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!

Good advice

There is nobody like Golda for seeing what needs doing—or saying.
She is always telling people: "Don’t be so humble—you’re not that great."

Simcha Dinitz, aide to Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel 1969-1974,
New York Times interview, March 1969

 

 

 

 

 

 

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