Keep talking

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals.
Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination.
We learned to talk and we learned to listen.
Speech has allowed the communication of ideas,
enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible.
Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking,
and its greatest failures by not talking.
It doesn't have to be like this.
Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future.
With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded.
All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

                                     1993 British Telecom advertisement 

 

 

 

 

The Trick

“What course of action do you favor?”

“Me? Why, none.
Mary, if there is any one thing I have learned
in the past couple of centuries, it’s this:
These things pass.
Wars and depressions and Prophets and Covenants—they pass.
The trick is to stay alive through them.”

                     Robert Heinlein, Methuselah’s Children

 

 

 

 

Poem: Be ahead of all parting

Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.
Climb praising as you return to connection.
Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.
That emptiness inside you allows you to vibrate
in resonance with your world. Use it for once.

To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable
numbers of beings abounding in Nature,
add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.

          Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13
          Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For all of it

For all that has been — thanks.
For all that will be — yes.

          Dag Hammarskjold, Markings

 

 

 

 

Just mentioning

I’m just going to mention these three rules that Lou [Reed] and I had. . . .
The first one is don’t be afraid of anyone.
Imagine your life if you’re not afraid of anyone.
Two, get a really good BS detector and learn how to use it.
Who’s faking and who is not?
Three, be really tender.
And with those three, you’re all set.

                    Laurie Anderson, 2015 interview with Terry Gross 

 

 

 

 

Just show up

Inspiration is for amateurs –
the rest of us just show up and get to work.

             Chuck Close, in Inside the Painter’s Studio by Joe Fig

 

 

 

 

Just notice

I urge you to please notice when you are happy,
and exclaim or murmur or think at some point,
“If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

             Kurt Vonnegut, Man Without a Country