Axiom of Existence

Whatever is referred to must exist.
        Let us call this the axiom of existence.

            John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language

 

 

 

 

 

Dead or alive

Every society honors its live conformists,
        and its dead troublemakers.

                Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Know This

Know this: The world is not a safe place.
You are not guaranteed a place at the table.
In fact, you will know grief so profound
it will crush the breath in your chest.
And yet the sun will still rise
and daffodils will glow yellow in spring.
And you will know joy so profound
it will stop the breath in your chest.
And it is between these two
that the work is done.
Speak Truth. Create art.
Build your own table of plenty.
And love, love with all that you are.
Love as if your life depended upon it:
It does.

                Laura Gail Grohe 

 

 

 

 

 

Universal praise

My idea in "My Sweet Lord," because it sounded like a "pop song,"
was to sneak up on them a bit.
The point was to have the people not offended by "Hallelujah,"
and by the time it gets to "Hare Krishna," they're already hooked, and their foot's tapping,
and they're already singing along "Hallelujah,"
to kind of lull them into a sense of false security.
And then suddenly it turns into "Hare Krishna,"
and they will all be singing that before they know what's happened,
and they will think, "Hey, I thought I wasn't supposed to like Hare Krishna!"

            George Harrison, born February 25, 1943 

 

 

 

 

Working magic

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions,
binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew each other.
Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.

                 Carl Sagan, Cosmos 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Snow

Snow is what it does.
It falls and it stays and it goes.
It melts and it is here somewhere.
We all will get there.

            Frederick Seidel 

 

 

 

Poem: God's World

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
    Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
    Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
        But never knew I this;
        Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart -- Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year.
My soul is all but out of me, -- let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

                        Edna St. Vincent Millay 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Morning

The great secret,
known to internists and learned early in marriage by internist’s wives,
but still hidden from the general public,
is that most things get better by themselves.
Most things, in fact, are better by morning.

            Lewis Thomas, Aspects of Biomedical Science Policy

 

 

 

 

Credo

Everybody counts or nobody counts.  

 Personal credo of character Harry Bosch as created by Michael Connelly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steadfast

Blessed are the steadfast, for they will inherit the earth.

The Beatitudes give us Matthew’s gospel image of Christ, showing how you and I can be Christlike. Matthew’s third Beatitude is almost everywhere mistranslated “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” The Greek word praüs is nothing like “meek;” it means: steadfastly pursuing your own purpose, despite whatever opposition and insults you meet, and despite your own temptation to anger in response, drawing you quickly off course. The prophet Isaiah put it clearest: “I have set my face like flint.”

King Darius I, carved the following rule into granite as his spiritual qualification to govern Persia, three thousand years ago. “By the favor of Ahura Mazda [the Wise God] I am a friend to right, I am not a friend to wrong. I do not desire that the weak should have wrong done to them by the mighty; nor the mighty have wrong done them by the weak. What is right, that is my desire. I am not a friend to any who follow lies. I am not hot-tempered. What things develop in my anger, I hold firmly in control by my own thinking power. I am firmly ruling over my own impulses.”

Nevertheless, King Darius I was killed by a disloyal subordinate. That happens to many people who are praüs, despite living loyal to their highest purpose. It happened to Jesus, did it not? And to Martin Luther King, Jr, to Dag Hammarskjold, and Malcolm X?  Many of them knew that might happen, but they acted all the more faithfully. 

Matthew’s third Beatitude recommends we try it too. He promises us our ideals’ fulfillment on earth, something that praüs people desire even more than personal success. Matthew’s gospel alone puts the word praüs in Jesus’ mouth: 

Take up my working yoke and study me, because I am praüs, and my plans are not distracted by narcissistic anger. My yoke will fit you smoothly and lighten your workload. 

[Matthew 11:29–30]

 

Excerpted from a sermon by Fr. Richard Fabian
on the 51st anniversary of his ordination 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Sonnet

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen,
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn,
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed. 

                                Billy Collins

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kanter's Law

Everything looks like a failure in the middle.
            Winners persist and persevere.

                            Rosabeth Moss Kanter

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grammar lesson

Remember: Y'all is singular.
        All y'all is plural.
                All y'all's is plural possessive.

                            Kinky Friedman

 

 

 

 

 

 

Calm

Nothing that happens on the surface of the sea
can alter the calm of its depths.

                    Andrew Harvey, The Direct Path

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: I Am Offering this Poem

I am offering this poem to you,
since I have nothing else to give.
Keep it like a warm coat
when winter comes to cover you,
or like a pair of thick socks
the cold cannot bite through,

I love you,

I have nothing else to give you,
so it is a pot full of yellow corn
to warm your belly in winter,
it is a scarf for your head, to wear
over your hair, to tie up around your face,

I love you,

Keep it, treasure this as you would
if you were lost, needing direction,
in the wilderness life becomes when mature;
and in the corner of your drawer,
tucked away like a cabin or hogan
in dense trees, come knocking,
and I will answer, give you directions,
and let you warm yourself by this fire,
rest by this fire, and make you feel safe

I love you,

It’s all I have to give,
and all anyone needs to live,
and to go on living inside,
when the world outside
no longer cares if you live or die;
remember,

I love you.

                            Jimmy Santiago Baca 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abundance

The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

        Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses

 

 

 

 

 

 

All

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist.

            Robert Browning, from Abt Volger 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Today

The ordinary miracles begin. Somewhere
a signal arrives: "Now," and the rays
come down. A tomorrow has come. Open
your hands, lift them: morning rings
all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer.
Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now,
you could close your eyes and go on full of light.

And it is already begun, the chord
that will shiver glass, the song full of time
bending above us. Outside, a sign:
a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air,
"Be warm." No one is out there, but a giant
has passed through town, widening streets, touching
the ground, shouldering away the stars.

                     William Stafford

 

 

 

 

 

Confidence

Confidence... thrives on honesty, on honor,
on the sacredness of obligations,
on faithful protection and on unselfish performance.
Without them it cannot live.

        Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address 1933

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wake up!

Boychick, wake up! Be something!
Make your life something good.
For the love of an old man who sees in your young days his new life,
for such love take the world in your two hands and make it like new.
Go out and fight so life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills.

                    Clifford Odets, Awake and Sing! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conditions

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, 

        but certainty is an absurd one.

                    Voltaire, Voltaire in His Letters

 

 

 

 

 

Follow your bliss

The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are happy -- not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what I call "following your bliss."

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

 

 

 

 

 

Light up the darkness

He [Bob Marley] had this idea. It was kind of a virologist idea. He believed that you could cure racism and hate... literally cure it, by injecting music and love into people's lives. When he was scheduled to perform at a peace rally, a gunman came to his house and shot him down. Two days later he walked out on that stage and sang. When they asked him why — He said, "The people who are trying to make this world worse are not taking a day off. How can I? Light up the darkness."

From I Am Legend, by Mark Protosevich, Akiva Goldsman
Bob Marley, born 6 February 1945 

 

 

 

 

Unfolding

Say not, "I have found the path of the soul."
Say rather, "I have found the soul walking upon my path."
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

                        Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Poem: Forget about enlightenment

Sit down wherever you are
And listen to the wind singing in your veins.
Feel the love, the longing, the fear in your bones.
Open your heart to who you are, right now,
Not who you would like to be,
Not the saint you are striving to become,
But the being right here before you, inside you, around you.
All of you is holy.
You are already more and less
Than whatever you can know.
Breathe out,
Touch in,
Let go.

                    John Welwood

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking

We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

Louise Glück, Nostos

 

 

 

 

 

 

Groundhog Day

What amazes me about the movie is that Murray and Ramis get away with it. They never lose their nerve. Phil undergoes his transformation but never loses his edge. He becomes a better Phil, not a different Phil. The movie doesn't get all soppy at the end. There is the dark period when he tries to kill himself, the reckless period when he crashes his car because he knows it doesn't matter, the times of despair.

We see that life is like that. Tomorrow will come, and whether or not it is always Feb. 2, all we can do about it is be the best person we know how to be. The good news is that we can learn to be better people. There is a moment when Phil tells Rita, "When you stand in the snow, you look like an angel." The point is not that he has come to love Rita. It is that he has learned to see the angel.

            Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 2005 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: February

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

                                    Margaret Atwood