Do something

I'd rather be in trouble for having done something
            than for not having done anything.

                        C. S. Forester, Lieutenant Hornblower

 

 

 

 

 

Leaping upwards

This is the predicament of man.
All souls descend a ladder from heaven to the world.
Then the ladders are taken away.
Once they are in this world, they are called upon from heaven to rise, to come back.
It is a call that goes out again and again.
Each soul seeks the ladder in order to ascend above; but the ladder cannot be found.
Most people make no effort to ascend, claiming, how can one rise to heaven without a ladder?
However, there are souls which resolve to leap upwards without a ladder.
So they jump and fall down. They jump and fall down, until they stop.
Wise people think that since no ladder exists, there must be another way.
We must face the challenge and act.
Be what it may, one must leap until God, in His mercy, makes exultation come about.

        Abraham Joshua Heschel, No Religion is an Island

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: New Every Morning

Every morn is the world made new.
You who are weary of sorrow and sinning,
Here is a beautiful hope for you,—
A hope for me and a hope for you.

All the past things are past and over;
The tasks are done and the tears are shed.
Yesterday’s errors let yesterday cover;
Yesterday’s wounds, which smarted and bled,
Are healed with the healing which night has shed.

Yesterday now is a part of forever,
Bound up in a sheaf, which God holds tight,
With glad days, and sad days, and bad days, which never
Shall visit us more with their bloom and their blight,
Their fulness of sunshine or sorrowful night.

Let them go, since we cannot re-live them,
Cannot undo and cannot atone;
God in his mercy receive, forgive them!
Only the new days are our own;
To-day is ours, and to-day alone.

Here are the skies all burnished brightly,
Here is the spent earth all re-born,
Here are the tired limbs springing lightly
To face the sun and to share with the morn
In the chrism of dew and the cool of dawn.

Every day is a fresh beginning;
Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,
And, spite of old sorrow and older sinning,
And puzzles forecasted and possible pain,
Take heart with the day, and begin again.

        Susan Coolidge 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bring your own

When I played Little League baseball for a few disastrous years, my least favorite part was going up to bat, because you had to wear one of these ratty old batting helmets supplied by the local rec department. None of them fit right, and they all smelled like a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you, because a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you. And so every at-bat carried not only the risk of striking out, but also the risk of contracting head lice.

A few kids, the serious ones, brought their own helmets—custom fitted, tastefully decorated with decals, and presumably containing zero lice. These kids ran the bases like little princes. Any errant pitches bounced harmlessly off their heads, leaving their perfect skulls un-dented. The outfielders would perk up whenever a kid with a bespoke helmet stepped up to the plate, all of them thinking to themselves, this kid might actually hit the ball.

I say all this because incentives are like batting helmets: if you don’t bring your own, you’ll have to use the crappy ones that are provided for you.

            Adam Mastroianni, experimentalhistory@substack.com 

One or the other

If you can’t manage courtesy, try silence.

             Jim Butcher, White Night

 

 

 

 

 

 

The changing but unchangeable sky

I can truthfully say that nothing during my life
has impressed me so much as the sky.
It is my religion and my philosophy.
It is my cathedral,
and I believe it to be a source of inspiration
to anyone who wants to look upward.
It is the only part of this world
that Man will not change, because he cannot.

        Eric Sloane, Eric Sloane’s Weather Book

 

 

 

 

 

Do unto others

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

Toni Morrison, Barnard College commencement address 1979

 

 

 

Defining robotics

The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot
as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man.
The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation
defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With."
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division
of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks
who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."

            Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide

 

 

 

 

 

Keep your wits about you

Trust that it is worth scratching on the wall
that God is love and life because,
all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding,
it may just be true.
Trust that if God is anywhere, God is here,
which means there is no telling
where God may turn up next --
around what sudden bend of the path
if you happen to have your eyes and ears open,
your wits about you,
in what odd small moments,
almost too foolish to tell.

        Frederick Buechner, New York Times, 2000

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: In September

September's Baccalaureate
A combination is
Of crickets, crows and retrospects,
And a dissembling breeze

That hints without assuming,
An innuendo sere,
That makes the heart put up its fun,
And turn philosopher.

                Emily Dickinson

 

 

 

 

 

Days of Awe

Every year before the Days of Awe, the Ba-al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, held a competition to see who would blow the shofar for him on Rosh Hashanah. Now if you wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba-al Shem Tov, not only did you have to blow the shofar like a virtuoso, but you also had to learn an elaborate system of kavanot — secret prayers that were said just before you blew the shofar to direct the shofar blasts and to see that they had the proper effect in the supernal realms.

All the prospective shofar blowers practiced these kavanot for months. They were difficult and complex. There was one fellow who wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba-al Shem Tov so badly that he had been practicing these kavanot for years. But when his time came to audition before the Ba-al Shem, he realized that nothing he had done had prepared him adequately for the experience of standing before this great and holy man, and he choked. His mind froze completely. He couldn’t remember one of the kavanot he had practiced for all those years. He couldn’t even remember what he was supposed to be doing at all. He just stood before the Ba-al Shem in utter silence, and then, when he realized how egregiously — how utterly — he had failed this great test, his heart just broke in two and he began to weep, sobbing loudly, his shoulders heaving and his whole body wracking as he wept.

All right, you’re hired, the Ba-al Shem said.

But I don’t understand, the man said. I failed the test completely. I couldn’t even remember one kavanah.

So the Ba-al Shem explained with the following parable: In the palace of the King, there are many secret chambers, and there are secret keys for each chamber, but one key unlocks them all, and that key is the ax. The King is the Lord of the Universe, the Ba-al Shem explained. The palace is the House of God. The secret chambers are the sefirot, the ascending spiritual realms that bring us closer and closer to God when we perform commandments such as blowing the shofar with the proper intention, and the secret keys are the kavanot. And the ax — the key that opens every chamber and brings us directly into the presence of the King, where he may be — the ax is the broken heart, for as it says in the Psalms, “God is close to the brokenhearted.”

        Rabbi Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared

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