[Image: “Armadillo, Aggie Ring, Domino,” by Flickr user “Jazz Guy.” (Found it there, of course, and use it here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!) I’m not sure why this struck me as an appropriate introduction to this week’s theme. But if you read the photographer’s riff which accompanies the photo at Flickr, you may agree that only someone who has sat down, opened their mind, and just let the world do what it will — well, maybe this is one result. (Aside for those unfamiliar with the ways of American college life: “Aggie” is the nickname for someone who is attending or has attended Texas A&M University — “A&M” meaning “Agricultural and Mechanical”… hence, of course, “Aggie.” The ring in the photo — next to the unexplained domino — seems to be one worn by a Texas A&M graduate.)]

From whiskey river:

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks don’t see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you’re already
in heaven now.
That’s the story.
That’s the message.
Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they’re
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off. I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s’why I’ll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes.

(Jack Kerouac [source: hard to pin down; apparently anthologized in The Portable Jack Kerouac, although that’s unconfirmed, but possibly originally in a letter to his ex-wife Edie])

…and:

Incantation

Because we time-travel into the future
at a blistering sixty minutes an hour,
I ask you to sit down and write me
one beautiful sentence I might carry
in my pocket on the journey when I go,
and in the window of the train unfold

O you were the best of all my days.

Never knowing if the thing is broken
or the door between us is still open,
you would like me to sit down and write
you one beautiful sentence you might
carry in your wallet when you leave,
and in the cab you take it out and read

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands.

Depending where one stands, each circle
back is a possible fall, a fail, a spiral,
and I would like you to take a few seconds
to write me out one beautiful sentence
to carry now across the night and ocean,
and held up at the gate I sit down and open

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt

(Nick Laird (note: Includes lines by Frank O’Hara, Hart Crane and Kurt Vonnegut) [source])

…and:

At least a flash of sanity: the momentary realization that there is no need to come to certain conclusions about persons, events, conflicts, trends, even trends toward evil and disaster, as if from day to day and even from moment to moment I had to know and declare (at least to myself): This is so and so, this is good, this is bad; we are heading for a “new era” or we are heading for destruction. What do such judgments mean? Little or nothing. Things are as they are, in an immense whole of which I am a part, and which I cannot pretend to grasp. To say I grasp it is immediately to put myself in a false position, as if I were “outside” it. Whereas to be in it is to seek truth in my own life and action, by moving where movement is possible and keeping still when movement is unnecessary, realizing that things will continue to define themselves — and will be more clear to me if I am silent and attentive, rather than constantly formulating statements in this age which is smothered in language, in meaningless and inconclusive debate, and in which, in the last analysis, nobody listens to anything except what agrees with his own prejudices.

(Thomas Merton [source (March 2, 1966)])

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