Poem: The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer

Of course I regret it. I mean there I was under umbrellas of fruit

so red they had to be borne of Summer, and no other season.

Flip-flops and fishhooks. Ice cubes made of lemonade and sprigs 

of mint to slip in blue glasses of tea. I was dusty, my ponytail

all askew and the tips of my fingers ran, of course, red

 

from the fruitwounds of cherries I plunked into my bucket

and still—he must have seen some small bit of loveliness

in walking his orchard with me. He pointed out which trees

were sweetest, which ones bore double seeds—puffing out

the flesh and oh the surprise on your tongue with two tiny stones

 

(a twin spit), making a small gun of your mouth. Did I mention

my favorite color is red? His jeans were worn and twisty

around the tops of his boot; his hands thick but careful, 

nimble enough to pull fruit from his trees without tearing

the thin skin; the cherry dust and fingerprints on his eyeglasses. 

 

I just know when he stuffed his hands in his pockets, said

Okay. Couldn't hurt to try? and shuffled back to his roadside stand

to arrange his jelly jars and stacks of buckets, I had made

a terrible mistake. I just know my summer would've been

full of pies, tartlets, turnovers—so much jubilee.
 

                                Aimee Nezhukumatathil

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is it

If we want to appreciate the mystery of life, it is essential to evade the compulsion of our desires by understanding that there does not need to be anything else in our current situations. There is no greater feeling, state, or condition that we have to achieve. There is no lesser or more limited feeling, state, or condition that we have to be liberated from. This is it. And this poignancy is always here. We can give ourselves permission to experience it; to be right here with it. To be available to it. To be available to the mystery of life is to be free.

    J. Jennifer Matthews, Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are

 

 

 

 

 

There's a difference

Man is not a rational animal,
        he is a rationalizing animal.

                Robert A. Heinlein, Assignment in Eternity

 

 

 

 

Connection

Connection for connection’s sake is not the point.
What we want to do is elevate the work of connectors
as the condition that makes transformation possible.

            Peter Block, Connecting for the Common Good    

 

 

 

 

 

Sound of silence

There are all kinds of silences
        and each of them means a different thing.

                 Beryl Markham, West with the Night

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Certainly absurd

Doubt is not an agreeable condition,
but certainty is an absurd one.

        Voltaire, in a 1767 letter to Frederick II of Prussia

Thou mayest

But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—
‘Thou mayest’—
that gives a choice.
It might be the most important word in the world.
That says the way is open.
That throws it right back on a man.
For if ‘Thou mayest’—
it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”

            John Steinbeck, East of Eden