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

From whiskey river:

The beginning of being fine is noticing how things really are.
1. Life is uncertain, surprises are likely.
2. If you are alive, that’s good; lower the bar.
3. In a dark place, you still have what really counts.
4. If you are in a predicament, there will be a gate.
5. What you need might be given to you.
6. The true life is in between winning and losing.
7. If you have nothing—give it away.

(John Tarrant [source, in much more complete form!])

…and, from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Human Beauty

If you write a poem about love…
the love is a bird,

the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death…

the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames

you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between

our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,

a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night

in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box

of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white

confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.

(Albert Goldbarth [source])

Not from whiskey river:

A plane crashing in Buffalo punctuates a time in history in which crashes of all kinds are happening. Houses are worth less than is owed on them, mutual funds that went up in an orderly fashion fall off a precipice, offices lay everyone off with an hour’s warning, large chain stores close their doors for good, the busy suburban hairdresser is empty on a Friday, and the hardware store is ominously quiet. Panicked reactions amplify the crisis—the VP of the semi conductor company stops work on the half constructed building while the production machinery is in transit on the high seas; the university declares a hiring freeze and the clinic is threatened with shutting down entirely because it can’t replace a receptionist who earns $9.00 an hour. And this all seems to happen very suddenly.

We play with dark fantasies to prepare ourselves for how it might be: “It’s going to be hard, very hard, and there will be breadlines and we will lose all the loot we have accumulated and we will push shopping carts containing all our belongings, and then we’ll die, slowly, while our teeth hurt.” Thus I have heard.

But wait a minute, winter is still cold, summer is still warm, bread, cheese, pickled onion and a beer is still a ploughman’s lunch, the sky still has windows of translucent distance at sunset after rain, a wet dog still smells like a wet dog. Perhaps we will be fine. Perhaps we don’t have to waste this crisis in wailing and gnashing our teeth. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before,” says Rahm Emanuel.

(John Tarrant [source — same as above])

…and:

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blaze of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

(Thomas Mann [source])

…and:

Time

The past has flown away,
the coming month and year do not exist;
Ours only is the present’s tiny point.

Time is but a fancied dot ever moving on
which you have called a flowing river-stream.

I am alone in a wide desert,
listening to the echo of strange noises.

(Mahmud Shabistari, translated by Florence Lederer [source])