Category: poise

America forgets.

We’re not a contest.
We’re a solution, of course.
America is free, and it’s your job to do it.

A church or a mosque
is not terror, of course.
It’s history, and your job to renew it.

A teacher says,

“Follow your curiosity.”

Einstein adds,

“Follow your curiosity. It’s the only thing that knows where you’re going.”

if yer gonna be a rooster
might as well have some character…

take another look
appreciate the stern eye,
the froth of feathers better than a comb,
and the parchment tail, the pride he tows each day.

Oh the wonderment, he says,
if an orchid makes its own moth.
Or if each the genera of fortunate tease,
the other thing he said.

Make your own Gulf Gusher.
The glass is rimmed with sand.
The contents are saturated in crude.
The garnish floats belly-up.

1.5 oz blueberry juice
.5 oz Kahlua
.5 oz chocolate liqueur
3 blueberries
sand colored sugar, i.e. raw or demerara
shake over ice, strain, float berries on top.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

Carl Sagan

Writing Down The Words:

Before someone told me the awful truth I was content to view the world as consisting of two bowls like the china ones in my mother’s cupboard. One bowl was filled with earth upon which some thoughtful deity had planted grass and flowers and trees. Atop this, upside down, its inner sides painted the loveliest blue, rested the other bowl. It was a comfort to know that when I lay down on my bed and pulled the covers to my chin, I was safely ensconced between the two bowls and I would never, ever fall out.

oops. lost the link to this:

“For a long while I have believed – this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness – that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity.

And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainly, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval.

But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee.

And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.  What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or a movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book.  Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth.  The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.”  ~ Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

There is no civilization without deep discontent.

“A good deal of modern American culture is an extended experiment in the effects of depriving people of what they crave most.

Happiness is within range only for adroit people who give the slip to America’s values.”  – Thomas Lewis

Retain wonder. The abandonment of the part of ourselves that is in touch with the ‘miraculous’ is abandonment of life.

Carl Jung tells the story of a man who comes to him for therapy, apparently at the insistence of his wife.

The man is dull as a stick: a Swiss high school principal of about sixty years of age, who did everything “right” all his life, and never experienced a moment of ecstasy or imagination. Jung suggests that he keep a record of his dreams, which he does, showing up at the second session with something potentially disturbing. He dreamt that he entered a darkened room, and found a three-year-old infant covered with feces, and crying. What, he asked Dr. Jung, could it mean? Jung decided not to tell him the obvious: that the baby was himself, that it had had the life crushed out of it at an early age, and was now crying out to be heard. Exposing the “shadow” to the light of day, Jung told himself, would precipitate a psychosis in this poor guy; he wouldn’t be able to handle the psychic confrontation. So Jung gave him some sort of neutral explanation, saw the man a few more times, finally pronounced him “cured,” and let him go.

Morris Berman writes :

One wonders if the good doctor did the right thing. Is a living death preferable to a psychotic awakening?

On the other hand—and I have a feeling Jung would agree with me on this—aren’t we all that man, to some degree? Perhaps not as wigged out, but it may be a question of degree, nothing more.

Tolstoy wrote that it was but a slight step from a five-year-old boy to a man of fifty, but a huge distance between a newborn and a five-year-old.

tip to Ms. Humorzo

Circling round to past and future, fantasy and fact. I suppose we could argue which is reality? The life of the body—or the life of the mind?

Zo:

Writers are people for whom writing is more difficult than others.

What locking yourself alone in a room every day—and not knowing how to do anything else—will produce.

A relaxing and informing jaunt with humans:

http://honeyrockdawn.com/2010/05/one/

Stephen Baldwin:

If you ask me, the only good chalice is a poisoned chalice. Honestly, any egotist pompous enough to actually slurp nectar from a chalice of any kind deserves all the spiritual burdens and acid reflux they are preordained to suffer through.

Just look at self-important King Arthur and his tedious quest for the so-called Holy Grail. What a fool’s errand that turned out to be.

Personally, I’m perfectly content to use a common ceramic mug with “Staples: That Was Easy!” printed on it for my own rituals and ceremonies. I don’t see why other mystics, Keepers of the Flame and High Priests can’t be equally as casual and economical with their altar-ware.

Blood is today’s gold. This world clamors for wealth and wealth is war.

I never knew what I could do until I let my dreams come through
but don’t think for one minute I expected to grow up in a land of lies;
blood instead of good.

These times are not mere error but also dis-remembering our motive.

No it isn’t black, it’s bleak. And that difference is us. It’s truly ridiculous but history is made on our strange willingness to pull us over the horizon. Oh sorry, you already know that 🙂

You’ve crafted both solution and purpose. Find me the few of you. You see. Of course I will offer my share to you. Yeh yeh, I know we’re feeble. We all know that. But we have a story, we are crafting tomorrow and there’s trust in that.

We invite the players to our game, it’s our cards on the table.

A bit of leverage and style in this kettle of civilization and I hope new friends arrive, sparks and flames, your eyes are open. Because it’s not mere money, it’s activity you’re after, both the same and both essential. You didn’t know that?

Make good of this disaster. I know for certain it hurts. It took your cash and made your confusion and that’s a good lesson. In an era brought few there’s you, as much as ever, as important as always.

We must be urgent. I’m not saying quick.
We are a good day. Or we are not.
There is a nation waiting.

A lonely path. 
Not lonely at all.

inspiratoria

Funny isn’t it?
There’s less than fifty 51 Google hits for things that make life more interesting.

I haven’t found the source, you know, the owner, the creator, the originator, the credit , the producer, the rights holder of this groovy doodle.

Stephen Baldwin:

I can also be seen still dancing among the finalists on Dancing With The Stars. For my last performance I have chosen the Mexican Four-Buttock Polka.

The dance is a physically, emotionally and spiritually demanding combination of extreme foot and body work, based on ancient Mayan choreography and religious ritual, and so I shall be dressed in purple sequins and a cowboy hat.

I’m hoping my footwork makes Nijinksy look like a “crippled Kulak from Smolensk”.

What does all this research about your body adapting to circumstances tell us? You are what you do all day. What does all this research about brain plasticity and rewiring tell us? You are what you do all day.

You are what you do all day.
That probably scares the shit out of a lot of people.
And it should.

She wrote,

“Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind . . . and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to show . . . that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being.”

We are each the executive HQ of the milieu, the agency of action, the liquid reciprocity of benefits and rights.

In the domain of the oak, the ox and the eagle, we make worthiness a conflict with perfection beyond the warrior’s urge to destroy, worthiness, the undreamt reward to the victor while subjugating the right to deny the loser, worthiness in charge of the civilization, that’s the deal we make, the inescapable onus on the individual to participate in the benefit of the whole, to scorn the myriad dynasties that misunderstand the miracle that can do that, worthiness, folding history’s duration into the critical mass of the free !

[pullquote]We must push for character.
Otherwise it’s Enema 2.0… numb in nodes of decision trees… tolls, polls and policy rolls… capitalist, christian and cowboy lost in the covert power of cue. BORING.[/pullquote]Some say we are the ‘probabilistic logic for the synthesis of reliable organisms from unreliable components’, a dismaying sprawl of uncoined vigor.

Beta of lobe and icon of belly, we are precious order and chaos. I’d say we are debugging space time toward the function of character, toward worthiness, the curiosity of breathing.

Pauline, writing down the words:

I must confess, numbers baffle me. They’re mysterious.

They multiply and divide with impunity, they add up to something else or take themselves away. When they are statistics, they lie. And when they are money, they disappear.

As for fractions, they make me fractious.

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” – Flannery O’Connor

When defining Canada
you might list some statistics
you might mention our tallest building
or biggest lake
you might shake a tree in the fall
and call a red leaf Canada
you might rattle off some celebrities
might mention Buffy Sainte-Marie
might even  mention the fact that
we've got a few Barenaked Ladies
or that we made these crazy things
like zippers
electric cars
and washing machines
when defining Canada
it seems the world's anthem has been
"been there done that"
and maybe that's where we used to be at
it's true
we've done and we've been
we've seen
all  the great themes get swallowed up by the machine
and turned into theme parks
but when defining Canada
don't forget to mention that we have set sparks

we are not just fishing stories
about the one that got away
we do more than sit around and say "eh?"

We Are More, the 2010 Olympic Commemoration by Shane Koyczan