Recognizing the Universe’s Hand When It’s Offered

by Leave a Comment

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Generosity is another quality which, like patience, letting go, non-judging, and trust, provides a solid foundation for mindfulness practice. You might experiment with using the cultivation of generosity as a vehicle for deep self-observation and inquiry as well as an exercise in giving. A good place to start is with yourself. See if you can give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Practice feeling deserving enough to accept these gifts without obligation—to simply receive from yourself, and from the universe.

(Jon Kabat Zinn [source])

…and:

Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air,
an armful of white blossoms,
a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
a shrill dark music, like the rain pelting the trees.
    like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds—
a white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light
    of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

There is a hole in the universe.

It is not like a hole in a wall where a mouse slips through, solid and crisp and leading from somewhere to someplace. It is rather like a hole in the heart, an amorphous and edgeless void. It is a heartfelt absence, a blank space where something is missing, a large and obvious blind spot in our understanding of the universe.

That missing something, strange to say, is a grasp of nothing itself. Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens.

(K. C. Cole [source])

…and:

Dust

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor —
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes —
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it

(Dorianne Laux [source])

…and:

If you knew what I knew about generosity, you wouldn’t let one meal go by without sharing it.

(Buddha [source (in slightly different words)])

From elsewhere:

To foster your spiritual life, you need an effective method especially suited to you. Buddhists call it upaya, “skillful means.” When I first heard about upaya many years ago, I felt excited because it helped me make sense of the many odd things we do in the name of religion. It’s important to have good ideas, but you also need to be skillful in your method. The practice of religion requires precise and thoughtful action…

Some schools of Buddhism teach that upaya goes along with two other aspects of the spiritual life: compassion (karuna) and wisdom (prajna). I’d like to borrow this Buddhist trio of virtues for my own religion. What could be more perfect than basing your life on wisdom, compassion, and skillful means? What better way to describe religion than as a deep way of life that takes into account your mind, your heart, and your hands? In my own private book of spiritual practices, along with these three central ingredients I would add wonder and serenity, two items I borrow from Glenn Gould. That gives me a five-legged table on which to build my religion: wisdom, compassion, skillful methods, wonder, and serenity.

(Thomas Moore [source])

…and:

Mysticism for Beginners

The day was mild, the light was generous.
The German on the café terrace
held a small book on his lap.
I caught sight of the title:
Mysticism for Beginners.
Suddenly I understood that the swallows
patrolling the streets of Montepulciano
with their shrill whistles,
and the hushed talk of timid travelers
from Eastern, so-called Central Europe,
and the white herons standing—yesterday? the day before?—
like nuns in fields of rice,
and the dusk, slow and systematic,
erasing the outlines of medieval houses,
and olive trees on little hills,
abandoned to the wind and heat,
and the head of the Unknown Princess
that I saw and admired in the Louvre,
and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings
sprinkled with pollen,
and the little nightingale practicing
its speech beside the highway,
and any journey, any kind of trip,
are only mysticism for beginners,
the elementary course, prelude
to a test that’s been
postponed.

(Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh [source])

…and:

Beach

The end, I think, will be a little like looking down as far as I can see to where the wind has kicked up the tide and turned it all the same—sea, spume, the air. There might even be someone walking toward me, the way in the edge-of-the-ocean blue light they’ll be obscure until the last moment. I think it’ll be late afternoon, the sky that luminous oyster white into which things disappear. I’ll stop to look at the sky, and the moment I do I realize I’m alone, I misunderstood the figure coming toward me, which, considering the time of day, is as it should be, especially now that the wind has kicked up a little and the white sun has almost dropped under the soft gray almost stillness of the water, it seems just the right hour to be, again, alive.

(Stanley Plumly [source])

Share

Our Only Hope Is to Be the Daylight

by Leave a Comment

[Image: “Wawona Tunnel, Yosemite National Park, 8:24AM,” 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 important thing about despair is never to give up, never wrap up and put away a sterile life, but somehow keep it open. Because you never can know what’s coming; never. That’s the great thing about life, the crucial thing to remember. You may beat your fists on a stone wall for years and years, and every consideration of common sense will say it’s hopeless, forget it, spare yourself; and then one day your bleeding hand will go through as if the wall were theatrical gauze; you’ll be in another realm where birds are singing and love is possible, and you’d have missed it if you’d given up, because it might be only that one day the wall was not stone.

(Allen Wheelis [source])

…and:

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot—air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That’s the world, and we all live there.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Our existence is finite. The self that we have created through so many years of effort and suffering will die. And sustained though we may be by the idea, the hope, the certainty that some portion of us will eternally endure, we also must acknowledge that this “I” who breathes and loves and works and knows itself will be forever and ever and ever… obliterated.

So, whether or not we live with images of continuity—of immortality—we also will have to live with a sense of transience, aware that no matter how passionately we love whatever we love, we don’t have the power to make either it, or us, stay.

(Judith Viorst [source])

…and:

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, how can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

(Ellen Bass [source])

…and (in slightly different and excerpted form):

In the Middle

of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather’s
has stopped at 9:20; we haven’t had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don’t ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee
and evening’s slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We’ll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

(Barbara Crooker [source])

From elsewhere:

“Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window… that was the moment, Maxi. Not when ‘everything changed.’ When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we’ve become, what we’ve been all the time.”

“And what we’ve always been is…?”

“Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs… planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”

After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or…”

“Course not, it’s a koan.”

(Thomas Pynchon [source])

Living With the News

Can I get used to it day after day
a little at a time while the tide keeps
coming in faster the waves get bigger
building on each other breaking records
this is not the world that I remember
then comes the day when I open the box
that I remember packing with such care
and there is the face that I had known well
in little pieces staring up at me
it is not mentioned on the front pages
but somewhere back near the real estate
among the things that happen every day
to someone who now happens to be me
and what can I do and who can tell me
then there is what the doctor comes to say
endless patience will never be enough
our only hope is to be the daylight

(W.S. Merwin [source])

…and:

# 30: You think your country lurches towards disaster.

You think your neighbors have lost their minds.

You think when you wake up tomorrow, things will be worse than they were this morning.

You’re probably right…

…and you’re probably wrong.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

Share

The Light Changes and — Ding! — the World Goes Topsy-Turvy

by Leave a Comment

[Image: “Greenway Funhouse,” 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:

Design

Here is the day, sun, gulls
backlit and cresting, a jackhammer
going on, suggesting
I’m here but not really
in it, I’m more
representative
of a person in early
ambient fall,
near a fountain, and Thursday
farmers’ market
like an architect’s model, precise,
small me, stuck on a bench
reading a book, lending the air
of things going too fast.

(Lia Purpura [source])

…and (last three paragraphs):

“I can’t help it,” I said. “My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.”

“Your what and your what?” he said.

“My soul and my meat,” I said.

“They’re separate?” he said.

“I sure hope they are,” I said. I laughed. “I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does.”

I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control.

“So when people I like do something terrible,” I said, “I just flense them and forgive them.”

“Flense?” he said. “What’s flense?”

“It’s what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board,” I said. “They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people—get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.”

(Kurt Vonnegut [source])

…and:

The Afterlife

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals—eagles and leopards—and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

(Billy Collins [source])

From elsewhere:

“There was a girl, Minnawara. She was clever, good with a spear. Eyes that could spot a kookaburra a kilometer away. One day, she stole a sling. The sling was supposed to belong to the whole tribe, but Minnawara hid it in a pouch. When the tribe discovered the sling was missing, they became very angry, and the elder asked Minnawara if she’d taken it. And she said no. So the elder put magic on the ground, and the ground began to get hot. The elder said, ‘Are your feet warm, Minnawara?’ That was the magic. Only someone who lied would feel the heat. She said no, her feet were fine. But soon she couldn’t stand it, so she began to hop from one foot to the other. And then she jumped. The elder said, ‘Why are you jumping, Minnawara?’ and she said, ‘I like to jump. I will always jump.’ And she did; she jumped everywhere for the rest of her days, because she was too stubborn to give up the sling. Her feet grew long and tough, and she was the first kangaroo.”

(Max Barry [source])

…and:

[Otis] disappears immediately with Fiona into her room, where along with the Beanie Baby overpop she keeps a Melanie’s Mall, with which Otis has become strangely intrigued. Melanie herself is a half-scale Barbie with a gold credit card she uses for clothes, makeup, hairstyling, and other necessities, though the secret identity Otis and Fiona have given her is a bit darker and requires some quick costume changes. The Mall has a water fountain, a pizza parlor, an ATM, and most important an escalator, which comes in handy for shoot-out scenarios, Otis having introduced into the suburban girl idyll a number of four-and-a-half-inch action figures, many from the cartoon show Dragonball Z, including Prince Vegeta, Goku and Gohan, Zarbon, and others. Scenarios tend to center on violent assault, terrorist shoplifting sprees, and yup discombobulation, each of which ends in the widespread destruction of the Mall, principally at the hands of Fiona’s alter ego the eponymous Melanie, in cape and ammo belts, herself. Among fiercely imagined smoke and wreckage, with generic plastic bodies horizontal and disassembled everywhere, Otis and Fiona kiss off each episode by high-fiving and singing the tag from the Melanie’s Mall commercial, “It’s cool at the Mall.”

(Thomas Pynchon [source])

…and:

Saying of Mulla Nasrudin

If I survive this life without dying, I’ll be surprised.

(Idries Shah [source])

Share

Trying All the Tricks (Especially Not Trying) to Keep Moving Forward

by 1 Comment

[Image: “Slow Moving,” 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:

Humanity is under great pressure to evolve because it is our only chance of survival as a race. This will affect every aspect of your life and close relationships in particular. Never before have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now. As you may continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.

(Eckhart Tolle [source])

…and (italicized portion):

The Zen Master warns: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” This admonition points up that no meaning that comes from outside of ourselves is real. The Buddhahood of each of us has already been obtained. We need only recognize it. Philosophy, religion, patriotism, all are empty idols. The only meaning in our lives is what we each bring to them. Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything outside ourselves can be our master. No one is bigger than anyone else. There are no mothers and fathers for grown-ups, only sisters and brothers.

(Sheldon Kopp [source])

…and:

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly [source])

From elsewhere:

What I want isn’t a moral. I don’t want to die. But I do want to be able to.

Death not as destination but as horizon. Not death up close. His desire not for the end but to continue not-ending in a quite new way. In the shadow of life’s culminating end. And if that was what he craved, wasn’t that, though he hadn’t said this to her either, to suggest that he was not, now, living? What could it be, to exist with the banality of endlessness?

(Keanu Reeves [source])

…and:

Letter to Noah’s Wife

You are never mentioned on Ararat
or elsewhere, but I know a woman’s hand
in salvation when I see it. Lately,
I’m torn between despair and ignorance.
I’m not a vegetarian, shop plastic,
use an air conditioner. Is this what happens
before it all goes fluvial? Do the selfish
grow self-conscious by the withering
begonias? Lately, I worry every black dress
will have to be worn to a funeral.
New York a bouillon, eroded filigree.
Anything but illness, I beg the plagues,
but shiny crows or nuclear rain.
Not a drop in London May through June.
I bask in the wilt by golden hour light.
Lately, only lately, it is late. Tucking
our families into the safeties of the past.
My children, will they exist by the time
it’s irreversible? Will they live
astonished at the thought of ice
not pulled from the mouth of a machine?
Which parent will be the one to break
the myth; the Arctic wasn’t Sisyphus’s
snowy hill. Noah’s wife, I am wringing
my hands not knowing how to know
and move forward. Was it you
who gathered flowers once the earth
had dried? How did you explain the light
to all the animals?

(Maya C. Popa [source])

…and:

Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why to we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves…

We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

(Milan Kundera [source: here and here])

…and:

The Tent

When did hordes of sentences start beginning with So?
As if everything were always pending,
leaning on what came before.
What can you expect?
Loneliness everywhere, entertained or kept in storage.
So you felt anxious to be alone.
Easier to hear, explore a city, room,
mound of hours, no one walking beside you.
Talking to self endlessly, but mostly listening.
This would not be strange.
It would be the tent you slept in.
Waking calmly inside whatever
you had to do would be freedom.
It would be your country.
The men in front of me had whole acres
in their eyes. I could feel them cross, recross each day.
Memory, stitched. History, soothed.
What we do or might prefer to do. Have done.
How we got here. Telling ourselves a story
till it’s compact enough to bear.
Passing the walls, wearing the sky,
the slight bow and rising of trees.
Everything ceaselessly holding us close.
So we are accompanied.
Never cast out without a line of language to reel us back.
That is what happened, how I got here.
So maybe. One way anyway.
A story was sewn, seed sown,
this was what patriotism meant to me—
to be at home inside my own head long enough
to accept its infinite freedom
and move forward anywhere, to mysteries coming.
Even at night in a desert, temperatures plummet,
billowing tent flaps murmur to one other.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

Share

Potpourri: June 18 (2025 Edition)

by Leave a Comment

[I don’t know why I’ve had The Moody Blues playing through my head so much recently. But part of the appeal of these annual posts is that I don’t work too hard to figure out why, exactly, I’m writing about topics X, Y, or Z… About the album from which these three songs come, see the note, below]

Welcome to this year’s incarnation of the “Potpourri” series. Per usual, don’t expect cosmic insights into, well, anything. What follows will just be a partial brain dump — the results of my reaching into my head, grasping a handful of topics, and then opening my fist for your inspection.

I was thinking when I woke up today of a “listicle” of sorts: a list, with a bit of discussion, of N items along a common theme. In this case, it’d be a list of quinquennial memories — not necessarily memories of a specific day of the year, just of particular ages. Like this:

  • Age 5 (kindergarten, looking something as I did in that photo to the right): I vaguely remember crying on my first day, probably at the shock of being left to fend for myself. Which made sense, in retrospect: my two sisters were still at home, not yet in school, and my brother was still on the way, so to speak. (He’d be born about six-seven weeks later.) [Aside: you can see all four of us “kids” in this very recent photo.]
  • Age 10 (fifth grade): My fifth-grade teacher was at the school for only a year. (What I myself remember of him personally was centered on the frequent globs of blood-dotted tissue paper seemingly glued to his chin and cheeks.) At the end of fifth grade, I had about two weeks of freedom before going off to Boy Scout camp for the first time — and nearly drowning in the process.
  • Age 15 (sophomore, high school): Who was my homeroom teacher? Who, my English teacher? (My Latin teacher, oh yeah: him, I remember.) What did I write? What did I do?
  • Age 20 (sophomore, junior college): I was lucky that year to be in college at all, and very lucky to be at the junior college in question. But I didn’t know about my luck before I set foot in the door; it took a handful of profoundly influential professors to make it plain to me.
  • Age 25: Setting forth, alone, on an extremely rocky period of life for me. Lots of romantic and occupational confusion and upheaval.
  • Age 30: Finally on the brink of settling down… starting my real career, marrying a just-right woman… unfortunately oblivious to the prospect of future turmoil! (That just-right woman, you see, had married me.)
  • Age 35: [The future turmoil arrives, and lingers for a sad while.]
  • Age 40: Deep into the online world. My first book, and other writing excitement (including my first experiences with a fictional alter ego). My first home outside of NJ.
  • Age 45+: Everything else.

I dunno. Looks kinda… well, kinda thin and wispy for a personal history, doesn’t it?

One of the things that’s been most important to me in the last year: finishing another damned novel (by way of the Substack platform, more or less one chapter every week). [Note] Well, I say “finishing,” but what I really mean is finishing the first draft. I don’t want to belabor the point, but keying in the words “The End” felt major.

Among the many interesting side trips I took along the way: dipping a toe into the use of AI image-generating tools to create images with which to illustrate most chapters. I’d never, never, never do so for a “real” book, insisting instead on paying a real artist… On the other hand, I’m in no position to pay a real artist to do so… and on yet another hand, I really wanted to head each post in the 23kpc series with some kind of visual embellishment…

Anyway, I experimented with a few such tools. The one I came to rely on the most, once I got the hang of using them at all, was the Microsoft Bing Image Creator (itself based on the DALL-E 3 image-generation software). Bing, of course (?), is Microsoft’s answer to Google Search… which means that it seemed — to me, anyhow — more adept than other platforms at interpreting what I meant: it had the English-language smarts of a search engine.

There at the left, you see Bing’s first image from the prompt — just now — saying, “a writer finishes a novel.” Most of its defaults with a very simple prompt like this center around photo-realistic, literal-minded interpretations of the input; if you want to get fancier, you’ve got to provide more guidance.

For instance, as I expanded the prompt at the right: “a science-fiction writer finishes a novel while riding a subway.” As with every prompt at Bing, it coughed up four alternative interpretations, varying details in the setting, depictions of people (if any), and so on. Of the four it offered me this go-round, the other three all featured a partially robotic writer, which is weird, but okay… The subway looked pretty good in all four, but this was the only one in which the writer appeared to be, well, writing; in the others, the writer was reading. So right away we have an anomaly of language: I didn’t specify that the writer was finishing the task of writing a novel.

One more go-round, with this prompt: “a science-fiction author finishes writing a novel while riding a subway. sepia photograph, 1930s-style.” Those sorts of details (the medium, the style, and so on) are the ones I commonly added to get the right “feel” for a book the tone of which was modeled on the films inspired by Dashiell Hammet’s The Thin Man:

The one at the left has nothing science-fictiony about it, but it’s the right “feel.” The missing element, Bing seemed to feel for options 2 and 3, could be provided by garbing the writer in a gas mask. But then it’s like a light bulb went on in the AI’s head: No! Wait — I know — put one of the writer’s fellow passengers in a steam-punkish sort of space suit…! (I’m actually not sure if the “writer” here is the apparent subject — the Amish-bearded guy in the foreground — or the space-suited character, who seems to be clutching a laptop on their knees.)

And that seems to be it for 2025, I think. See you in a year (and, gods willing, many times over in between) — thank you as always for stopping by!

Note: about the Moody Blues album, On the Threshold of a Dream…

From Wikipedia:

[Producer Tony] Clarke adds, “This album set the standard for how we recorded future concept albums. It’s quite important in so many ways. It was the first time we had true freedom in the studio. This was our first chance at being left alone — no men in white coats or people with clipboards. It’s still quite lovely. I’m proud of a great deal of it. All in all, I’m glad we did it.”

(But be sure to see, too, the whole section of the article about the album’s songwriting process.)

This selection offers a fairly representative sample of the “Moodies” style — which, as I once summarized to my brother, is a sort of blend of pretentious and portentous: soaring instrumentation, and lyrics which seem to but ultimately don’t hold up under too-close inspection. Of course, for the time, this wasn’t all that uncommon, but I always thought the Moody Blues had developed the style to an especially florid level.

…and, as for these specific three songs:

“Have You Heard” dates from at least 1966, when an early version appeared in the band’s live set. Its lyrics repeat the album’s theme of enlightenment. The song bookends “The Voyage”, an instrumental piece that builds with Mellotron-produced orchestral strings and reaches a crescendo with a repeated melody on piano before cellos lead a transition back to a reprise of “Have You Heard”. [Engineer Derek] Varnals remembers the introductory section of “The Voyage” being influenced by Also sprach Zarathustra, having been used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was released several months before the album’s sessions. The track took three days to record, with Mike Pinder largely working alone on Mellotron, with overdubbed cellos, piano and other instruments played by the group.

At the end of the “Have You Heard” reprise, the album concludes with the droning electronic sound that opens the album. Produced by Mellotron, the sound plays continuously into the album’s run-out groove, causing it to play continuously until the record player’s tonearm is lifted.

Sui generis, the Moody Blues.

[back to top]

Share

Dancing a Gingerly Two-Step along an Uncertain Border

by Leave a Comment

[Cartoon (spotted on Instagram) by the artist known as worry__lines.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (first paragraph):

I’ve been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech – if not all human speech – is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breathe in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder – they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we’re breathing in. The problem is, that when we’re breathing in, we can’t speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.

The minute we start breathing out, we can talk; speech is made with the outgoing, exhaled breath. The problem that this poses, though, is that as we exhale, nutrients are leaving our bodies; our bones get softer, our muscles get flaccid, our skin starts to loosen. You could think of that as the dying breath. So as we breath out, we have less and less presence.

When we make verbal meaning, we use the dying breath. In fact, the more I say, the more my meaning is disclosed. Meaning grows in opposite ratio to presence or vitality. That’s a weird thing. I don’t know why God made us that way.

It’s a kind of paradigm for life, right? As we die, the meaning of our life gets disclosed. Maybe the paradigm for living is encoded or embedded in speech itself, and every time we speak we’re enacting on a small-scale, microcosmic level the bigger scale of our lives. So that the less vitality we have, the more the meaning of our lives get disclosed.

(Li-Young Lee [source])

…and (highlighted portion):

The Impossible Dream

In Delaware a Congressman
accused of sexual misconduct
says clearly at the press conference,
speaking
right into the microphone
that he would like very much
to do it again.

It was on the radio
and Carla laughed
as she painted, Die, You Pig
in red nail polish
on the back of a turtle
she plans to turn loose tomorrow
in Jerry’s backyard.

We lived near the high school that year
and in the afternoons, in autumn,
we could hear the marching-band rehearsals
from the stadium:
off-key trumpets, carried by the wind,
drums and weirdly smeared trombones:

a ragged ‘Louie Louie’
or sometimes, ‘The Impossible Dream’.

I was reading a book about pleasure,
how you have to glide through it
without clinging,

like an arrow
passing through a target,
coming out the other side and going on.

Sitting at the picnic table
carved with the initials of the previous tenants;
thin October sunlight
blessing the pale grass —
you would have thought we had it all —

But the turtle in Carla’s hand
churned its odd stiff legs like oars,
as if it wasn’t made for holding still,

and the high-school band played
worse than ever for a moment
— as if getting the song right
was the impossible dream.

(Tony Hoagland [source])

From elsewhere:

The Weight of Sweetness

No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.

Song, wisdom, sadness, joy: sweetness
equals three of any of these gravities.

See a peach bend
the branch and strain the stem until
it snaps.
Hold the peach, try the weight, sweetness
and death so round and snug
in your palm.
And, so, there is
the weight of memory:

Windblown, a rain-soaked
bough shakes, showering
the man and the boy.
They shiver in delight,
and the father lifts from his son’s cheek
one green leaf
fallen like a kiss.

The good boy hugs a bag of peaches
his father has entrusted
to him.
Now he follows
his father, who carries a bagful in each arm.
See the look on the boy’s face
as his father moves
faster and farther ahead, while his own steps
flag, and his arms grow weak, as he labors
under the weight
of peaches.

(Li-Young Lee [source])

…and:

Our bodies are shot with mortality. Our legs are fear and our arms are time. These chill humors seep through our capillaries, weighting each cell with an icy dab of nonbeing, and that dab grows and swells and sucks the cell dry. That is why physical courage is so important—it fills, as it were, the holes—and why it is so invigorating. The least brave act, chance taken and passage won, makes you feel loud as a child.

But it gets harder. The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence. We let our bodies go the way of our fears. A teenaged boy, king of the world, will spend weeks in front of a mirror perfecting some difficult trick with a lighter, a muscle, a tennis ball, a coin. Why do we lose interest in physical mastery? If I feel like turning cartwheels—and I do—why don’t I learn to turn cartwheels, instead of regretting that I never learned as a child? We could all be aerialists like squirrels, divers like seals; we could be purely patient, perfectly fleet, walking on our hands even, if our living or stature required it. We can’t even sit straight, or support our weary heads.

When we lose our innocence—when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there’s death in the pot—we take leave of our senses. Only children can hear the song of the male house mouse. Only children keep their eyes open.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

I like the American-Canadian border, ’cause if you’re walking on the border with a friend, and you push your friend into Canada, he can’t push you back right away, ’cause first he has to go through customs. “What brings you to Canada?” [Points to the side] “That asshole.” “When are you leaving?” “As soon as I regain my equilibrium!”

(Mitch Hedberg [source])

Share

In the Midst of The Static, One (Possible) Voice

by Leave a Comment

[Image: “The Heartbeat of a Typophile,” an interpretation of a heartbeat, created by displaying the title phrase as it appears using a font called “FR Pasta Mono.” The font is the creation of a type designer named Béla Frank; I found this “cardiographic” illustration posted (under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) on Flickr, in the photostream of a user there identified as arnoKath.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Many a time have I merely closed my eyes at the end of yet another troublesome day and soaked my bruised psyche in wild water, rivers remembered and rivers imagined. Rivers course through my dreams, rivers cold and fast, rivers well-known and rivers nameless, rivers that seem like ribbons of blue water twisting through wide valleys, narrow rivers folded in layers of darkening shadows, rivers that have eroded down deep into the mountain’s belly, sculpted the land, peeled back the planet’s history exposing the texture of time itself.

(Harry Middleton [source])

…and:

Fall In

Write without reason.
Go too far. Fall in, fall in.
Say I am here, my palms are open
even though you are lost and don’t know
who you are.

(Laurie Doctor [source])

…and:

Egocentricity, the illusion of separateness, requires constant maintenance. What maintains it is that endless buzz-buzz-buzz in our minds, telling us who we are, who they are, what we are doing, what is important, where we are going next – creating that subject-object relationship in every split second. The continual brainwashing that maintains our identity is like a tape loop.

Every time we pay attention, every time we are present, it is like cutting through that tape. Of course, the tape is instantly spliced back together again, so in the beginning there can be these little snips and then these quick repairs, and you can’t really tell any damage was done. But when you start paying attention more, the snips are more frequent. Then egocentricity gets in a real bind, because if we continue to pay attention, we are going to see how it all works, how the illusion is created.

The first thing we see is how most of what goes on in our minds is nonsense. Here we are, trying to think deep and yet lofty thoughts, but in fact it’s mostly gobbledygook.

Egocentricity continues to play those tapes that maintain our conditioning. But once you see what is happening, the power of it falls away. And you begin to change; you are not able to hold the identity together in the same way.

Ego’s only hope of maintaining the illusion of separateness is to get you to quit paying attention to what goes on in your mind.

(Cheri Huber, Trying to be Human [source])

From elsewhere:

…and:

I have seen the souls of the dead, traveling in a branching river; they look very much like white blood cells, a pale doughnut-like shape, I cannot tell whether there is anything in the centers, or whether the centers are empty. When one of them comes to a fork in the river, it need not go either one way or the other; it may go both ways. It is able to do this because souls are not bound by time in the same way that living bodies are, so that it is able to exist in what we would understand as two places at once. Also it can move either backward or forward in time, in addition to what we might call this sideways motion, this ability to exist simultaneously in different spaces. Some souls are interested in our world and try to speak to us, but it is really very difficult for them to have much effect, not having bodies of their own, and some of them go around looking for people to talk to, but there are so few of us who can hear them. The recently dead are remembered by the living and so they can speak to them for a while, these people are receptive, but those who are long dead have a much smaller chance of finding anyone and they become fuzzy, their particular features are worn away as they go tumbling along in the great river. They glow, they wait for us, but we cannot find them. Sometimes you will hear one calling from very far away, very faint waves or pulses like a radio broadcast from a planet in another galaxy, scattered signals that are almost impossible to distinguish from the static, which is made up of meaningless bits and pieces of other voices that have broken down over the great distance into a kind of dust. But in the midst of this static you will think you can identify one voice, sentences that you can almost piece together, as an archaeologist can construct an entire body from a few splinters of bone; but of course sometimes you will get it wrong, and this is a great tragedy, both for you and for the soul who is trying to communicate with you. I am talking to you… Be careful. Can you understand what I’m saying?

(Kirsten Bakis [source])

…and:

Praisesong

At the coffee shop you love,
white mugs heavy on the table
between us, young baristas—
spiky haired and impatient—
cannot imagine how two people
so old to them can feel so wanton,
coffee growing cold between us,
middle-aged bodies growing hot
under the other’s gaze. Even now,
apart, you send me songs so I may
listen to love from the golden throat
of a saxophone, piano keys playing
jazz across my soft belly.
How is it the tide of terror
has quit rising in me, or rises
and recedes as tides do, bringing
sea glass worked smooth
and lovely by the sheer fact
of time, bringing trash—
plastic mesh and old sneakers—
useless things now we might
bag up and remove, bringing
a lapping tongue of water up
over our toes as we hold hands
and walk along its edge—
carefully, gleefully, both.

(Sarah Browning [source])

Share

Pausing Each Day at the Gateless Gate… Then Stepping Through

by Leave a Comment

[Image: “Tallulah Falls” (1841), by George Cooke. Why this? See the excerpt from Alan Lightman’s essay, below.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

To Waiting

You spend so much of your time
expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself

with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left alone for long

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

Wonder begins with the element of surprise. The now almost obsolete word “wonderstruck” suggests that wonder breaks into consciousness with a dramatic suddenness that produces amazement or astonishment. We can no more create a state of wonderment than we can plan a surprise for ourselves. Consider, for example, how strange it would be to say, “I’m going out for a walk and wonder at the dogwoods in bloom.” It may, indeed, happen that the dogwoods will evoke wonder, but we cannot be assured of it prior to the experience.

Because of the suddenness with which it appears, wonder reduces us momentarily to silence. We associate gaping, breathlessness, bewilderment, and even stupor with wonder, because it jolts us out of the world of common sense in which our language is at home. The language and categories we customarily use to deal with experience are inadequate to the encounter, and hence we are initially immobilized and dumbfounded. We are silent before some new dimension of meaning which is being revealed.

(Sam Keen [source])

…and:

This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.

To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.

(Terry Tempest Williams [source])

…and:

Anyone can see that if grasping and aversion were with us all day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand them? Under that condition, living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness, and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us. We have periods of rest making us refreshed, alive, well. Why don’t we feel thankful for this everyday Nirvana?

We already know how to let go—we do it every night when we go to sleep, and that letting go, like a good night’s sleep, is delicious. Opening in this way, we can live in the reality of our wholeness. A little letting go brings us a little peace, a greater letting go brings us a greater peace. Entering the gateless gate, we begin to treasure the moments of wholeness. We begin to trust the natural rhythm of the world, just as we trust our own sleep and how our own breath breathes itself.

(Jack Kornfield [source])

From elsewhere:

Wonders

In a wide hoop of lamplight, two children—
a girl and her younger brother—jump marbles
on a star-shaped playboard. Beside them,
in a chair near a window, their father
thinks of his mother, her recent death

and the grief he is trying to gather.
It is late October. The hooplight spreads
from the family, through the window,
to the edge of a small orchard, where
a sudden frost has stripped the fruit leaves
and only apples hang, heavy and still
on the branches.

The man looks from the window, down
to a scrapbook of facts he is reading.
The spider is proven to have memory, he says,
and his son, once again, cocks his small face
to the side, speaks a guttural oh, as if
this is some riddle he is slowly approaching,
as if this long hour, troubled with phrases
and the queer turn in his father’s voice,
is offered as a riddle.

There is the sound of marbles
in their suck-hole journeys, and the skittery
jump of the girl’s shoe
as she waits, embarrassed, for her father
to stop, to return to his known self, thick
and consistent as a family bread.
But still he continues,

plucking scraps from his old book, old
diary of wonders: the vanishing borders
of mourning paper, the ghostly shape
in the candled egg, beak and eye
etched clearly, a pin-scratch of claw.

A little sleet scrapes at the window.
The man blinks, sees his hand on the page
as a boy’s hand, sees his children bent over
the playboard, with the careful pattern
of their lives dropping softly away, like
leaves in a sudden frost—how the marbles
have stalled, heavy and still on their fingers,
and after each phrase the guttural
oh, and the left shoe jumping.

(Linda Bierds [source])

…and:

…many had a lingering feeling that human beings were somehow separated from the rest of nature. Such a view is nowhere better illustrated than in the painting Tallulah Falls (1841) by American painter George Cooke, an artist associated with the Hudson River School. Although this group of artists celebrated nature, they also believed that human beings were set apart from the natural world. Cooke’s painting depicts tiny human figures standing on a small promontory above a deep canyon. The people are dwarfed by tree-covered mountains, massive rocky ledges, and a waterfall pouring down to the canyon below. Not only insignificant in size compared with their surroundings, the human beings are mere witnesses to a scene they are not part of and never could be.

(Alan Lightman [source])

[back to top]

Share

When I Walked onto the Strand, I Recognized Nothing

by Leave a Comment

[Image: “The Strand at Carmel-by-the-Sea,” 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 third stanza included there; this is the complete poem):

On Living

I

Living is no laughing matter:
        you must live with great seriousness
                like a squirrel, for example—
        I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
                I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
        you must take it seriously,
        so much so and to such a degree
      that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                                your back to the wall,
        or else in a laboratory
                in your white coat and safety glasses,
                you can die for people—
             even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
             even though you know living
                is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
        I mean, you must take living so seriously
             that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—
             and not for your children, either,
             but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
             because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let’s say you’re seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get
    from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
    about going a little too soon,
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we’ll look out the window to see it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously
    for the latest newscast…
Let’s say we’re at the front—
  for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
  we might fall on our face, dead.
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
    but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
    about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say, 
   before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
      I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
    we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
               and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
  I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even 
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
  in pitch-black space… 
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
                               if you’re going to say “I lived”…

(Nâzim Hikmet, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk [source])

…and (in slightly different form):

Our purpose is to consciously, deliberately evolve toward a wiser, more liberated and luminous state of being, to return to Eden, make friends with the snake, and set up our computers among the wild apple trees.

Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution—a melding into the godhead, into love—is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force be-cause to admit it is to acknowledge that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial. Our mission is to jettison those pointless preoccupations and take on once again the primordial cargo of inexhaustible ecstasy. Or, barring that, to turn out a good thin-crust pizza and a strong glass of beer.

(Tom Robbins [source])

From elsewhere:

The history of science can, in fact, be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once accepted as “givens” as phenomena that can now be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All of these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been fixed at the beginning of time or the result of random events thereafter, have ultimately been explained as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature—laws found by us human beings.

(Alan Lightman [source])

…and:

The Doctor Sighs

as he removes the otoscope
It’s not just the hammer,

anvil, and stirrup, he says.
It’s the blacksmith, too.
And the dry goods store
with the weaselly clerk,
not to mention the saloon
rife with cowboys and
a prostitute with humble
cleavage. And I’m afraid
it’s also the calibrated hearts
in that freezing ten-room
hotel, the mayor’s daughter
weeping into well water,
the moon spreading its
anxious light over everything

In short, Ronald, I’m not
surprised you called
for an appointment today.

(Ron Koertge [source])

…and:

# 28 (“I See What You Did There”): The history of art and philosophy can, in fact, be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that have never been accepted as “givens” as real phenomena that cannot be understood entirely, if at all, in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the inadequately explained: the circular shape of the sky, the six-sided patterns of planets, the hue of the wake of a bustard moving through a lake, the angle of snowflakes, the temperature of a flying boat, the orbits of water, the size of raindrops, the boiling weight of the sun. None of these phenomena, and many more, are explicable as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature–laws found by us human beings. But there they are: comprehensible, apparently meaningful, even profound, but defying explanation.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

…and:

The human body is the most resistant thing there is to magic, ’cause it’s a vessel of will.

(T.L. Huchu [source])

Share

Both of These Things Can Be True (But One May Be Truer)

by 2 Comments

[Image: “New York shops don’t try to mislead you,” by Ed Yourdon. (Found it on Flickr, where it was shared under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) I recognized the photographer‘s name immediately: he was a very influential tech guy back in the 1970s, when I started working in software development. I had no idea he was also a prolific photographer… but, well, I guess both of those things could be true, eh?]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (in slightly different form; below is the original):

Man becomes a historical animal preoccupied with the past and the future, and here we encounter the strangest of paradoxes… The historical idea of self, the ego, requires a constant re-living of memories in order to sustain a continuity of its own. It is only aware of itself as a repeatedly up-dated autobiography. The ego does not actually exist — it is an illusion of continuity…

So the conventional ego, the false passport, is built up from an edited picture album of our past. That version often seems more real than we are in the present moment. That is because here/now we are in constant flux and flow, but what we have been is nicely and securely fixed. The false identity is frozen throughout time, a final static noun. And just because it is unchanging we become more clearly identified with that identity card than we do with the real living, moment-to-moment entity.

In order to support the new false self we have to become more and more identified with the past, with old knowledge and a fixed belief system which continue to bolster up our historical selves. And we forget there was ever anything else.

(Yatri [source])

…and:

Every time a thought is born, you are born. When the thought is gone, you are gone. But the ‘you’ does not let the thought go, and what gives continuity to this ‘you’ is thinking. Actually there’s no permanent entity in you, no totality of all your thoughts and experiences. You think that there is ‘somebody’ who is feeling your feelings – that’s the illusion. I can say it is an illusion but it is not an illusion to you.

(U.G. Krishnamurti [source])

…and:

we must

we must bring
our own light
to the
darkness.

nobody is going
to do it
for us.

as the young boys
ski
down the slopes

as the fry cook
gets his last
paycheck

as dog chases
dog

as the chessmaster
loses more than
the game

we must bring
our own light
to the
darkness.

nobody is going
to do it for us,

as the lonely
telephone
anybody
anywhere

as the great beast
trembles
in nightmare

as the final season
leaps into
focus

nobody is going
to do it
for us.

(Charles Bukowski [source])

From elsewhere:

This incapacity to die, ironically but inevitably, throws mankind out of the actuality of living, which for all normal animals is at the same time dying; the result is denial of life (repression). The incapacity to accept death turns the death instinct into its distinctively human and distinctively morbid form. The distraction of human life to the war against death, by the same inevitable irony, results in death’s dominion over life.

(Norman O. Brown [source])

…and:

“There’s a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight,” answered [Father Brown]. “What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the opposite way. It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right end.”

(G.K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

Yes No Days

Every day he thought before he went outside.
If it was a yes day things would be
as they seemed. So everything comes true.
His face a lonely moon in the window, his
house resting on a quiet spine. It took
courage to step from a warm house
on a no day. The world might swing wrong,
and yes, a no day could become
a yes day, and vice versa. There were days
like windows facing out and faces wanting
back in. “Isn’t the sky nice?” he hears
his mother say, so he lets go
of the cat who is right on the brink
of telling all she knows.

(Ralph Burns [source])

…and:

I was intrigued by the fact that even though I had learned that gravity pulls us toward the earth as we orbit the sun—and that there is no real “up” and “down”—my feeling of being down on the ground below the sky had remained unchanged. To shift my perspective, I would sometimes lie outside with my arms and legs outstretched and take in as much of the sky and horizon as possible. Attempting to break free of the familiar feeling of being down here with the moon and stars above me, I would relax all my muscles—surrendering to the force holding me tightly to the surface of our planet—and focus on the truth of my situation: I’m floating around the universe on this giant sphere—suspended here by gravity and going for a ride. Lying there, I could sense that I was in fact looking out at the sky, rather than up. The delight I experienced came from temporarily silencing a false intuition and glimpsing a deeper truth: being on the earth doesn’t separate us from the rest of the universe; indeed, we are and have always been in outer space.

(Annaka Harris [source])

…and:

Happiness

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine

(Jane Kenyon [source])

Share
Verified by MonsterInsights