(Source: weissesrauschen, via alice44)
Soul Tree
Living on air with roots in the soil
About the author
Temporarily not busted flat
Elsewhere
A Simple Truth
All around the world, in Akansas and Afghanistan, in London and Leningrad, from the noisy hustle of Manhattan to the silence of the Mohave desert, people are pretty much the same.
Oh sure we dress up in the multi-colored clothes of nationalism and religion and culture but underneath that superficial outer show we all want the same things. We want peace and prosperity for ourselves and our families. We want to be valued and loved. We want our children to grow up healthy and secure. We want the simple things that go to make up a worthwhile human life.
When our government sends soldiers to foreign countries to kill they’re not destroying some other species that is evil incarnate.They’re snuffing out the lives and hopes of real people just like you and me. When the bombs explode the families they kill, the brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers, are just like ours. The houses they turn to rubble are homes like our own homes.
This is surely something we need to remember the next time someone starts beating the drum of war or fanning the flames of hatred and fear. The simple truth is that, all over the world, across race and country and religion, what connects us is far more real and powerful than anything that divides us.
Water
Everything on the earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
nibbled away, the petal fell, falling
until the only flower was the falling itself.
Water is another matter,
has no direction but its own bright grace,
runs through all imaginable colors,
takes limpid lessons
from stone,
and in those functionings plays out
the unrealized ambitions of the foam.
Pablo Neruda
Tyler Knott: The Things They Never Tell You
There are things they never tell you
things you need to know or maybe knew
before the angels pressed their fingers to your lips,
silencing the secrets and hiding them deep inside
when light first found your eyes.
…
To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man’s injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man’s superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?
Perspective
Boogie Woogie Flu
Seventy Dylan covers for his seventieth birthday, and lots of other interesting entries.
A Parable
‘O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,
We build but as our fathers built;
Behold thine images, how they stand,
Sovereign and sole, through all our land.
‘Our task is hard, - with sword and flame
To hold thine earth forever the same,
And with sharp crooks of steel to keep
Still, as thou leftest them, thy sheep.’
Then Christ sought out an artisan,
a low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin
Pushed from her faintly want and sin.
These he set in the midst of them,
And as they drew back their garment-hem,
For fear of defilement, ‘Lo, here, ’ said he,
‘The images ye have made of me! ‘
Jill's Toes
When you were born
You had an extra little toe
Nestled against the others
Like a kernel of sweet corn
In a short row.
As would any mother
I adored your little toes.
But the doctor warned
That all your life
You would have to go
In special shoes
At great expense.
So pensively I watched him
Twist off the little toes,
A moment’s pain
To make you normal
Like everyone else.
So of course
You grew up to be an artist.
So much for uniformity
That cannot be imposed
The ghosts of those little toes
Printed invisibly
On each work you compose,
Despite the urgency of doctors
Despite the urgency of mothers
And that Procrustean twist
To save the cost of shoes.
Suburban encounter
So soon the cloud burst passes.
Then scrabbling children squeal and rattle their unconcern
at mothers’ shrieked injunctions.
Toward the horizon lazy ships tug at tethers,
desiring the freedom of the high sea,
young men longing for the anonymity of large cities.
Let go without restraint,
pushed by compass-boxing tide, wind and current
about that faceless immensity
they are derelict, abandoned, hopeless.
To spite the world they kill and burn,
Laughing at their heinous deed
And their victim’s trusting demise.
