ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.

HERMANN HESSE

It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is.

JOYCE CAROL OATES

Life is energy, and energy is creativity. And even when we as individuals pass on, the energy is retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release if only someone will take the time and the care to unlock it.

HAROLD PINTER from The Hothouse

Women! I’ve known them all. Did I ever tell you about the woman in the blue dress? She was a spy. A spy in a blue dress. I met her in Casablanca. Believe it or believe it not that woman was an agent for a foreign power. She was tattooed on her belly with a pelican. Yes. Her belly was covered with a pelican. She could make that pelican waddle across the room to you. On all fours, sideways, feet first, arse-upwards, any way you like. Her control was superhuman. Only a woman could possess it. Under her blue dress she wore a shimmy. And under that shimmy she wore a pelican.

W. H. AUDEN

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.

SAM SHEPARD from Buried Child

Well you can hardly blame others for not fulfilling your hallucination.

LIN JENSEN from Deep Down Things

As both a Buddhist and a student of deep ecology, I’m struck how much the two have in common, each exacting of the follower a genuine paradigm shift in perception.

For the Buddhist the shift is an awakening to earth as an extension of one’s own body wherein the dichotomy of self and other dissolves. For the deep ecologist the shift is a similar awakening wherein earth is realized as one indivisible body comprised of all beings of any sort.

In both instances, this awakening is of profound proportions arguing for a shared communal relationship with earth that is unknown in modern industrial society.

My prayer is that to the very last of this planet’s brief tenure in the vast cycle of the universe someone will remain to say “earth” and to say it from the heart’s core.

MARGARET ATWOOD from Cat’s Eye

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.

TrainsOfThought

TOM WAITS - "The Ghosts Of Saturday Night (After Hours At Napoleone’s Pizza House)"

A cab combs the snake,
Tryin’ to rake in that last night’s fare,
And a solitary sailor
Who spends the facts of his life like small change on strangers…

Paws his inside P-coat pocket for a welcome twenty-five cents,
And the last bent butt from a package of Kents,
As he dreams of a waitress with Maxwell House eyes
And marmalade thighs with scrambled yellow hair.

Her rhinestone-studded moniker says, "Irene”
As she wipes the wisps of dishwater blonde from her eyes
And the Texaco beacon burns on,
The steel-belted attendant with a ‘Ring and Valve Special’…
Cryin’ “Fill'er up and check that oil”
“You know it could be a distributor and it could be a coil.”

The early mornin’ final edition’s on the stands,
And that town cryer’s cryin’ there with nickels in his hands.
Pigs in a blanket sixty-nine cents,
Eggs - roll 'em over and a package of Kents,
Adam and Eve on a log, you can sink 'em damn straight,
Hash browns, hash browns, you know I can’t be late.

And the early dawn cracks out a carpet of diamond
Across a cash crop car lot filled with twilight Coupe Devilles,
Leaving the town in a-keeping
Of the one who is sweeping
Up the ghost of Saturday night.

VALERIE STEIKER from “Dressing for Dinner, and Other Things My Mother Knew”

I come from a long line of small, elegant, dark-haired women who are somewhat excitable and look good in red.

GEORGE HARRISON - “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

I look at you all, see the love there that’s sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps
I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps

I don’t know why nobody told you
How to unfold your love
I don’t know how someone controlled you
They bought and sold you

I look at the world and I notice it’s turning
While my guitar gently weeps
With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps

Well…

I don’t know how you were diverted
You were perverted too
I don’t know how you were inverted
No one alerted you

I look at you all, see the love there that’s sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps
Look at you all
Still my guitar gently weeps

SELF-PORTRAIT

@20somethingboy

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER - “Icelandic Hurricane”

No earth tremor, but a skyquake. Turner could have painted it, secured by ropes. A single  mitten whirled past right now, several miles from its hand. Facing the storm I am heading for that house on the other side of the field. I flutter in the hurricane. I am being x-rayed, my skeleton hands in its application for discharge. Panic grows while I tack about, I am wrecked, I am wrecked and drown on dry land! How heavy it is, all that I suddenly have to carry, how heavy it is for the butterfly to tow a barge! There at last. A final bout of wrestling with the door. And now inside. Behind the huge window-pane. What a strange and magnificent invention glass is—to be close without being stricken… Outside a horde  of transparent splinters of gigantic shapes rush across the lava plain. But I flutter no more. I sit behind the glass, still, my own portrait.

ALICE MUNRO

You protect yourself by thinking if you have all these rituals and routines then nothing can get you.

Channa masala.

HANNAH ARENDT from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968)

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

EDMUND WHITE

The French have such an attractive civilization, dedicated to calm pleasures and general tolerance, and their taste in every domain is so sharp, so sure, that the foreigner (especially someone from chaotic, confused America) is quickly seduced into believing that if he can only become a Parisian he will at last master the art of living.

CHARLES DE LIN - “Tower & Bear”

Refuse litters

the first floor:
    rusting stovepipes,
    rusting stove,
    broken chair,
    forgotten raincoat
    hanging from a peg
    beside the rickety
    ladder stairs.

Up those stairs,
dust lies thick as neglected dreams
there,
in that forgotten tower;
up again,
one more floor,
into the wizard’s hat now,
where a mountain range of
shin-high bat guano
strides across the water-stained wood,
skitter-skree of bats
in the crown of the raftered hat above,
but you can see,
through the trees,
a glimpse of water,
you can understand
how the tower came to be,
    if not why it was forgotten.

The road that once
wound up the hill
is so overgrown now
you need imagination
to mark its turns,
but I don’t ever follow that road;
I cut through the woods,
up the hill,
above the lake;
I step over fallen snags,
work my way through the new growth,
over the humped bones
of granite behemoths
    more forgotten than any wooden tower;
for a time
I follow the swath Jim and Paul cut,
    removing dying trees
    for firewood,
then I slip into the deeper woods,
through the sudden surprises
of small sunned meadows,
past the dry paper football
of a hornet’s nest
hanging from
an impossibly thin twig,
down into a gully,
scramble up again
and then I see it,
first the wizard’s hat,
    shingles black,
then the tower.

I sit
where the moss makes no differentiation
    between limestone and granite
    and fallen snag,
where the goldenrod rustles
and the birch and maple murmur,
and I listen to their gossip,
all the gossip
   —because even
    the silent stone underfoot
    and the motionless Queen Anne’s lace
    has a voice;
the only sound I make
is the faint skritch of pen on paper,
waking the tower
in my sketchbook,
    ghostlike, at first,
lines so faint, they mean nothing,
but connecting, one to the other,
gathering volume and shape,
until there are two towers
in the wood,
upon the hill,
above the lake:
one an echo,
the other forgotten.

And that would be enough:
the tower, the gossip,
the insect hum,
the sunlight an Impressionist’s dream
as it patterns the hilltop,
    yellow on green,
    violet on green,
    green on green on brown,
the maples red,
the tower brown and grey,
as though it had grown,
    moss-like from the forest floor,
    rather than raised by human hand.
My heart is so full,
it would be enough.

But the forest allows me
one more gift:
    a rustle in the berry bushes
    down in the gully.
The bear seems as
surprised as I am
- delicate for all his bulk;
coat, a midnight black;
nose lifted as he senses me
sensing him;
eyes the dark of the shadows
that collect at the bottom
of the lake.

He stands so close,
not ten feet from me,
I could count the hairs on his muzzle,
were I so inclined,
but at that moment
my gaze encompasses everything:
no one detail,
    but all details at once.
My pulse drums,
    first with fear,
    then with awe,
    then with a gratefulness
    that words cannot express.

I hold my breath
and know that,
although I am only a guest here,
    for one brief moment,
I may call this home;
I have been given,
    for one brief moment
    which lasts a lifetime,
a glimpse into the Otherworld
from which all our spirits
once came.

Then my host turns,
broad black back
slipping away among the trees
    like water running downhill,
    retreating
    like a faerie glamour,
and he is gone.
But the wonder remains,
lodged inside my spirit,
and know I will never forget
the tower,
the bear,
the gift I was allowed,
there in the woods,
upon the hill,
above the lake.

         Ottawa,
         November 12, 1992

---

LI BAI - “Clearing at Dawn”

The fields are chill, the sparse rain has stopped;
The colours of Spring teem on every side.
With leaping fish the blue pond is full;
With singing thrushes the green boughs droop.
The flowers of the field have dabbled their powdered cheeks;
The mountain grasses are bent level at the waist.
By the bamboo stream the last fragment of cloud

Blown by the wind slowly scatters away.

SEUNG SAHN

What is your correct direction? Do you have one? You must show me! If you don’t understand, throw away all your books! I ask you, what are you? When you were born, where did you come from? When you die, where will you go? What is your name? How old are you?

These are all simple questions. Maybe you say, “My name is Robert.” That is your body’s name. What is your true self’s name? Perhaps you say, “I am thirty-five years old.” But that is your body’s age. What is your true age? Tell me, tell me! If you don’t understand, only go straight—don’t know

Don’t check your feelings; don’t check your mind; don’t check your understanding.

David Colin Onze

W. S. MERWIN - “Under the Day”

To come back like autumn
to the moss on the stones
after many seasons
to recur as a face
backlit on the surface
of a dark pool one day
after the year has turned
from the summer it saw
while the first yellow leaves
stare from their forgetting
and the branches grow spare

is to waken backward
down through the still water
knowing without touching
all that was ever there
and has been forgotten
and recognize without
name or understanding
without believing or
holding or direction
in the way that we see
at each moment the air

DAVID DELINGER

The changes that take place when liberal Democrats replace not so liberal or compassionate Republicans (or Democrats) are merely cosmetic.

VIRGINIA WOOLF from The Waves

The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Yes Yes

when God created love he didn’t help most
when God created dogs He didn’t help dogs
when God created plants that was average
when God created hate we had a standard utility
when God created me He created me
when God created the monkey He was asleep
when He created the giraffe He was drunk
when He created narcotics He was high
and when He created suicide He was low

when He created you lying in bed
He knew what He was doing
He was drunk and He was high
and He created the mountains and the sea and fire at the same time

He made some mistakes
but when He created you lying in bed
He came all over His Blessed Universe.

JOHN KEATS - “Sonnet on Peace”

O Peace! and dost thou with thy presence bless
The dwellings of this war-surrounded Isle;
Soothing with placid brow our late distress,
Making the triple kingdom brightly smile?
Joyful I hail thy presence; and I hail
The sweet companions that await on thee;
Complete my joy let not my first wish fail,
Let the sweet mountain nymph thy favourite be,
With England’s happiness proclaim Europa’s Liberty.
O Europe! let not sceptred tyrants see
That thou must shelter in thy former state;
Keep thy chains burst, and boldly say thou art free;
Give thy kings law leave not uncurbed the great ;

So with the horrors past thou’lt win thy happier fate!

SAMUEL BECKETT from The Unnamable

One starts things moving without a thought of how to stop them. In order to speak. One starts speaking as if it were possible to stop at will. It is better so. The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.

Li Bai - “In the Quiet Night”

The floor before my bed is bright:
Moonlight – like hoarfrost – in my room.
I lift my head and watch the moon.

I drop my head and think of home.

ALDOUS HUXLEY on “the often horrible fooleries of religion and magic.”

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of religion and magic … Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

NICHIREN

Winter always turns into Spring. Never, from ancient times on, has anyone heard or seen of winter turning back to autumn.

YUAN MEI - “Climbing the Mountain”

I burned incense, swept the earth, and waited
              for a poem to come ...

Then I laughed, and climbed the mountain,
              leaning on my staff.

How I’d love to be a master
              of the blue sky’s art:

see how many sprigs of snow-white cloud
              he’s brushed in so far today.

PEMA CHÖDRÖN

Others will always show you exactly where you are stuck. They say or do something and you automatically get hooked into a familiar way of reacting—shutting down, speeding up, or getting all worked up. When you react in the habitual way, with anger, greed, and so forth, it gives you a chance to see your patterns and work with them honestly and compassionately. Without others provoking you, you remain ignorant of your painful habits and cannot train in transforming them into the path of awakening.

Nick Offerman by F. Scott Schafer

SAMUEL BECKETT from Waiting for Godot 

In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.