Integrity

Difficult though integrity may be to achieve,
the test for it is deceptively simple.
If you wish to discern either the presence or absence of integrity,
you need to ask only one question.
What is missing?
Has anything been left out?

    M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace

 

 

 

 

 

Voting

It is not decided by votes what is true; otherwise we could never come to any truth, ever. People will vote for what is comfortable — and lies are very comfortable because you don't have to do anything about them, you just have to believe. Truth needs great effort, discovery, risk, and it needs you to walk alone on a path that nobody has traveled before.

Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh), Your Answers Questioned 

 

 

 

 

 

Don't go there

Despair is deadly sin,
    but worse, it is mortal folly.

                Edith Pargeter, The Devil's Novice

 

 

 

 

 

Foundations

You aspire to great things?
Begin with little ones.
You desire to erect a very high building?
Think first of the foundation of humility.
The higher one intends it, the deeper must the foundation be laid.

        St. Augustine, De Verbis Domini, Sermon X

Poem: November

Show's over, folks. And didn't October do
A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries
Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.

Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees.
Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage,
While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The bees

Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage
And gone to shiver in their winter clusters.
Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge

On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster
Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin,
Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters.

Even the swarms of kids have given in
To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure:
TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains.

The days throw up a closed sign around four.
The hapless customer who'd wanted something
Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.

                         Maggie Dietz

 

 

 

 

All Saints Day

We are not saints,
    but we have kept our appointment.
        How many people can boast as much?

                 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: All Hallows' Eve

Be perfect, make it otherwise.
Yesterday is torn in shreds.
Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes
Rip apart the breathing beds.
Hear bones crack and pulverize.
Doom creeps in on rubber treads.
Countless overwrought housewives,
Minds unraveling like threads,
Try lipstick shades to tranquilize
Fears of age and general dreads.
Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,
Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.
Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise
You and the werewolf: newlyweds.

                Dorothea Tanning