That Time of the Year, That Time of Your Life

[Image: “Christmas Shopping 216 (DuPage Children’s Museum),” by Michael Kappel. (Found on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!)]

From whiskey river:

Rule 8:
…for a Better Way to Live

Never again clutter your days or nights with so many menial and unimportant things that you have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along. This applies to play as well as work. A day merely survived is no cause for celebration. You are not here to fritter away your precious hours when you have the ability to accomplish so much by making a slight change in your routine. No more busy work. No more hiding from success. Leave time, leave space, to grow.

(Og Mandino [source])

…and:

The Christmas Letter

Wherever you are when you receive this letter
I write to say we are still ourselves
In the same place
And hope you are the same.

The dead have died as you know
And will never get better,
And the children are boys and girls
of their several ages and names.

So in closing I send you our love
And hope to hear from you soon.
There is never a time
Like the present. It lasts forever
Wherever you are. As ever I remain.

(John N. Morris [source: nothing canonical; earliest other citation I could find is here — but evidently appeared in the poet’s collection, The Glass Houses])

Not from whiskey river:

A Child’s Nativity

Struck dumb at arm’s length,
The crayon Madonna regards
As if with aversion
Her terrific baby,
A three-foot man she holds only in her hands.
He stares like guns.

Angels are falling
Under a sharp star,
Alleluias
Issue from their heads.
Enormous thin sheep
Intent as wolves
Surround Him.

(John N. Morris [source])

…and:

Dreamwood

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
or the child’s older self, a poet,
a woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day. If this were a map,
she thinks, a map laid down to memorize
because she might be walking it, it shows
ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert
here and there a sign of aquifers
and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map
it would be the map of the last age of her life,
not a map of choices but a map of variations
on the one great choice. It would be the map by which
she could see the end of touristic choices,
of distances blued and purpled by romance,
by which she would recognize that poetry
isn’t revolution but a way of knowing
why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced
wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,
mass-produced yet durable, being here now,
is what it is yet a dream-map
so obdurate, so plain,
she thinks, the material and the dream can join
and that is the poem and that is the late report.

(Adrienne Rich [source])