Category: poise

A Genteel Meditation On Chickens:

Watching chickens is a very old human pastime, and the forerunner of psychology, sociology and management theory. Watching chickens helps us understand human motivations and interactions and why so many words and phrases have something in common with chickens:

Mind, impressive ecstasy, loyalty to noble, hung in the basement of the paleomagnetic crater we call home, standing great, an iron stiff skeleton sinewed to virtue, our first and forever moment, free envisioning robed in the seduction of better, penetrating boundary, bending blood, task of will, only our good, our beauty, and only beauty, our melody exposed to the exquisite, well beyond the dilemma of our hopefulness.

Every human is labor.
And today, we are our future.
We have that in common with all things.

Time, a sharp hope and memory drifts across the ribbon of life’s highway, the vast prairie of the mind, a new horizon every moment, a new footprint every thought. Seasons quilt the hills, stitchery of fresh and brown; stone erodes to sand; the cup of earth sways beneath the ocean’s heavy brew; magnetic hands of moon and star hold us all within.

We are vast creatures, we humans.
Touched by crisp of endless space.

We are vast creatures, we humans.
Never dirt nor sky but all alike.

We are vast creatures, we humans.
None too small and none so large.

We meet first within the caverns of the mountains and second along the slopes toward the sea. We meet again with the yearning grass and glimpse each other through the blizzard and the rain. We wander flat rivers or explore the spongy fingers of the delta near the coast, and we meet in clear water turned within the brine; breeze can be our only wind, another seared by desert, and another cut by hurricane, another crystal’d winter; at last, we each our time, none so greater than the next, none so infinite as we are made.

I don’t know what’s meant by ‘Know Thyself’, which seems to ask a window to look at a window. – James Richardson

Strive. Only survive. Damn war. I’m proud of troops, sad, and listen to officers and do what authority commands but I do not think these things save us nor will nor can no matter we salute nor pay nor blood lost. I’m glad of Founders and Paine and rebels and our less death and least threat, our land. But I do not think Jesse Helms should be buried without scorn and I will never like rank in its pilfering, nor tricks, nor lies, nor bullies, nor praise a prize of thieves. I take great dreams with most poets and wilt to prophets but do not live outside my heart and never do with yours, no, not one claim while the infinite is binding.

Anne Herbert:

The possibilities. Are greater than I imagined. I mean that good things have happened that have revealed that a bunch more good things are possible. And beyond that is what is really possible and good. What is possible is in no way limited by what I can imagine.

What I can imagine is limited by what I have experienced. What is possible occupies a much bigger space than that.

Anne Herbert:

Don’t complain about the way things are; change them. One tiny increment of improvement is so much more interesting that great waves of accurate critique.

Anne Herbert:

Peace. The peace of rocks melting at the center of the Earth. The peace of trees growing up here on the edge. Routine and endless transformation. Peace.

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side by side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky. – Rainer Maria Rilke

I feel sorry for today’s politicians. They are merely branding beneath thinking. Terrible but true. We will forget them. I pity today’s corporate executive. Error will be writ to them. Though few knew. Soldiers will not be forgotten. Blood is sticky. Anyone will tell you where bureaucrats go. Petty is a cruelty. If we deserve ourselves, pathology will be the new obesity. Revenge will not begin. I can do that. Hate will stay a desert.

These are the last years of dark humanity. Goodness will be fashion; the craft of willingness. We will tread lightly across our world. I cannot imagine the pride we’ll celebrate! Why do I know these things? I am a child surviving. Creed not greed can taunt me. With you or not, I select a grand tomorrow. There. It’s said.

If truly that’s youly so duly on toes;
The hat, the ribbon, the upturned nose;
More proud, more able than anyone knows,
Then of course I’ll be wherever you goes.