One question

One of the cheapest commodities in the world is unfulfilled genius.
All of us want to be known as a unique individual,
the one who broke out of the pack.
So, you offer yourself up as a sacrifice and what you're afraid of
is losing and being thrown back into the pack.
One question taunts you.
Do you want to have, or do you want to be?

                Leon Uris, Mitla Pass

Here and now

This is what you must be like.
Grow wherever life puts you down.

            Ben Okri, The Famished Road

 

 

 

 

Change starts here

If you want to change the world, change yourself.

                    Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues 

 

 

 

 

 

Pay attention

The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.

            Simone Weil, Waiting on God

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Tornado Imagined from Far Away

Up from the south it came, out of the
west, at a diagonal,
fifty miles in its full course,
once it was done—and in its body length, each
time it touched down, from a mile long
to twenty miles. “All we could see
was a lot of gray and stuff.” “It was like
a train, but much louder.” “All we saw was this
white wall of water, if you will.”
Witnesses reported funnel
clouds setting down eleven times, like
anteater noses looking for something,
or a grayish teat growing down
to search out and eat,
but of course it was just cold and heat,
wet and dry, wind, counter-
clockwise force. One life
ended, within a collapsed home,
curled around her stepson’s infant son.
Some homes almost disappeared,
as if the atoms that had made them were gone,
and many homes now partially stand, as if
gored, or chewed on. And how many trees,
how many hairs on a head, torn out,
how many plants turned back from discrete
beings into wads of matter.
Pine, oak, maple, beech,
hemlock, witch hazel, lady’s slipper,
pitcher plant, trillium,
Indian pipe. Gardens, trails—
by a waterfall, a bench, gone in one
bite, dissolved like a grain of salt, as if
thousands of years passed in a minute,
as if we jumped the Pleistocene
to the Hiroshimal. But it’s just weather.
Friend, let us be good to one another.

                   Sharon Olds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wisdom Art

Stevie Van Zandt, who has been playing guitar in Springsteen’s E Street Band since the early seventies, said, “The rock generation has changed the concept of chronological time. I personally know seven artists in their eighties still working. And the entire British Invasion is turning eighty in the next few years. Nobody’s grandparents made it past their sixties when we grew up.” He sees the “the birth of something I call ‘wisdom art’ – art that the artist could not have created when they were young…so there is a legitimate justification for continuing to create.”

        David Remnick, The New Yorker, 2021

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is
        while you are thinking about it.

                     Sonja Lyubomirsky, The Myths of Happiness