Our heavenly Father understands our disappointment, suffering, pain, fear, and doubt. He is always there to encourage our hearts and help us understand that He’s sufficient for all of our needs. When I accepted this as an absolute truth in my life, I found that my worrying stopped.
— Charles Stanley
To My Soul
To my soul I say child hush,
you have caused enough pain.
Be still and watch the birds.
See how they disappear
at sundown, looking for home.
Or maybe they carry it with them
in ways that we humans
cannot even comprehend.
Be still and know that God Is
so we are not, and if trees
can stand for a thousand years,
you can sit for a moment,
drinking water in the shade.
My soul will only misbelieve
and long for the rhythm of waters,
how the storm comes bringing
the destruction of change.
Still, quietly, I sit here
and pray for forgiveness.
I must not fear. Fear is the mindkiller. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
My thought for the day, from Dune by Frank Herbert.
“Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.”
The musical geese cross
between the faltering wetlands
of the San Joaquin and look
down on us. They could answer
my questions but I’m already
gone, in my bed by the sea.
The fine car is too fast
for the wisdom of birds.
You talk about suffering
and I think about silence.
It makes my heart do funny
things. I see that we are animals
born in Heaven’s dark imagination
but I still don’t understand.
Pain might be the greatest
of God’s mysteries.
Where are we going?
What am I supposed to do?
And will we dive like kingfishers
into eternity?
The new cover of Charlie Hebdo is out and you’ve seen it. It’s poignant. I won’t post it here. It’s not that I don’t feel defiant, or sorry for the mindless violence and waste of life that touched Paris recently. I just don’t feel – for lack of a better term – the right to post that. I’ve simply got things too good.
As an American in a relatively progressive part of the country, with a liberal education and technical resources, I enjoy almost unqualified freedom of expression. So for me to act like I should don my beret and join my fellows at the barricades would be … disingenuous and impertinent.
I should acknowledge that my freedom of speech has been defended with some struggle, though let’s not invoke “The Troops,” if you don’t mind. God bless them one and all, but no. The First Amendment protects us against censorship by our own government. One might argue that the government is protecting the people from the government by fighting extremism abroad, which is a threat to our way of life, including our rights to defend ourselves against our government. And I would say give it a rest, Mr. Cheney.
Freedom of expression in the United States has been defended by journalists, writers and artists, pornographers, outcasts and misfits, whose books have been banned and who have spent time in jail for defending their sources. They’ve had to stand against monoliths ranging from the US government to the local PTA; ignorant jackasses bent on keeping the likes of Mark Twain and John Green out of the schools.
Sometimes the persistent leakage of industrial grade Stupid in this country raises quite an unpleasant smell. But the air is pretty fresh where I live, is my point. So my moral imperative to speak out against censorship, though incontestable, does not give me license to imply that I’m one of the oppressed.
Have I digressed?
Then by way of condolence and sympathy, I offer a poem by the Sufi poet Rumi, and a link to see – free gratis – the stained glass of the Cathedral Notre Dame de Paris. I was there once, you know, and it was beautiful.
Je Suis Charlie, frères et sœurs.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Love Dogs
One night a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
“So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
“Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
“This longing
you express is the return message.”
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
Here’s to the general health of the whole world, lest some damn fool take offense.
I used to think it was an amusing exaggeration. Maybe it’s not. I have realized that there are people out there – people of influence or with the capacity for violence – who really will throw a fit if they feel they’re not in control of other people’s minds, and the center of all the attention.
And I remember this thing my elders taught me when I was young:
Nobody has the right not to be offended.
We have the right not to be attacked.
We have the right not to be exploited.
We have the right not to be terrorized.
We have the right not to be robbed.
We have the right not to be silenced.
We have the right not be prevented from worshiping the god of our understanding.
But we do not have the right not to be offended.
And we do not have the right not be ignored.
So are you offended by something you don’t like? Good for you. So what? Who cares? It has nothing to do with the rest of us, whether we like that thing or not. Your reaction has even less to do with the person who created it. Being insulted is an arbitrary, subjective reaction to external stimuli and just one way of finding the stuff that you do like. Good luck with that.
Civilization does not exist to satisfy our tastes and applaud our eccentric little performance. Creativity is the outward expression of cognitive functions which are not subject to community control. We share and publish and react in the hope of finding common ground. Then it falls to each person to find in the society around them a place of belonging and a means of self-affirming expression. The world doesn’t owe anybody a custom-made reality.
Those of us who feel a creative urge owe ourselves a level of honesty and industry. We owe our audience gratitude, and our pledge to do our best to fill the amount of time we have asked them to give with something worthy of their attention.
The Internet and books and magazines movies and TV and music and art, is all practically infinite. If you find something you don’t like, and stop to complain instead of looking for something that seems right for you, you’re simply doing it wrong. If you think you can tell someone else how to express himself to suit your tastes, you’re just a fool.
Oh Good Grief
Funny thing, until this week I had never heard of Charlie Hebdo. I knew there was a little magazine in Europe that pissed off some whacko extremists a while back, but I couldn’t tell you its name or its nation. It only had 30,000 subscribers on a planet of 7,000,000,000 people. The magazine, and its lampooning of religion, got about a megaton of free publicity this week.
I don’t mean that cynically. It’s just ironic that the crazies who hated the innocent people at the magazine, and murdered them, and are now dead themselves, did vastly more to spread the alleged blasphemy than the victims could have ever have hoped to do.
I don’t know if I would like the content of Charlie Hebdo magazine. I’m skeptical that it would be to my taste. The mockery of religion is not amusing to me. Disrespect isn’t funny, though respectable is as respectable does. But that doesn’t make me angry. It makes me a guy who’s looking elsewhere for his reading material.
I believe there is a God, it’s not me, and God can take care of Himself. The God of my understanding is not weak and vulnerable, a easy victim of bad taste, nor does He require human sacrifice. The necessary sacrifice has been made for me, long ago.
Did you count the 12 days of Christmas? Yesterday, January 5, was the 12th day of Christmas on the Gregorian calendar. Today is Epiphany (Theophany). Time for a change.
Today is December 24, 2014, Christmas Eve, on the Julian (Orthodox) calendar. So Merry Christmas – Christ is Born! – to millions of Orthodox Christians around the world, whose churches keep the old calendar.
I took the Christmas lights down from the windows of my condo today. I thought about leaving them strung about the living room – over the piano, the table, maybe up and around in the aging ficus plant. But I put them in a box. I will miss the warmth of colored light in the room.
The days after the holidays are past always leave me feeling just a little blue, you know? Autumn and the holiday season are my favorite time of year, and I’m sure I’m not alone. Hard to believe it goes by so fast.
So it goes. In memory there are so many nights of such lights in other rooms, lighting the faces of people who’ve been so profoundly dear to me. Let memory serve. Let darkness and silence abide as it will, until Christmas comes around again.
I was just thinking. If my life was a book, what kind would it be? Not a novel, I think. Not a phone book, a pretty blank journal, or a coffee table book of surreal watercolors. Possibly a crafting book: 101 Things to Make with Macaroni and Elmer’s Glue. More likely, a chapbook of disjointed poems, printed on plain paper, galleys partly assembled and dedication unwritten. You would find it in a desk drawer, under a collection of old birthday cards.
And if that’s true, metaphorically, shouldn’t I do something about it? Life should be a travel book of images: Kyle’s Amazing Walkabout Through Time and Space.
Scary, isn’t it? This mortality business, I mean. This urge to do something and be something in our brief passage. And it doesn’t make it easier that life turns out to be memory and that memory is fragments. It all makes plot conjectural at best.
Once there was a man
who failed at everything he tried
but wrote it all down
before he died.
I woke up this morning with a line from Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot floating in my thoughts:
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word
I don’t know why. Maybe it was just a bit of dream flotsam, but it was hard to shake the hunch that it was supposed to mean something. Maybe it’s a sticky note from my unconscious mind. So all day long I’ve let it hang there in my peripheral awareness, along with the fact that it’s New Year’s Eve, in hopes of decrypting the meaning.
Now an Eliot scholar might tell us that the larger stanza is a metaphor of the incarnation in the world of God. The divine condescension of Infinity. The Word, as in the first lines of Genesis – a prefigurment of nativity – possibly connoting the repudiation and crucifixion of Christ by an unhearing Mankind. But that’s not why it was buzzing in my brain as I woke up.
By Jove, I think I’ve got it. The whirling, the unstillness – My mind was groping for an image of Time whirling around the center of eternity. Because I have wasted too much time this year. I’ve wasted too much time every year. And it seems to me that time is precious. We should endeavor to avoid wasting it, or allowing others to do so.
Hasn’t it been truly said that there are no ordinary moments? Then let’s make our moments, hours, and days count for all we can in the year to come. Let’s try to spend as few moments as possible almost writing, almost doing, almost loving, not quite living.
And let’s forgive ourselves for not quite living up to that. God is with us and we are loved.
For me, 10 minutes until the ball drops. So it goes.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 25 trips to carry that many people.
I lost a poem last night. Traveling down the great San Joaquin with my parents, under a thirsty waxing crescent of the moon, it appeared in my mind large and promising. I typically get 3 or 4 words of an idea if I’m lucky – just a tiny fuse to light in a stiff wind of distractions. But this was a complete thought, a compound sentence of maybe 10 words. A small stanza, if I’d been in a position to save it. But I was driving. Otherwise, I could have typed it into my iPhone and tonight or tomorrow I might have a new poem to share with you.
“As you get older, you should get impatient with showing off in literature. It is easier to settle for blazing light than to find a language for the real. Whether you are a writer or a bird-dog trainer, life should winnow the superfluous language. The real thing should become plain. You should go straight to what you know best.”
I’ve had that quotation of Thomas McGuane floating around in my mind for several days.
A language for the real. OK. I like that. But what’s real?
Is it real to say that my life is a continuum of bird-dog training, or sleep, or eating, or music, or silence, or suffering, or joy, from the spring of 1961 to the middle of December 2014? No, that is not what I see as true. I see fragments. And what I believe is real about my life – and possibly about yours – is that reality cannot be very simply said.
Metaphor 