[Cartoon found at the site of the Anxiety and Stress Disorders Institute of Maryland.]
From whiskey river:
Bad People
A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks — what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams — that’s the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, “You.”
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god — who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge — can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.
(Robert Bly, Morning Poems [source])
…and:
We think hitting the ground, knocking over the barrier is a mistake, but the ground we hit, the failure we experience is not a mistake. The world is endlessly mysterious, experience is profound to a degree that will always surprise us. But it is never a mistake. To foster even a meager appreciation of that (and when we’re in the midst of a fall, meager is pretty big) is to begin to practice, to raise the bodhi-mind. It is the decision to stop complaining and to start paying attention. Contained in the fall is exactly what we need to stand. Everything we need is available, but we have to invite it.
(Bonnie Myotai Treace [source])
