notes from solitary

"I am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy."
 - Dylan Thomas

><((((º>

This Morning
This morning was something. A little snow
lay on the ground. The sun floated in a clear
blue sky. The sea was blue, and blue-green,
as far as the eye could see.
Scarcely a ripple. Calm. I dressed and went
for a walk - determined not to return
until I took in what Nature had to offer.
I passed close to some old, bent-over trees.
Crossed a field strewn with rocks
where snow had drifted. Kept going
until I reached the bluff.
Where I gazed at the sea, and the sky, and
the gulls wheeling over the white beach
far below. All lovely. All bathed in a pure
cold light. But, as usual, my thoughts
began to wander. I had to will
myself to see what I was seeing
and nothing else. I had to tell myself this is what
mattered, not the other. (And I did see it,
for a minute or two!) For a minute or two
it crowded out the usual musings on
what was right, and what was wrong - duty,
tender memories, thoughts of death, how I should treat
with my former wife. All the things
I hoped would go away this morning.
The stuff I live with every day. What
I've trampled on in order to stay alive.
But for a minute or two I did forget
myself and everything else. I know I did.
For when I turned back I didn't know
where I was. Until some birds rose up
from the gnarled trees. And flew
in the direction I needed to be going.
 - Raymond Carver



The voice.
The handwriting.
The gait.
Maybe the smell of my hair.
That's all.
Go ahead, resurrect me.
 - Vera Pavlova
99
If There is Something to Desire: One Hundred Poems



"We don't live our lives by choice, but by default. We play the roles we are born to. We don't live our lives, we dispose of them. We throw them away because we don't know any better. And the reason we don't know any better is because we never asked. We never questioned or doubted. Never stood up. Never drew a line. We never walked up to our parents or our spiritual advisers or our teachers or any of the other formative presences in our early lives and asked one simple. honest, straightforward question. The one question that must be answered before any other question can be asked:
"What the hell is going on here?"
 - Jed McKenna
Spiritual Warfare



"What do we know for sure? That's the real question. That's what the cogito is. That's what solipsism is. This isn't theory. This isn't belief or faith. This is the basic fact of existence. It's all about figuring out exactly what we know for certain as opposed to everything else. It's truly amazing that something so glaringly obvious and irrefutable is so universally ignored by science and philosophy and religion."
 - Jed McKenna



Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices,

or opened
as flowers of a tree that blooms
only once in a lifetime:

words that may have the power
to make the sun rise again.
 - Denise Levertov
from Writing in the Dark



"Have an uncomfortable mind; be strange. Be disturbed: by what is happening on the planet, and to it; by the cruelty, and stupidity humanity is capable of; by the unbearable beauty of certain music, and the mysteries and failures of love, and the brief, confusing, exhilarating hour of your own life."
 - Kim Addonizio
Bukowski in a Sundress



Now all my teachers are dead except silence
I am trying to read what the five poplars are writing
on the void

Of all the beasts to man alone death brings justice
But I desire
To kneel in a doorway empty except for the song

Who made time provided also its fools
Strapped in watches and with ballots for their choices
Crossing the frontiers of invisible kingdoms

To succeed consider what is as though it were past
Deem yourself inevitable and take credit for it
If you find you no longer believe enlarge the temple

Through the day the nameless stars keep passing the door
That have come all that way out of death
Without questions

The walls of light shudder and an owl wakes in the heart
I cannot call upon words
The sun goes away to set elsewhere

Before nightfall colorless petals blow under the door
And the shadows
Recall their ancestors in the house beyond death

At the end of its procession through the snow
Falling
the water remembers to laugh
 - W. S. Merwin
from A Scale in May
September 30, 1927 -
March 15, 2019



"As I see it, to refuse the possibility of finding another person interesting, complex and as complicated as oneself is a form of violence. At bottom, this is a refusal of nuance, and I wish to posit that nuance is sacred. To call it sacred is to value it so highly that we find it fitting to somehow set it apart as something to which we're forever committed. Nuance refuses to envision others degradingly, denying them the content of their own experience, and talks us down tenderly from the false ledges we've put ourselves on. When we take it on as a sacred obligation, nuance also delivers us out of the deadly habit of cutting people out of our own imaginations. This opens us up to the possibility of at least occasionally finding one another beautiful, the possibility of communion."
 - David Dark



I Have Just Said
I have just said
something
ridiculous to you
and in response,
your glorious laughter.
These are the days
the sun
is swimming back
to the coast
and the light on the water
gleams
as never, it seems, before.
I can't remember
every spring,
I can't remember
everything -
so many years!
Are the morning kisses
the sweetest
or the evenings
or the inbetweens?
All I know
is that "thank you" should appear
somewhere.
So just in case
I can't find
the perfect place -
"Thank you, thank you."
 - Mary Oliver
Felicity



Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere) arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) and

changing everything carefully
 - E. E. Cummings
from Spring is like a perhaps hand

<°))))><

"I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; . . .  that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we - I mean all human beings - are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art."
 - Virginia Woolf



"The reason for writing it down on paper or on a computer where you can see it is because the brain, unlikely as it may sound, is no place for serious thinking. Any time you have serious thinking to do, the first step is to get the whole shootin' match out of your head and set it up someplace where you can walk around it and see it from all sides. Attack, switch sides and counter-attack. You can't do that while it's still in your head. Writing it out allows you to act as your own teacher, your own critic, your own opponent. By externalizing your thoughts, you can become your own guru; judging yourself, giving feedback, providing a more objective and elevated perspective."
 - Jed McKenna
Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing



"The voice, the tale, the image, the parable that gets through to you - that wins your heart - religiously is the one that makes it past your defenses. You've been won over, and you probably didn't see it coming. You've been enlisted into a drama, whether positively or negatively, and it shouldn't be controversial to note that it happens all the time. When you really think about it, there's one waiting around every corner. It's as near as the story, song or image you can't get out of your head. Religion happens when we get pulled in, moved, called out or compelled by something outside ourselves. It could be a car commercial, a lyric, a painting, a theatrical performance or the magnetic pull of an Apple store. The calls to worship are everywhere."
 - David Dark



"Diaries are very futile. I must be all dream or all deed. It is quite impossible for me to express any of the beauty I feel to half the degree I feel it; and yet it is a great pleasure to seize an impression and lock it up in words: you feel as if you had it safe forever."
 - Wallace Stevens



"Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won't do what they want - won't give them more money, won't be more successful, won't see them more often. Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft. A writer friend of mine suggests opening the jar and shooting them all in the head. But I think he's a little angry, and I'm sure nothing like this would ever occur to you."
 - Anne Lamott
Bird by Bird



"My only plea is that all artists have to range the full extent of their own lives freely. The rest of the world can censor and bury their private past. We cannot, and so have to remain partly green till the day we die . . . callow-green in the hope of becoming fertile-green."
 - John Fowles



"You . . . travel to other worlds?"

"Yes. I travel to other worlds."

I put the glass down and pulled out a cigarette; lit it before speaking.

"In the flesh?"

"If you can tell me where the flesh ends and the mind begins, I will answer that."

"You um . . . you have some evidence of this?"

"Ample evidence." He allowed a moment to pass. "For those with the intelligence to see it."
 - John Fowles
The Magus



"I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore."
 - Cheryl Strayed
Tiny Beautiful Things



Under the trees,
welcoming spring.
Things take care of themselves.


Filling the eye,
blue, blue mountains
in all directions.
 - Gesshu Soko



"They said, 'You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.'
The man replied, 'Things as they are
are changed upon the blue guitar.'"
 - Wallace Stevens
(The Man with the Blue Guitar)

'Things as they are? Above? Below?
In hell or heaven? Fast or slow . . . ?'
They silenced him. 'It's not about
philosophy, so cut it out.
We want the truth and not what you
are playing on the blue guitar.
So start again and play it straight
don't improvise, prevaricate.
Just play things as they really are.'
The man replied, 'Things as they are

are not the same as things that were
or will be in another year.
The literal is rarely true
for truth is old and truth is new
and faceted - a metaphor
for something higher than we are.
I play the truth of Everyman
I play the truth as best I can.
The things I play are better far
when changed upon the blue guitar.'
 - P. K. Page
from The Blue Guitar

><((((º>
American Poetry
Whatever it is, it must have
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.

Like the shark, it contains a shoe.
It must swim for miles through the desert
Uttering cries that are almost human.
 - Louis Simpson
The Owner of the House



"We do our twenty minutes of meditation a day in the hope that, properly stilled, our minds will stop just reflecting back to us the confusion and multiplicity of our world but will turn to a silvery mist like Alice's looking glass that we can step through into a world where the beauty that sleeps in us will come awake at last. We send scientific expeditions to Loch Ness because if the dark and monstrous side of fairy tales can be proved to exist, who can be sure that the blessed side doesn't exist, too? I suspect that the whole obsession of our time with the monstrous in general - with the occult and the demonic, with exorcism and black magic and the great white shark - is at its heart only the shadow side of our longing for the beatific, and we are like the knight in Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal, who tells the young witch about to be burned at the stake that he wants to meet the devil her master, and when she asks him why, he says, "I want to ask him about God. He, if anyone, must know."
 - Frederick Buechner
Telling the Truth



Tomorrow
Cigarette smoke hanging on
in the living room. The ship's lights
out on the water, dimming. The stars
burning holes in the sky. Becoming ash, yes.
But it's all right, they're supposed to do that.
Those lights we call stars.
Burn for a time and then die.
Me hell-bent. Wishing
it were tomorrow already.
I remember my mother, God love her,
saying, Don't wish for tomorrow.
You're wishing your life away.
Nevertheless, I wish
for tomorrow. In all its finery.
I want sleep to come and go, smoothly.
Like passing out of the door of one car
into another. And then to wake up!
Find tomorrow in my bedroom.
I'm more tired now than I can say.
My bowl is empty. But it's my bowl, you see,
and I love it.
 - Raymond Carver



Photosynthesis
Morning falls out of its orbit
and swims up through the blue.
Last night, when I heard the news,
I forgot my human hunger.
Now I am making calculations
with a row of ivy and old hibiscus.
I am silent as a shadow in the ferns,
I am frond green and curled.
It may be necessary to drink through
the roots; I could eat sunlight and air,
start a green factory in each finger;
I could make each arm a branch.
Let me begin as stem and leaf.
I'll make something you can breathe.
 - Joyce Sutphen



As The Poems Go
as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you've created very
little.
it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.
leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line now as
a man plays a piano through the radio,
the best writers have said very
little
and the worst,
far too much.
 - Charles Bukowski



"In one recorded dialogue with a student, Bashō instructed, "The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective." "Don't you mean too subjective or too objective?" his student asked. Bashō answered, simply, "No."
 - Jane Hirshfield
The Heart of Haiku



"The work of writing brings replenishment even to the writer dealing with painful subjects or working out formal problems, and there are times when suffering's only open path is through an immersion in what is. The eighteenth-century Urdu poet Ghalib described the principle this way: 'For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river - / Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.'
Difficulty then, whether of life or of craft, is not a hindrance to an artist. Sartre called genius 'not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.' Just as geological pressure transforms ocean sediment into limestone, the pressure of an artist's concentration goes into the making of any fully realized work. Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance - a gnarled tree, the flow of a statue's draped cloth. Through such tensions, physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself. Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life. We seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows."
 - Jane Hirshfield



"All my desires are born of my dreams. And I have proven my love with words. To what fantastic creatures have I entrusted myself, in what dolorous and ravishing world has my imagination enclosed me? I am sure of having been loved in the most mysterious of domains, my own. The language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not touch the flesh of my love. My amorous imagination has always been constant and high enough so that nothing could attempt to convince me of error."
 - Paul Éluard



"Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different.  And we experience them as different because we think of them as different."
 - David Bohm
Thought as a System



"Maybe it's all utterly meaningless. Maybe it's all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which, pay attention to what it means to be truly human in a world that half the time we're in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us. Any fiction that helps us pay attention to that is religious fiction. The unexpected sound of your name on somebody's lips. The good dream. The strange coincidence. The moment that brings tears to your eyes. The person who brings life to your life. Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues."
 - Frederick Buechner

<°))))><
"We make our lives pleasurable, and therefore bearable, by picturing them as they might be; it is less obvious, though, what these compelling fantasy lives - lives of, as it were, a more complete satisfaction - are a self-cure for. Our solutions tell us what our problems are; our fantasy lives are not - or not necessarily - alternatives to, or refuges from, those real lives but an essential part of them . . . There is nothing more obscure than the relationship between the lived and the unlived life.

So we may need to think of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening."
 - Adam Phillips
Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life



       Everywhere
around me the birds are waiting
for the light. In this world of dreams
don't let the clock cut up
your life in pieces.
 - Jim Harrison
from Rumination
Songs of Unreason



Packing for the Future: Instructions
Take the thickest socks.
Wherever you're going
you'll have to walk.

There may be water.
There may be stones.
There may be high places
you cannot go without
the hope socks bring you,
the way they hold you
to the earth.

At least one pair must be new,
must be as blue as a wish
hand-knit by your mother
in her sleep.

Take a leather satchel,
a velvet bag and an old tin box -
a salamander painted on the lid.

This is to carry that small thing
you cannot leave. Perhaps the key
you've kept though it doesn't fit
any lock you know,
the photograph that keeps you sane,
a ball of string to lead you out
though you can't walk back
into that light.

In your bag leave room for sadness,
leave room for another language.

There may be doors nailed shut.
There may be painted windows.
There may be signs that warn you
to be gone. Take the dream
you've been having since
you were a child, the one
with open fields and the wind
sounding.

Mistrust no one who offers you
water from a well, a songbird's feather,
something that's been mended twice.
Always travel lighter
than the heart.
 - Lorna Crozier
What the Living Won't Let Go



"The artist is the person who makes life more interesting or beautiful, more understandable or mysterious, or, probably, in the best sense, more wonderful. The ideal artist is he who knows everything, feels everything, experiences everything, and retains his experience in a spirit of wonder and feeds upon it with creative lust."
 - George Wesley Bellows



Inside
No one to hear but
Records for the broken player.
No reason for order but order
persists, from breakfast to bath
to work, rain falling at one speed,
the windows darkening and blurring,
accident beating against belief.
A loud engine, which is one way to say
one thing. The floors swept daily,
though it takes at least one hour for the first,
one for the last. In the pages of a book,
quick studies of gesture,
tents of hands.
 - Saskia Hamilton
Divide These



Avoid small talk. Embrace conversation.
Buy a plant, water it. Make your bed. Make
someone else's bed. Have a smart mouth,
and quick wit. Run. Make art. Create.
Swim in the ocean. Swim in the rain. Take
chances. Ask questions. Make mistakes.
Learn. Know your worth. Love fiercely.
Forgive quickly. Let go of what doesn't
make you happy.
 - Paulo Coelho de Souza



"Imagine a world where speaking or writing words can literally or directly make things happen, where getting one of those words wrong can wreak unbelievable havoc, but where with the right spell you can summon immensely powerful agencies to work your will. Imagine further that this world is administered: there is an extensive division of labour, among the magicians themselves and between the magicians and those who coordinate their activity. It's bureaucratic, and also (therefore) chaotic, and it's full of people at desks muttering curses and writing invocations, all beavering away at a small part of the big picture. The coordinators, because they don't understand what's going on, are easy prey for smooth-talking preachers of bizarre cults that demand arbitrary sacrifices and vanish with large amounts of money."
 - Ken MacLeod
The Atrocity Archives



"The Master is not trapped in opposites. His this is also a that. He sees that life becomes death and death becomes life, that right has a kernel of wrong within it and wrong a kernel of right, that the true turns into the false and the false into the true. He understands that nothing is absolute, that since every point of view depends on the viewer, affirmation and denial are equally beside the point. The place where the this and the that are not opposed to each other is called "the pivot of the Tao." When we find this pivot, we find ourselves at the center of the circle, and here we sit, serene, while Yes and No keep chasing each other around the circumference, endlessly. Mind can only create the qualities of good and bad by comparing. Remove the comparison, and there go the qualities. What remains is the pure unknown: ungraspable object, ungraspable subject, and the clear light of awareness streaming through. The pivot of the Tao is the mind free of its thoughts. It doesn't believe that this is a this or that that is a that. Let Yes and No sprint around the circumference toward a finish line that doesn't exist. How can they stop trying to win the argument of life until you stop? When you do, you realize that you were the only one running. Yes was you, No was you, the whole circumference, with its colored banners, its pom-pom girls and frenzied crowds - that was you as well. At the center, the eyes open and again it's the sweet morning of the world. There's nothing here to limit you, no one here to draw a circumference. In fact, there's no one here - not even you."
 - Stephen Mitchell
The Second Book of the Tao



Don't go off sightseeing.
The real journey is right here.
The great excursion starts
from exactly where you are.
You are the world.
You have everything you need.
You are the secret.
You are the wide opened.

Don't look for the remedy for your troubles
outside yourself.

You are the medicine.
You are the cure for your own sorrow.
 - Jalaluddin Rumi
The Forbidden Rumi



An Old Story
We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful
Dream. The worst in us having taken over
And broken the rest utterly down.
                                                          A long age
Passed. When at last we knew how little
Would survive us - how little we had mended

Or built that was not now lost - something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather.

Then animals long believed gone crept down
From trees. We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.
 - Tracy K. Smith
Wade in the Water

><((((º>
"The deepest level of obsession is obsession with a sense of self. A sense of self, generated as a reaction to non-referential space, lies at the core of every habituated pattern. A self is felt to be a permanent, independent unit. The feeling of permanence manifests in life as a feeling of dullness, of not being quite present. The illusion of independence arises as a feeling of separation. The feeling of being one thing arises as a feeling of incompleteness or dissatisfaction. Together, these three qualities obscure the mystery of being."
 - Ken McLeod



"I wish there was more talk about soul. We've largely given up such talk, in favor of commerce, politics, the talk of people who expect answers, results. I've said in a poem, "the normal condition of the soul is to be starved." If this is true, those of us who are vigilant about our souls are trying to feed them. Save them? Faust gambled with his soul, which suggests that we should be using different currency when we gamble. But it seems to me that gambling, at its healthiest, is one way of activating the soul, nudging it from its hungry sleep. I'm speaking about gambling in its most reductive form: taking a chance. The act of taking a chance is energizing. The art of the act of taking a chance can lead to the sublime. Like the time I saw Paco Camino exhibit perfect grace - a series of slow, exact moves - with an erratic bull in Madrid. Or Miles Davis, years ago at a club, riding an impulse beyond himself. Surely those folks who play their lives and their work eminently safe don't often put themselves in the position where they can be startled or enlarged. Don't put themselves near enough to the realm of the unknown where discovery resides, and joy has been rumored to appear. The realm of the unknown is contiguous to the realm of failure. The gambler, deep down, has made a pact with failure. He'll accept it because it has interesting neighbors."
 - Stephen Dunn
Walking Light



A Gift
Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.
 - Denise Levertov
Sands of the Well



"Imagine you are standing on the prow of a sailboat, watching a school of dolphins leaping left and right. When travelling long distances, jumping saves dolphins energy, because there's less friction in the air than in the water below. It also seems to be an efficient way to move rapidly and breathe at the same time. Typically, the animals will alternate long, ballistic jumps with bouts of swimming underwater, close to the top, for about twice the length of the leap - a spectacular, high-speed, surface-piercing display sometimes known as 'porpoising'.

These cetacean acrobatics are a fruitful metaphor for what happens when we think. What most of us still call 'our conscious thoughts' are really like dolphins in our mind, jumping briefly out of the ocean of our unconscious for a short period before they submerge themselves once again. This 'dolphin model of cognition' helps us to understand the limits of our awareness. For example, the windows of time in which these leaps into consciousness unfold (as well as subsequent 'underwater' processing) vary hugely. And similar to the way that dolphins break the surface of the water, thoughts often cross the border between conscious and unconscious processing, and in both directions. Sometimes individual dolphins are so close to the surface that they can be half in and half out of the water; you might actually be able to learn how to spot them right before they jump, just as you can learn to identify subtle, semi-conscious patterns before they manifest as full-blown thoughts and feelings. There might even be more than one dolphin: in all likelihood, there's a whole race going on between our thoughts, a continuous inner competition for the focus of attention and for what finally seizes control over our behaviour.

The point is that the mental contents available to us via introspection are nothing more than momentary flashes of automatic cognitive processing, grinding away beneath the waves of our awareness most of the time. This raises a strange question: who is the 'us', standing at the prow and watching these dolphin-thoughts scoot past?"
 - Thomas Metzinger



"Just see, nothing is actually touching you when you just observe, when you don't say 'this should not be'. Pay attention to this wonderful power in you. Just witness without judgement, interference or attachment. Give it a chance."
 - Mooji



"But what we call a "self" is actually just a story about our experience of life. And we construct the story because we're trying to give some order to what is actually a remarkably chaotic process. And then we get seduced by the seeming consistency of the story that we've constructed, and instead of just relating directly to our experience, we try to relate to our experience in terms of the story."
 - Ken McLeod



Wallace Stevens and Mozart
Oh Wallace Stevens, dear friend,
You are such a pest. You are so sure.
You think everyone is in your family.

It is you and your father and Mozart,
And ladies tasting cold rain in Florence,
Puzzling out inscriptions, studying the gold flake.

It is as if life were a visit to Florence,
A place where there are no maggots in the flesh,
No one screaming, no one afraid.

Your job, your joy, your morning walk,
As if you walked on the wire of the mind,
High above the elephants; you cry out a little but never
fall.

As if we could walk always high above the world,
No bears, no witches, no Macbeth,
No one screaming, no one in pain, no one afraid.
 - Robert Bly
Morning Poems



"What I have been thinking about, lately, is bewilderment as a way of entering the day as much as the work.

ゆ

"The illuminati used flagellation, levitation and starvation as a method of accounting for the power of the invisible world over their lives. Public suffering and scars gave the evidence of hidden miseries which had begun to require daylight.

The poet uses words to do the same. From the lashes of whip and ink the secrets become common, rather than signs of individual genius.

After all, the point of art is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn't."
 - Fanny Howe
an excerpt from a talk on the Poetics & Readings Series
Small Press Traffic at New College, San Francisco



One Source of Bad Information
There's a boy in you about three
Years old who hasn't learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometimes it's a girl.

This child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
"Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk."

You live with this child, but you don't know it.
You're in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He's uninformed, but he does want

To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He's got six big ideas.
Five don't work. Right now he's repeating them to you
 - Robert Bly
Morning Poems



"Even if you're going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you're living now, or live another one than the one you're losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can't lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don't have?"
 - Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

<°))))><

This unfinished business of my
childhood
this emerald lake
from my journey's other
side
haunts hierarchies of heavens

a palm forest
fell overnight
to make room for an unwanted
garden
ever since
fevers and swellings
turn me into a river
 - Etel Adnan
from The Spring Flowers Own
The Spring Flowers Own & The Manifestations of the Voyage



"In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be."
 - Mary Oliver



"I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one's center of life inside of one's self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity - to decorate one's inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone."
 - Edith Wharton



"Unwilling to tolerate life's ambiguity, its unresolvability, its inevitability, we search for certainty, demanding that someone else must provide it. Stubbornly, relentlessly, we seek the wise man, the wizard, the good parent, someone else who will show us the way. Surely someone must know. It simply cannot be that life is just what it appears to be, that there are no hidden meanings, that this is it, just this and nothing more. It's not fair, not enough! We cannot possibly bear having to live life as it is, without reassurance, without being special, without even being offered some comforting explanations. Come on now! Come across! You've got to give us something to make it all right. The medicine tastes lousy. Why should we have to swallow it just because it's the only thing we can do? Can't you at least promise us that we will have to take it just once, that it won't taste that bad, that we will feel just fine immediately afterward, that we will be glad we took it? No? Well then, surely, at least you have to give us a lollipop for being good. But what if we are talking to ourselves? What if there is no one out there listening? What if for each of us the only wise man, the only wizard, the only good parent we will ever have is our own helpless, vulnerable self? What then?"
 - Sheldon B. Kopp



The Neurons Who Watch Birds
We have to think now what it would be like
To be old. Some funny little neurons,
Developed for high-speed runners, and quick
Handed bowmen, begin to get tired. They fire

But then lay down their bows and watch birds.
The kidney cells - "Too much thinking!" the Chinese
Say - look around for help, but the kids have
All gone to the city. Your friends get hit by lightning,

And your enemies live on. This isn't going to get
Better. Crows yelling from the telephone wires
Don't include you in the stories they tell, and they seem
To remember some story that you haven't heard.

What can you do? We'll have to round up
All those little people wandering about
In the body, get them to sit up straight, and study
This problem: How do we die?
 - Robert Bly
Morning Poems



"If I have been given any gifts in this life, it's my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination. I'm in my eighties now, and if there's one thing of which I am most proud, it's that I have permitted no authority (neither civilian nor military, neither institutional nor societal) to relieve me - by means of force, coercion or ridicule - of that gift. From the beginning, imagination has been my wild card, my skeleton key, my servant, my master, my bat cave, my home entertainment center, my flotation device, my syrup of wahoo; and I plan to stick with it to the end, whenever and however that end might come, and whether or not there is another act to follow."
 - Tom Robbins
Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life



"Although at first glance there may appear to be a fairly thin line between them, there are significant differences between the attempt to somehow magically exert one's will on tangible reality for one's own benefit (manifestation), and the inspiration to imagine entirely new realities (sometimes to add color and bounce to the drab waltz of existence, sometimes to facilitate the recognition of wonder, sometimes just for the hell of it); between an attempt to mentally force fortune to alter its course for one's personal gain (to manifest, say, a winning lottery ticket), and possessing the lightness of spirit and the freedom of mind to live as if such developments would pale in comparison to those one regularly experiences at the piano, the easel, the writing pad, or upon viewing a pattern of fallen leaves in the gutter; to live - against all evidence - as if advances in fortune were already here."
 - Tom Robbins
Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life



"Sometimes you dream strange dreams, impossible and unnatural; you wake up and remember them clearly, and are surprised at a strange fact: you remember first of all that reason did not abandon you during the whole course of your dream; you even remember that you acted extremely cleverly and logically for that whole long, long time when you were surrounded by murderers, when they were being clever with you, concealed their intentions, treated you in a friendly way, though they already had their weapons ready and were only waiting for some sort of sign; you remember how cleverly you finally deceived them, hid from them; then you realize that they know your whole deception by heart and merely do not show you that they know where you are hiding; but you are clever and deceive them again - all that you remember clearly. But why at the same time could your reason be reconciled with such obvious absurdities and impossibilities, with which, among other things, your dream was filled? Before your eyes, one of your murderers turned into a woman, and from a woman into a clever, nasty little dwarf - and all that you allowed at once, as an accomplished fact, almost without the least perplexity, and precisely at the moment when, on the other hand, your reason was strained to the utmost, displaying extraordinary force, cleverness, keenness, logic? Why, also, on awakening from your dream and entering fully into reality, do you feel almost every time, and occasionally with an extraordinary force of impressions, that along with the dream you are leaving behind something you have failed to fathom? You smile at the absurdity of your dream and feel at the same time that the tissue of those absurdities contains some thought, but a thought that is real, something that belongs to your true life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart; it is as if your dream has told you something new, prophetic, awaited; your impression is strong, it is joyful or tormenting, but what it is and what has been told you - all that you can neither comprehend nor recall."
 - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Idiot



"The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself.

There may be a broken trail of stone and bone faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind. It was not and it was; we know not in what instant or in what infinity of years. Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside of time."
 - G. K. Chesterton



nature      an endless song
a symphony of diversity and balance
inertia  outwardly;
a lot happening on the inside
demanding all attention
vital to attend
focus
inwardly;
not moving enough to produce
a reflection or substance
to focus on
sad      unknown
suffused with rose water
choice     what we all have
 - Svetlana Lilova
Metaphysical Dictionary

><((((º>