Useful

I am holding on to the idea that through wisdom, through experience, you might in some important ways recover innocence.  I want to be playful.  I want to be experimental.  I want to be useful.  That is our family prayer, as you know.  It is not the most grandiose prayer.  It is just, we are available for work.  That is U2’s prayer.  We want to be useful, but we want to change the world.  And we want to have fun at the same time.  What is wrong with that?   

                                 Bono, The Rolling Stone Interview, January 11, 2019

Poem: For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet

Put down that bag of potato chips,

that white bread, that bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer,

and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds.

They travel the earth gathering essences

of plants to clean.

Give it back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift

to fly to the stars’ ears and back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for

you since you were a dream planting itself

precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the

encampment of the guardians who have

known you before time, who will be

there after time. They sit before the fire

that has been there without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial

insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds

and animal people who accompany you.

Ask their forgiveness for the harm we

humans have brought down upon them.

Don’t worry.

The heart knows the way though there may

be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed

soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will

despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours,

a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a

thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might

run away and leave your heart for the

immense human feast set by the thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the

fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul,

you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage,

or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your

mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way

to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors

to make way for those who are heading in

our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you.

These helpers take many forms: animal,

element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in

corners and creases of shame, judgment, and

human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will

want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering.

It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them

together. They will be happy to be found after

being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is

bathed and given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone

you know who loves and supports you. Keep

room for those who have no place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember,

keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person

find their way through the dark.

           Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings

Need a laugh?

Check out this enterprising and inspiring six-year-old who is making a difference in his neighborhood

Vital resources

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.  They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.  Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.  

                         The Letters of William James

Discernment

We always see through a glass darkly, and that is what faith is about. I will live by the best I can discern today. Tomorrow I may find out I was wrong. Since I do not live by being right, I am not destroyed by being wrong.  

                  Verna Dozier, The Dream of God 

A case for optimism

From an article by Brad Spurgeon in the New York Times, August 17, 2005

Any intellectual who divides opinion as much as Colin Wilson has for almost 50 years must be onto something, even if it is only whether humans should be pessimistic or optimistic.

Mr. Wilson, who turned 74 in June and whose autobiography, "Dreaming to Some Purpose," recently appeared in paperback from Arrow, describes in the first chapter how he made his own choice. The son of working-class parents from Leicester - his father was in the boot and shoe trade - he was forced to quit school and go to work at 16, even though his ambition was to become "Einstein's successor." After a stint in a wool factory, he found a job as a laboratory assistant, but he was still in despair and decided to kill himself.

On the verge of swallowing hydrocyanic acid, he had an insight: there were two Colin Wilsons, one an idiotic, self-pitying teenager and the other a thinking man, his real self.

The idiot, he realized, would kill them both.

"In that moment," he wrote, "I glimpsed the marvelous, immense richness of reality, extending to distant horizons."

The middle way

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate—but there is no competition—

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

                              T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets