Saturday, come to that. Apologies for the disruption to routine… maybe I’ll stop by in a few days and change the posting date, heh.

A Dance to the Lilt of the Moment

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[Image: “Play that Tune,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

You have consented to time and it is winter. The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget.

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.

(Wendell Berry [source])

…and:

That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Landscape And Soul

Though we should not speak about the soul,
that is, about things we don’t know,
I’m sure mine sleeps the day long,
waiting to be jolted, even jilted awake,
preferably by joy, but sadness also comes
by surprise, and the soul sings its songs.

And because no one landscape compels me,
except the one that’s always out of reach
(toward which, nightly, I go), I find myself
conjuring Breugel-like peasants cavorting
under a Magritte-like sky – a landscape
the soul, if fully awake, could love as its own.

But the soul is rumored to desire a room,
a chamber, really, in some far away outpost
of the heart. Landscape can be lonely and cold.
Be sweet to me, world.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and:

It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours–arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additions existence. Life, in short, just wants to be.

(Bill Bryson [source])

From elsewhere:

Naturalists call [stickywilly] by its botanical name, Galium aparine. It grows nearly everywhere and offers itself for many human uses: as a hot drink, in a cake, as a salve for eczema, or as protection from scurvy. But it goes by so many common names that stickywilly recipes passed down in rural families are hard to share because it would not be clear to others what wildflower, when dried and brewed, actually serves as a half-decent substitute for coffee. Is it catchweed? Bobby button or bedstraw or cleaverwort? Possibly it’s cleavers, or clivers, or any of the nearly endless riffs on the plant’s tendency to cling: stickyweed, stickybob, stickybud, stickyback, sticky molly, sticky grass, stickyjack, stickeljack, gripgrass, whippysticks. Shall I keep going? I could keep going for days…

I embrace the old-timey plants that evolved to feed wildlife, the plants with names that change from place to place and people to people. And I will always insist on the homely names of my Wiregrass ancestors. It was stickywilly in the fields of Lower Alabama, and it remains stickywilly to me all these years later in Tennessee. What you call the wildflowers will tell you who you are.

(Margaret Renkl [source])

…acnd:

Prayer for Joy

What was it we wanted
to say anyhow, like today
when there were all the letters
in my alphabet soup and suddenly
the ‘j’ rises to the surface.
The ‘j’, a letter that might be
great for Scrabble, but not really
used for much else, unless
we need to jump for joy,
and then all of a sudden
it’s there and ready to
help us soar and to open up
our hearts at the same time,
this simple line with a curved bottom,
an upside down cane that helps
us walk in a new way into this
forest of language, where all the letters
are beginning to speak,
finding each other in just
the right combination
to be understood.

(Stuart Kestenbaum [source])

…and:

We frequently walk with the sole purpose of getting from one place to another. But where are we in between? With every step, we can feel the miracle of walking on solid ground. We can arrive in the present moment with every step.

(Thich Nhat Hanh [source])

Everyday Delights (However Tiny or Grand, Light or Dark, Shallow or Deep, and Plentiful or Rare)

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[Image: “Choreology,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The Moment

Walking the three tiers in first light, out
here so my two-year-old son won’t wake the house,
I watch him pull and strip ragweed, chicory, yarrow,
so many other weeds and wildflowers
I don’t know the names for, him saying Big, and Mine,
and Joshua—words, words, words. Then
it is the moment, that split-second
when he takes my hand, gives it a tug,
and I feel his entire body-weight, his whole
heart-weight, pulling me toward
the gleaming flowers and weeds he loves.
That moment which is eternal and is gone in a second,
when he yanks me out of myself like some sleeper
from his dead-dream sleep into the blues and whites
and yellows I must bend down to see clearly, into
the faultless flesh of his soft hands, his new brown eyes,
the miracle of him, and of the earth itself,
where he lives among the glitterings, and takes me.

(Len Roberts [source])

…and:

Suddenly I understood that we must take care of things just because they exist.

(Maura O’Halloran [source])

…and (with an ellipsis filled in):

It would be better, think they, if Heaven were above and Hell below—anywhere outside, but not within. But that comfort has been knocked from under us. There are no places to go to, either for reward or punishment. The place is always here and now, in your own person and according to your own fancy. The world is exactly what you picture it to be, always, every instant. It is impossible to shift the scenery about and pretend that you will enjoy another, a different act. The setting is permanent, changing with the mind and heart, not according to the dictates of an invisible stage director. You are the author, director and actor all in one: the drama is always going to be your own life, not someone else’s. A beautiful, terrible, ineluctable drama, like a suit made of your own skin. Would you want it otherwise? Could you invent a better drama?

(Henry Miller [source])

From elsewhere:

Here in New England, each season carries a hundred foreshadowings of the season that is to follow-which is one of the things I love about it. Winter is rough and long, but spring lies all round about. Yesterday, a small white keel feather escaped from my goose and lodged in the bank boughs near the kitchen porch, where I spied it as I came home in the cold twilight. The minute I saw the feather, I was projected into May, knowing that a barn swallow would be along to claim the prize and use it to decorate the front edge of its nest. Immediately, the December air seemed full of wings of swallows and the warmth of barns. Swallows, I have noticed, never use any feather but a white one in their nest-building, and they always leave a lot of it showing, which makes me believe that they are interested not in the feather’s insulating power but in its reflecting power, so that when they skim into the dark barn from the bright outdoors they will have a beacon to steer by.

(E.B. White [source])

…and:

Kablooey is the Sound You’ll Hear

then plaster falling and the billow of gypsum
after your sister blows a hole in the ceiling
of your brother’s bedroom with the shotgun
he left loaded and resting on his dresser.

It’s Saturday, and the men are in the fields.
You and your sister are cleaning house
with your mother. Maybe your sister hates
cleaning that much, or maybe she’s just

that thorough, but somehow she has lifted
the gun to dust it or dust under it (you are busy
mopping the stairs) and from the top landing
where you stand, you turn toward the sound

to see your sister cradling the smoking shotgun
in her surprised arms, like a beauty queen
clutching a bouquet of long-stemmed roses
after being pronounced the official winner.

Then the smell of burnt gunpowder
reaches you, dirty orange and sulfurous,
like spent fireworks, and through the veil
of smoke you see a hole smoldering

above her head, a halo of perforations
in the ceiling—the drywall blown clean
through insulation to naked joists, that dark
constellation where the buckshot spread.

The look on your sister’s face is pure
shitfaced shock. You’d like to stop and
photograph it for blackmail or future
family stories but now you must focus

on the face of your mother, frozen at the base
of the stairs where she has rushed from
vacuuming or waxing, her frantic eyes
searching your face for some clue

about the extent of the catastrophe.
But it’s like that heavy quicksand dream
where you can’t move or speak,
so your mother scrambles up the steps

on all fours, rushes past you, to the room
where your sister has just now found her voice,
already screaming her story—it just went off!
it just went off! —as if a shotgun left to rest

on safety would rise and fire itself.
All this will be hashed and re-hashed around
the supper table, but what stays with you
all these years later, what you cannot forget,

is that moment when your mother
waited at the bottom of the steps
for a word from you, one word,
and all you could offer her was silence.

(Debra Marquart [source])

…and:

I watched the faces of the mourners gathered around Dr. Gauss’s grave. They varied in age. The older ones sat on folding chairs while the rest of us stood. I tried to read people’s faces. Some had their heads bowed. Some looked around. One man blew his nose aggressively while the woman next to him watched, a look on her face that suggested she wanted to harm him. There was the occasional yawn. A few people snuck a peek at their phone, checking a text from a colleague, perhaps, a lover, the weather, a fantasy baseball league. Did they know the old man well?

[…]

A priest shook holy water onto the casket from a silver container that looked like a tall pepper mill.

“O God,” he intoned, “who by the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light, grant your servant Walter to your…”

A few murmurs from the assembled. “Walter?” I heard someone say. At the center of the crowd around the grave, wearing black, an old woman sat in a folding chair. She lifted her head, a confused expression on her weathered face, and shouted. “Walter? His name isn’t Walter! It’s Samuel!”

The priest said, “I am so… I am so sorry. I’m doing another… later on…”

He cleared his throat and started again.

Tim whispered, “I have to admit that this is more interesting than I thought it would be.”

(John Kenney [source: nowhere online (yet), but from this book])

Made Something New, Have You? Or Maybe You Just… Found It?

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[Image: “Stone & Stone Liberty Warehouse No. 2 (Drive In),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH. This is in downtown Durham, NC; as you might expect, given the area’s history, the original building was a tobacco warehouse — the newer construction, though, has repurposed “the look” as, well, who knows: apartments, condominiums, offices… Ironically, I’m pretty sure — given more recent history — it’s a no-smoking facility.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (with two additional sentences from the source):

I’d like to be a Gecko, not permanently, but for ten minutes or so. Geckos are charming small lizardy creatures with suction pads for feet. They live vertically. Walls are their terra firma. For them trees grow sideways, hills are sky, pavements are walls. Our heads may be in the clouds but our feet are always on the ground and even if you wear spectacles which make you see the world upside down, you adjust in a day or so, and see everything the right way up. Take the glasses off and you’ll have another few upside-down days until everything reverts back to normal.

(Alan Fletcher [source])

…and:

Strangers

A man and a woman happened to sit next to one another on a train. The woman took out a book and began reading. The train stopped at a half dozen stations, but she never looked up once.

The man watched her for awhile, then asked, “What are you reading?”

“It’s a ghost story,” she said. “It’s very good, very spooky.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.

“Yes, I do,” she replied. “There are ghosts everywhere.”

“I don’t believe in them,” he said. “It’s just a lot of superstition. In all my years I’ve never seen a ghost, not one.”

“Haven’t you?” the woman said — and vanished.

(Alvin Schwartz [source])

…and:

It rains during the morning. No visitors today. I feel lonely and amuse myself by writing at random. These are the words:

Who mourns makes grief his master.
Who drinks makes pleasure his master.

The fact that Saigyo composed a poem that begins, “I shall be unhappy without loneliness,” shows that he made loneliness his master. He also wrote:

In the mountain village
who are you calling, yobuko-bird?
I thought you lived alone.

There’s nothing so intriguing as living alone. Chosho, the recluse, said:

If one’s guest enjoys a half-day’s leisure,
His host loses a half-day’s leisure.

Sodo is always moved by these words. I, too, feel it.

Not this human sadness,
cuckoo,
but your solitary song.

(Basho [source])

From elsewhere:

I realise at this late stage — coming up to forty years of creative work – that you build a life over time – there is no rush. What matters is to do the work that interests you; find a way to pay your bills, shape everything you do around your core values, because every decision we make — and that’s the food on the plate to the people we work with — every decision either supports or undermines who you are, who you want to be.

We make mistakes, we all do, and it doesn’t matter unless those mistakes become a habit that pulls us further and further away from our course.

Take yourself seriously and don’t cut corners. You can move fast – that’s different. Go at the speed you need, but don’t cut corners.

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

…and:

Something New Under the Sun

It would have to shine. And burn. And be
a sign of something infinite and turn things
and people nearby into their wilder selves
and be dangerous to the ordinary nature of
signs and glow like a tiny hole in space

to which a god presses his eye and stares.
Or her eye. Some divine impossible stretch
of the imagination where you and I are one.
It would have to be something Martin Buber
would say and, seeing it, point and rejoice.

It could be the mouth of a Coca-Cola bottle
or two snakes rolling down a mountain trail.
It would have to leap up out of the darkness
of a theater and sing the high silky operatic
note of someone in love. And run naked

slender fingers through the hair of a stranger,
or your mother or father, or grandfather, or
a grassy hill in West Virginia. It would live
on berries and moss like a deer and roam
the woods at night like the secret life of

the woods at night and when the sun rises you
could see it and think it is yours and that
would be enough and it would come to you
as these words have come to me–slowly,
tenderly, tangibly. Shy and meanderingly.

(Steve Scafidi [source])

…and:

The world begins to exist when the individual discovers it.

(Carl Jung [source: here and elsewhere])

…and:

You can make a game out of the simplest things: a few rules and a goal. One of the more elegant modern game designs is The Mind. The game is comically simple. There’s a deck with a hundred cards in it, numbered from 1 to 100. For level one, you shuffle the deck and deal each player one random card. The goal is for all players to work together as a team to play the cards in order, from lowest to highest. But there is one single, glorious catch: You’re not allowed to communicate. You can’t talk, signal, grunt, or gesture to each other. You have to coordinate wordlessly to play those cards in order. If you can do it for level one, you go up to level two: Reshuffle the deck, and deal two random cards to each person. For a four-player game, you win the game if you can beat level eight—that’s eight random cards dealt to each person, to be played out in perfect order, in total silence.

The game asks you to do the seemingly impossible: to be telepathic. And then it teaches you how that’s actually possible. You play the game by developing a shared sense of timing for how long you should wait to play a given card. And you can get very good at it together. Your group can play these wild, precise sequences in lockstep tempo. It will start to feel like you can touch the inside of each other’s brains and hear a collective clock ticking.

(C. Thi Nguyen [source])

…and:

(I’m pretty sure I’ve used this video before here on RAMH, but once I chose today’s theme it just seemed an inescapable addition. And it does, after all, fit the theme, no?)

It’s Easy to See It Once You See It

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[Image: “Audrey II (Milan Fashion Week),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

                         The workshop…

The paper I write on or you
write on, every word we write,
every cross and twirl of the
pen, and the curious way we
write what we think, yet very
faintly…

In them realities for you and
me — in them poems for you
and me…

In them themes, hints, provokers.

(Walt Whitman [source])

…and:

The way of seeing mountains and rivers differs according to the type of being that sees them. There are beings that see what we call water as a jeweled necklace. It does not mean however that they see a jeweled necklace as water…

What different types of beings see is different. And we should reflect on this fact. Is it that there are various ways of seeing an object? Or is it that we have mistaken various images for one object? We should concentrate every effort on understanding this question and then concentrate still more. Given this multitude of perspectives, it follows that training on the way of practice and verification must also not be merely of one or two kinds. The ultimate realm must have a thousand types, ten thousand kinds.

(Dogen, translated by Carl Bielefeldt [source])

…and:

All your nonsenses and truths, your finery and squaladoptions, combine and coalesce into one noise including laugh and whimper, scream and sigh, forever and forever repeating, in any tongue we care to choose, whatever lessened, separated message we want to hear. The Universe says simply, but with every possible complication, ‘Existence’ and it neither pressures us nor draws us out, except as we allow. It all boils down to nothing, and where we have the means and will to fix our reference within that flux, then there we are. Let me be part of that outrageous chaos… and I am.

(Iain Banks [source])

From elsewhere:

This very distinguished philosophy professor came out on the platform in front of this gang of students and took a bit of chalk and scrawled up a proposition in symbolic logic on the board. He turned to the audience and said, “Well now, ladies and gentlemen, I think you’ll agree that that’s obvious?”

Then he looked at it a bit more and started to scratch his head and after a while he said, “Excuse me!” And he disappeared.

About half an hour later he came back beaming all over his face and said triumphantly, “Yes, I was right—it is obvious!”

(John Brunner [source])

…and:

The Mongolian countryside is government land. Instead of the patchwork of farms and fences that divide an American countryside, the land is an unbroken expanse, more a blanket than a quilt. On this rolling and largely treeless nation, Mongolian nomads—who make up around a fifth of the population—are free to set up camp and graze their herds where they wish. Likewise, you may drive wherever you wish. The countryside has few roads. Or is one big road. Feel like visiting the folks who live off by that stream in the distance? Turn the steering wheel and aim the car.

(Mary Roach [source])

…and:

Drive

We are two copper spoons
beneath the blanket.
I am listening to my wife’s
gentle breaths.
She is finally relaxed
after a long night of wrestling
in her sleep.
My hand is on her thigh
but I am thinking about
the perfect drive I hit
on number five at Southwind,
and the seven iron to the edge
of the green.
I replay the birdie putt trickling in
to the hole over and over again.
It could be on the golf channel
except there’s no roaring crowd,
no exuberant fan screaming,
“get in the hole!”
no English accent whispering
into a microphone
about the significance of the shot,
how my steady play today
finally reflects my potential,
my work ethic, my readiness
for the moment.
She shifts her weight, the air between
our hips disappears.
I close my eyes.
I am no longer watching the flight
of the ball. I am the ball in flight.
I have been well struck. I am moving
with intention toward the earth.
This is not a game.
And it’s us doing all the whispering.

(Frank X Walker [source])

…and:

# 32: From the “How to See 3D” section of the Magic Eye books series’ FAQ:

Hold the center of the printed image right up to your nose. It should be blurry. Focus as though you are looking through the image into the distance. Very slowly move the image away from your face until the two squares above the image turn into three squares. If you see four squares, move the image farther away from your face until you see three squares. If you see one or two squares, start over!

When you clearly see three squares, hold the page still and the hidden image will magically appear. Once you perceive the hidden image and depth, you can look around the entire 3D image. The longer you look, the clearer the illusion becomes. The farther away you hold the page, the deeper it becomes.

Well, I don’t know about that — it’s probably just my own quirk, my own literal-mindedness, but…: all that printing, focusing, shuffling and shifting and squinting of paper — I’d rather just look at the world for those minutes, yes?

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

How to Grasp the Point (Hint: There Is No Point)

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[Image: “Day 1: Orientation (Sedona, Arizona),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Be greeted psychoneurotics!

For you see sensitivity in the insensitivity of the world,
uncertainty among the world’s certainties.

For you often feel others as you feel yourselves.

For you feel the anxiety of the world, and its bottomless narrowness and self-assurance.

For your phobia of washing your hands from the dirt of the world,
for your fear of being locked in the world’s limitations.
for your fear of the absurdity of existence.

For your subtlety in not telling others what you see in them.

For your awkwardness in dealing with practical things, and
for your practicalness in dealing with unknown things,
for your transcendental realism and lack of everyday realism,
for your exclusiveness and fear of losing close friends,
for your creativity and ecstasy,
for your maladjustment to that “which is” and adjustment to that which “ought to be”,
for your great but unutilized abilities.

For the belated appreciation of the real value of your greatness which never allows the appreciation of the greatness of those who will come after you.

For your being treated instead of treating others, for your heavenly power being forever pushed down by brutal force;
for that which is prescient, unsaid, infinite in you.

For the loneliness and strangeness of your ways.

Be greeted.

(Kazimierz Dabrowski [source])

…and:

How is it that I usually seem to be in my body? Partially, because perceiving things from eye-level is the most efficient way of making use of the information coming in from our predominant sense of sight. Blind people feel they are in their fingertips when reading braille. Dogs probably are more inclined to feel they are inside their noses. Exactly where we are depends on how we are perceiving.

It also concerns what we are able to control. It is the ability to control events that gives rise to a sense of self. The technology of virtual reality mimics this. Virtual reality is a computer-generated world in which you can move about as though it were real. The computer detects your movements so that the scenery changes realistically as you walk around and move your head and body. Special gloves that you wear detect the movements of your hands, so that the virtual hand appears to be your hand. And, to you, it seems real. It could be blue, green, or pitted with glowing nodules but it will still seem like you. Virtual reality gives you an illusory sense of control, so it creates a you that feels real, when it is no more than information being processed by a computer. The position where I seems to be depends on the viewpoint that takes in the information and the parts of the world that can be directly controlled.

(Susan Blackmore [source])

…and (italicized portion):

A lead-pencil has a point, an argument may have a point, remarks may be pointed, and a man who wants to borrow five pounds from you only comes to the point when he asks you for the fiver. Lots of things have points: especially weapons. But where is the point to life? Where is the point to love? Where, if it comes to the point, is the point to a bunch of violets? There is no point. Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless...

Life is not a question of points, but a question of flow. it’s the flow that matters.

(D.H. Lawrence [source])

From elsewhere:

We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience—a new feeling of what it is to be “I.” The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing—with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego…

As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and basic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it a Hintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our minds which we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence “I” am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

The Before Picture

It’s complicated, my relationship status
with progress. I often prefer

the “before” picture. The future
is where I’m going only because

I have no choice, because time
moves in one direction, dragging

a bit of itself behind like meat.
An unseen hand keeps

tugging it—time’s rabbit leg,
time’s hunk of red venison—

just out of reach. Did I just describe
the future as bait? Am I strung

along? I know, when I arrive there,
it won’t be there. Won’t be that.

It’ll be now, the way it is
right now. And again. Refresh,

refresh, refresh. The befores
pile up behind me. It’s now again.

(Maggie Smith [source])

Trying to Be You Can Be Very Confusing

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[Image: “Please Refrain Yourselves,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (in slightly different wording):

Groundedness comes in many forms: resolute common sense, daily prayer or meditation, a regular job that keeps us engaged with material realities, physical exercise, or something as simple as family life. One needs a sufficient engagement with the requirements of the so-called real world so that one is less likely to fall prey to flights of fancy or become engulfed by archetypes, repressed complexes, or manias that will make one lose one’s wits. The specter of madness haunts the spiritual search. To point this out should not be dismissed as mere pessimism or negativity.

A recurring motif of the esoteric traditions is the realm of the unseen — other dimensions, invisible entities, inner planes, etheric bodies, energy centers, planetary forces, hidden masters, the list goes on and on. While it may prove necessary to grant a provisional reality to such claims in the course of inner exploration, there lies a real danger in swallowing them wholesale and proceeding blithely onward. It is all too easy to project one’s wishes or fears onto the twilight zone of the invisible, reading deep portents into chance occurrences and see-ing connections where none actually exist.

Some people with a tendency toward paranoia are strongly attracted to the esoteric precisely because it mirrors their secret fears: unseen forces affect our lives, consensus reality is a sham, the universe is somehow converging on our personal slice of life. The spiritual landscape is littered with addled mystics who jumped into esoteric belief systems that were more than their sanity could bear and –most significantly — more than their closely watched personal experience had borne out.

Which leads us to [a] skill that it would be wise to cultivate: the ability to maintain a simultaneous belief and disbelief in all matters esoteric until you have undeniably experienced them for yourself. Let us call this “faithful skepticism.”

The kind of “knowing” that one finds in gnosis is personally verified. It isn’t based on the hearsay of another’s experience or revelation any more than it is based on theological dogma or belief.. Even when you have experienced something that seems real, it is well to compare notes with an experienced teacher and keep room in your worldview for the possibility that it is all in your imagination. Keep things in perspective.

(Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney [source]) [See the note below for an aside about this passage]

…and:

Whenever we finish talking to ourselves the world is always as it should be. We renew it, rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die.

(Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality [source])

…and:

Sentient beings are in essence buddhas.
It is like water and ice.
There is no ice without water,
There are no buddhas outside sentient beings.

What a shame, sentient beings seek afar,
Not knowing what is at hand.
It is like wailing from thirst
In the midst of water.

(Hakuin [source])

From elsewhere:

And there was money to think about; there was always money. He’d saved on rent these past eight months; on the other hand, what he’d saved on rent he’d spent on drink, to quell the anxiety caused by the means he’d adopted of saving rent. Life was a series of loops, each smaller than the last.

(Mick Herron [source])

…and:

What the Silence Said

Do you still believe in borders now?
Birds soar over your maps and walls, and always have.
You might have watched how the smoke from your own fires
travelled on wind you couldn’t see
wafting over the valley
and up and over the hills and over the next valley and the next hill.

Did you not hear the animals howl and sing?
Or hear the silence of the animals no longer singing?
Now you know what it is to be afraid.

You think this is a dream? It is not
a dream. You think this is a theoretical question?
What do you love more than what you imagine is your singular life?
The water grows clearer. The swans settle and float there.

Are you willing to take your place in the forest again? to become loam and bark
to be a leaf falling. from a great height. to be the worm who eats the leaf
and the bird who eats the worm? Look at the sky: are you
willing to be the sky again?
You think this lesson is
too hard for you You want the time-out to end. You want
to go to the movies as before, to sit and eat with your friends.
It can end now, but not in the way you imagine You know
the mind that has been talking to you for so long—the mind that
can explain everything? Don’t listen.

You were once a citizen of a country called I Don’t Know.
Remember the burning boat that brought you there? Climb in.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

You’ve got no time at all, but it seems like you’ve got forever. You’ve got nothing to do, but it seems like you’ve got everything.

You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven’t moved hardly, they’ve hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they’ve measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life.

You’ve got forever, but that’s no time at all.

You’ve got forever; and somehow you can’t do much with it. You’ve got forever and it’s a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.

(Jim Thompson [source])

_____________________________

Note: I’ve been dipping into whiskey river‘s extensive but (alas) limited collection of quotations for close to twenty years now; inevitably, I’ve used some of them more than once. This week, the opening selection (by Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney) first showed up at RAMH in a Friday post about four years ago, here, and I devoted some time to ruminating further about it.

[back]

Finding Our Way Out of a Corner

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[Image: “‘We’re Trapped!’ (They Cried, Ignoring the Exit),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there.

(Henry Miller [source])

…and:

Parallel Reality
(a peculiar notion)

A huge part of the maintenance system for egocentric conditioning is the belief in a parallel reality. This original faulty premise from which people can live their whole lives goes like this:

There is an alternate, parallel reality that exists simultaneously with this reality, and in that one, everything is as it should be.

Consider this:

A little child is playing and throws a rock at a tree. The rock ricochets and hits his little brother in the head who begins to scream. Mother is frightened by the screams and rushes out of the house, demanding to know what has happened. Little child senses this is not a good situation. He knows the right explanation could save him, doesn’t know what that is, and goes mute.

Younger brother yells, “He hit me with a rock!” Mother yells, “What is the matter with you? Why did you hit your brother with a rock?”

Little child whimpers, “I didn’t mean to. I was aiming at a tree. It bounced off.”

Does this work? Is the child off the hook?
No way. The response from mother is
the all-time award-winning crazy-maker:

“You shouldn’t have done that.
You should know better.“

At first the child is bewildered. He tries to figure out how he could have known something he didn’t know. He concludes others must be able to do it, and there must be something wrong with him for not being able to. Finally, he just accepts, “That’s right, I should know better.”

This is the birth of the parallel reality myth in which:
I know what I should know
I do what I should do
I feel what I should feel
I look how I should look
I never forget to remember
I always make the right decision
I always say the right thing
and on and on and on…

Here, in this reality, I should know better but don’t; there, somehow, I do.

It would serve us well to see that the little child who threw the rock could not have known better, that we never know better, that this is an illusion, an imaginary world perpetuated by looking at a moment that has passed and saying, “It should have been different.”

(Cheri Huber [source: fragments can be viewed at the Internet Archive and Google Books; the entire passage doesn’t seem to be available for free anywhere online — other than at whiskey river’s commonplace book, of course; I could verify the whole thing by purchasing the ebook at Amazon; other booksellers offer it in various formats, too])

From elsewhere:

A double-bind game is a game with self-contradictory rules, a game doomed to perpetual self-frustration—like trying to invent a perpetual-motion machine in terms of Newtonian mechanics, or trying to trisect any given angle with a straightedge and compass. The social double-bind game can be phrased in several ways:

The first rule of this game is that it is not a game.
Everyone must play.
You must love us.
You must go on living.
Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role.
Control yourself and be natural.
Try to be sincere.

Essentially, this game is a demand for spontaneous behavior of certain kinds. Living, loving, being natural or sincere—all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen “of themselves” like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores—weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith—in life, in other people, and in oneself—is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time. This is, of course, risky because life and other people do not always respond to faith as we might wish. Faith is always a gamble because life itself is a gambling game with what must appear, in the hiding aspect of the game, to be colossal stakes. But to take the gamble out of the game, to try to make winning a dead certainty, is to achieve a certainty which is indeed dead.

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

Proof

(Written for the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani, Jan. 1, 2026, NYC)

You have to imagine it:

Who said you were too dark/too
Large? Too queer/too loud?

Who said you were too poor/
Too strange? Too fat?

You have to imagine it:

Who said you must keep quiet?
Who heard your story, then
Rolled their eyes?

Who tried to change your name
To invisible?

You’ve got to imagine:

Who heard your name
And refused to pronounce it?
Who checked their watch
And said “not now”?

James Baldwin wrote:

“The place in which I’ll fit
Will not exist
Until I make it.”

New York, city of invention,
Roiling town, refresher
And re-newer,

New York, city of the real,
Where the canyons
Whisper in a hundred
Tongues,

New York,
Where your lucky self
Waits for your
Arrival,

Where there is always soil
For your root.

This is our time.

The taste of us/the spice of us
The hollers and the rhythms and
The beats of us.

In the echo of our
Ancestors,
Who made certain we know
Who we are.

City of Insistence,
City of Resistance,

You have to imagine:

An Army that wins without
Firing a bullet,

A joy that wears down
The rock of no.

Up from insults,
Up from blocked doors,
Up from trick bags,
Up from fear/up from shame,
Up from the way it was done before.
You have to imagine:

That space they said wasn’t yours.
That time they said you’d never own.
The invisible city lit, on its way.
This moment is our proof.

(Cornelius Eady [source])

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