New blood

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men
    and is not concerned about the slums that cripple the souls —
        the economic conditions that stagnate the soul
            and the city governments that may damn the soul —
                is a dry, dead, do-nothing religion in need of new blood.

                        Martin Luther King, Jr., Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool
                        Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church, Chicago, August 1967 

 

 

 

Poem: Parallax

You never know
What will change the world-
a word lightly spoken
a touch from a stranger
a glance from a woman
in a red dress,
or a flower opening in your gardens
What you do know
down deep in your bones
is that the cells have
lined up in a new arrangement,
muscles grown
where before was weak and hollow,
and when you woke up this morning,
something else was on your mind
because the old furniture had moved
around to make room.
A momentary alignment of planets
has opened a door somewhere.
You never know how or when,
only that it means
Everything.

                Lenore Horowitz

 

 

 

 

 

A listener and a searcher

As we turn from the galaxies
    to the swarming cells of our own being,
        which toil for something,
            some entity beyond their grasp,
let us remember man, the self-fabricator
    who came across an ice age to look
           into the mirrors and the magic of science. 

Surely he did not come to see himself or his wild visage only.

He came because he is at heart a listener and a searcher
        for some transcendent realm beyond himself.

This he has worshiped by many names,
        even in the dismal caves of his beginning.

Man, the self-fabricator, is so by reason of gifts he had no part in devising –
    and so he searches as the single living cell in the beginning
        must have sought the ghostly creature it was to serve.

                                            Loren Eiseley The Hidden Teacher 

 

 

 

 

 

In case you are wondering...

You are not crazy.
        You are not alone,
                and there's nothing wrong with you.

                            Peter Block

 

 

 

 

 

Failure to communicate

The reason you don't understand me, Edith,
        is because I'm talkin' to you in English
            and you're listenin' in dingbat!

                Archie Bunker, All In the Family
                TV premiere January 12, 1971

Invisible forces

I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms,
and with the invisible molecular moral forces
that work from individual to individual,
stealing in through the crannies of the world
like so many soft rootlets,
or like the capillary oozing of water,
and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride,
if you give them time.

        William James, born January 11, 1842
        From a letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman 

The movies

We are always acting on what has just finished happening.
        It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago.

We think we're in the present, but we aren't.
        The present we know is only a movie of the past.

                Ken Kesey, in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe