The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong. Mahatma Ghandi

Revenge

At times ... I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I'd rest at last
and if I were ready -
I would take my revenge!

But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who'd put
his right hand over
the heart's place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they'd set -
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

Likewise ... I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn't bear his absence
and who his presents thrilled.

Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school...
asking about him
and sending him regards.

But if he turned
out to be on his own -
cut off like a branch from a tree -
without mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I'd add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness -
nor the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I'd be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street - as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

~ Taha Muhammad Ali ~

(Read by Taha Muhammad Ali and translated by Peter Cole,
St. Mark's Cathedral, Seattle, October 7, 2006)

 

 

When we seek for connection, we restore the world to wholeness.  Our seemingly separate lives become meaningful as we discover how truly necessary we are to each other.

     Margaret Wheatley

In the Cards

Midnight. She complains
in the nursing home they
play too slow, forget what's
led, make up their own rules,
cheat. My grandmother, 89, abloom
in her flower-print dress and Ben
Hogan golf cap, her tinted gray
spectacles and cane, her sensible
shoes, reviews the sleepy bidding.
She's waited all year for this:
her children sprawled around her
at the table one last time,
their scores climbing brightly
on the score pad.

Wide awake for once, she exclaims
how she's amazed by each new day,
her one blind eye a pool
of blue glacier water, her other
eye asquint and smiling, her lips
blue in this warm room, taking
tricks for all she's worth.
The evening blurs into beer,
smoke, Velveeta, and sleep.
Oh my, she remarks, hearts
are trump? And they are,
and we hold the cards she's dealt us,
and we make our startled bids,
or go over, or go down.

 

Ronald Wallace

 

q

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

     Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

p

Love in the Classroom

-- for my students

 

Afternoon.  Across the garden, in Green Hall,

someone begins playing the old piano –

a spontaneous piece, amateurish and alive,

full of a simple, joyful melody.

The music floats among us in the classroom.

 

I stand in front of my students

telling them about sentence fragments.

I ask them to find the ten fragments

in the twenty-one-sentence paragraph on page forty-five.

They’ve come from all parts

of the world – Iran, Micronesia, Africa,

Japan, China, even Los Angeles – and they’re still

eager to please me.  It’s less than half

way through the quarter.

 

They bend over their books and begin.

Hamid’s lips move as he follows

the tortuous labyrinth of English syntax.

Yoshie sits erect, perfect in her pale make-up,

legs crossed, quick pulse minutely

jerking her right foot.  Tony,

from an island in the South Pacific,

sprawls limp and relaxed in his desk.

 

The melody floats around and through us

in the room, broken here and there, fragmented,

re-started.  It feels mideastern, but

it could be jazz, or the blues – it could be

anything from anywhere.

I sit down on my desk to wait,

and it hits me from nowhere – a sudden

sweet, almost painful love for my students.

 

“Never mind,” I want to cry out.

“It doesn’t matter about fragments.

Finding them or not.  Everything’s

a fragment and everything’s not a fragment.

Listen to the music, how fragmented,

how whole, how we can’t separate the music

from the sun falling on its knees on all the greenness,

from this movement, how this moment

contains all the fragments of yesterday

and everything we’ll ever know of tomorrow!”

 

Instead, I keep a coward’s silence,

the music stops abruptly;

they finish their work,

and we go through the right answers,

which is to say

we separate the fragments from the whole.

 

     Al Zolynas

 

If you would make a man happy, do not add to his possessions but subtract from the sum of his desires.

     Seneca

 

 

Stephen Wilder

Mary McDowell Center for Learning

20 Bergen St.

Brooklyn, NY 11201

stephenw@mmcl.net

718 625-3939

 

P

Autumn Quince

How sad they are,
the promises we never return to.
They stay in our mouths,
roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.
Houses built and unwittingly lived in;
a succession of milk bottles brought to the door
every morning and taken inside.

And which one is real?
The music in the composer's ear
or the lapsed piece the orchestra plays?
The world is a blurred version of itself --
marred, lovely, and flawed.
It is enough.

~ Jane Hirschfield ~

 

 

 

One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence. Lewis Mumford

THAT LIVES IN US If you put your hands on this oar with me, they will never harm another, and they will come to find they hold everything you want. If you put your hands on this oar with me, they would no longer lift anything to your mouth that might wound your precious land - that sacred earth that is your body. If you put your soul against this oar with me, the power that made the universe will enter your sinew from a source not outside your limbs, but from a holy realm that lives in us. Exuberant is existence, time a husk. When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space; love goes mad with the blessings, like my words give. Why lay yourself on the torturer's rack of the past and the future? The mind that tries to shape tomorrow beyond its capacities will find no rest. Be kind to yourself, dear - to our innocent follies. Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance. You will come to see that all evolves us. ~ Rumi ~ (Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West by Daniel Ladinsky)

Quote

Without a doubt, there is such a thing as too much order.

Arnold Loebel (author of children's books)

Q

I said to my children, "I'm going to work and do everything that I can do to see that you get a good education. I don't ever want you to forget that there are millions of God's children who will not and cannot get a good education, and I don't want you feeling that you are better than they are. For you will never be what you ought to be until they are what they ought to be." - Martin Luther King Jr.,

p

What the Somali Woman Told Me She tells me that my long beard is as useless as the tall grass surrounding my house like weeds. I tell her that I am a man of wisdom, and luck. A white bird sits on my roof. Once a woman carried me on her back. I could see everything. I felt I could fly, like eagle, like owl. Her breasts are large with milk. Her fingers are covered with jewels - rubies, emeralds, and gold. She says: Your beard is empty The wind fills your house. The birds have flown away. Gary Lawless

q

When we seek for connection, we restore the world to wholeness. Our seemingly separate lives become meaningful as we discover how truly necessary we are to each other. Margaret Wheatley

p

A Flight Crossing the Canyons One day I thought a leaf was a bird, It flew so high. It turned, it whirled above the cliffs. There was a hackberry tree to the West. There was a cottonwood to the East. It flew its way between them, North, towards a ridgeline of boulders. Horizon to horizon, it turned and tilted. It feathered its wings, Always sailing further away Than I could ever think The path of a leaf could go. But then I thought, It flew on its path, The way we all will go. Each leaf, each life, the wings of a bird, Going always further than we will ever know. Drum Hadley

p

Ripple If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung, Would you hear my voice come thru the music, Would you hold it near as it were your own? Its a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken, Perhaps they're better left unsung. I dont know, dont really care Let there be songs to fill the air. Ripple in still water, When there is no pebble tossed, Nor wind to blow. Reach out your hand if your cup be empty, If your cup is full may it be again, Let it be known there is a fountain, That was not made by the hands of men. There is a road, no simple highway, Between the dawn and the dark of night, And if you go no one may follow, That path is for your steps alone. Ripple in still water, When there is no pebble tossed, Nor wind to blow. But if you fall you fall alone, If you should stand then whos to guide you? If I knew the way I would take you home. Robert Hunter

q

Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education. Chuang-Tzu

q

We are often imprisoned in the cage of our own abilities and routines, which provides us with a sense of security. Alice Miller

p

Ripeness

 

Ripeness is

what falls away with ease.

Not only the heavy apple,

the pear,

but also the dried brown strands

of autumn iris from their core.

 

To let your body

love this world

that gave itself to your care

in all of its ripeness,

with ease,

and will take itself from you

in equal ripeness and ease,

is also harvest.

 

And however sharply

you are tested -

this sorrow, that great love -

it too will leave on that clean knife.

 

     Jane Hirshfield

 

 

Stephen Wilder

q

When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely - the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears - when you give your whole attention to it.

     Krishnamurti

 

 

Stephen Wilder

p

I have lived on the lip

of insanity, wanting to know reasons,

knocking on a door. It opens.

I've been knocking from the inside.

 

Rumi (trans. by Coleman Barks and John Moyne)

 

 

Stephen Wilder

q

What misery to be afraid of death.

What wretchedness to believe only in what can be proven.

 

     Mary Oliver

 

Stephen Wilder

p

No, no, there is no going back.

Less and less you are

the possibility that you were.

More and more you have become

those lives and deaths

that have belonged to you.

You have become sort of a grave

containing much that was

and is no more in time, beloved

then, now, and always.

And so you have become a sort of tree

standing over a grave.

Now more than ever you can be

generous toward each day

that comes, young, to disappear

forever, and yet remain

unaging in the mind.

Every day you have less reason

not to give yourself away.

 

     Wendell Berry

 

Stephen Wilder

q

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

Mahatma Ghandi

p

The Stones

 

I owned a slope full of stones.

Like buried pianos they lay in the ground,

shards of old sea-ledges, stumbling blocks

where the earth caught and kept them

dark, an old music mute in them

that my head keeps now I have dug them out.

I broke them where they slugged in their dark

cells, and lifted them up in pieces.

As I piled them in the light

I began their music.  I heard their old lime

rouse in breath of song that has not left me.

I gave pain and weariness to their bearing out.

What bond have I made with the earth,

having worn myself against it?  It is a fatal singing

I have carried with me out of that day.

The stones have given me music

that figures for me their holes in the earth

and their long lying in them dark.

They have taught me the weariness that loves the ground,

and I must prepare a fitting silence.

 

Wendell Berry

 

Stephen Wilder

q

Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.  Why did we look up for a blessing - instead of around, and down?  What hope we have lies here.  Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon.  Not from above, but from below.  Not in the light that binds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

 

Ursula K. Le Guin

 

 

Stephen Wilder

p

To the Traveler

 

These stones aren't sad.

Within them lives gold,

they have the seeds of planets,

they have bells in their depths,

gloves of iron, marriages

of time with amethysts:

on the inside laughing with rubies,

nourishing themselves from lightening.

 

Because of this, traveler, pay attention

to the hardships of the road,

to the mysteries on the walls.

 

I know this at great cost,

that all life is not outward

nor all death within,

and that the age writes letters

with water and stone for no one,

so that no one knows,

so that no one understands anything.

 

Pablo Neruda (trans. by Dennis Maloney)

 

 

Stephen Wilder

q

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer.  But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Henry David Thoreau

 

Stephen Wilder

p

     - When They Sleep

 

All people are children when they sleep.

There's no war in them then.

They open their hands and breathe

in that quiet rhythm heaven has given them.

 

They pucker their lips like small children

and open their hands halfway,

soldiers and statesmen, servants and masters.

The stars stand guard

and a haze veils the sky,

a few hours when no one will do anybody harm.

 

If only we could speak to one another then

when our hearts are half-open flowers.

Words like golden bees

would drift in.

- God, teach me the language of sleep.

 

     Rolf Jacobsen (trans. by Robert Hedin)

 

 

p

Vocation

This dream the world is having about itself

includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,

a groove in the grass my father showed us all

one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell

something better about to happen.

I dreamed the trace to the mountains, over the hills,

and there a girl who belonged wherever she was.

But then my mother called us back to the car:

she was afraid; she always blamed the place,

the time, anything my father planned.

Now both of my parents, the long line through the plain

the meadowlarks, the sky, the world's whole dream

remain, and I hear him say while I stand between the two,

helpless, both of them part of me:

"Your job is to find what the world is trying to be." William Stafford

q

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

     Helen Keller

q

Act as if what you do makes a difference.  It does.

    William James

p

Call and Answer

     August 2002

 

Tell me why it is we don't lift our voices these days

And cry over what is happening.  Have you noticed

The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?

 

I say to myself:  "Go on, cry.  What's the sense

Of being an adult and having no voice?  Cry out!

See who will answer!  This is Call and Answer!"

 

We will have to call especially loud to reach

Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding

In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

 

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can't

Escape from silence?  If we don't lift our voices, we allow

Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.

 

How come we've listened to the great criers - Neruda,

Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass - and now

We're silent as sparrows in the little bushes?

 

Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.

Where are we in the week?  Is it Thursday yet?

Hurry, cry now!  Soon Sunday night will come.

 

     Robert Bly

 

q

Peace between countries must rest on the solid foundation of love between individuals.

     Mohandas K. Ghandi

p

A Path through Grass

 

A path through grass

worn as an old hoehandle

and pale as silver.

The silent things

that build bridges so many places,

roads after dead people, a handle,

a path in the field

moves like an unreal thing through the summer,

moon bridges build over the green seas.

 

Rolf Jacobson

q

Walking is really the only kind of locomotion that puts us on equal terms with the world about us. Our modern mechanical methods of transportation tend to make us lose sight of our relative importance.

     Fillipo de Fillipi  (1932)

p

Traveling this high

mountain trail, delighted

by wild violets.

 

 Basho (trans. by Sam Hamill)

q

Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause within our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace.

       Terry tempest Williams

p

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream,

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

Life is but a dream.

q

Men are afraid to rock the boat in which they hope to drift safely through life's currents, when, actually, the boat is stuck on a sandbar. They would be better off to rock the boat and try to shake it loose. Thomas Szasz

p

Pledge

 

With flags everywhere unfurled,

even pinned to tender breasts,

would you think of love?

A gentle hand and kind word

are declarations of allegiance. 

Some prefer waving banners and singing

anthems while covering their hearts

with eyes closed,

"Oh, say can you see.?"

 

If we each dropped all our flags

and stood naked before everyone

would it be clear how

we need one another?

Would that fragile flesh -

mine and yours and theirs-

soft and yielding,

persuade tears to wash

away all pledges but

one?

 

     Stephen Wilder

q

Every form of refuge has its price.

     Don Henley

p

Encounter

 

WE were riding through the frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

 

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

 

That was long ago.  Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

 

O my love, where are they, where are they going-

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

 

            Czeslaw Milosz

q

There is a time for departure even when there is no certain place to go.

     Tennessee Williams

p

Ask the world to reveal its quietude -

not the silence of machines when they are still,

but the true quiet by which birdsongs,

trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms

become what they are, and are nothing else.

Wendell Berry (Sabbaths 2001, III)

q

If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.

Henry Miller

q

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of

fighting a foreign enemy.

-James Madison, fourth US president (1751-1836)

p

The Waitresses The waitresses At the restaurant Have to keep reminding The schizophrenic man That if he keeps acting Like a schizophrenic man They'll have to ask him to leave the restaurant. But he keeps forgetting that he's a schizophrenic man, So they have to keep reminding him.

Matt Cook

q

Suffering shows us what we are attached to... dying doesn't cause suffering, resistance to dying does.

Terry Tempest Williams

p

Borrowed Time I will not die tonight I will lie in bed with my wife beside me, curled on the right like an animal burrowing. I will fit myself against her and we will keep each other warm. I will not die tonight. My son who is seven will not slide beneath the ice like the boy on the news. The divers will not have to look for him in the cold water. He will call, "Daddy, can I get up now?" in the morning. I will not die tonight. I will balance the checkbook, wash up the dishes and sit in front of the TV drinking one beer. For the moment I hold a winning ticket. It's my turn to buy cold cuts at the grocery store. I fill my basket carefully. For like the rain that comes now to the roof and slides down the gutter I am headed to the earth. And like the others, all the lost and all the lovers, I will follow an old path not marked on any map.

David Moreau

q

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Simone Weil

p

Mother's Day

I do not doubt you would have liked

one of those pretty mothers in the ads:

complete with adoring husband and happy children.

She's always smiling, and if she cries at all

it is absent of lights and camera,

makeup washed from her face.

But since you were born of my womb, I should tell you:

ever since I was small like you

I wanted to be myself-and for a woman that's hard-

(even my Guardian Angel refused to watch over me

when she heard.)

I cannot tell you that I know the road.

Often I lose my way

and my life has been a painful crossing

navigating reefs, in and out of storms,

refusing to listen to the ghostly sirens

who invite me into the past,

neither compass nor binnacle to show me the way.

But I advance,

go forward holding to the hope

of some distant port

where you, my children-I'm sure-

will pull in one day

after I've been lost at sea.

-to my mother

Daisy Zamora (trans. Margaret and Elinor Randall)

q

Let the beauty of what we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

-Rumi

p

Airport Security In the airport I got wanded, though not by a fairy princess. I had to remove my shoes, prove they were not twin bombs. But the strangest scene I saw that day was where random checks delayed the suspicious- the grey lady in her wheelchair and the toddler boy tugged from his mother's hand, pulled through the metal detector's arch. She tried to follow but was restrained by two guards who grasped her arms as she yelled, "But I told him not to talk to strangers!" The child wailed bloody murder. A female guard patted the boy all over, although he did not giggle. I myself went on profiling terrorists. ---------------They were so obvious.

David Ray

q

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.

-Abraham Lincoln, 16th US president (1809-1865)

p

In memory of George Lewis, Great Jazzman

 by Lou Lipsitz

1

 

Man is the animal that knows

the clarinet

 

     makes his living

on the docks, a stevedore,

110 lbs., carrying what loads

he can

 

the Depression comes along,

his teeth rot, no money, and

he has to accept silence

 

2

 

Thirteen years

later

     they put the instrument

back together

     with rubber bands

bought him

new teeth

     and then he began

 

          I    C    E

       E               I

     C                   C

   I                       E

     C                   C

       E                I

          I    C    E

  C-------------------C

 

     R              R

 

        E          E

 

           A      A

 

             M  M

 

              E    R                        A    V

       V                T              W              E

 O                           H    E                        S

 

  M------------------------------T

   Y                            I

    B                          N

     U                        I

      C                      E

       K                    L

        E                  O

         T'               H

          S G O T       A

 

One song they say

 

     was pure

uninhibited joy

words

     cannot tell you

 

     survived so long

in those empty jaws

 

3

 

He lived and died

there.

Had a New Orleans funeral.

 

Leading the mourners

his old friends' band

trudged

     to the cemetery, heads

down, trombones scraping

the ground, slow tones of

"Just a Closer Walk..."

helping to carry

     the solemn mud

of their steps.

 

Graveside,

     words said, tears fallen,

they turned

     to walk back;

a few beats on the big

drum, then soft plucking

of a banjo string--

     in another block

the clarinet wailed

and then suddenly they were

playing

     "The Saints..." full blast

and people jumped

and shouted and danced

just as he'd known they would.

 

4

 

Alright.  There is a frailness

in all our music.

Sometimes we're broken

and it's lost.

Sometimes we forget

for years it's even in us, heads

filled with burdens and smoke.

And sometimes we've held

to it and it's there,

waiting to break out

walking back from the end.

 

q

Beyond happiness and unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity:  it does not give us eternity, but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack:  here is there and now is always.

     Octavio Paz

p

A bonus poem this week - the lilacs are just beginning to open here and I was reminded of this poem, among other things...

 

City of My Youth

 

It would be more decorous not to live.  To live is not decorous,

Says he who after many years

Returned to the city of his youth.  There was no one left

Of those who once walked these streets.

And now they had nothing, except his eyes.

Stumbling, he walked and looked, instead of them,

On the light they had loved, on the lilacs again in bloom.

His legs were, after all, more perfect

Than nonexistent legs.  His lungs breathed in air

As is usual with the living.  His heart was beating,

Surprising him with its beating, in his body

Their blood flowed, his arteries fed them with oxygen.

He felt, inside, their livers, spleens, intestines.

Masculinity and femininity, elapsed, met in him

And every shame, every grief, every love.

If ever we accede to enlightenment,

He thought, it is in one compassionate moment

When what separated them from me vanishes

And a shower of drops from a bunch of lilacs

Pours on my face, and hers, and his, at the same time.

     

            Czeslaw Milosz  (trans. by the Author and Robert Hass)

 

p

In a single cry

     the pheasant has swallowed

          the fields of spring.

                     Yamei

q

Life isn't a matter of milestones, but of moments.

     Rose Kennedy

p

Easter Morning 

On Easter morning all over America
the peasants are frying potatoes in bacon grease.

We're not supposed to have "peasants"
but there are tens of millions of them
frying potatoes on Easter morning,
cheap and delicious with catsup.

If Jesus were here this morning he might
be eating fried potatoes with my friend
who has a '51 Dodge and a '72 Pontiac.

When his kids ask why they don't have
a new car he says, "these cars were new once
and now they are experienced."

He can fix anything and when rich folks
call to get a toilet repaired he pauses
extra hours so that they can further
learn what we're made of.

I told him that in Mexico the poor say
that when there's lightning the rich
think that God is taking their picture.
He laughed.

Like peasants everywhere in the history
of the world ours can't figure out why
they're getting poorer. Their sons join
the army to get work being shot at.

Your ideals are invisible clouds
so try not to suffocate the poor,
the peasants, with your sympathies.
They know that you're staring at them.

 

            Jim Harrison

eliminating excess electron excitation

Recent studies have shown that the electricity required to power household appliances when they are in a stand-by mode accounts for approximately 5% of total annual residential electricity consumption. Using DOE data from 2004, this means that 64 million MWh of electricity goes to stand-by power, equivalent to the output of 18 typical power stations. A significant contribution to global warming!!

 

So don't leave that computer in stand-by mode - turn it off when you are not using it.

Your children will be glad you did!

p

God speaks to each of us

 

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

 then walks with us silently out of the night.

 

 These are words we dimly hear:

 

 You, sent out beyond your recall,

 go to the limits of your longing.

 Embody me.

 

 Flare up like flame

 and make big shadows I can move in.

 

 Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

 Just keep going.  No feeling is final.

 Don't let yourself lose me.

 

 Nearby is the country they call life.

 You will know it by its seriousness.

 

 Give me your hand.

 

  ~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

(Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

q

How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and keeping that picture in mind, we manage each day to be and to do what really matters most.

     Stephen Covey

 

In the past year a number of people have joined this group.  It is wonderful to have more and more people sharing these thoughts.

 

  Please know that I am always happy to receive your suggestions.  I save them and when the time comes, they pop out and claim their spot.

I am especially interested in having more of us share our own poems.  while some of us have done so, I know of at least a half dozen - I am sure there are more of you - who do write, but have not yet let the rest of us enjoy your writing.  Please don't be shy.  I promise to respectfully share what you send in. 

 

And of course, if you have any reaction to any of the quotes or poems, please let me know.

Stephen

p

The First Green of Spring

Out walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold,
this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting
to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life,

harbinger of things to come. Now we sit at the table munching
on this message from the dawn which says we and the world
are alive again today, and this is the world's birthday. And

even though we know we are growing old, we are dying, we
will never be young again, we also know we're still right here
now, today, and, my oh my! don't these greens taste good.

David Budbill

q

I fear nothing, I hope for nothing, I am free.

        -Nikos Kazantzakis, poet and novelist (1883-1957)

q

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

T. S. Eliot

p

The question before me, now that I

am old, is not how to be dead,

which I know from enough practice,

but how to be alive, as these worn

hills still tell, and some paintings

of Paul Cezanne, and this mere

singing wren, who thinks he's alive

forever, this instant, and may be.

 

 

Wendell Berry,  Sabbaths 2001, VI

q

Home is where you are; home is where you find yourself.

     Moritz Thompsen

 

Moritz Thompsen wrote only 4 books in his lifetime and he did not begin writing until his 50s. The scion of wealthy Seattlites, his grandfather was one of the robber barons in the west and his father was, in a word, impossible.  Moritz was a bombardier in WWII, then a hog farmer and finally he volunteered for the Peace Corps in the 60's.  Sent to Ecuador, his first book recounts his experiences in a poor coastal village.

 

Although he wrote only 4 books, he writes like an angel.  Somewhat irascible, he is also self-deprecating and always good company.  I recently reread all four of his books and, apart from having interesting stories to tell, his prose is so wonderful that it wouldn't matter much what he chose to write about.   As it is, all his books are  memoirs, compassionately describing the lives of those whose world he shares. 

The first, "Living Poor"  tells of his struggles to understand the people he has been sent to "serve".  The book is, in turns hilarious, deeply poignant and burning with anger at how the  poor are kept poor.

The second, "The Farm on the River of Emeralds"  tells of his partnership with one of his friends from the village as they purchase land and struggle to farm it together - and to understand one another.

The third book tells of a trip he makes to Brazil, after his partner has kicked him off the farm.  He never fails to be an interesting and thoughtful traveling companion as he reflects on his two years on the farm with his friend Ramon and the events - and his shortcomings - that led to his departure.

But it is his final book, published posthumously, that is his finest.  Entitled "My Two Wars",  it is about his experience making bombing runs over Germany during WWII and his battles with his tyrannical father.  In the previous three books we have had glimpses of his earlier life and what led him to live among the poor in south America, but in this book, we come to know how this man came to be who he was.  It is truly an epic tale and so skillfully written that it can be picked up and opened randomly to be read just for the pleasure of the his language and his company.

 

To give you a sense and to further encourage you to read him, here is a paragraph, chosen almost at random, from his third book:

The slow lazy negligent beat of the diesel is like the opening bars of some tremendously long Mahler symphony; it hints that we will be taken to far and awful places but at another's pace.  We must now submit to the river's rhythm.  All night in the cabin sleeping off and on, very warm in a curtained-off bunk, one of four, I listen to the piston beat of the engine - slow, slow - waiting for it to confront the push of currents, waiting for the boar to get under way.  It never changes and five days later (or was it six or seven?)  at the end of the trip, I will still be waiting, needing to have the memory of having struggled, at least for a time, against that unimaginable flood.

 

 

q

The Last Rites of the Bokononist Faith

(excerpt)

 

God made mud.

God got lonesome.

So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"

"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."

 

And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.

Lucky me, lucky mud.

 

I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.

Nice going, God.

Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have.

I feel very unimportant compared to You.

The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud

that didn't even get to sit up and look around.

I got so much, and most mud got so little.

Thank you for the honor!

 

Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.

What memories for mud to have!

What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!

I loved everything I saw!

Good night.

 

 

~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ~