Bobby McFerrin is brilliant. (And so are his audiences. It’s just that he’s the one onstage.)
[Hat tip to Janet Reid.]
Have I Forgotten to Remember to Answer the Right Question?
[Found this image here.]
From whiskey river (highlighted portion):
The Difficult Simplicity of Certain Contemplations
Tapping a tarot card with her dusky finger,
the woman tells me
sit with your emptiness,
in time answers will come.
She says I know them all and only must remember.My friend tells me I must decide what is enough,
then live with it.Even my shiny-suited banker waxes wise, asks me
if I think rich people are happier than I.But always there’s the knowledge
of how all this will end.In between
we try to love a life that’s like a man who can’t commit–
a little restless, always vague
when someone asks when are you going to. . . ,a life that’s like the ragged, feral cat
mewling at the door,
insinuating with its cheek and hunger.
We give it mercy or rough blame.I’ll tell you what love of this life is. It’s looking up
through trees newly bare of leaves
and seeing there the oldest road,
a broken line of white stars
stretching out across the sky.It’s thinking,
this could almost be enough.
(Susan Elbe [source])
Finding the Life You Want in the Life You’ve Got
[“Crossroads,” by Hungarian artist István Orosz. For more about this image, see the Note at the bottom of this post.]
From whiskey river:
A Note
Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;to be a dog
or stroke its warm fur;to tell pain
from everything it’s not;to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;and to keep on not knowing
something important.
(Wislawa Szymborska [source])
…and:
I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality, and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.
(Marilynne Robinson, Gilead [source])
Lost in the Trees
[Image from Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. Today seems like a good day to open with this, since it marks the official release of Spike Jonze’s film version.]
From whiskey river:
Threat
You can live for years next door
to a big pine tree, honored to have
so venerable a neighbor, even
when it sheds needles all over your flowers
or wakes you, dropping big cones
onto your deck at still of night.
Only when, before dawn one year
at the vernal equinox, the wind
rises and rises, raising images
of cockleshell boats tossed among huge
advancing walls of waves,
do you become aware that always,
under respect, under your faith
in the pine tree’s beauty, there lies
the fear it will crash someday
down on your house, on you in your bed,
on the fragility of the safe
dailiness you have almost
grown used to.
(Denise Levertov [source])
Off Balance
[Image by Jan Piller at redbubble.com. Click the image for the original/to purchase.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Taking a walk with you
lacking the wit and depth
that inform our dreams’
bright landscapes,
this countryside
through which we walk
is no less beautiful for being only what it seems.
rising from the dyed
pool of its shade,
the tree we lean against
was never made to stand
for something else,
let alone ourselves.
nor were these fields
and gullies planned
with us in mind.
we live unsettled lives
and stay in a place
only long enough to find
we don’t belong.
even the clouds, forming
noiselessly overhead,
are cloudy without
resembling us, and, storming
the vacant air,
don’t take into account
our present loneliness.
and yet, why should we care?
already we are walking off
as if to say,
we are not here,
we’ve always been away.
(Mark Strand [source])
…and:
Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, vertigo is something other than 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.
(Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being [source])
So Deep a Sound in Autumn
[Image: “Autumn Grasses,” a two-panel folding screen by 19th-century
Japanese artist Shibata Zeshin. Click image for more information.]
From whiskey river (which has been on a William Stafford binge for a few weeks, not that you’ll find me complaining):
Assurance
You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.
(William Stafford [source])
Travels
From whiskey river:
The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes
among
things that change. But it doesn’t
change.
People wonder about what you are
pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s
unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
(William Stafford [source])
…and:
May your trails be crooked, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds, may your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
(Edward Abbey, “A Prayer for the Traveler” [apparently not a title Abbey himself used: source])
On the Inside, Looking In
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Messenger
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.
(Mary Oliver [source])
Thinking Good
[Caption: “I want you to start thinking good thoughts about someone new at our house. I want you to start thinking good thoughts about a pussy cat.” Cartoon by George Booth, from his 1975 collection, Think Good Thoughts About a Pussy Cat.]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
Sojourns in the Parallel World
We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension — though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal — then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
— but we have changed, a little.
(Denise Levertov [source])
…and:
Things to Think
Think in ways you’ve never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
(Robert Bly [source])
Hauntings
From whiskey river (first stanza):
Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies
Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripèd bag,
or a jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion
With fleas that one never knew were there,
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,
Trekking off into the living world.
You fetch a shoe-box, but it’s much too small, because she won’t
curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.But you do not wake up a month from then, two months,
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh,
God! Oh, God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters, —
mothers and fathers don’t die.And if you have said, “For heaven’s sake, must you always be
kissing a person?”
Or, “I do wish to gracious you’d stop tapping on the window
with your thimble!”
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you’re busy
having fun,
Is plenty of time to say, “I’m sorry, mother.”To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,
who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries;
they are not tempted.
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;
They are not taken in.
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake
them and yell at them;
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide
back into their chairs.Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house.
(Edna St. Vincent Millay)
…and:
How I Became a Ghost
It was all about objects, their objections
expressed through a certain solidity.My house for example still moves
through me, moves me.
When I tried to reverse the process
I kept dropping things, kept finding myself
in the basement.Windows became more than
usually problematic.
I wanted to break them
which didn’t work, though for awhileI had more success with the lake.
The phone worked for a long time
though when I answered
often nobody was there.Bats crashed into me at night,
but then didn’t anymore.The rings vanished from my hand,
the pond.I stopped feeling the wind.
One day the closets were empty.
Another day the mirrors were.
(Leslie Harrison [source])
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