RAMH@18: A Door Whispers All But Closed…

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[Image by photographer “Compagnon,” found on Unsplash. This harkens back to the first — much smaller — image which appeared on the very first post here at RAMH.]

When I first started Running After My Hat (the blog, not the habit — that, I’d been up to for pretty much my whole life), I thought it was aimed at a specific goal: laying the groundwork for a book project. The book in question, a memoir, would come to be called something like How It Was: The Boy’s Seasons. I never did nail down the title, nor of course the book itself — not completely to my satisfaction, although I’d “finished” it, sorta-kinda, over a decade earlier…

(Aside: I did eventually, though, create a 23-page e-book of the final section, regarding Christmas season; it’s still available on Amazon for 99 cents… free, if you’re on the Kindle Unlimited plan.)

By two years later, I’d obviously gotten, well, distracted: fresh winds, y’know, and different hats. Oh, I continued to post about the How It Was project — something like two dozen times, often just by excerpting from one section or another. But considering the total number of posts (counting this one), which is now 1,910… well, my focus on How It Was turned out to be a very, very small hat, indeed. For that two-year anniversary post, I pulled out links to a selection of five representative (?) posts in addition to the first one; in retrospect, on a re-reading, I’d obviously already chosen to pursue hats while mounted on a pogo stick:

See what I mean? Boing… boing… boing…

The pattern continued, such as it was — sometimes while obsessing for days or weeks about a topic (some series’ posts spanned months, even years) — for the rest of my time here.

But really, RAMH has been sputtering for a long time. If not for the weekly whiskey river Fridays series, I think there may have been maybe a dozen posts at johnesimpson.com in, what, the last five years or so?

Time to put things more or less in mothballs, methinks. There’s a chance I’ll pop up here occasionally, just for old times’ sake — maybe the annual “Potpourri” post every June 18, maybe an update to the Christmas-music playlist… who knows? But such posts will be rare. And I’m thinking of just turning off all future comments, if there’s a way to do that, just so I no longer have to review new ones for spam/phishing attempts.

So yes, you may still hear sounds from this corner occasionally. But mostly, it’ll be the chirping of crickets.

Now, I suppose it must be said that I and my Running After My Hat identity are not really “going away.” At some point, I carried the branding (haha, such as it is) over to the Tumblr platform, where it’s called “Running After My (Tumbling) Hat.” But that’s never served as anything other than a tie-in to this place; every one of my Tumblr posts, I’m confident, was simply cross-posted from here. There are Facebook and Instagram incarnations, too, although they’ve been steadily withering on the vine (and again, never with fruits of their own). I’ve also dipped one toe or another into the waters at Mastodon, Bluesky, and so on.

But for the last couple of years, I’ve been actively “blogging” (so to speak) only via the Substack platform. (Note that my Substack site is also called “Running After My Hat.”) Several of my series there have spun off from projects begun here or elsewhere during what we could — very, very wryly — call “the RAMH years”:

  • The Propagational Library is the near-final draft of the novella of that name which I first wrote and “published” in real time at RAMH, back in 2012.
  • 23kpc — also nearing completion offline — is a novel which I’ve mentioned a few times here, starting in 2015.
  • #jesstorypix is a series of “microfictions” (up to a few hundred words apiece, most shorter) which I first began on Instagram in oh, maybe 2018 or so — stories inspired by photographs I’d taken.

Most recently, I’ve taken up with exploring the use of AI as a fiction-writing partner; this series, called “Imagination Machines,” started in early March and has continued, roughly weekly, since then. The goal is not major, for now: I expect it to continue just towards build a complete short story — or possibly a novel’s first chapter — step by excruciating step, while “showing my (and the AI’s) work” along the way.

Anyhow, if you’ve gotten used to — and liked! — the kinds of things I’ve written about here, you might also be interested in what continues to happen with me over at Substack.

(But sadly, I think I’ve run out of gas for my whiskey river Fridays streak! I’ll never say “never again” for that series; it’s really served as a weekly psychological anchor for me. But if it returns — probably at Substack — it will probably have a different name, and not necessarily appear like clockwork.)

Finally, I must tip my hat — all of them, in fact — to numerous people I’ve “met” here (often via their own blogs) in the last 18 years. Blogging as it used to be feels like operating a sputtering, battered used car — a 30-year-old Honda Civic, say; few of those folks’ blogs are anything like still active. But even though I’ve met almost none of them in real life, I’ve continued to stay in touch with them by other means: Facebook, Instagram, Substack, simple email messages. And they have all come to occupy exclusive, durable niches of my soul. (Which sounds ridiculously flowery, but damn it, it’s true.) I’m so very happy to have crossed paths with each of you. In alphabetical order, by the names/handles I best remember you by:

  • Ashleigh Burrows
  • DarcKnyt
  • Eisha
  • “fg”
  • Froog
  • Jayne
  • Jules
  • Kate
  • Marta
  • Misssy
  • Moon Rat (and other names)
  • Nance
  • Querulous Squirrel
  • Rowena
  • Tessa

Thank you so much, folks. You’ve meant — continue to mean — much, much more to me than I’d ever have imagined complete strangers would mean when I first set up this blog; if I’d never met any of you, I doubt I’d still be “blogging” (or Substacking, etc.) in that gray, unhappy alternate universe.

*poof*

As It Was in the Beginning (Only Different)

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[Cartoon by David Borchart, from The New Yorker (January 11, 2016)]

Note to long-time (frequent or occasional) visitors to Running After My Hat: this will be the last (regularly scheduled) “whiskey river Friday” post here. I may still drop something else from time to time, but this will begin the process of winding RAMH down to something like stasis. More details to come, especially this coming Monday, April 20: anniversary #18!.

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (#1, May, 2005):

This then is life.
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.

How Curious! how real!
Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun.

(Walt Whitman [source])

…and:

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors . . . Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote and had the decency of not publishing. Nothing, nothing, my friend; what I have told you: I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . Can you imagine that I not even know the date of my death?

(Jorge Luis Borges [source])

From whiskey river itself (December, 2024) (italicized lines):

Advice to Myself #2: Resistance

Resist the thought that you may need a savior,
or another special being to walk beside you.
Resist the thought that you are alone.
Resist turning your back on the knife
of the world’s sorrow,
resist turning that knife upon yourself.
Resist your disappearance
into sentimental monikers,
into the violent pattern of corporate logos,
into the mouth of the unholy flower of consumerism.
Resist being consumed.
Resist your disappearance
into anything except
the face you had before you walked up to the podium.
Resist all funding sources but accept all money.
Cut the strings and dismantle the web
that needing money throws over you.
Resist the distractions of excess.
Wear old clothes and avoid chain restaurants.
Resist your genius and your own significance
as declared by others.
Resist all hint of glory but accept the accolade
as tributes to your double.
Walk away in your unpurchased skin.
Resist the millionth purchase and go backward.
Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book —
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.
Resist all pressure to have children
unless you crave the torment of joy.
If you give in to irrationality, then
resist cleaning up the messes your children make.
You are robbing them of small despairs they can fix.
Resist cleaning up after your husband.
It will soon replace having sex with him.
Resist outrageous charts spelling doom.
However you can, rely on sun and wind.
Resist loss of the miraculous
by lowering your standards
for what constitutes a miracle.
It is all a fucking miracle.
Resist your own gift’s power
to tear you away from the simplicity of tears.
Your gift will begin to watch you having your emotions,
so that it can use them in an interesting paragraph,
or to get a laugh.
Resist the blue chair of dreams, the red chair of science, the black chair of the humanities, and just be human.
Resist all chairs.
Be the one sitting on the ground
or perching on the beam overhead
or sleeping beneath the podium.
Resist disappearing from the stage,
unless you can walk straight into the bathroom and resume the face,
the desolate face, the radiant face, the weary face, the face
that has become your own, though all your life
you have resisted it.

(Louise Erdrich [source])

…and (October, 2024):

Don’t Hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

(Mary Oliver [source])

From elsewhere:

I suffer from Compulsive Cosmology. The condition often manifests itself on clear summer nights when I’m out looking for the dog. For no good reason something in the sky catches my attention and the next thing I know I am standing with my head bent backward, slack-jawed, contemplating the scope and ultimate fate of the universe.

It is a cruel disease indeed that forces a middling intellect such as mine into this position. I was, after all, an English Major. The last science course I had was 12th grade Physics and my clearest memory of that was the teacher’s profoundly active case of dandruff. I never understood it. At age 17 even I had heard of treatment shampoo. That brief moment of intellectual superiority may be at the root of my Compulsive Cosmology. It left me with the unshakable delusion that I get the Big Picture.

Then as now what intrigues me about the universe is the utter impossibility of its scale. You cannot force your brain big enough to hold it and it is said to be expanding faster than you can think. Still, when I stare up at it and summer flies coast in and out of my mouth I feel as if I am on the verge of getting it. I see its shape, I feel its speed and know its age. And then the dog shows up and I go inside.

(Tom Bodett [source: not available online, originally spotted in this issue of Funny Times])

…and:

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. Perhaps you are indeed carrying within yourself the potential to visualize, to design, and to create for yourself an utterly satisfying, joyful, and pure lifestyle. Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust, and as long as it comes from your own will, from your own inner need, accept it, and do not hate anything.

(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])

..and finally, maybe inevitably:

# 000: If you believe in ghosts — ghosts in the sense of diaphanous (once-living, now-dead) beings who pass through walls, moan lugubriously through the night, make your pipes rattle and your lawn die — well, I hate to break the news but… you are probably nuts.

And yet…

Everyone alive who does not suffer from certain neurological disorders has a past, carries it in their heads, never lets it go but sometimes takes little pleats and darts in its surface: neatening it up, fitting it around other thoughts and sometimes — often — fitting the other thoughts around it. The nature of the past is forever to be known but also unknown, really; we “understand” it, if at all, only in the way that a ten-year-old might “understand” quantum electrodynamics. It has a shape, it has a texture, it has sound and color, it — yes — smells… but it’s not quite there, either.

Hold onto your past. It’s yours, like no one else’s. You carry it with you — inescapably — as you move from room to room, from moment to moment, and it never changes no matter what you think you’re doing to change it. The past is that place where you never quite live, but are always moving to, always carrying around in a satchel, sometimes unpacking it for your or someone else’s inspection. It is a gift, unsought, to every human who has ever lived.

And there, there is where the ghosts live.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

Take a Good, Soft Look

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

Note to long-time (frequent or occasional) visitors to Running After My Hat: this will be the next-to-last Friday post here. it’s possible I may still drop something else from time to time, but this will begin the process of winding RAMH down to something like stasis as it approaches its eighteenth anniversary. More details to come, especially on that April 20 occasion.

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

So let us now take a critical look at the state of awakening, kensho-satori, and reexamine it from the same broad biological perspective. At its core it is change. Change means shifting from old to new. What is enlightenment’s first crucial contribution? What it sheds. What it subtracts. It destructures, deprograms and deconditions in depth. As a result, the brain becomes less top-heavy; its functions are simplified, revitalized. New systems of adaptive behaviors can develop more readily in such a reorganized brain. Accordingly, one can be cautiously optimistic about this unique capacity of the brain to shift into a wide range of alternate states. For herein resides a potential resource, a resource which could serve as the basis both for our long-range biological survival and for our cultural advancement.

(James Austin [source])

…and:

We must reach the understanding that the world is an apparition, a dream; that life is a dream. But we must feel this deeply. In the Buddhist monasteries, the neophyte must live every moment of his life experiencing it fully. He must think: “Now it is noon; now I am crossing the patio; now I will meet the superior.” And at the same time he must think that the noon, the patio, and the superior are unreal, that they are as unreal as he and his thoughts for Buddhism denies the I.

One of the great delusions is the I… There is no subject; what exists is a series of mental states. If I say “I think,” I am committing an error, because I am assuming a fixed subject and then an act of that subject, which is thought. It is not so. One should say […] not “I think,” but rather “it is thought,” as one says “it is raining.” When we say “it is raining,” we do not think that the rain is performing an act but rather that something is happening. In the same way that we say “it’s hot,” “it’s cold,” we should also say “it’s thinking,” “it’s suffering,” and avoid the subject.

(Jorge Luis Borges [source])

…and:

We see, often, too often, what we want to see. Even the bellowing specter of self-made hell must be fussed over like a fetish, as precious and potent as any great work of art. We choose to commit ourselves to it, if only because, like the Big Dipper, it is what we revisit each night, the habit by which we familiarize the dark. The Promethean gift of our imagination is found at the heart of most tragedy, the real weapon discovered at the crime scene. Why would we fashion such horrors?…

 We can no longer enter into enchantment with life, we enter into a meta-relationship with it — we “interpret” our dreams, reconstruct the narratives of our pasts, hold ourselves at arms length. In the doldrums between the psyche and world it inhabits, imagination exists like a creature in a zoo exhibit, subject to the scrutiny of the intellect, deemed to be both quaint and a curiosity. With no access to its natural habitat, the psyche paces without purpose or dignity. Like Rilke’s panther in the Paris Zoo, its circumnabulations are, “a dance of strength about a center / in which a mighty will stands stupefied”. Imagination is trapped, obsessive, unable to fulfill its nature…

It is one thing, one quite horrible thing, to be lost amid the hall of mirrors of ones own feeble sight, to suspect that your feeling of disorientation is not merely a trick of the mind. You know you have the Mortal Dread within you, and you know how it can cause you to envision the worst: ghastly chimera over the sea and in the skies. It can contaminate the very thing you hold dear, make love itself seem monstrous, unworthy of your best efforts to see beyond and through its most despairing mirage. It can, in effect, make you believe in witches, and in lovers forever held hostage by their own limitations.

(Bia Lowe [source: here, here, and here])

From elsewhere:

Riding Out At Evening

At dusk, everything blurs and softens.
From here out over the long valley,
the fields and hills pull up
the first slight sheets of evening,
as, over the next hour,
heavier, darker ones will follow.

Quieted roads, predictable deer
browsing in a neighbor’s field, another’s
herd of heifers, the kitchen lights
starting in many windows. On horseback
I take it in, neither visitor
nor intruder, but kin passing, closer
and closer to night, its cold streams
rising in the sugarbush and hollow.

Half-aloud, I say to the horse,
or myself, or whoever: let fire not come
to this house, nor that barn,
nor lightning strike the cattle.
Let dogs not gain the gravid doe, let the lights
of the rooms convey what they seem to.

And who is to say it is useless
or foolish to ride out in the falling light
alone, wishing, or praying,
for particular good to particular beings,
on one small road in a huge world?
The horse bears me along, like grace,

making me better than what I am,
and what I think or say or see
is whole in these moments, is neither
small nor broken. For up, out of
the inscrutable earth, have come my body
and the separate body of the mare:
flawed and aching and wronged. Who then
is better made to say be well, be glad,

or who to long that we, as one,
might course over the entire valley,
over all valleys, as a bird in a great embrace
of flight, who presses against her breast,
in grief and tenderness,
the whole weeping body of the world?

(Linda McCarriston [source])

The World Is Full of Joys to Juggle (But Don’t Watch Yourself Juggling Them)

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[Image: “Confounding Focus,” 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 (last stanza):

The Greatest Grandeur

Some say it’s in the reptilian dance
of the purple-tongued sand goanna,
for there the magnificent translation
of tenacity into bone and grace occurs.

And some declare it to be an expansive
desert—solid rust-orange rock
like dusk captured on earth in stone—
simply for the perfect contrast it provides
to the blue-grey ridge of rain
in the distant hills.

Some claim the harmonics of shifting
electron rings to be most rare and some
the complex motion of seven sandpipers
bisecting the arcs and pitches
of come and retreat over the mounting
hayfield.

Others, for grandeur, choose the terror
of lightning peals on prairies or the tall
collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas,
because there they feel dwarfed
and appropriately helpless; others select
the serenity of that ceiling/cellar
of stars they see at night on placid lakes,
because there they feel assured
and universally magnanimous.

But it is the dark emptiness contained
in every next moment that seems to me
the most singularly glorious gift,
that void which one is free to fill
with processions of men bearing burning
cedar knots or with parades of blue horses,
belled and ribboned and stepping sideways,
with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies
of black-robed choristers; to fill simply
with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried
crockery, tangerine and almond custards,
polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing
walls; that space large enough to hold all
invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000
definitions of god and more, never fully
filled, never.

(Pattiann Rogers [source])

…and:

We inhabit a deeply imagined world that exists alongside the real physical world. Even the crudest utterance, or the simplest, contains the fundamental poetry by which we live. This mind fabric, woven of images and illusions, shields us. In a sense, or rather, in all senses, it’s a shock absorber. As harsh as life seems to us now, it would feel even worse — hopelessly, irredeemably harsh — if we didn’t veil it, order it, relate familiar things, create mental cushions. One of the most surprising facts about human beings is that we seem to require a poetic version of life. It’s not just that some of us enjoy reading or writing poetically, or that many people wax poetic in emotional situations, but that all human beings of all ages in all cultures all over the world automatically tell their story in a poetic way, using the elemental poetry concealed in everyday language to solve problems, communicate desires and needs, even talk to themselves.

When people invent new words, they do so playfully, metaphorically — computers have viruses, one can surf the internet, a naive person is clueless. In time, people forget the etymology or choose to disregard it. A plumber says he’ll use a gasket on a leaky pipe, without knowing that the word comes from garçonette, the old French word for a little girl with her hymen intact. We dine at chic restaurants from porcelain dinner plates without realizing that when the smooth, glistening porcelain was invented in France a long time ago, someone with a sense of humor thought it looked as smooth as the vulva of a pig, which is indeed what porcelain means. When we stand by our scruples, we don’t think of our feet, but the word comes from the Latin scrupulus, a tiny stone that was the smallest unit of weight. Thus a scrupulous person is so sensitive he’s irritated by the smallest stone in his shoe. For the most part, we are all unwitting poets.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

From elsewhere:

You don’t know about the Change War, but it’s influencing your lives all the time and maybe you’ve had hints of it without realizing.

Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn’t seem to be bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Ghosts—not the story-book kind, but the billions of beings who were once so real and strong it’s hard to believe they’ll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons—spirits able to range through all time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you’ve had hints of the Change War.

(Fritz Leiber [source])

…and:

Teaching the Ape to Write Poems

They didn’t have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair,
then tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
“You look like a god sitting there.
Why don’t you try writing something?”

(James Tate [source])

…and:

Meditation with a Gash in the Natural Order

I like parking at the big box store, watching people come out and go in.
Swaying winter grasses in the median, sky that brigand Saturday blue.
I’m waiting to pick up my son from his guitar lesson. Already masterful,
he doesn’t quit. Even Jimi Hendrix continued with a vocal coach,
up to the very day he died. I have so much useless knowledge.
Like what the monk said about meditation: if while sitting on your cushion
you have the best idea you’ve ever had—stunning, complete—
you mustn’t get up to capture it. Also, a lot of what we call miraculous
is just the way things work: a monarch always emerges from its chrysalis
as a radically different worm. A miracle is living flesh restored to reeking
corpse. It’s the man sitting calmly, shaved and dressed, after he’d raved
at city gates for more years than anyone who stepped around him
could remember. The monk said: when wondering what to do in life,
do what will cost you the most. Commit to watching the gorgeous
bubble evanesce. That’s the only way this works.

(Leslie Williams [source])

Life Never Sleeps, and Your Muse Shouldn’t Either

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[Image: “Operational Readiness,” by Georgie Pauwels. Spotted it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Thesaurus

Given a way would I be this; given
this thing would I be this. I never knew
how persons could be things, and yet we were

in the vast cosmic Thing; we were little
things. There were greater animations than
ourselves, and to them we were things. This was

a thought in the forest of —thesaurus
of—my nomenclature. How often had
I thought, am I alive or am I dead,

never knowing what either Thingness was.
These were the woods we were talking about,
these were the words we were talking about,

where the forest was always in the trees,
where what I saw was always what I was;
my words, some leaves, all bristling with my life,

animate and aimée, all that was all.
There was an aura, call it a halo,
call it the glow of the moment of grace;

there was something oracular and old,
there was the show and glow, there was hello,
there was yes, no, there was congenial

and genial and joy. There was genius,
a genie in the bottle, breath in the lungs,
there was more than just being as I was:

wind in the woods, a forest in my mind,
the mind of my life found in the forest,
the Thing being named my thing, as it was.

(Sarah Arvio, Sono [source])

…and (italicized portion):

“If artists don’t set out to make significant art, what do they do?”

“…Maybe they do set out to make something significant, in a roundabout sort of way, but it’s not like setting out to make something practical or useful. For one thing, it’s more like play than work. On the other hand, they don’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter. The good ones make art because they have to make it–even though they probably won’t understand why until after it’s already made.”

“But how do they know what to make?”

“That’s dictated by their vision.”

“You mean it comes to ’em like in a dream?”

“No, no, it’s seldom that dramatic. Listen, it’s really pretty simple. If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.“

(Tom Robbins [source])

…and (italicized lines):

Why We Tell Stories
For Linda Foster

I

Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground

and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers

and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened

and learned to speak

2

We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us

and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else
and because we had survived
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
we discovered bones that rose
from the dark earth and sang
as white birds in the trees

3

Because the story of our life
becomes our life

Because each of us tells
the same story
but tells it differently

and none of us tells it
the same way twice

Because grandmothers looking like spiders
want to enchant the children
and grandfathers need to convince us
what happened happened because of them

and though we listen only
haphazardly, with one ear,
we will begin our story
with the word and

(Lisel Mueller [source])

From elsewhere:

A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.

And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton—once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?

[…]

We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t “attack” anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.

(Annie Dillard [source])

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])

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