“Speech is sharing — a cooperative art”
From The dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Sharing
Good bones by Maggie Smith
Mysteries, yes by Mary Oliver
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.
By Mary Oliver
Simple
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
Henry David Thoreau
Acrylic on cardboard
Quiet
“The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind”
Albert Einstein
Unselfish work
Unselfish work leads to silence, for when you work selflessly, you don’t need to ask for help. Indifferent to results, you are willing to work with the most inadequate means. You do not care to be much gifted and well equipped. Nor do you ask for recognition and assistance. You just do what needs to be done, leaving success and failure to the unknown. For everything is caused by innumerable factors, of which your personal endeavor is but one. Yet such is the magic of man’s mind and heart that the most improbable happens when human will and love pull together.
– I Am That By Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
All systems go
An open invitation:
Step outside the ordinary.
All systems go.
Inside and Out.
insanity by Charles Bukowski
sometimes there’s a crazy one in the street.
he lifts his feet carefully as he walks.
he ponders the mystery
of his own anus.
while the American dollar collapses
against the German mark
he’s thinking of Bette Davis and her old movies.
it’s good to bring thought to bear on things
arcane and forbidden.
if only we were crazy enough
to be willing to ignore our
mechanical and static perceptions
we’d know that a half-filled coffee cup
holds more secrets
than, say,
the Grand Canyon.
sometimes there’s a crazy one walking
in the street.
he slips past
walks with a black crow on his shoulder
is not worried about alarm clocks or
approval.
however, almost everybody else is sane, knows the
answers to all the unanswerable questions.
we can park our automobiles
carve a turkey with style
and can laugh at every feeble joke.
the crazy ones only laugh when there is
no reason to
laugh.
in our world
the sane are too numerous,
too submissive.
we are instructed to live lives of boredom.
no matter what we are doing –
screwing or eating or playing or
talking or climbing mountains or
taking baths or flying to India
we are numbed,
sadly sane.
when you see a crazy one walking
in the street
honor him but
leave him alone.
stand out of the way.
there’s no luck like that luck
nothing else so perfect in the world
let him walk untouched
remember that Christ also was insane.
By Charles Bukowski
Prayer in Gratitude for the Right Song Arriving at the Right Time, for Example Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings or Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising,” or Chet Baker’s “She Was Too Good to Me”
Because you know and I know that a song can save your life. We know that we don’t say it much, but it’s true. When you are dark and despairing a song comes and makes you weep as you think yes yes yes. When you are joyous a song comes to top off the moment and make you think the top of your head will fly off from sheer fizzing happy. A song makes you sob with sadness for such pain and loss as throbs inside the bars of the song. A song roars that we will not be defeated by murder but we will stand together and rise again, brothers and sisters! A song makes your heart stagger that you found someone to love with such an ache and pang. A song comes—how amazing and sweet and glorious that is! And this is not even to get into how amazing and miraculous music itself is, the greatest of all arts. But this evening, haunted by a song that slid out of the radio and lit up your heart, we pray in thanks that there are such fraught wild holy moments as this one. And so: amen.
By Brian Doyle
be alone by Charles Bukowski
when you think about how often
it all goes wrong
again and again
you begin to look at the walls
and yearn to stay inside
because the streets are the
same old movie
and the heroes all end up like
old movie heroes:
fat ass, fat face and the brain
of a lizard.
it’s no wonder that
a wise man will
climb a 10,000 foot mountain
and sit there waiting
living off of berry bush leaves
rather than bet it all on two dimpled knees
that surely won’t last a lifetime
and 2 times out of 3
won’t remain even for one long night.
mountains are hard to climb.
thus the walls are your friends.
learn your walls.
what they have given us out there
in the streets
is something that even children
get tired of.
stay within your walls.
they are the truest love.
build where few others build.
it’s the last way left.
– Charles Bukowski
small circle big circle 