by W.S. Merwin, from The Shadow of Sirius
we believe in measure
we do it with the first breath we take
and the first sound we make
it is in each word we learn
and in each of them it means
what will come again and when
it is there in meal and in moon
and in meaning it is the meaning
it is the firmament and the furrow
turning at the end of the field
and the verse turning with its breath
it is in memory that keeps telling us
some of the old story about us
Doris Kearns Goodwin identified ten traits that made Abraham Lincoln a great leader. They are not only appropriate qualities to look for in today’s leaders, but for followers to cultivate, as well.
Capacity to listen to different points of view I walk into the bakery next door
To my apartment. They are about
To pull some sort of toast with cheese
From the oven. When I ask:
What's that smell? I am being
A poet, I am asking
What everyone else in the shop
Wanted to ask, but somehow couldn't;
I am speaking on behalf of two other
Customers who wanted to buy the
Name of it. I ask the woman
Behind the counter for a percentage
Of her sale. Am I flirting?
Am I happy because the days
Are longer? Here's what
She does: She takes her time
Choosing the slices. "I am picking
Out the good ones," she tells me. It's
April 14th. Spring, with five to ten
Degrees to go. Some days, I feel my duty;
Some days, I love my work.
Matt White was born on this day in Rockford, Illinois (1967). He has performed in the Nutcracker, 
Here are the vows I read to him during our civil union ceremony in Stowe, Vermont on February 7, 2003. We held our private ceremony in the home of Justice of the Peace Elizabeth Campbell who was baking cookies when we arrived.
Matt,
Being born into this world is a mystery. 
I did not go searching for you. You were a complete surprise. If I had known that such a phenomenon as Matt White existed, I would have set out to find you. You were like a pond hidden in the mountains of New Mexico that I accidently happened upon—your surface completely still, your water crystal clear, the sun shining in the clear blue sky above you. Breathtaking. I continue to be amazed by the endless discoveries I’ve made in you.
How lucky are those who have been given a glimpse of the brightly colored fish living inside you. But I am the luckiest of all, having learned that contained in your depths is a treasure chest overflowing with riches and magic beyond my wildest dreams. I will never tire of swimming in you as long as I live.
It is in awe of these miracles of life and love which are so easily taken for granted that I enter into this vow of commitment to you by the choices I make every day. By practicing paying attention to the holiness hidden inside each moment—in private and in public, in pleasure and in suffering, alone and together—may our love continue its slow, unrepeatable blooming.
* * * * *
For What Binds Us
by Jane Hirschfield
There are names for what binds us: strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them: the skin that forms in a half-
empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints
dovetailed on their own weight, the way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down—and gravity, scientists say, is
weak.
And see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with a great
vehemence, more strong than the simple, untested surface
before.
There’s a name for it on horses, when it comes back darker and
raised: proud flesh, as all flesh is proud of its wounds, wears
them as honors given out after battle, small triumphs pinned to
the chest.
And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a
scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, proud; how the
black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or
mend.
What animates these beautiful machines,
all these sleepwalkers,
with a shared sense of being at the center
combined with a desire not to exist at all?
What digs in its heels against
children crying, children laughing,
dirty dishes, clean laundry, long fingernails,
visitors arriving and leaving,
yet yearns to live forever
and even resolves to wake up?
What makes us pull the car over
to drag a fallen tree from the road on Christmas Eve?
What makes us keep driving, accidently hitting the one
who stopped in the dark to prevent a tragedy?
What makes us weigh the suffering of the driver,
the dead, and both of their loved ones,
as if attempting to solve such a puzzle
ever comforted anyone?
ONE
A priest, Father Flynn, in his early thirties,
in green and gold vestments, gives a sermon.
He is working class, from the Northeast.
From Dancing with Life by Phillip Moffitt:
First if your craving for the six kinds of sense desires, or kama tanha: craving for certain food tastes or for pleasing sounds or for silence; craving for sexual, affectionate, or comforting touch or simple physical comfort in your body; craving for attractive, pleasant, comforting, inspiring sights as well as for pleasant, refreshing smells; and finally, craving for thoughts that are confirming, useful, stimulating, and reassuring to you. Just think of how many different sense desires you have in any given moment!
The second type of craving is the desire for existence and for becoming what you are not. In Pali this is called bhava tanha. You may want to be wealthy, or more athletic, or sexually desirable, or a better musician. The craving to “become” can be wholesome—to be a good parent or a better friend to others, or to be more generous, healthier, or more disciplined—yet still cause suffering…
The third type of tanha arises when you are disillusioned with something in your life and want to get rid of it or want it to cease with such intensity that you crave nonexistence. This state of mind is called vibhava tanha. For instance, you may be so overwhelmed by chronic back pain or a difficult emotion that you are flooded with aversion to life itself. Or you have such antipathy toward your physical appearance, aging, or disease that life seems unbearable. In each of these instances, your nervous system is overcome by the energy generated by the craving, and it seems as if your whole being is rejecting existence. Vibhava tanha is annihilation. If you have ever felt suicidal, even briefly, then you have had flashes of vibhava tanha in the extreme. In its milder manifestations, vibhava tanha is part of everyday life. For example, you can feel so humiliated when you make a big mistake in front of others that for a brief moment your mind is filled with this craving.
I don’t know how my resumé found out
we were staying in town for Christmas,
but he pulled up as soon as the girl left
to visit her mother’s side of the family.
He’s still driving the hail-damaged Corolla
with the broken muffler.
I accepted the foil-wrapped plate of assorted cookies
and invited him in for a bowl of soup.
We exchanged the details of our holiday plans
like presidents of small countries
offering economic updates and projected budgets,
implying confidence for growth in the coming year.
He still favors films outside the mainstream
in spite of the isolation that tends to cultivate,
and he was especially enthusiastic about poets
he had recently discovered.
We could tell he’s as curious and idealistic as ever,
and his assets remain primarily intangible.
He’s still second guessing his choices, lacking in confidence,
and haunted by a persistent aversion to boredom and risk.
He sight-read a few carols.
We didn’t point out the shakiness of his Brahms
and he didn’t tell us that our piano
had drifted imperceptibly out of tune.
He seemed underwhelmed by our gifts to each other
and we yawned when he solved my new Rubik’s cube.
When he finally left, we hurried out to see the new
Meryl Streep movie which promised not to resolve at the end.
“There is only one real deprivation…and that is not to be able to give one’s gifts to those one loves most…The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.”
~ May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
You Reading This, Be Ready
by William Stafford
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –
What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
[Thanks JC!]
Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
APOPHASIS refers, in general, to mentioning by not mentioning.
APOPHENIA is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the unmotivated seeing of connections accompanied by a specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness.
From Nietzsche’s prologue to On the Genealogy of Morals:
We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable people—we are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there’s good reason for that. We've never tried to find out who we are. How could it ever happen that one day we'd discover our own selves? With justice it’s been said that “Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.” Our treasure lies where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always busy with our knowledge, as if we were born winged creatures—collectors of intellectual honey. In our hearts we are basically concerned with only one thing, to “bring something home.” As far as the rest of life is concerned, what people call “experience”—which of us is serious enough for that? Who has enough time? In these matters, I fear, we've been “missing the point.”
Our hearts have not even been engaged—nor, for that matter, have our ears! We've been much more like someone divinely distracted and self-absorbed into whose ear the clock has just pealed the twelve strokes of noon with all its force and who all at once wakes up and asks himself “What exactly did that clock strike?”—so we rub ourselves behind the ears afterwards and ask, totally surprised and embarrassed “What have we really just experienced? And more: “Who are we really?” Then, as I've mentioned, we count—after the fact—all the twelve trembling strokes of the clock of our experience, our lives, our being—alas! in the process we keep losing the count. So we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we have to keep ourselves confused. For us this law holds for all eternity: “Each man is furthest from himself.” Where we ourselves are concerned, we are not “knowledgeable people.”
Un Conte de Noël
(A Christmas Tale)
Arnaud Desplechin, the director of A Christmas Tale, interviews Catherine Deneuve in the November/December 2008 edition of Film Comment.
"I think a poem is a dream, a dream which you are willing to share with the community. It happens a writer often doesn't understand a poem until some months after he's written it."
"It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day....The problem of painting night scenes and effects on the spot and actually by night interests me enormously."
“The Starry Night, done [in1889], has long ranked as the most popular painting at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). This inspired the museum, in collaboration with Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum, to mount the exhibition Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night (through January 5, 2009). It will then travel to the Van Gogh Museum (February 13-June 7, 2009).”
~ From “Van Gogh’s Night Visions,” by Paul Trachtman, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2009
“I wouldn’t ever say whether the priest is innocent or guilty because I saw ‘Doubt’ as being about something larger…What’s so essential about this movie is our desire to be certain about something and say, This is what I believe is right, wrong, black, white. That’s it. To feel confident that you can wake up and live your day and be proud instead of living in what’s really true, which is the whole mess that the world is. The world is hard, and John is saying that being a human on this earth is a complicated, messy thing…And I, personally, am uncomfortable with that messiness, just as I acknowledge its absolute necessity. I find the need to play a part like Father Flynn inescapable, and I only want to do things I’m that passionate about. I know there are actors out there that present themselves as cool cats, but you better take your cool-cat suit off if you want to act. You can’t otherwise.”
~ Philip Seymour Hoffman, from “A Higher Calling,” by Lynn Hirschberg, New York Times Sunday Magazine (12.21.08)
~ Meryl Streep, from “Meryl Streep: Mother Superior,” by Mick Brown, Daily Telegraph (12.2008)
~ From “Pakistan's Sufis Preach Faith and Ecstasy,” by Nicholas Schmidle, Smithsonian Magazine, December 2008
~ Michael Merzenich, Professor Emeritus, University of California at San Francisco; Chief Scientific Officer, Posit Science
“Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
"The art of letting thing happen, action through non-action, letting go of oneself, as taught by Meister Eckhart, became for me the key to opening the door to the way. We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this actually is an art of which few people know anything. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating and never leaving the simple growth of the psychic processes in peace."
"The word Santa means holy. And Santa Claus is one of the true figures of imagination that we have left that children can really relate to. Adults can, too, but maybe not with the same sense of reality as children obviously. But I don't know if there are any other figures of imagination that have so much reality...I do think he embodies the real spirit of Christmas. And I'm speaking as someone who has really studied theology for a long time. I don't think we should give Christmas over to the theologians to discuss the intricacies of theology. I think that it's about a figure who understands what it means to give, to relate to children, to have a good spirit, create friendliness in the world, and bring the world together. He travels the whole world on Christmas Eve, it's not just one country. There's an awful lot in Santa Claus that I really love."
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the
Indian in a white poncho lies dead
by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night
with plans and the simple breath
that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness
as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow
as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness
that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.
Ars Poetica #100: I Believe
by Elizabeth Alexander
Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry
is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said
“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats
for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?
* * * * *
Poet Elizabeth Alexander will read at the swearing in of Barack Obama next month. In response to the news, she said, “This incoming president of ours has shown in every act that words matter, that words carry meaning, that words carry power, that words are the medium with which we communicate across difference, and that words have tremendous possibilities and those possibilities are not empty."
[Thanks Jeanne!]
~ Richard Moran, from Essay-review of The Reasons of Love by Harry Frankfurt
by Ted Kooser, from VQR
This black sedan lies on its top
on the kitchen window sill, its wheels
in the air, its battery drained,
the oil trickling into the cylinders.
It must have happened during the night
when no one was around to see,
and it looks like someone has been here
early this morning to pop the trunk
and crawl in under it to take out
something. But I am only barely
curious, continuing on as I am,
doing my few breakfast dishes,
fussy to get all the egg from the tines
of my fork, and then from the spatula
and the weary old skillet that has seen
so much, and me with the morning
picking up speed, the days streaming past,
hot suds all sparkly on my hands.
Excerpt from More Than It Hurts You by Darin Strauss:
by Virgil Suárez, from 90 Miles
from Franco's Spain, everything we encountered
or bought had "free" written on it.
The boxes of cereal spoke of a free mystery
surprise, the junk mail came bundled,
and somehow that word sang to us.
My father and I got wise—the word
became cheap, untrustworthy, hollow.
Having been fooled before, we knew what "free"
really meant. We learned lessons the hard way;
nothing free ever came so easily, but my mother—
who had heard stories of people throwing
out television sets, sofas, washing machines,
perfectly good chairs—believed in this land
of plenty where people discarded simply
because things were old or someone
had grown tired of them. She believed
in all that was cast to the curb. A cousin
who cruised the neighborhood streets
for these free goods told her of his finds
over the telephone. On the weekends,
she sent my father and me out to hunt,
to find these throwaways, but we always
came back empty-handed. We never
really looked. We stopped for donuts
or to watch a baseball game at the park.
Now, years later, my father dead, my mother
gets the mail, the catalogs, and she sends
it all up to me in Tallahassee, and she's circled
the word "free" and asks me what the deal is.
Most Sundays I try to convince her once
and for all that there are no deals, that nothing
is free, then there's silence over the line,
and I can hear her thinking otherwise.
She is a woman who wants to cling to something
as simple as a two-for-one deal, the extra, the much
more, lo gratis: these simple things she knows
have kept us going all these exiled years.
[Thanks Garrison Keillor!]
"A human being is part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature."
It is so difficult to see this flower*
because the countless others
we’ve seen before
cloud the view,
along with how we expect it to look
and how it might be improved.
Even the faces of the ones we love deeply
hide like buried treasure
behind histories of expression.
In order to see
what is right in front of our eyes,
we first have to recognize
we have gradually
become blind,
and then begin
the slow work of forgetting.
* Substitute with any noun: beach, stone, bird, soap bubble, house, grandmother, beef stew, homeless person, celebrity, potato, dollar bill, construction worker, politician, drug addict, child, teacher, report card, mail order catalogue, boss, swimming pool, dog, towel, onion, computer, neighbor, planet, pine cone, cigarette, airplane, spam subject, fork, mountain, etc.
by Marvin Levine, from Look Down From Clouds
Escher got it right.
Men step down and yet rise up,
the hand is drawn by the had it draws,
and a woman is poised on her very own shoulders.
Without you and me this universe is simple,
run with the regularity of a prison.
Galaxies spin along stipulated arcs,
stars collapse at the specified hour,
crows u-turn south and monkeys rut on schedule.
But we, whom the Cosmos shaped for a billion years
to fit this place, we know it failed.
For we can reshape,
reach an arm through the bars
and, Escher-like, pull ourselves out.
And while whales feeding on mackerel
are confined forever in the sea,
we climb the waves,
look down from clouds.
~ William Faulkner, from his acceptance speech for winning the Nobel Prize in literature on this day in 1950. Read about the gritty back-story details leading up to this speech at The Writer’s Almanac.
~ Marlon Brando, talking about how his childhood insecurities provided emotional material which he used as an actor, from Songs My Mother Taught Me. This quote was part of a review by Michiko Kakutani of Somebody: the reckless life and remarkable career of Marlon Brando, a new biography of the actor written by Stefan Kanfer.
[Thanks http://mysite.verizon.net/resohdyv/Kit!]
From “Auggie Wren’s Christmas,” by Paul Auster:
Auggie and I have known each other for close to eleven years now. He works behind the counter of a cigar store on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, and since it's the only store that carries the little Dutch cigars I like to smoke, I go in there fairly often. For a long time, I didn't give much thought to Auggie Wren. He was the strange little man who wore a hooded blue sweatshirt and sold me cigars and magazines, the impish, wisecracking character who always had something funny to say about the weather, the Mets or the politicians in Washington, and that was the extent of it.
But then one day several years ago he happened to be looking through a magazine in the store, and he stumbled across a review of one of my books. He knew it was me because a photograph accompanied the review, and after that things changed between us. I was no longer just another customer to Auggie, I had become a distinguished person. Most people couldn't care less about books and writers, but it turned out that Auggie considered himself an artist. Now that he had cracked the secret of who I was, he embraced me as an ally, a confidant, a brother-in-arms. To tell the truth, I found it rather embarrassing. Then, almost inevitably, a moment came when he asked if I would be willing to look at his photographs. Given his enthusiasm and goodwill, there didn't seem any way I could turn him down.
Clips from Smoke:
[Link to this story found on Jonathan Carroll’s blog]
~ Jonathan Carroll, in conversation about his new novel, The Ghost in Love, with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm (12.04.08)
“We first meet the Angel of Death in a local cafe as he takes a meal with ghostly Ling. But Death plays only a peripheral role in all this. As he explains to Ling, Ben's fate ‘is out of our hands. Plus, we're fascinated to see what will happen to him now ...’ You'll be fascinated too, if you're alive to the experience of immersing yourself in the most seriously entertaining writing of the day…Whatever the genre, Carroll creates novels so fascinating and intelligent and seriously delightful that no other writer in English can touch him.”
~ Alan Cheuse, from “Death’s Absence, Writ Large and Small,” All Things Considered (12.09.09)
“It’s an important part of my personality that I continually adjudicate, but I never reach a verdict…You can’t know exactly what’s going on in your neighbor’s house or in his head or his heart. You can make suppositions, you can make assumptions, but you always have to factor in that you can’t know.”
~ John Patrick Shanley, from “‘Doubt’ and Doubts of a Workingman,” David Carr, New York Times (12.04.08)
by Ellen Bass, from Mules of Love
[Thanks Garrison!]
~ Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School, speaking with the New York Times about his article, “Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study,” which was published Thursday (12/04/08) in the British Medical Journal.
[Thanks LInda!]
Excerpts from “The History of the Personal and The Personal in History: The Poetry of Patrick Phillips,” by Billy Reynolds, storySouth (2005):
…
There is nothing that gives me more delight in poetry than surprise. I think of Rilke’s “you must change your life.” Of Bishop: “And I let it go.” Of Herbert: “Me thought I heard one calling, Child / and I replied, My Lord.” And if surprise is one of my great pleasures in poetry, it requires first an expectation, and the suspense of waiting for it to be fulfilled. I love the narrative movement of sonata form, when a symphony establishes a phrase, elaborates it almost beyond recognition, and then finally returns to the tonic key that we had almost, but not quite, forgotten. It is journey that ends in a homecoming. And that is, I think, the ideal relationship between decorum and surprise: a poem that is both surprising and inevitable in its closing lines, as the formal contract with the reader is upheld, but not in the way that we expected.
…
Look
By Patrick Phillips, from Chattahoochee.
I'd like to ask my mother
why I'm here, straddling
one thigh of her bell-bottom jeans,
listening to her whisper look
look sweetie in my ear.
But I can't stop staring
at our fat cat Walina,
ancestor of every cat
that ever roamed that house,
as she blinks back at me,
licks between her claws,
then turns again to eating
the clear, vein-laced skin
stretched over the faces
of her babies squirming
in a pulled-out dresser drawer.
I'd like to ask—but this is back
before anything means anything, when it all just is,
and even the squinting kittens
are like a game my mother made up
to pass the drizzly afternoon.
Back in the cold, dark evening
of childhood, where I'm always
alone: watching Walina
close her mouth around the runt—
the sleepy one, the one too weak
to butt its head against her,
that meows and meows
though no sound comes out,
when she drops it outside the drawer.
This is in the oldest room
of the house behind my eyelids,
where the world began:
where a light bulb pops and flickers
over everything, and no one
ever comes to stop the kitten
from dragging its sack of blood
all over the white linoleum.
"Rumi teaches the opening heart. Rumi says that whatever was said to the rose was said to me here in my chest. The implication being that for 
~ Coleman Barks, from “A Valentine to the World,” a BookPage interview with Linda Stankard
~ Pema Chödrön, from This Moment is the Perfect Teacher: Ten Buddhist Teachings on Cultivating Inner Strength and Compassion
From "Standing in Someone Else’s Shoes, Almost for Real," by Benedict Carey, New York Times (12.1.08):
Marriage counselors have couples role-play, each one taking the other spouse’s part. Psychologists have rapists and other criminals describe their crime from the point of view of the victim. Like novelists or moviemakers, their purpose is to transport people, mentally, into the mind of another.
Now, neuroscientists have shown that they can make this experience physical, creating a “body swapping” illusion that could have a profound effect on a range of therapeutic techniques. At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last month, Swedish researchers presented evidence that the brain, when tricked by optical and sensory illusions, can quickly adopt any other human form, no matter how different, as its own.
The technique is simple. A subject 
To add a physical element, the researchers have each person squeeze the other’s hand, as if in a handshake. Now the subject can see and “feel” the new body. In a matter of seconds, the illusion is complete. In a series of studies, using mannequins and stroking both bodies’ bellies simultaneously, the Karolinska researchers have found that men and women say they not only feel they have taken on the new body, but also unconsciously cringe when it is poked or threatened.
[Thanks Dōshin!]
By Patrick Phillips, from Boy
that grand piano we found one night on Willoughby
that someone had smashed and somehow
heaved through an open window.
And you might think by this I mean I'm broken
or abandoned, or unloved. Truth is, I don't
know exactly what I am, any more
than the wreckage in the alley knows
it's a piano, filling with trash and yellow leaves.
Maybe I'm all that's left of what I was.
But touching me, I know, you are the good
breeze blowing across its rusted strings.
What would you call that feeling when the wood,
even with its cracked harp, starts to sing?
[Thanks Mr. Keillor!]
Excerpts from an interview with Truthdig columnist and author Chris Hedges in The Sun Magazine (Dec. 2008), “Moral Combat: Chris Hedges on War, Faith, and Fundamentalism."
...Fundamentalism is a form of tribalism. There’s a great comfort in it, because it discourages self-criticism and self-reflection. Retreating into tribal groups is a way to revert to a childlike state of security, rather than live as an adult and struggle with ambiguity.
...I think that those who remain open to other realities must always cope with anxiety. That is the pain of being fully human. The only other choice is to live in an authoritarian system — either religious or secular — where moral choice is made for you, because you are told what is moral and what is immoral.
...Communism, fascism, religious fanaticism, neocon utopianism in Iraq — there are all sorts of ideologies that can motivate people to kill. Religion is just one. Like political ideologies, theological systems are a human creation. God is a human concept, a flawed attempt by human beings to acknowledge, cope with, and explain the infinite, which is the only reality.
...Like art, [religion] is an attempt at wisdom, which doesn’t come from knowledge. You can memorize as many sutras, verses, and prayers as you want, but it will never make you wise. Religion and art are both ways of grappling with those non-rational forces of love, beauty, truth, grief, and meaning that make one a whole individual. The problem is not religion. The problem is the human heart. And the new atheists don’t get that. People will always find reasons to act inhumanely, whether it’s religion, or nationalism, or “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” or the workers’ paradise.
By Jalalu'l-Din Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
person feels better, you’re that,
and the onset of disease too. You’re sudden,
terrible screaming. Some problems require
we go for help. When we knock on a stranger’s
door, you sent us. Nobody answers. It’s
you! When work feels necessary, you
are the way workers move in rhythm.
You are what is: the field, the players,
the ball, those watching. Someone claims to
have evidence that you do not exist.
You’re the one who brings the evidence in,
and the evidence itself! You are inside
the soul’s great fear, every natural
pleasure, every vicious cruelty. Someone
loves something, someone else hates
the same. There you are. Whatever anyone
wants or not: political power, injustice,
material possessions, those are your script,
the handwriting we study. Body, soul,
shadow. Whether reckless or careful,
you are what we do. It’s absurd to ask
your pardon. You’re inside repentance,
and sin! The wonder of various jewels,
agate, emerald. How we are during the day,
then at night, you are those moods and
the pure compassion we feel for each
other. Every encampment has a tent
where the leader is, and also the wide
truth of your imperial tent overall.
A night full of talking that hurts,
my worst held-back secrets: everything
has to do with loving and not loving.
This night will pass.
Then we have work to do.
There’s a shredding that’s really a healing,
that makes you more alive!
A lion holds you in his arms.
Fingers rake the fretbridge for music.
Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance, in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.
All I know of spirit
is this love.
Daron Larson
Freelance Contemplative
Time and patience turn the mulberry leaf to 
