Poem: An Instructor's Dream

Many decades after graduation
the students sneak back onto
the school-grounds at night
and within the pane-lit windows
catch me their teacher at the desk
or blackboard cradling a chalk:
someone has erased their youth,
and as they crouch closer to see
more it grows darker and quieter
than they have known in their lives,
the lesson never learned surrounds
them: why have they come? Is
there any more to memorize now
at the end than there was then—
What is it they peer at through shades
of time to hear, X times X repeated,
my vain efforts to corner a room’s
snickers? Do they mock me? Forever?
Out there my past has risen in
the eyes of all my former pupils but
I wonder if behind them others
younger and younger stretch away
to a day whose dawn will never
ring its end, its commencement bell.

                 Bill Knott

 

 

 

 

 

Resistance = Persistence

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary.
It is self created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life....
The pain that you create now is always some form of non acceptance,
some form of unconscious resistance to what is.
On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment.
On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

 

 

 

Remembering the 1989 San Francisco earthquake

Civilization exists by geological consent,
            subject to change without notice.

    Will Durant, What is Civilization? 1946 Ladies' Home Journal

 

 

 

 

 

Don't just sit there...

There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still.
You've only got one life, one youth,
and you can let it slip through your fingers
if you want to; nothing easier.
Most people do that.

        Willa Cather, The Bohemian Girl

 

 

 

 

 

Ignorance

Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. Creeds, articles, and institutes of religious faith ossify our brains and make change impossible. As such they are nuisances, and in practice have to be mostly ignored.

        George Bernard Shaw, Everybody's Political What's What?

Discovery

The only real voyage of discovery, the only Fountain of Youth,
consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes,
in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of a hundred others,
in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees.

            Marcel Proust, The Maxims of Marcel Proust 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That magic moment

You have to take risks … We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen. Every day, God gives us the sun — and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Every day, we try to pretend that we haven't perceived that moment, that it doesn't exist — that today is the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention to their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment. It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us. But that moment exists — a moment when all the power of the stars becomes a part of us and enables us to perform miracles.

Paul Coelho, By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept