Reminder

The Book of Life and the Book of Death are open every day,
and our name is written in one or the other of them at every moment,
and then erased and written again the moment after that.
We are constantly becoming, continuously redefining ourselves.
This doesn’t just happen on Rosh Hashanah.

Alan Lew
This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared:
    The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

Much obliged

We each have a moral obligation
to conserve and preserve beauty in this world;
there is none to waste.

            Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

 

 

 

 

 

 

Making relationships work

Here is a relationship booster
that is guaranteed to work:
Every time your spouse or lover says something stupid
make your eyes light up as if you
just heard something brilliant.

Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

Poem: What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

                        Philip Levine

 

 

 

 

A magical illusion and fabulous game

You have seen that the universe is at root
a magical illusion and a fabulous game,
and that there is no separate "you" to get something out of it,
as if life were a bank to be robbed.
The only real "you" is the one that comes and goes,
manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being.
For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view,
points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.

        Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

 

 

 

Long life

Life well spent is long.

        Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks

 

 

 

Character

Aging is no accident.
It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul.
We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years;
the older we become, the more our true natures emerge.
Thus the final years have a very important purpose:
the fulfillment and confirmation of one's character.

        James Hillman, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life

 

 

 

 

 

In praise of trouble makers

Conformity may give you a quiet life;
it may even bring you to a University Chair.
But all change in history, all advance,
comes from the nonconformists.
If there had been no trouble-makers,
no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.

         A. J. P. Taylor, The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett

Infinite passion

There is no end.
There is no beginning.
There is only the infinite passion of life.

        Federico Fellini, Fellini on Fellini

 

 

 

 

 

Back to School

The best reason to go to school,
    even if you're a so-called teacher,
        is to find out how much you don't know.

                Pico Iyer, The Best Reason to Go to College, New York Times, September 2020

A new day

I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day,
a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic
waiting somewhere behind the morning.

                    J. B. Priestley, Delight 

 

 

 

 

 

Simple

This is my simple religion.
There is no need for temples;
no need for complicated philosophy.
Our own brain, our own heart is our temple;
the philosophy is kindness.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: They might not need me—yet they might—

They might not need me—yet they might—
I’ll let my Heart be just in sight—
A smile so small as mine might be
Precisely their necessity—

                        Emily Dickinson 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to school

“I’m afraid I’m not a very good grown-up,” he told the Sun. “My wife has always felt I’m more comfortable with children than grown-ups. … I teach a fourth-grade class in a public school once a week — I teach them my version of art history — and I just love sitting in those little chairs.”

Dr. Robert Coles, Baltimore Sun interview

Limitations

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

             Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Vanity and Suffering of Life

 

 

 

 

Nature

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man
if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature
and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

            E. B. White, The Points of My Compass

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Long and short

Es tan corto el amor y tan largo el olvido.
Love is so short and forgetting is so long.

        Pablo Neruda, Tonight I Can Write (Puedo Escribir)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Summer

There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.

                 Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A different kind of place

[This] mirror reminds me of a story I once heard about a Persian dervish.

They say that a dervish arrived at a temple and asked the doorman, “What kind of place is this?”

The doorman answered: “This is a place where you must leave envy, lust, greed, anger, hostility, meanness, and the like behind to enter.“

To this, the dervish said, “If I were able to put all these negative traits behind, why would I need to enter this place? I need a place where I can carry in my impurities, and emerge without them.“
 

Alireza Taghdarreh, Light and Language in Thoreau and Rumi

 

 

 

Poem: August Morning

It’s ripe, the melon
by our sink. Yellow,
bee-bitten, soft, it perfumes
the house too sweetly.
At five I wake, the air
mournful in its quiet.
My wife’s eyes swim calmly
under their lids, her mouth and jaw
relaxed, different.
What is happening in the silence
of this house? Curtains
hang heavily from their rods.
Ficus leaves tremble
at my footsteps. Yet
the colors outside are perfect--
orange geranium, blue lobelia.
I wander from room to room
like a man in a museum:
wife, children, books, flowers,
melon. Such still air. Soon
the mid-morning breeze will float in
like tepid water, then hot.
How do I start this day,
I who am unsure
of how my life has happened
or how to proceed
amid this warm and steady sweetness?

                        Albert Garcia

 

 

 

 

 

Looking good

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important.
They don't mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed
in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

            T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

Believe it

Wear a mask long enough and it becomes your face.
Play a role long enough and it becomes who you are.
Spend enough time pretending something is true
and you might as well believe it.

        Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

 

 

What is all this?

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers. Each of us emerges from the preconsciousness of babyhood and simply finds himself here, in it, in the world. That experience alone astonishes some people. What is all this — what is the world? And what are we?

Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher

 

 

 

 

Right and wrong

If we were not provided with the knack for being wrong,
we could never get anything useful done.
We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives,
and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones.

            Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail

 

 

 

 

Look no further

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

            John Barth, The End of the Road

 

 

 

 

 

Tend to your corner

I've had to learn, time and again,
that faithfulness isn’t always about taking big leaps,
but also walking with small steps,
and that it’s possible to make a lasting difference in the world
by tending to one small corner of it.

        Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave

 

 

 

 

Poem: Dawn

5am: the frogs
ask what is it, what is it?
It is what it is.

         Campbell McGrath

 

 

 

 

 

Power

Power, used well, should be empowering, contagious, and creative.
It should be collaborative, enabling, and protective.
It should be self-critical, curious, and brave.
It should know its own limits and be prepared to risk its own reputation.
This kind of power asks questions to which it does not know the answers
and listens because in listening is learning, and in learning is life.

        Padraig O'Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World 

 

 

 

 

 

Take it as you find it

When I eat my dinner I don’t do it to the greater glory of God; I do it because I enjoy it.
The world’s full of amusing things—books, wine, travel, friends—everything.
I’ve never seen any meaning in it all, and I don’t want to see one.
Why not take life as you find it?

                George Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exceptional

Carlyle remarked: “The population of England is twenty millions, mostly fools.”
Everybody who read this considered himself one of the exceptions, and therefore enjoyed the remark.

Bertrand Russell, How to Become a Man of Genius

 

 

 

 

 

Walk on the west side

The Upper West Side is the part of Manhattan I like best;
it has the excitement and pace of the city,
but with the feel of a real neighborhood.
Just by walking on the street you know that real life is being lived there.

        David Rosenfelt, New Tricks

 

 

 

 

Tomato harvest

The tomato hides its griefs.
    Internal damage is hard to spot.

                Julia Child, Julia Child & Company

 

 

 

 

 

Light and shadow

Any religion is a shadow of God.
But the shadows of God are not God.

        Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Women Who Dye Their Hair

Some of us have done it since our twenties
when our hair turned white on the death of a loved one
or it ran in the family like baldness, and some of us
spray red or purple on shaved stubble,
and others have let it creep up on us,
counting the odd hair, then the fifth, the fiftieth,
till our teenagers point out how old we’re getting
but our lovers who hate anything artificial
like make-up and sequins, though they accept
icecream and the Pill, say we shouldn’t bother,
so we steal home from Boots with the ColorGlo
and lock ourselves in the bathroom in rubber gloves,
emerge an hour later ten years younger
with a smart grey streak over one temple
and mahogany smudges round the jaw line.
And when the roots start to show we carelessly
pop into the hairdresser and book a colour
which means a cut and finish and takes all morning
so we can catch up on our reading, extending
our knowledge of the stars and multiple orgasm,
but we have to go every six weeks or it starts to fade
and by now the local firm is turning our hair to hay
so we find a better one at fifty quid a splash,
a rollercoaster we can’t get off of,
and we decide to let it all grow out and be our age
which isn’t a hundred and five but might as well be.

                                Janet Fisher

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fair warning

One of the saddest lessons of history is this:
If we’ve been bamboozled long enough,
we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth.
The bamboozle has captured us.
It’s simply too painful to acknowledge,
even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.
Once you give a charlatan power over you,
you almost never get it back.

             Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

 

 

 

 

Lost in translation

Do not imagine that art is something which is designed
to give gentle uplift and self-confidence.
Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense.
But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.

            Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

A good bet

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

        Franz Kafka The Zürau Aphorisms 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Think twice

Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas
are not only ill prepared for making discoveries;
they also make very poor observations.

        Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine

 

 

 

 

 

Honor where honor is due

May we learn to honor the hammock, the siesta,
        the nap and the pause in all its forms.

                        Alice Walker, The Cushion in the Road

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source error

Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian
any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.

        William Ashley "Billy" Sunday, Billy Sunday, The Man and his Message

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

Poem: Fishing on the Susquehanna in July

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure—
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one—
a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table—
trying to manufacture the sensation
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt
that others have been fishing
on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
sliding the oars under the water
then raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come to
fishing on the Susquehanna
was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

when I balanced a little egg of time
in front of a painting
in which that river curled around a bend

under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,
dense trees along the banks,
and a fellow with a red bandanna

sitting in a small, green
flat-bottom boat
holding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikely
ever to do, I remember
saying to myself and the person next to me.

Then I blinked and moved on
to other American scenes
of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown hare
who seemed so wired with alertness
I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

                            Billy Collins

 

 

 

 

 

All there is

Maybe the moment is all there is. Maybe I should just gather my clamshells and be quiet. The exquisite experience of joy—when I am completely consumed by a pleasurable activity such as conversation with good friends or good food or laughing with my children—is certainly one of the moment. But for some reason, I and many of my fellow travelers are not satisfied with the moment. The Now isn’t enough. We want to go beyond the moment. We want to build systems and patterns and memories that connect moment to moment to eternity. We long to be part of the Infinite.

Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

Old friends, new worlds

Each friend represents a world in us,
a world possibly not born until they arrive,
and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

            Anaïs Nin, March 1937, Diary entries

Wonder

Punctuationally speaking, wonder is a period
at the end of a statement we've long taken for granted,
suddenly looking up and seeing the sinuous curve
of a tall black hat on its head,
and realizing it was a question mark all along.

        David James Duncan, My Story as told by Water

 

 

 

 

 

Learn from the best

Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality,
for one can temporarily evade reality
by avoiding the distasteful situation;
but anxiety is a source of education always present
because one carries it within.

        Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

 

 

 

 

An insider's view

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying,
since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

                George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

 

 

 

 

 

Sacred and healing

A shaman, according to Claude Levi-Stauss, is a person who has a concrete relationship with language, because he uses it for healing, as a tool and as medicine. To the shaman, words aren’t just words, but a scalpel for slicing and reorganizing what’s in this world, for cutting and binding; a phenomenon with power over all other phenomena – something truly sacred. In his Structural Anthropology, Levi-Strauss says that scientists’ problem with shamans is that they really do heal people.

                Alvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Shakespeare never used the word “ping” and neither should you

When you say
ping me
I want to punch you.
It’s true.
Bio break, too.
It makes me cringe.
And if I am being honest
I don’t care about your ducks or the row they’re in.
I don’t know what net-net means unless it’s being said by an excited tennis announcer.
Come to think of it
let’s not circle back
or drill down
or take a deep dive
or take it offline
or level the playing field
or create action items
and honestly I don’t care
if this won’t scale
and may I add that
going forward I would like to park this project.
And this job.
I quit.
Now.
Sorry.
I have a hard stop.

        John Kenney, Love Poems for Anxious People

 

 

 

 

 

 

A state of grace

Age has no reality except in the physical world.
The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time.
Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits
remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom.
Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything,
but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.

            Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

 

 

 

 

Priorities

You have to get your priorities right.
Women are around all the time
but World Cups come only once every four years.

        Peter Osgood, English footballer
        quoted in A Commonplace Book: British Heritage Travel

 

 

 

 

 

If in doubt, assume life

You may discover someone apparently dead,
and it can be difficult to tell whether he is really dead or not….
If there is any doubt whether someone is dead, treat him as being alive.

What to Do When Someone Dies
British Consumers Association book 1967
quoted in Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Longing for Utopia

A map of the world that does not include Utopia
is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out
the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
And when Humanity lands there, it looks out,
and, seeing a better country, sets sail.
Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

        Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism 

 

 

 

 

 

Get up!

I say to the body, Up with you now,
and I can feel it struggling,
like an old hack foundered in the street.

        Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing

Remembering the Beatitudes

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

Kurt Vonnegut, Cold Turkey, at online publication In These Time

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Answer July

Answer July —
Where is the Bee —
Where is the Blush —
Where is the Hay?

Ah, said July —
Where is the Seed —
Where is the Bud —
Where is the May —
Answer Thee — Me —

Nay — said the May —
Show me the Snow —
Show me the Bells —
Show me the Jay!

Quibbled the Jay —
Where be the Maize —
Where be the Haze —
Where be the Bur?
Here — said the Year —

            Emily Dickinson

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy people

If we observe genuinely happy people, we shall find that they do not just sit around being contented. They make things happen. They pursue new understandings, seek new achievements, and control their thoughts and feelings. In sum, our intentional, effortful activities have a powerful effect on how happy we are, over and above the effects of our set points and the circumstances in which we find themselves. If an unhappy person wants to experience interest, enthusiasm, contentment, peace, and joy, he or she can make it happen by learning the habits of a happy person.

Sonja Lyubomirsky
The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want

Look, but don't touch

An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument.
Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin.
What if everybody jumped on his violin?

        Marilyn Monroe, Life magazine 1962

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, to be in England

The English winter — ending in July,
To recommence in August.  

        Lord Byron, from Don Juan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You gotta love it

When you leave New York,
you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is.
Clean is not enough.

        Fran Lebowitz, reported in Rand Lindsly's Quotations

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Common weal

To the ignorant and bawling fanatics who stun you with their pother about liberty, political or civil liberty seems to be the principal end for which government ought to exist. But the final cause or purpose for which government ought to exist, is the furtherance of the common weal to the greatest possible extent.

            John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined 

 

 

 

 

 

E Pluribus Unum

America is woven of many strands;
I would recognize them and let it so remain.
It's "winner take nothing" that is the great truth
of our country or of any country.
Life is to be lived, not controlled;
and humanity is won by continuing to play
in face of certain defeat.
Our fate is to become one, and yet many—
This is not prophecy, but description.

            Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man

 

 

 

 

Hold fast to the dream

The republic is a dream
Nothing happens unless first a dream.

    Carl Sandburg, Washington Monument by Night, stanza 4

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: The High-School Lawn

Gray prinked with rose,
White tipped with blue,
Shoes with gay hose,
Sleeves of chrome hue;
Fluffed frills of white,
Dark bordered light;
Such shimmerings through
Trees of emerald green are eyed
This afternoon, from the road outside.

They whirl around:
Many laughters run
With a cascade's sound;
Then a mere one.

A bell: they flee:
Silence then: —
So it will be
Some day again
With them, — with me. 

                Thomas Hardy

 

 

 

 

 

 

The quest

We spend our life, it's ours,
trying to bring together in the same instant
a ray of sunshine and a free bench... 

            Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your own village

That you need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it.
Your own village means that you're not alone,
that you know there's something of you
in the people and the plants and the soil,
that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you.

            Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfire

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A glimpse of nothing

Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York,
a place on the plains that I love,
a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles,
she asked, "But what is there to see?"
The answer, of course, is nothing.
Land, sky, and the ever-changing light.

            Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

 

 

 

 

 

Hindsight

When we look back,
the only things we cherish
are those which in some way met our original want;
the desire which formed in us in early youth,
undirected, and of its own accord.

            Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

 

 

 

 

 

Paradigm of infinity

Whatever else prairie is—grass, sky, wind—
it is most of all a paradigm of infinity,
a clearing full of many things except boundaries,
and its power comes from its apparent limitlessness;
there is no such thing as a small prairie
any more than there is a little ocean,
and the consequence of both is this challenge:
try to take yourself seriously out here,
you bipedal plodder, you complacent cartoon.

                William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: So This Is Nebraska

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of the redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting at every post.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like

waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

                     Ted Kooser 

 

 

 

 

A good place

But, for a little while, this is the place for us —
a good place too —
a place of good omen, a place of beginning things —
and of ending things I never thought would end.

            Beryl Markham, West with the Night

 

 

 

 

 

 

Midwestern machismo

Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest.
There was something athletic about it.
You flexed your face into a smile
and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.

            Lorrie Moore, The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

 

 

 

 

 

One great secret

Human beings—any one of us, and our species as a whole—
are not all-important, not at the center of the world.
That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret,
offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains
or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.

            Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

 

 

 

 

 

 

A recipe for kindness

Have a heart that never hardens,
    and a temper that never tires,
        and a touch that never hurts.

                    Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

 

 

 

 

 

Worth the effort

Anyone can be a barbarian;
it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

        Leonard Woolf, Barbarians Within and Without

 

 

 

 

 

Summer Soltice: New York City

By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it,
he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building
and over the soft, tarry surface
to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice
and said if they came a step closer that was it.
Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,
the cops came in their suits blue-grey as the sky on a cloudy evening,
and one put on a bullet-proof vest, a
black shell around his own life,
life of his children's father, in case
the man was armed, and one, slung with a
rope like the sign of his bounden duty,
came up out of a hole in the top of the neighboring building
like the gold hole they say is in the top of the head,
and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die.
The tallest cop approached him directly,
softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking,
while the man's leg hung over the lip of the next world
and the crowd gathered in the street, silent, and the
hairy net with its implacable grid was
unfolded near the curb and spread out and
stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive a birth.
Then they all came a little closer
where he squatted next to his death, his shirt
glowing its milky glow like something
growing in a dish at night in the dark in a lab and then
everything stopped
as his body jerked and he
stepped down from the parapet and went toward them
and they closed on him, I thought they were going to
beat him up, as a mother whose child has been
lost will scream at the child when its found, they
took him by the arms and held him up and
leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the
tall cop lit a cigarette
in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and
then they all lit cigarettes, and the
red, glowing ends burned like the
tiny campfires we lit at night
back at the beginning of the world.

                        Sharon Olds

Poem: This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
    They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself.

 

                    Philip Larkin 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Juneteenth

I'm not gonna help nobody get something my negroes don't have.
If I'm gonna die, I'll die now right here fighting you, if I'm gonna die.
You my enemy.
My enemies are white people, not Viet Congs or Chinese or Japanese.
You my opposer when I want freedom.
You my opposer when I want justice.
You my opposer when I want equality.
You won't even stand up for me in America for my religious beliefs,
and you want me to go somewhere and fight,
but you won't even stand up for me here at home.

        Muhammad Ali in 1967 statement on television,
        on refusing to register for the draft and fight in the Vietnam War 

In pursuit of the profound

Transformation comes more from pursuing
        profound questions than seeking practical answers.

                    Peter Block, The Answer to How is Yes

 

 

 

 

 

All the world's a stage

New York is the city where the future comes to rehearse.

       Mayor Ed Koch, New York Times, 1986

 

 

 

 

Bloomsday

James Joyce’s friends used to say
that even though he had lost his faith,
he never ceased to be a Jesuit.

        Leo Damrosch, Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

 

 

 

 

 

Harder than you think

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

            Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grace

Imperfection is the prerequisite for grace.
Light only gets in through the cracks.

           Philip Yancey, What's So Amazing About Grace?

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

                Theodore Roethke

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome

New Yorkers are born all over the country,
and then they come to New York City and it hits them:
Oh, that's who I am.

        Delia Ephron, Sister Mother Husband Dog (Etc.)

 

 

 

 

Raw material

And so I learned what solitude really was.
It was raw material - awesome, malleable,
older than men or worlds or water.
And it was merciless -
for it let a man become precisely
what he alone made of himself.

            David James Duncan, The River Why

 

 

 

 

Fallible, unpredictable, improbable

The future is too interesting and dangerous
to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency.
We need all the fallibility we can get.
Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability
and total improbability of our connected minds.

        Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why?

Why blame the dark for being dark?
It is far more helpful to ask
why the light isn’t as bright as it could be.

        Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

 

 

 

 

Things hold

Things don't fall apart. Things hold.
Lines connect in thin ways that last and last
and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept.

            Lucille Clifton, Generations: a memoir

 

 

 

 

 

 

Living faith

The Allah of Islam is the same as the God of Christians and the Ishwara of Hindus. Even as there are numerous names of God in Hinduism, there are as many names of God in Islam. The names do not indicate individuality but attributes, and little man had tried in his humble way to describe mighty God by giving Him attributes, though He is above all attributes, Indescribable, Inconceivable, Immeasurable. Living faith in this God means acceptance of the brotherhood of mankind. It also means equal respect for all religions.

                        Mahatma Gandhi, My God 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: More Than Enough

The first lily of June opens its red mouth.
All over the sand road where we walk
multiflora rose climbs trees cascading
white or pink blossoms, simple, intense
the scene drifting like colored mist.

The arrowhead is spreading its creamy
clumps of flower and the blackberries
are blooming in the thickets. Season of
joy for the bee. The green will never
again be so green, so purely and lushly

new, grass lifting its wheaty seedheads
into the wind. Rich fresh wine
of June, we stagger into you smeared
with pollen, overcome as the turtle
laying her eggs in roadside sand.

                        Marge Piercy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Following the rules

 [This is taken from an excellent longer article, the link to which is below]

Every couple will eventually have some version of the “Let’s Make a Rule” fight, where they try to solve some interpersonal issue through legislation. “You think I don’t take enough interest in your life, so let’s make a rule: I have to ask you three things about your day before I start telling you about mine.” The theory behind the Let’s Make a Rule fight is that we could live in harmony with one another if we could just compile all of our expectations into one big Google Doc.

The Let’s Make a Rule fight never leads to a satisfying conclusion because nobody actually wants their partner to follow the rules. They want their partner to care. Being asked “How was your day, dear?” through gritted teeth because that’s what our Relationship Handbook says to do is probably worse than not being asked at all.

You want your partner to realize that your preferences are not silly affectations that can be belittled, ignored, or disputed until they go away, that they are, in fact, load-bearing parts of your personality, and to reject them is to reject you. In return, you have to realize that some of your preferences are more malleable than you thought, that maybe they don’t all have to be foundational to your sense of self, and that some of them can be bent or jettisoned in the interests of coexistence.

This is the work of love, and it takes a lifetime. You can’t speedrun it by filling out a spreadsheet or signing a contract. The frictions of a lifelong relationship can be made intelligible—that is, understandable to the people involved, but they cannot be made legible—that is, understandable to everyone else.

The best couples I know have all sorts of arrangements and accommodations that make zero sense to me but perfect sense to them, and that’s exactly why they work well together. A successful relationship is nothing more than a package of haphazard remedies and rickety fixes that people would only ever devise and maintain when they really, really want to be together.

Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History

Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them!