brocken spectre

"We see, often, too often, what we want to see. Even the bellowing specter of self-made hell must be fussed over like a fetish, as precious and potent as any great work of art. We choose to commit ourselves to it, if only because, like the Big Dipper, it is what we revisit each night, the habit by which we familiarize the dark. The Promethean gift of our imagination is found at the heart of most tragedy, the real weapon discovered at the crime scene. Why would we fashion such horrors?

How did this happen that the very organ of our humanness - as nostril is to dog, as sonar is to bat, as pupil is to owl - would dead-end us with confusion, false information, self obsession? Would an elephant hang itself with its trunk?

We project - at the very least - to anticipate and taste what we can not touch, molecule to molecule, and - at the very best - to live out the Golden Rule, heart to heart. We each spend a lifetime struggling to bridge our detachment, to belong, at last - to know the Other.

So what gives? Why do we do such a dismal job of it?

How do we become so dazzled, so blinded?"
 - Bia Lowe
Killing the Buddha



Sage #3
(This poem's about looking for the sage and not finding her)

Some say she moved in with her ex-girlfriend in Taiwan
Some say she went to Florida to wrestle alligators

Some say she went to Peach Blossom Spring
To drink tea with Tao Qian

Miho says she's living in Calexico with three cats
And a gerbil named Max

Some say she's just a shadow of the Great Society
A parody
Of what might-have-been

Rhea saw her stark raving mad
Between 23rd and the Avenue of the Americas
Wrapped in a flag!

I swear I saw her floating in a motel pool
Topless, on a plastic manatee, palms up

What in hell was she thinking?

What is poetry? What are stars?
Whence comes the end of suffering?
 - Marilyn Chin
poets.org

"When I stop and think about what it's all about I do come up with some answers, but they don't help very much.

I think it is safe to say that life is pretty mysterious. And hard.

Life is short. I know that much. That life is short. And that it's important to keep reminding oneself of it. That life is short. Just because it is. I suspect that each of us is going to wake up some morning to suddenly find ourselves old men (or women) without knowing how we got that way. Wondering where it all went. Regretting all the things we didn't do. So I think that the sooner we realize that life is short the better off we are.

Now, to get down to the basics. There are 24 hours a day. There is you and there are other people. The idea is to fill these 24 hours as best one can. With love and fun. Or things that are interesting. Or what have you. Other people are most important. Art is rewarding. Books and movies are good fillers, and the most reliable.

Now you know that life is not so simple as I am making it sound. We are all a bit fucked up, and here lies the problem. To try and get rid of the fucked up parts, so we can just relax and be ourselves. For what time we have left."
 - Joe Brainard
The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard
crashingly beautiful

"That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb with fatigue, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they've closed, to open our souls once they've shied away, to soften our minds once they've been hardened by the storms of our day."
 - Mark Nepo
crashingly beautiful



"I suspect almost every day that I'm living for nothing, I get depressed and I feel self-destructive and a lot of the time I don't like myself. What's more, the proximity of other humans often fills me with overwhelming anxiety, but I also feel that this precarious sentience is all we've got and, simplistic as it may seem, it's a person's duty to the potentials of his own soul to make the best of it. We're all stuck on this often miserable earth where life is essentially tragic, but there are glints of beauty and bedrock joy that come shining through from time to precious time to remind anybody who cares to see that there is something higher and larger than ourselves. And I am not talking about your putrefying gods, I am talking about a sense of wonder about life itself and the feeling that there is some redemptive factor you must at least search for until you drop dead of natural causes."
 - Lester Bangs
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
crashingly beautiful

"Do not dwell in the mistakes of the past. Do not lose yourself in the castles of the future and do not give your authenticity away to experts, gurus, government commissions, bosses, wives, mates - take back your mind and your body and begin to engage with the fact that you are alive, you are going to die, nobody knows what being alive is and nobody knows what dying is. You're involved in a mysterious engagement where every living moment presents you with mystery, opportunity, and wonder. There is no mundane dimension, really. If you have the eyes to see it, it's all transcendental."
 - Terence McKenna

II
What departs at death is 19 grams (= 7/8 ounce) of you shedding a soft blue light. What remains behind is various. Within a year of the passing of Emily Dickinson's dog Carlo (1848-1866) there were 5 other Carlos in Amherst and 2 in novels. Some centuries later workers digging the Athens metro unearthed the grave of a dog, small paws still folded, collar studded with a row of blue beads. Use a distant brush to paint these things. Do not redip.

III
Look what a thousand-blue-thousand-white-thousand-blue-thousand-white-thousand-blue-thousand-white-thousand-blue wind today and my two arms blowing down the road!
 - Anne Carson
from a Short Talk on the Withness of the Body

we rupture and we break
we stagger and we shine
mistake after mistake
inhabiting our minds

we stagger and we shine
we live our lives on spin
inhabiting our minds
and undermining limbs

we live our lives on spin
and thrive until we grieve
we undermine our limbs
then get the strength to leave

we thrive until we grieve
emotions steady try us
we get the strength. we leave.
what anger in defiance.
 - Allison Joseph
from Untethered

"True, in the spring, when the epidemic was expected to end abruptly at any moment, no one troubled to take another's opinion as to its probable duration, since everyone had persuaded himself that it would have none. But as the days went by, a fear grew up that the calamity might last indefinitely, and then the ending of the plague became the target of all hopes."
 - Albert Camus
The Plague



The difference between what's whole

and what's held, what's withheld
or revealed, what's real and what's

revelation - that's what I seek,
rest of my life spent in search

of little epiphanies, tiny sparks surging
out of the brain during the clumsiest speech.
 - Allison Joseph
from Little Epiphanies

<°))))><

"The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth - with a capital G. 'Progress' in our nation has for too long been confused with 'Growth'; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better - toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote, the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here as we do."
 - Edward Abbey
Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast



"A second truth of equal weight contradicts the first, proclaiming through art, religion, philosophy, science and even war that human life, in some way not easily definable, is significant and unique and supreme beyond all the limits of reason and nature. And this second truth we can deny only at the cost of denying our humanity."
 - Edward Abbey
Desert Solitaire

Canto Nine
It must have been raining a hundred days,
and the water that saturated
the roots of all the plants
Reached the library and soaked all the holy words
which were closed up in the convent.

When the good weather came,
Sajat-Novà, who was the youngest monk,
got a ladder and took all the books up to the roof,
out in the sun. Then he waited for the warm air
to dry the wet paper.

There was a month of good weather
and the monk kneeled down in the courtyard
waiting for the books to give some sign of life.
And finally one morning the pages started
to rustle slightly in the breeze.
It sounded like a swarm of bees had arrived on the roof
and he started to cry because the books were talking.
 - Tonino Guerra
translated by Adria Bernardi
Abandoned Places

"Once I knew, then I forgot. It was as if I had fallen asleep in a field only to discover at waking that a grove of trees had grown up around me.
"Doubt nothing, believe everything," was my friend's idea of metaphysics, although his brother ran away with his wife. He still bought her a rose every day, sat in the empty house for the next twenty years talking to her about the weather.
I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it!
My friend's empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it."
 - Charles Simic
The World Doesn't End

"For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the 'end of ideologies' and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth."
 - Jacques Derrida



"One of my teachers at Columbia was Joseph Brodsky, who's a Russian poet, wonderful, amazing poet, who was exiled from the Soviet Union for being a poet. And he said look, you Americans, you are so naïve. You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn't come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language."
 - Marie Howe

"I believe our survival demands revolution, both cultural and political. If we are to survive the disasters that threaten, and survive our own struggle to make it new - a struggle I believe we have no choice but to commit ourselves to - we need tremendous transfusions of imaginative energy. If it is indeed revolution we are moving toward, we need life, and abundantly - we need poems of the spirit, to inform us of the essential, to help us live the revolution. And if instead it be the Last Days - then we need to taste the dearest, freshest drops before we die - why bother with anything less than that, the essential?"
 - Denise Levertov
The Poet in the World

Beasts bounding through time
Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward
us
impossibly.
 - Charles Bukowski
You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense



"To be is to have mortal shape, mortal conditions, to struggle, to evolve. Paradise is, like the dream of the Buddhists, a Nirvana where there is no more personality and hence no conflict. It is the expression of man's wish to triumph over reality, over becoming. The artist's dream of the impossible, the miraculous, is simply the resultant of his inability to adapt himself to reality. He creates, therefore, a reality of his own - in the poem - a reality which is suitable to him, a reality in which he can live out his unconscious desires, wishes, dreams. The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life, which is a work of art. When man becomes fully conscious of his powers, his role, his destiny, he is an artist and he ceases his struggle with reality."
 - Henry Miller
The Wisdom of the Heart



The Elephant in the Room
The room is
almost all
elephant.
Almost none
of it isn't.
Pretty much
solid elephant.
So there's no
room to talk
about it.
 - Kay Ryan

><((((º>

"Here we are, we the people of the United States: the greatest people on earth, so we think. We have everything - everything it takes to make people happy. We have land, water, sky and all that goes with it. We could become the great shining example of the world; we could radiate peace, joy, power, benevolence. But there are ghosts all about, ghosts whom we can't seem to lay hands on. We are not happy, not contented, not radiant, not fearless."
 - Henry Miller
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

The Conditional
Say tomorrow doesn't come.
Say the moon becomes an icy pit.
Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified.
Say the sun's a foul black tire fire.
Say the owl's eyes are pinpricks.
Say the raccoon's a hot tar stain.
Say the shirt's plastic ditch-litter.
Say the kitchen's a cow's corpse.
Say we never get to see it: bright
future, stuck like a bum star, never
coming close, never dazzling.
Say we never meet her. Never him.
Say we spend our last moments staring
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
Say, It doesn't matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you'd still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.
 - Ada Limón

"Can you explain why it is that there are, at last count, sixteen schools of psychotherapy with sixteen theories of the personality and its disorders and that patients treated in one school seem to do as well or as badly as patients treated in any other - while there is only one generally accepted theory of the cause and cure of pneumococcal pneumonia and only one generally accepted theory of the orbits of the planets and the gravitational attraction of our galaxy and the galaxy M31 in Andromeda? (Hint: If you answer that the human psyche is more complicated than the pneumococcus and the human white-cell response or the galaxies or Einstein's general theory of relativity, keep in mind that the burden of proof is on you. Or if you answer that the study of the human psyche is in its infancy, remember then this infancy has lasted 2,500 years and, unlike physics, we don't seem to know much more about the psyche than Plato did.)"
 - Walker Percy
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

"A summer day - I was twelve or thirteen - at my cousins' house, in the country. They had a fox, collared and on a chain, in a little yard beside the house. All afternoon all afternoon all afternoon it kept -

Once I saw a fox, in an acre of cranberries, leaping and pouncing, leaping and pouncing, leaping and falling back, its forelegs merrily slapping the air as it tried to tap a yellow butterfly with its thin black forefeet, the butterfly fluttering just out of reach all across the deep green gloss and plush of the sweet-smelling bog.

- it kept running back and forth, trembling and chattering."
 - Mary Oliver
Upstream

A Name
When Eve walked among
  the animals and named them -
nightingale, red-shouldered hawk,
fiddler crab, fallow deer -
I wonder if she ever wanted
them to speak back, looked into
their wide wonderful eyes and
whispered, Name me, Name me.
 - Ada Limón
The Carrying



"Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely "subjective," and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don't, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word "affection" and the terms of value that cluster around it - love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence - have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong."
 - Wendell Berry
Brother Tom

"There are many out there who have never been on a 7:30 a.m. freeway or punched a timeclock or even had a job and don't intend to, can't, won't, will die first rather than live the common way. In a sense, each of them is a genius in his or her way, fighting against the obvious, swimming upstream, going mad, getting on pot, wine, whiskey, art, suicide, anything but the common equation. It will be some time before they even us out and make us say quits.

When you see that city hall downtown and all those proper precious people, don't get melancholy. There is a whole tide, a whole race of mad people, starving, drunk, goofy, miraculous. I have seen many of them. I am one of them. There will be more. This city has not been taken. Death before death is sickening. The strange ones will hold, the war will continue. Thank you."
 - Charles Bukowski



"Despite all the talk about freedom of speech, freedom of the press, electoral freedom, and so on, I dare say it would be a shock to know what the common man thinks about the problems which confront the world. The common man is always cleverly set off one against the other, children are always ruled out, young people are ordered to conform and obey, and the views of the wise, the saintly, the true servers of mankind, are forever scorned as impractical."
 - Henry Miller
Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

There Are Mornings
Even now, when the plot
calls for me to turn to stone,
the sun intervenes. Some mornings
in summer I step outside
and the sky opens
and pours itself into me
as if I were a saint
about to die. But the plot
calls for me to live,
be ordinary, say nothing
to anyone. Inside the house
the mirrors burn when I pass.
 - Lisel Mueller
Alive Together

"The democratic man our poets sang of but who, alas, is being rapidly exterminated, along with the buffalo, the moose and the elk, the great bear, the eagle, the condor, the mountain lion. The sort of American who never starts a war, never raises a feud, never draws the color line, never tries to lord it over his fellow-man, never yearns for a higher education, never holds a grudge against his neighbor, never treats an artist shabbily, and never turns a beggar away. Often untutored and unlettered, he sometimes has more of the poet and the musician in him, philosopher too, than those who are acclaimed as such. His whole way of life is aesthetic. What marks him as different, sometimes ridiculous, is his serenity and originality. That he aspires to be none other than himself, is this not the essence of wisdom?"
 - Henry Miller
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

<°))))><
"Sometimes when I meet old friends, it reminds me how quickly time passes. And it makes me wonder if we've utilized our time properly or not. Proper utilization of time is so important. While we have this body, and especially this amazing human brain, I think every minute is something precious. Our day-to-day existence is very much alive with hope, although there is no guarantee of our future. There is no guarantee that tomorrow at this time we will be here. But we are working for that purely on the basis of hope. So, we need to make the best use of our time. I believe that the proper utilization of time is this: if you can, serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think that is the whole basis of my philosophy.

So, let us reflect what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren't born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we must develop basic good human qualities - warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful and more peaceful - happier."
 - Dalai Lama XIV
The Art of Happiness
Happy 87th Birthday, Gyalwa Rinpoche
The 14th Dalai Lama

Oh the house of denial has thick walls
and very small windows
and whoever lives there, little by little,
will turn to stone.

In those years I did everything I could do
and I did it in the dark -
I mean, without understanding.

I ran away.
I ran away again
Then, again, I ran away.
 - Mary Oliver
from Hum, Hum

"It's kind of get your boats time, but it's also rebuild your levees time, and it's also time to address the climate change that drives the floods literally and in terms of this metaphor. You can mourn and organize. And there will always be lives, projects, communities, hopes, ideas worth fighting for. There are so many. In that sense we are rich."
 - Rebecca Solnit

"An important part of building a new culture was allowing people to complain about their past. At first, the more they complained, the worse the past would seem. But by venting, people could start to resolve the past. By bitching and bitching and bitching, they could exhaust the drama of their own horror stories. Grow bored. Only then could they accept a new story for their lives. Move forward."
 - Chuck Palahniuk
Haunted



But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain.
 - Billy Collins
from Water Table
The Art of Drowning



"Our tourists returning from abroad dwell on the poverty and misery of the great masses in Europe, Asia, Africa. They speak with pride of the abundance which we in America share. They talk of efficiency, sanitation, home comforts, high wages, the freedom to move about and to speak one's mind, and so on. They speak of the privileges as if they were American "inventions." (As if there had never been a Greece, a Rome, an Egypt, a China, an India, a Persia.) They never speak of the price we pay for these comforts, for all this progress and abundance. (As if we were free of crime, disease, suicide, infanticide, prostitution, alcoholism, addiction to drugs, military training, armament races and the obsession with lethal weapons.)"
 - Henry Miller
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

"We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic people - the poets, the mystics, the explorers - were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark."
 - Jenny Offill
Dept. of Speculation



The History Teacher
Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador’s hat?"

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.
 - Billy Collins
Questions About Angels

I was a Zen monk who didn't know Zen
so I chose the woods for the years I had left
a robe made of patches over my body
a belt of bamboo around my waist
mountains and streams explain Bodhidharma's meaning
flower smiles and birdsongs reveal the hidden key
sometimes I sit on a flat-topped rock
after midnight cloudless nights when the moon fills the sky
 - Stonehouse
translated by Red Pine

"Maybe love, too, is beautiful because it has a wildness that cannot be tamed. I don't know. All I know is that passion can take you up like a house of cards in a tornado, leaving destruction in its wake. Or it can let you alone because you've built a stone wall against it, set out the armed guards to keep it from touching you. The real trick is to let it in, but to hold on. To understand that the heart is as wide and vast as the universe, but that we come to know it best from here, this place of gravity and stability, where our feet can still touch ground."
 - Deb Caletti
Wild Roses><((((º>

"So our families were train wrecks; we've ruined the earth; kids die all the time. How do we understand that something welcoming remains, sometimes hidden, that we can still trust? When all seems lost, a few friends, the view, and random last-ditch moments of grace, like Liquid Wrench, will do. Otherwise, I don't know. We don't exactly solve this problem, or much of anything, although one can learn to make a perfect old-fashioned, or blinis."
 - Anne Lamott
Small Victories

Maybe we have to betray ourselves in order
just to be ourselves. In the end, Truth taps
at the window of our souls. What quivers on the lake
are only the footprints of Fate. Even our astronomers
hear the funeral sounds of dying galaxies before they
ever see them. Gusts of time are filling my lungs.
 - Richard Jackson
Resonance

"It suits us to pretend that we all belong to the one world, but we are more alone than we realize. This aloneness is not simply the result of our being different from each other; it derives more from the fact that each of us is housed in a different body. The idea of human life being housed in a body is fascinating. For instance, when people come to visit your home, they come bodily. They bring all of their inner worlds, experiences, and memories into your house through the vehicle of their bodies. While they are visiting you, their lives are not elsewhere; they are totally there with you, before you, reaching out toward you. When the visit is over, their bodies stand up, walk out, and carry this hidden world away. This recognition also illuminates the mystery of making love. It is not just two bodies that are close, but rather two worlds; they circle each other and flow into each other. We are capable of such beauty, delight, and terror because of this infinite and unknown world within us."
 - John O'Donohue
Anam Cara



"We cannot, for example, draw a line around the eyes that is not necessarily arbitrary. There is no point at which the eyes begin or end, either in time or in space or conceptually. The eye bone is connected to the face bone, and the face bone is connected to the head bone, and the head bone is connected to the neck bone, and so it goes down to the toe bone, the floor bone, the earth bone, the worm bone, the dreaming butterfly bone. Thus, what we call our eyes are so many bubbles in a sea of foam. This is not only true of our eyes but of our other powers of sensation as well, including the mind."
 - Red Pine
The Heart Sutra



After twenty years of nights beneath the moon and the clouds
to find myself old is hard
crows come looking for food at the altar
monks return with empty begging bowls
others work the waves for shrimp and clams
I swing a hoe in the mountains
when Solomon's seal is gone there is still pine pollen
and one square inch free of care
 - Stonehouse
translated by Red Pine

Demeter
Where I lived - winter and hard earth.
I sat in my cold stone room
choosing tough words, granite, flint,

to break the ice. My broken heart -
I tried that, but it skimmed,
flat, over the frozen lake.

She came from a long, long way,
but I saw her at last, walking,
my daughter, my girl, across the fields,

In bare feet, bringing all spring's flowers
to her mother's house. I swear
the air softened and warmed as she moved,

the blue sky smiling, none too soon,
with the small shy mouth of a new moon.
 - Carol Ann Duffy

"What we learn, of value, we get indirectly, largely unconsciously. It is too often stressed, in my opinion, that we learn through sorrow and suffering. I do not deny this to be true, but I hold that we also learn, and perhaps more lastingly, through moments of joy, of bliss, of ecstasy. Struggle has its importance, but we tend to overrate it. Harmony, serenity, bliss do not come from struggle but from surrender."
 - Henry Miller
Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Midsummer, Tobago
Broad sun-stoned beaches.

White heat.
A green river.

A bridge,
scorched yellow palms

from the summer-sleeping house
drowsing through August.

Days I have held,
days I have lost,

days that outgrow, like daughters,
my harbouring arms.
 - Derek Walcott
Sea Grapes

"How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past?"
 - Mark Strand

"We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas."
 - Alan Watts

<°))))><

Narrow road, wide road, all of us on it, unhappy,
Unsettled, seven yards short of immortality
And a yard short of not long to live.
Better to sit down in the tall grass
and watch the clouds,
To lift our faces up to the sky,
Considering - for most of us - our lives have been a constant mistake.
 - Charles Wright

"Here's how it ends: Prisoners who remind us of the precariousness of our freedom, cancer patients who remind us of our own mortality, immigrants who encroach upon our territory, and widow and widower who prove to us that at any moment we may lose the people we love are a source of anxiety and threat. We choose to deal with our fear by turning away from its source, by rejecting the prisoner, jollying the cancer patient along, excluding the immigrant, or avoiding contact with the widow and widower. But each time we do this we only add to the fear, perpetuate the problems, and miss an opportunity to prepare ourselves for the changes that are inevitable in a changing world."
 - Stuart Ross
The Book of Grief and Hamburgers



"So the myth in our society is that people are competitive by nature and that they are individualistic and that they're selfish. The real reality is quite the opposite. We have certain human needs. The only way that you can talk about human nature concretely is by recognizing that there are certain human needs. We have a human need for companionship and for close contact, to be loved, to be attached to, to be accepted, to be seen, to be received for who we are. If those needs are met, we develop into people who are compassionate and cooperative and who have empathy for other people. So . . . the opposite, that we often see in our society, is in fact, a distortion of human nature precisely because so few people have their needs met."
 - Gabor Maté



"I cannot understand antiabortion arguments that center on the sanctity of life. As a species, we've fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don't believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain, and lifelong, grinding poverty show us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we've made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred."

"However, what I do believe to be genuinely sacred - and, indeed, more useful to the earth as a whole - is trying to ensure that there are as few unbalanced, destructive people as possible. By whatever rationale you use, ending a pregnancy 12 weeks into gestation is incalculably more moral than bringing an unwanted child into this world.
It's those unhappy, unwanted children, who then grew into angry adults, who have caused the great majority of humankind's miseries. They are the ones who make states feel feral; streets dangerous; relationships violent."
 - Caitlin Moran
How to Be a Woman



Remedy
When I was young, exorcisms were quite common, a remedy not unlike ice baths. Plus, devils were shorter in those days just as people were. They hadn't eaten enough fruits or vegetables, and lacked essential vitamins and iron, grew thin and pale, fell easily into brooding depressions. They looked more like deer than sheep, and when they possessed you it was usually because they were fleeing from someone else and didn't realize where they were until it was too late. It was more a question of giving directions than driving them out. "Turn right at the hairdresser's, go straight until you get to the abandoned schoolhouse, then turn left. You should see the exit from there." "Thank you. I was completely lost." "You're welcome. Good luck." "You too, and thanks again."
 - Dag T. Straumsvåg
translated by Robert Hedin
At the Great Door of Morning



"Contemporary civilization is returning to begging to stop ecocide, but the first step in this return should be to leave the parental home in the great house of the world. Our parents are everywhere - because everything instructs us, encourages us, educates us. Does anyone really believe that humans invented the wheel, or fire, or tools on their own? Stones roll downhill, flames fall from the sky, birds weave nests and pull ants out of their nests with sticks, just like monkeys or elephants. The natural sciences were taught by nature itself."
 - James Hillman
The Soul's Code



The Sympathies of the Long Married
Oh well, let's go on eating the grains of eternity.
What do we care about improvements in travel?
Angels sometimes cross the river on old turtles.

Shall we worry about who gets left behind?
That one bird flying through the clouds is enough.
Your sweet face at the door of the house is enough.

The two farm horses stubbornly pull the wagon.
The mad crows carry away the tablecloth.
Most of the time, we live through the night.

Let's not drive the wild angels from our door.
Maybe the mad fields of grain will move.
Maybe the troubled rocks will learn to walk.

It's all right if we're troubled by the night.
It's all right if we can't recall our own name.
It's all right if this rough music keeps on playing.

I've given up worrying about men living alone.
I do worry about the couple who live next door.
Some words heard through the screen door are enough.
 - Robert Bly
Talking into the Ear of a Donkey



Surviving
There are days when the fear of death
is as ubiquitous as light. It illuminates
everything. Without it, I might not
have noticed this ladybird beetle,
bright as a drop of blood
on the window's white sill.
Her head no bigger than a period,
her eyes like needle points,
she has stopped for a moment to rest,
knees locked, wing covers hiding
the delicate lace of her wings.
As the fear of death, so attentive
to everything living, comes near her,
the tiny antennae stop moving.
 - Ted Kooser
Delights and Shadows



"As a rule the tales which get abroad in the world are false - perhaps because the truth is not interesting enough?
People always exaggerate things. More so, when months and years have passed and the place is distant do they relate any story they please, or even it put down in writing, so that at last it becomes established fact.

Anyhow, it is a world that is full of lies, and we shall make no mistake if we make up our minds that what we hear is really not at all strange and unusual but merely exaggerated in the telling."
 - Yoshida Kenkō
Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō

This is an old man's poetry,
written by someone who's spent his life
Looking for one truth.
Sorry, pal, there isn't one.
Unless, of course, the trees and their blow-down relatives
Are part of it.
Unless the late-evening armada of clouds
Spanished along the horizon are part of it.
Unless the diminishing pinprick of light
stunned in the dark forest
Is part of it.
Unless, O my, whatever the eye makes out,
And sends us, on its rough-road trace,
To the heart, is part of it,
then maybe that bright vanishing might be.
 - Charles Wright
from Ancient of Days

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"For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you're lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you're alive."
 - Ann Patchett
What Now?

"Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment."
 - James Hillman
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy & the World's Getting Worse

"Alas, I myself have started to feel the onset of something, a sadness perhaps, the dawn of a new season, an existence even. But enough of this. Tell me about yourself and what it is like where you are. Do the leaves ever stop falling? Are the shadows ever anything but long? And the mountains? Can one see them?"
 - Mark Strand

Perfection is out of the question for people like us,
So why plug away at the same old self when the landscape

Has opened its arms and given us marvelous shrines
To flock towards?
 - Mark Strand
from The Next Time<°))))><