Choosing Which Choice to Make

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[Image: “Why Choose When You Can Have Both?,” by Tom Waterhouse: one of my favorite photographers on Flickr. As always when I share one of them: thank you for the generous Creative Commons license!]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

This is how the technique works: faced with a problem, one doesn’t feebly sit back and wait for things to happen. Neither does one toss a coin, or consult an astrologer, and hope that the outcome will prove the right one. Not at all. The very definite action to be taken falls into four stages:

(i) See yourself to be the Ground or Bottom Line for the pros and cons of the problem to arise from — as many of them and in as much detail as may be. Encourage them to arrange themselves in all sorts of ways. Live with that display, brood on it, sleep on it, but don’t go hankering after a decision. As entertaining the problem in all its aspects, as the Screen for them to come and go on, as their Mirror, you remain neutral. Among the exhibits, however, you may well find, prominently featured, a dateline for the problem’s solution. Brood on that, too.

(ii) One morning on waking, or during the day when you are preoccupied with some chore, the completed pattern of things to come arrives, spontaneously and unannounced, from the Bottom Line. So inevitable it seems, so conclusively does it resolve your problem, that you are left in no doubt that here is the right decision, arrived at in the right way at the right time. It has been immaculately conceived in you and for you but not by you. Certainly not by you the human being. Accordingly, it arrives carrying the authority of its parentage, which is the real You, the Source, the World’s Beginning and the World’s End.

(iii) Now it is the turn of that decision itself, of that seemingly so right design, to go on display above your Bottom Line: and to reveal its limitations and weak spots. All manner of doubts and difficulties, and dilemmas about how to give effect to the decision, are now likely to appear. Again, you don’t solve them by choosing between possible alternatives. You stay with them till they, in turn, are ripe and ready to resolve themselves.

(iv) Finally, the plan is implemented. With interest, perhaps with awe, you watch it take shape. At no time do you feel that you are moulding or forging that shape. It forms in you as cloud-shapes form in the sky, or intricate patterns in a kaleidoscope.

Such, then, is the technique of No-choice, resulting in no stress of the superfluous and toxic sort. It works. It works creatively, coming up with unforced and unpredictable and truly inspired solutions that you couldn’t possibly take personal credit for. And it works like that because, to tell the truth, it is not a technique at all, not a useful dodge for relieving you of the pains of indecision, and certainly not a recipe for a quiet life at all costs. No: it works because it’s the way you are built, the way you function in any case, whether you realize it or not. All this choosing one thing in preference to another is illusory, a great cover-up. Separate individuals, as such, are powerless to make the slightest difference in a universe where every one of them is tightly controlled by the rest. Pretending otherwise, pretending that, as our sole selves, we exercise free will, is as absurd and dishonest as it is vainglorious — and stressful. Only the Source of all, under the sway of none, has free will; and only deeds which are seen to proceed from it, which are referred back to it, which are felt to be its own deeds — only these carry its marvellous smell, the smell of an originality and rightness which belongs solely to that Origin. To live the choiceless life that we have been describing is not fatalism. It is not giving up the struggle and accepting that one is a machine within a Machine. It is to identify with the Machine’s Inventor, to take one’s stand in Freedom itself. It is to be one’s Source, to choose what flows from it, and to perceive it as very good.

(Douglas (D.E.) Harding [source])

From elsewhere:

Dimity had once seen a picture of a real ocean when she went with Rowena to Commoner Town to pick up some imported fabric. It had been hanging on the fabric merchant’s wall, a picture of a sea on Sanctity. She remembered saying at the time how much the imaged expanse of water looked like grass. Someone had laughed at this, saying it was the grass that looked like water. How would one know which looked like which?

(Sherri Tepper [source])

…and:

Father Brown’s figure remained quite dark and still; but in that instant he had lost his head. His head was always most valuable when he had lost it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million… it was real inspiration—important as rare crises—when whosoever shall lose his head the same shall save it.

(G.K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

Say what you will about classical music, one thing it has going for it is that it lets your mind wander. Rock bands, blues bands—and yes, salsa bands too—they’re all intent on securing your undivided attention. That’s what the drums and amplifiers are there for. But classical musicians seem more willing to let you settle down, settle in, and follow your thoughts wheresoever they might lead you.

It’s a little like the wardrobe in that children’s book, the one where the plucky girl passes through the coats and finds herself in a whole new world. One moment you’re in Carnegie Hall listening to a sonata, and the next thing you know you’re wandering in a forest where the snow’s beginning to fall, and there in a little clearing surrounded by pines you come upon a lamppost.

Now, on the one hand you’re thinking: What the heck is a lamppost doing in the middle of a snowy wood? But on the other hand, it seems perfectly natural to find it there. There’s something so friendly and inviting about a lamppost that it’s a welcome addition wherever it happens to appear.

(Amor Towles [source])

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If You’ve Gotta Argue, Maybe Start with Yourself?

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[Image: “Jw Allosaurus meets Rl Allosaurus,” by a user on DeviantArt identified only as “Allosaurus28.” My understanding is that “Jw” represents the dinosaur as depicted in the Jurassic World film series; “Rl,” as it’s believed to have looked in real life (see Wikipedia for much more information).]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that – well, lucky you.

(Philip Roth [source])

…and:

It’s vital to remember who you really are. It’s very important. It isn’t a good idea to rely on other people to do it for you, you see. They always get it wrong.

(Terry Pratchett [source])

…and:

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

(Muriel Rukeyser [source: not canonical, but see here])

…and (in slightly different form):

The Argument Clinic

Man: Ah. I’d like to have an argument, please.

Receptionist: Certainly sir. Have you been here before?

Man: No, I haven’t, this is my first time.

Receptionist: I see. Well, do you want to have just one argument, or were you thinking of taking a course?

Man: Well, what’s the cost?

Receptionist: Well, it’s one pound for a five minute argument, but only eight pounds for a course of ten.

Man: Well, I think it would be best if I perhaps started with just the one and then see how it goes.

Receptionist: Fine. Well, I’ll see who’s free at the moment.

(Pause)

Receptionist: Mr. DeBakey’s free, but he’s a little bit conciliatory. Ah yes, try Mr. Barnard; room 12.

Man: Thank you.

(Walks down the hall, opens door)

Mr Barnard: WHAT DO YOU WANT?!

Man: Well, I was told outside that…

Mr Barnard: DON’T GIVE ME THAT, YOU SNOTTY-FACED HEAP OF PARROT DROPPINGS!

Man: What?

Mr Barnard: SHUT YOUR FESTERING GOB, YOU TIT! YOUR TYPE REALLY MAKES ME PUKE, YOU VACUOUS, COFFEE-NOSED, MALODOROUS PERVERT!

Man: Look, I CAME IN HERE FOR AN ARGUMENT, I’m not going to just stand…!!

Mr Barnard: OH, I’m sorry, but this is abuse.

Man: Oh, I see, well, that explains it…

(Monty Python [source, but see the note below])

From elsewhere:

When that mad medley of fun and fancy, of grossness and delicacy, “The Playboy of the Western World,” was put on the American stage, men laughed—generally at the wrong time—out of the hopeless confusion of their minds. The “Playboy” was admittedly an enigma. The night I saw it, the audience, under the impression that it was anti-Irish, or anti-Catholic, or anti-moral, or anti-something, they were not sure what, hurled denunciations and one missile—which looked strangely like a piece of pie—at the ?actors. It was a disgraceful scene, but not without its humorous side; for when the riotous interruptions had subsided, an elderly man arose, and, with the manner of an invited speaker at a public dinner, began, “From time immemorial”—But the house had grown tired of disturbances, and howled him down. He waited for silence, and then in the same composed and leisurely manner began again, “From time immemorial”—At this point one of the policemen who had been restoring order led him gently but forcibly out of the theatre; the play was resumed; and what it was that had happened from time immemorial we were destined never to know.

(Agnes Repplier [source])

…and:

We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

(H.L. Mencken [source])

…and:

The Eye

Said the Eye one day, “I see beyond these valleys a mountain veiled with blue mist. Is it not beautiful?”

The Ear listened, and after listening intently awhile, said, “But where is any mountain? I do not hear it.”

Then the Hand spoke and said, “I am trying in vain to feel it or touch it, and I can find no mountain.”

And the Nose said, “There is no mountain, I cannot smell it.”

Then the Eye turned the other way, and they all began to talk together about the Eye’s strange delusion. And they said, “Something must be the matter with the Eye.”

(Kahlil Gibran [source])

__________

Note: This isn’t an “official” source, but apparently a book generated from a fan site of all the scripts. From the short introduction:

…this is not intended as a replacement for the printed Python scripts, this is only intended as reference material for people wanting to look up a specific sketch, as I so often get emails from people asking about this sketch or that sketch … if you enjoy the Monty Python sketches, please buy the books “All the Words” (or “Just the Words”) volumes 1 and 2, the official script books that inspired this site. Okay?

[back]

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Lie Perfectly Still and Look Only Inward

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[Image: “The Moss Islands,” 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:

Wean Yourself

Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.

From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.

Think of how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, “The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheatfields and mountain passes,
and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.”

You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.
Listen to the answer.

There is no “other world,”
I only know what I’ve experienced.
You must be hallucinating.

(Jalaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks [source])

…and:

Do you think I know what I’m doing?
That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?
As much as a pen knows what it’s writing,
or a ball can guess where it’s going next.

(Jalaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks [source])

…and (second paragraph):

Red flag, red-light district, red-blooded, Red Cross, red herring, red-bait, red-eye, red man, red-hot, red-faced—these are all variations on a theme that goes far beyond the simple association of color and word. To make these images, we must pass the words through our own consciousness and particularity. And in this act of trying to know something else in its specificity, our own particularity is likewise revealed.

Some people fear seeing or feeling anything about which there is no general agreement. For others, it is thrilling to be aware of innuendo, shading, complexity. For those who do not wish to step away from consensus, the creative is useless at best; at worst, it is dangerous. But for those who are intrigued by the multiplicity of reality and the unique possibilities of their own vision, the creative is the path they must pursue.

(Deena Metzger [source])

From elsewhere:

It takes a while for our experience to sift through our consciousness. For instance, it is hard to write about being in love in the midst of a mad love affair. We have no perspective. All we can say is, “I’m madly in love,” over and over again. It is also hard to write about a city we just moved to; it’s not yet in our body. We don’t know our new home, even if we can drive to the drugstore without getting lost. We have not lived through three winters there or seen the ducks leave in fall and return to the lake in spring. Hemingway wrote about Michigan while sitting in a café in Paris. “Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough.”

Our senses by themselves are dumb. They take in experience, but they need the richness of sifting for a while through our consciousness and through or whole bodies. I call this “composting.” Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grounds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.

(Natalie Goldberg [source])

…and:

Filming the Doomsday Clock

We were told that the cloud cover was a blanket
about to settle into the shape of the present
which, if we wanted to imagine it
as a person, would undoubtedly look startled—
as after a verbal berating
or in advance of a light pistol-whipping.
The camera came and went, came and went,
like a masked man trying to light a too-damp fuse.
The crew was acting like a litter of mimics
trying to make a killing.
Anything to fill the vacuum of time.
The wind whirred and tracked the clouds.
The credits, we were told, would take the form
of a semi-scrawl, urban-sprawl, graffiti-style
typography. The soundtrack would include
instrumental versions of “Try a Little Tenderness.”
Our handler, who was walking backward
in order to maintain constant eye contact with us,
nearly stumbled over a girl in a sheath and pearls
who was misting a shelf of hothouse flowers.
While the two apologized to each other,
we stood and watched the fine spray settle
over the leaves and drip onto the floor.
On the way out, we passed a door
with a small window reinforced with wired glass
through which we could see a nurse
positioning a patient on a table. We swore
afterward we’d heard her say, “Lie perfectly still
and look only inward.” A clock chimed and
as the others were audibly counting backwards
from five to zero, I thought I heard someone say,
“Now let go of this morbid attachment to things.”

(Mary Jo Bang [source])

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The Blurry Line Where I Stop and Everything Else Continues

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[Image: “Focus Tracking,” 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:

What do people want? What are any of us actually, fundamentally, looking for in all the various things we are looking for? We all are, and yet we remain unconvinced that we are, or that we are enough. Regardless of how much we augment our being with our immense doing, in an effort to construct an abiding and secure identity, we remain unsure. Even the greatest of us know, in the middle of the night, when the moment is most tender, that we are all like clouds, like grass, springing up and dying back when winter comes. Somehow, despite all the various accomplishments, both inner and outer, of a lifetime, none of us can escape the fact that we are less and less day by day, as time runs on. Whether or not we think about this we all know it. The most basic fact of our lives — our very existence, our very sense of identity — is elusive, constantly sliding away.

It was the genius of the Buddha to pinpoint this abiding human problem and to apply gentle acupressure right at the heart of it. The Buddha felt that since what we hold to as identity, our fixed sense of being a person, is so unreliable (as we always knew, always feared), we should stop insisting on it with such shrillness. Rather than trying to avoid the reality of not being someone, Buddha thought that we should observe and embrace this fact. There is no real identity outside of flux, he taught. If we practice and train in this existential fact, which we verify with meditation experience, then we have nothing to fear. As we begin to warm up to life in this way, with openness to the endless change within and outside us, we come to see the effort to maintain a brittle sense of identity as cold, even frozen. We come to appreciate that the whole point of spiritual practice is to warm up, to become flexible with what we think we are and begin to release ourselves to our experience as it really is. This warmth melts the ice of identity and lets the waters of our lifetime flow.

(Zogetsu Norman Fischer [source: absolutely none that I’ve found… possibly a transcription from a video or other non-text source, but that’s unconfirmed])

…and (except for the fourth stanza):

And now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth.
Let’s not speak in any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their
brothers in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
(Life is what it is about,
I want no truck with death.)

If we were not so singleminded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve,
and you keep quiet and I will go.

(Pablo Neruda [source])

…and:

If there were just one gift I could give to you,
I would stand as a mirror to your life,
and you would see the way you’ve grown,
see the way you shine,
and see all the love that’s in your eyes.

(Ellen Stapenhorst,via Thomas F. Crum [source])

From elsewhere:

All around me people are going to work. They are opening shops and heading for metro stations. They move in formations, they take directions, they are pulled along, but I don’t feel that same pull, it is a cord I lack, this is something I am not a part of. I cannot catch hold. Either that or it is something that washes them along the streets, a current that carries them along, but this current cannot reach me. Or perhaps it is some inner mechanism. Something that steers their feet through the streets, an inner drive which I don’t possess, a spring that cannot be tightened, a mechanism that is missing. I don’t know whether they are being pulled, carried along by the current or whether inner mechanisms are propelling them along the streets, but I know that, whatever it is, it doesn’t work on me.

(Solvej Balle [source])

…and:

Everyone is vulnerable. For some people, for Steve, it comes out as fear, avoiding situations where the vulnerability is exposed. For others, for an awful lot of people these days, vulnerability comes out as anger, pushing away anything that feels like it might pierce their shell. Steve watches people on TV sometimes, shouting the odds about this, that, or the other, railing against the truth of reality, and he always sees the pain first. They have lost someone, or they never had someone, and so now they have lost themselves.

(Richard Osman [source — the full text of the book is not online, including at that link, but you can find this excerpt on Goodreads, here])

…and:

Sitting Outside

These lawn chairs and the chaise lounge
of bulky redwood were purchased for my father
twenty years ago, then plumped down in the yard
where he seldom went when he could still work
and never had stayed long. His left arm
in a sling, then lopped off, he smoked there or slept
while the weather lasted, watched what cars passed,
read stock reports, counted pills,
then dozed again. I didn’t go there
in those last weeks, sick of the delusions
they still maintained, their talk of plans
for some boat tour or a trip to the Bahamas
once he’d recovered. Under our willows,
this old set’s done well: we’ve sat with company,
read or taken notes—although the arm rests
get dry and splintery or wheels drop off
so the whole frame’s weakened if it’s hauled
across rough ground. Of course the trees,
too, may not last: leaves storm down,
branches crack off, the riddled bark
separates, then gets shed. I have a son, myself,
with things to be looked after. I sometimes think
since I’ve retired, sitting in the shade here
and feeling the winds shift, I must have been filled
with a child dread you could catch somebody’s dying
if you got too close. And you can’t be too sure.

(W.D. Snodgrass [source])

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The Stalk That I Call Me (This Quiet Day)

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[Image: “7:19 AM,” 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:

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])

…and:

The human mind has grown even since the time of the Buddha, 2,500 years ago. The human mind is more noisy and more all-pervasive, and the egos are bigger. There’s been an ego growth over thousands of years; it’s growing to a point of madness, with the ultimate madness having been reached in the twentieth century. One only needs to read twentieth-century history to see that it has been the climax of human madness, if it’s measured in terms of human violence inflicted on other humans.

So in the present time, we can’t escape from the world anymore; we can’t escape from the mind. We need to enter surrender while we are in the world. That seems to be the path that is effective in the world that we live in now. It may be that at the time of the Buddha, withdrawing was much, much easier than it would be now. The human mind was not yet so overwhelming at that time.

(Eckhart Tolle [source])

…and:

In his book On Having No Head, Douglas Harding pointed out that our actual experience of life is of being a stalk, the body, which ends at the chest and shoulders, upon which sits the entire universe. We can’t directly experience ourselves as having a head; we simply assume we are looking out through the eyes in our head because we see others doing that, and when we look in the mirror, that’s what we see. But our experience is of an undifferentiated world of colors, shapes, textures, sounds, feelings and sensations, all existing in one reality, roughly in the spot where we think of our head as being. All that exists, exists on top of the stalk that I call me.

The truly amazing next step in this realization is that the stalk I call me is included in the total existence that extends outward from the top of the stalk. My actual experience is that nothing is separate. I cannot say that any one thing is separate from any other one thing because they all occupy the same space — the space that exists, and contains, the stalk that I call me.

(Cheri Huber [source])

…and:

There are two kinds of people in this world; those who think there are two kinds of people and those who are smart enough to know better.

(Tom Robbins [source])

From elsewhere:

He didn’t doubt that I was telling the truth. He had spoken to me and had forgotten it. That was what scared him. It was one thing for me to have encountered a fracture in the normal progression of time, but the idea that he had played a part in my day and that he had had conversations and done things he could not remember obviously gave him the same feelings of faintness and unease which I had had when I saw that slice of bread drifting floorward. That strange moment when the ground under one’s feet falls away and all at once it feels as though all predictability can be suspended, as though an existential red alert has suddenly been triggered, a quiet state of panic which prompts neither flight nor cries for help, and does not call for police, fire brigade or ambulance. It is as if this emergency response mechanism is there on standby at the back of the mind, like an undertone, not normally audible, but kicking in the moment one is confronted with the unpredictability of life, the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility. That time stands still. That gravity is suspended. That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws.

(Solvej Balle [source])

…and:

What [an international team of consciousness researchers] did was simple and elegant. To test how different parts of the cortex were talking to each other, they stimulated activity in one location and recorded how this pulse of activity spread to other cortical regions over space and time. They did this by combining two techniques: EEG and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). A TMS rig is a precisely controlled electromagnet which allows a researcher to inject a short and sharp pulse of energy directly into the brain through the skull, while EEG in this case is used to record the brain’s response to this zapping. It’s like banging on the brain with an electrical hammer and listening to the echo.

(Anil Seth [source])

…and:

Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to. As you listen more and more to the teachings, contemplate them, and integrate them into your life, your inner voice, your innate wisdom of discernment, what we call in Buddhism “discriminating awareness,” is awakened and strengthened, and you begin to distinguish between its guidance and the various clamorous and enthralling voices of ego. The memory of your real nature, with all its splendor and confidence, begins to return to you.

You will find, in fact, that you have uncovered in yourself your own wise guide. Because he or she knows you through and through, since he or she is you, your guide can help you, with increasing clarity and humor, negotiate all the difficulties of your thoughts and emotions. Your guide can also be a continual, joyful, tender, sometimes teasing presence, who knows always what is best for you and will help you find more and more ways out of your obsession with your habitual responses and confused emotions. As the voice of your discriminating awareness grows stronger and clearer, you will start to distinguish between its truth and the various deceptions of the ego, and you will be able to listen to it with discernment and confidence.

(Sogyal Rinpoche [source])

…and:

Mind Wanting More

Only a beige slat of sun
above the horizon, like a shade
pulled not quite down. Otherwise,
clouds. Sea rippled here and
there. Birds reluctant to fly.
The mind wants a shaft of sun to
stir the grey porridge of clouds,
an osprey to stitch sea to sky
with its barred wings, some dramatic
music: a symphony, perhaps
a Chinese gong.

But the mind always
wants more than it has—
one more bright day of sun,
one more clear night in bed
with the moon; one more hour
to get the words right; one
more chance for the heart in hiding
to emerge from its thicket
in dried grasses—as if this quiet day
with its tentative light weren’t enough,
as if joy weren’t strewn all around.

(Holly Hughes [source])

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Why All This Music, This Astonishing World?

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[Image: “Sunset after Hurricane Ian, Jacksonville Beach, Florida,” 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:

Why All This Music?
(excerpt)

. . . It’s 1500
in the book of Chinese watercolors: scholar-artist T’ang Yin
is asleep inside his mountain cottage, dreaming that a self of him,
that looks like him, is floating in the air above
the highest peaks, that looks like air we’d have
if lakes of milk gave off a vapor.
. . . From the Everfloating Void
above our world, a human image slowly drifts back down
and joins its earthly body once again, reenters
days and nights of wine shop, scandal, lawyers
— for such (in part) is the life of T’ang Yin.
He’s been dreaming. And now he’s going to set it down
on a wafer of unrolled rice paper. Writing:
Rain on the river. That’s all. That’s his poem.
He’s writing:

Rain on the river.

(Albert Goldbarth [source; also see the note at the foot of this post])

…and:

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

(Wislawa Szymborska [source])

…and:

Solitude (I)

I was nearly killed here, one night in February.
My car shivered, and slewed sideways on the ice,
right across into the other lane. The slur of traffic
came at me with their lights.

My name, my girls, my job, all
slipped free and were left behind, smaller and smaller,
further and further away. I was a nobody:
a boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded.

The headlights of the oncoming cars
bore down on me as I wrestled the wheel through a slick
of terror, clear and slippery as egg-white.
The seconds grew and grew — making more room for me —
stretching huge as hospitals.

I almost felt that I could rest
and take a breath
before the crash.

Then something caught: some helpful sand
or a well-timed gust of wind. The car
snapped out of it, swinging back across the road.
A signpost shot up and cracked, with a sharp clang,
spinning away in the darkness.

And it was still. I sat back in my seat-belt
and watched someone tramp through the whirling snow
to see what was left of me.

(Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Robertson [source])

From elsewhere:

It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate. That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are… The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences. Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case. We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.

(Solvej Balle. translated by Barbara J. Haveland [source])

…and:

A Beautiful House with a Hot Tub and Pool

I miss my magnolias, miss my maples, think
Where did they go?, think, Oh yes, to the past,
that place where everything goes and can I visit?
No, but also Yes. And can I stay away? Also Yes,
but also No. And in the same way that languages
only get simpler, people only get sadder. Yesterday
at the dentist I thought Thank God for nitrous oxide
and I thought Thank God for Dr. Rachel drilling away
in my tooth but wanting nothing she does to hurt me.
I wish that were true all the time. That we all wanted
nothing we did to hurt anyone at all. My friend
with a beautiful house insists that we call his pet
a companion animal, which I don’t think changes
very much, but I want nothing that I do to hurt him,
so I call his dog a companion animal, and then
I think Is that what my trees were? Not really
my trees, but companion trees, offering me their flowers
and then their leaves, offering me their oxygen
in exchange for my carbon dioxide, not exactly grateful
for my copious applications of neem oil to kill
the parasites invading their branches but flourishing
in the absence of those pests, the flowers
and leaves all I really wanted in return. I miss
my companion trees, my flowering Jane,
my flowering Brown Beauty, my flowering Star,
my leafy red maples, scarlet and feathery
all summer. My friend’s companion animal is licking
my face and my friend asks Could you be content
anywhere? And I say Yes, I can be content anywhere,
but then I think Is that true? Of course it’s easy
to be content at my handsome friend’s beautiful house,
by his heated pool, in what might be a physical manifestation
of contentment if ever there was one. So I think it again
on the subway, think it again writing e-mails, think it again
making breakfast: Yes, I can be content anywhere,
but alas sadly: No. It’s not true. I can’t be content here
in my uncomfortable present, in my uncomfortable chair,
on the uncomfortable subway, at this uncomfortable desk,
in this uncomfortable classroom. But oddly, I am content
to visit the past, to say Hello everything I’ve lost,
to say I wish you could come here to the present,
my lost companion trees. I wish you could meet
everything I’ve found.

(Jason Schneiderman [source])

__________

About Albert Goldbarth’s “Why All This Music?”: the poem as it appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of The Georgia Review has this, um, sui generis subtitle:

Wherein Goldbarth, Badgered by The Georgia Review into Conducting a Version of an Interview, Sighs and Accepts a Few Queries from Poets in the Audience, on the Condition that These Questions Come from the Bodies of Their Poems, and the Answers (Such as They Are) Come from the Bodies of Goldbarth’s Poems (with a little verbal glue in non-poem form in italics)

The poem spans some 14 pages in that issue; in context, this excerpt apparently stands as Goldbarth’s hypothetical reply to a question from Walt Whitman (as it appeared in Leaves of Grass): “Who need be afraid of the merge?”

[back]

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No One Was Paying Attention to the Sky

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[Image: “Florida (July 2021),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (in somewhat different form):

Desire is never on the map

it’s that unnamed lake you found once, driving a gravel road, 
not where you thought you were going fast, window down,

hair loose to the dry wind, bare foot pressing metal, soft feathers 
of cottonwood drift through, maple seed spinning in its wild gyre.

Bugs spatter on the windshield in Rorschach  you want to read
like tea leaves, imagine you might learn how you’ve come

to this road, which left turn at midnight, which wrong side
of  town. Then there it is glittering pure and cold before you,

and suddenly you want that stone-skipping ache more
than your life, even knowing how the cold  water

makes each hair stand on end as you enter,
one foot at a time sand crumbling underfoot,

then, the delicious  submersion, as you slip
the laws of gravity, surface tension.

And so it is you push off from shore, not caring 
that this lake—as you knew the instant

you saw it—has no bottom.

(Holly Hughes [source])

…and:

The ultimate nature of the experience of life is that toil and pleasure, sorrow and joy, are inseparably mixed in it. The very will to life that brought one to light, however, was a will to come even through pain into this world; else one never would have got here. And that is the notion underlying the oriental idea of reincarnation. Since you came to birth in this world at this time, in this place, and with this particular destiny, it was this indeed that you wanted and required for your own ultimate illumination. That was a great big wonderful thing that you thereupon brought to pass; not the “you,” of course, that you now suppose yourself to be, but the “you” that was already there before you were born and which even now is keeping your heart beating and your lungs breathing and doing for you all those complicated things inside that are your life. You are not now to lose your nerve! Go on through with it and play your own game all the way!

(Joseph Campbell [source])

…and:

Winter Afternoon by the Lake

Black trunks, black branches, and white snow.
No one nearby, five o’clock, below zero,
Late January.  No birds.  No wind.
You look, and your life seems stopped.  Perhaps

You died suddenly earlier today.  But the thin
Moon says no.  The trees say, “It’s been this way
Before, often.  It’s cold, but it’s quiet.”  We’ve experienced
This before, among the messy Saxons putting back

The hide flap.  A voice says:  “It’s old.  You’ll never
See this again, the way it is now, because
Just today you sensed that someone gave you
Life and said, “Stay as long as you like.”

The snow and the black trees, pause, to see if we’re
Ready to re-enter that stillness.  “Not yet.”

For Owen

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.

(Flannery O’Connor [source])

From elsewhere:

My favorite [experiment in measuring our “inner clock”], by a distance, involved jumping off cranes. The neuroscientist David Eagleman set out to test the common intuition that subjective time slows down in moments of high drama, such as in the moments before a car crash. He reasoned that this subjective slowing down might be due to an internal clock running faster—more ticks of the clock in a given time period, longer perceived duration. This in turn should lead to a “speeding up” of the rate of perception since a faster clock should mean an improved ability to perceive short durations.

To test this idea, Eagleman and his team designed a special digital watch, which displayed a series of numbers that flickered so quickly that they were impossible to read in normal conditions. Then he persuaded some brave volunteers to repeatedly perform scary adrenaline-loaded leaps into the void while staring at their flickering watches. If an internal clock was indeed speeding up, then—his reasoning went—the volunteers should see the blur resolve into readable numbers while in free fall. They couldn’t, so his study provided no evidence for an internal clock. Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but still… what an experiment!

(Anil Seth [source])

…and:

Mercury Rising (A Visualization)
(excerpt)

Q. Why is not the air in CITIES so FRESH, as that in the COUNTRY?
A. Because it is impregnated with the breath of its numerous inhabitants…
—from Guide to Science, 1868 by Rev. Dr. Brewer

[…]

2a.

you take the trail into the forest,
look up at the trees,
the streams of light coming down through the branches.

you walk on a bed of pine needles.

on your left,
a little ways off the path,
you see a clearing where there’s a small animal.

you ask the animal a question and it gives you an answer.
“vapor.”
you thank it for that and return to the path.

as you walk along
you see something shiny
and when you get closer
you see it’s a key.

you pick it up and put it in your pocket.

further along off to the right,
you see another clearing,
and another small animal awaits you.

you ask it a question.

it gives you an answer, but it’s hard to make out.
you can sense a word forming with an ‘r’:
“reality”?
and you thank it for that.

you return to the trail.

(Jena Osman [source])

…and (in lightly edited form):

Mac: “I’m watching the sky, sir. It’s doing some amazing things. It’s got everything, reds, greens, a kind of shimmering and there’s a noise, too, like a far-off thunder, only it’s softer. I wish I could describe it, I wish you could see it…

Happer: Be more specific. You’re my eyes and ears there. Give me details.

Mac: Sir, I’ll give you the colours first. It’s white and green and red, I’m sorry, that’s the phone box… Oh it’s blue! It’s just blue! It’s like a shower of colour…!“

Happer: “Ah, you’re a lucky man, MacIntyre. I haven’t seen the aurora since ’53, in Alaska.“

[…]

Mac: “I haven’t seen a comet yet, sir. I don’t know if I could spot one with all this other stuff going on. The other night Ben was saying that meteors are always a good sign of a comet and that stuff we saw coming from Leo the other night may just be an indication of what might be happening in the future… With regard to comets, of course. I will probably just keep my eye posted on Leo because there’s some extraordinary things happening in the sky and as you suggested I’ll watch Virgo as well, and I’ll let you know if anything— God! It just went red all over! It’s red all over!“

([source])

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You Feel Your Life as a Weekend

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[Image: “Misty Morning, Loch Rannoch 6,” by a Flickr user with the handle “xylophilist” (Gr: wood lover.) The original photo is here; I’m pretty sure the photographer is one Tim Haynes, whose Web site is here. I use this photo today under the terms of the photographer’s generous Creative Commons license; thank you!]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Things I Want Decided

Which shouldn’t exist
in this world,
the one who forgets
or the one
who is forgotten?

Which is better,
to love
one who has died
or not to see
each other when you are alive?

Which is better,
the distant lover
you long for
or the one you see daily
without desire?

Which is the least unreliable
among fickle things—
the swift rapids,
a flowing river,
or this human world?

(Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.

(André Gide [source])

…and:

February

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

(Margaret Atwood [source])

…and:

What does it feel like to be alive?

Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!

It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.

(Annie Dillard [source])

Not from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

[…continuing from above…]

Who turned on the lights? You did, by waking up: you flipped the light switch, started up the wind machine, kicked on the flywheel that spins the years. Can you catch hold of a treetop, or will you fall off the diving planet as she rolls? Can you ride out the big blow on a coconut palm’s trunk until you fall asleep again, and the winds let up? You fall asleep again, and you slide in a dream to the palm tree’s base; the winds die off, the lights dim, the years slip away as you idle there till you die in your sleep, till death sets you cruising down the Tamiami Trail

Knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you, rear, kick, and try to throw you; you hang on to the ring. It is riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping. Or, conversely, you step aside from the dreaming fast loud routine and feel time as a stillness about you, and hear the silent air asking in so thin a voice, Have you noticed yet that you will die? Do you remember, remember, remember? Then you feel your life as a weekend, a weekend you cannot extend, a weekend in the country.

O Augenblick verweile.

(Annie Dillard [ibid.])

…and:

My Brother the Artist, at Seven

As a boy he played alone in the fields
behind our block, six frame houses
holding six immigrant families,
the parents speaking only gibberish
to their neighbors. Without the kids
they couldn’t say “Good morning” and be
understood. Little wonder
he learned early to speak to himself,
to tell no one what truly mattered.
How much can matter to a kid
of seven? Everything. The whole world
can be his. Just after dawn he sneaks
out to hide in the wild, bleached grasses
of August and pretends he’s grown up,
someone complete in himself without
the need for anyone, a warrior
from the ancient places our fathers
fled years before, those magic places:
Kiev, Odessa, the Crimea,
Port Said, Alexandria, Lisbon,
the Canaries, Caracas, Galveston.
In the damp grass he recites the names
over and over in a hushed voice
while the sun climbs into the locust tree
to waken the houses. The husbands leave
for work, the women return to bed, the kids
bend to porridge and milk. He advances
slowly, eyes fixed, an animal or a god,
while beneath him the earth holds its breath.

(Philip Levine [source])

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The Taking In; the Giving Out

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[Image: “He Knew What He Had to Do,” by Alan Levine. Found it on Flickr, and am sharing it here (with minimal alteration) under its Creative Commons license — thank you!]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

For the traveler today
Among the Zen parables, one koan is called “Just Drinking Tea”. Tea represents Zen spirit: he who tastes it tastes Zen.

Hot plum tea is offered to a visitor arriving from afar. Honey and sugar are dissolved in hot water and a pickled plum with the seed removed is proffered between the points of chopsticks. The visitor first steeps the plum briefly in the honey water. He then removes and eats it before drinking the tea. The sourness of the plum and the sweetness of the tea relieve the fatigue of the journey.

For the cook today
The three spirits of zen cooking –
First, the heart of pleasure.
Second, the heart of kindness.
Third, it’s a big deep heart.
Pay attention to everything.

These are Dogen’s three spirits of zen cooking. The happy spirit feels joy and gratitude at the privilege of being assigned the worthy task of cooking, an opportunity to follow the true way. The venerable spirit calls upon a kind heart in the pursuit of food that will please the diner. The great spirit does not flinch from the smallest detail and offers unwavering help in the unshakable quest for improvement.

For all of us today
“Taste as much of this as you can. Swallow what you need and spit out the rest.”

(Taizan Maezumi [source: unknown; appears in a handful of Facebook posts and PDFs but never with an actual citation])

…and:

Home For Thanksgiving

The gathering family
throws shadows around us,
it is the late afternoon
Of the family.

There is still enough light
to see all the way back,
but at the windows
that light is wasting away.

Soon we will be nothing
but silhouettes: the sons’
as harsh
as the fathers’.

Soon the daughters
will take off their aprons
as trees take off their leaves
for winter.

Let us eat quickly –
let us fill ourselves up.
the covers of the album are closing
behind us.

(Linda Pastan [source])

…and:

A Winter Notebook

2

I am not available
At the moment
Except to myself.

Downstairs the plumber
Is emptying the big tank,
Water-logged.
The pump pumped on and on
And might have worn out.

So many lives pour into this house,
Sometimes I get too full;
The pump wears out.

So now I am emptying the tank.
It is not an illness
That keeps me from writing.
I am simply staying alive
As one does
At times by taking in,
At times by shutting out.

(May Sarton [source])

From elsewhere:

Physical labor as a bringer of sleep doesn’t seem to do much for me. But the woods do, where thoughts of weather, of food, and of the day’s journey so dominate the mind that everything else subsides. The rise and fall of temperature and of wind, the beginning and the end of rain matter here in a way that is irrelevant elsewhere. With the right gear, it is a pleasure to live with the weather, to wait for sun and feel the cool of rain, to watch the sky with absorption and speculation, to guess at the meaning of succeeding events. I hate feeling miserably wet and cold. But with boots, heavy wool socks, rain pants, rain parka, and a wide-brimmed hat I have been dry and warm through all the downpours, on and off the river.

(John McPhee [source])

…and:

When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

The Bait

Saturday mornings, before
my weekly chores,
I used to sneak out of the house
and across the street,
grabbing the first grasshopper
walking in the damp California grass
along the stream.
Carefully hiding a silver hook
beneath its green wings,
I’d float it out
across the gentle ripples
towards the end of its life.
Just like that.
I’d give it the hook
and let it ride.
All I ever expected for it
was that big-mouth bass
awaiting its arrival.
I didn’t think
that I was giving up one life
to get another,
that even childhood
was full of sacrifice.
I’d just take the bright green thing,
pluck it off its only stalk,
and give it away as if
it were mine to give.
I knew someone out there
would be fooled,
that someone would accept
the precious gift.
So I just sent it along
with a plea of a prayer,
hoping it would spread its wings this time
and fly across that wet glass sky,
no concern for what inspired
its life, or mine,
only instinct guiding pain
towards the other side.

(Eric Chock [source])

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Don’t Panic: The Stranger on the Road May Well Be Yourself

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

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

In my experience, you always think you know what you’re doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn’t and you couldn’t. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That’s my idea. Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It’s a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it’s a normal human activity and that “everybody’s creative.” They’re not. Honestly, I never sit down to write anything without thinking, This is a weird thing to be doing! Why am I sitting here writing? Why am I looking at the Ellsworth Kelly on my wall? I don’t know. It feels funny to do these things, but it feels funnier not to, so I write and look.

(David Hickey [source])

…and:

Too Easy: to Write of Miracles

Too easy: to write of miracles, dreams where the famous give
mysterious utterance to silent truth;
to confuse snow with the stars,
simulate a star’s fantastic wisdom.

Easy like the willow to lament,
rant in tramples roads where pools
are red with sorrowful fires, and sullen rain
drips from the willows; ornamental leaves;
or die in words and angrily turn
to pace like ghosts about the walls of war.

But difficult when, innocent and cold,
day, a bird over a hill, flies in
—resolving anguish to a strange perspective,
a scene within a marble; returning
the brilliant shower of coloured dreams to dust,
a smell of fireworks lingering by canals
on autumn evenings—difficult to write
of the real image, real hand, the heart
of day or autumn beating steadily:
to speak of human gestures, clarify
all the context of a simple phrase
—the hour, the shadow, the fire,
the loaf of a bare table.

Hard, under the honest sun, to weight
a word until it balances with love—
burden of happiness on fearful shoulders;
in the ease of daylight to discover
what measure has its music, and achieve
the unhaunted country of the final poem.

Sicily, 1948

(Denise Levertov [source])

…and:

What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

(Elizabeth Bishop [source])

From elsewhere:

The Good God and the Evil God

The Good God and the Evil God met on the mountain top.

The Good God said, “Good day to you, brother.”

The Evil God did not answer.

And the Good God said, “You are in a bad humour today.”

“Yes,” said the Evil God, “for of late I have been often mistaken for you, called by your name, and treated as if I were you, and it ill-pleases me.”

And the Good God said, “But I too have been mistaken for you and called by your name.”

The Evil God walked away cursing the stupidity of man.

(Kahlil Gibran [source])

…and:

We are warmed by fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So, too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts. We must find our real selves not in the froth stirred up by the impact of our being upon the beings around us, but in our own soul, which is the principle of all our acts…

The soul does not find itself unless it acts. Therefore it must act. Stagnation and inactivity bring spiritual death. But my soul must not project itself entirely into the outward effects of its activity. I do not need to see myself, I merely need to be myself. I must think and act like a living being, but I must not plunge my whole self into what I think and do or seek always to find myself in the work I have done. The soul that projects itself entirely into activity, and seeks itself outside itself in the work of its own will is like a madman who sleeps on the sidewalk in front of his house instead of living inside where it is quiet and warm. The soul that throws itself outdoors in order to find itself in the effects of its own work is like a fire that has no desire to burn but seeks only to go up in smoke.

(Thomas Merton [source])

#51: The two men met at an intersection known to both, but recognized by neither.

“I haven’t seen you in forever!” exclaimed the younger man to the older.

“And I,” replied the older, laughing, “could say the same thing for you!”

“Want to walk together for a while?”

“Thought you’d never ask. Where you want to go?”

“I think,” said the young man, and paused. “…I think it doesn’t much matter. How about that horizon over there?”

The older man laughed. “That’s funny. That’s exactly where I myself was headed!”

And so they set out, not quite arm in arm — but all but.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

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