17/ Truth keeps bumping and banging into me. Last night and again this morning, I am both confronted and somehow comforted by this constant Sharpe thrust of reality. It’s invasive like a scalpel; it removes what’s left of the egoic self like a cure for cancer. But not in one merciful stroke! The trouble […]
18/ We live in a kind of “underlife” in the shadows of what neuroscience recognizes as six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise. Oh yes, and joy! That’s the one that, (like the other five that also come and go) keeps that other five from totally overwhelming us! It makes for an occasionally agreeable […]
19/ One of my favorite Songs of Loss and Sorrow from way back in those hurtin’ days (and one which may still put in a compelling appearance when that “lovin’feelin’ “ button gets pressed) goes, in part, like this: Someone left the cake out in the rain And I don’t think that I can take […]
20/ I was sitting last night with a friend at a crowded bar called Garibaldi’s. Everything was loud – the sounds, the people, the colors, even the taste of my house white wine had a certain attack! Still, there was a reigning inner quietude. This morning, writing at the window of my favorite cafe ( […]
21/ As very young children we are told bedtime stories. Even if our parents never actually read stories to us. We take in all of our life-story at the nipple of life, so to speak. And what we are fed adds not only flesh to our bones, but ideas to our head. From birth right […]
22/ “ If useless things do not hang in your mind, every season is a good season for you.” Murnon The writer John Updike once said: “ The writer of fiction, a professional liar, is paradoxically obsessed with what is true –what feels true, what rings true in the fabrication being assembled “. In […]
23/ Whoever this Murphy guy was, he seems to have left his legacy deep in the heart of our daily human experience when he declared: “ If anything can go wrong, it will.” Now that’s a Law right up there with Gravity ! And don’t we know it! I hear old Murphy’s sometimes chuckling, sometimes […]
24/ “ It is difficult to get the news from poems; yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is to be found.” William Carlos Williams Look around right now at our fellow inmates. We’re a strange, assorted lot; the embodiment of a wild and crazy god-guy-girl whirling away at the […]
25/ We start to toddle in early childhood and spend the rest of our days teetering into tomorrow. Our balance is precarious; we reach for that parental hand that will help hold us up, keep us going and otherwise save us from what we fear may harm us. From our first, hesitant steps into our […]
26/ The Law of Oops shakes the hell out of our tree of beautiful beliefs! We totter and tremble when it happens; the beliefs we cling to fall, gently or heavily, to the earth below. It’s a mercy-less mercy, a powerful de-composing of this tree we call “me”. Many of the very notions that we […]