Reflect.

Like a pool or a lawyer and his degree from a school

or the carpenter and his tool

or a junky and his fuel

Expect

nothing you can't hold with your own mind

or can't do on your own time

or is not one of a kind

Reflect

Self, others, cultures, pockets, purposes, exchange

Change, the words, the silence, the strange

Or a forgotten shooting range.

- O.P.

3 things.

Take more risks. 

Reflect more. 

Do more things that live on after life is over. 

It is the things we leave undone that haunt us,

far more than the mistakes we've made.  

Interesting how our moral culture attacks the fall

before it focuses on activating the ready waiting.  

I've been thinking about these three things ever since Orion told me of them.  

Specifically the first two.  

THE JOYS OF THE ROAD

Carman, Bliss, (1861-1929)

(My friend Molly showed me this poem, and there are a few verses that she said reminded her of me, starting with 'a lover of books', and my heart took it as a true, deep compliment.)

Now the joys of the road are chiefly these

A crimson touch on the hard-wood trees;

A vagrant's morning wide and blue,

In early fall, when the wind walks, too;

A shadowy highway cool and brown,

Alluring up and enticing down

The outward eye, the quiet will,

And the striding heart from hill to hill;

Asking nothing, revealing naught,

But minting his words from a fund of thought,

A keeper of silence eloquent,

Needy, yet royally well content,

A lover of books, but a reader of man,

No cynic and no charlatan,

Who never defers and never demands,

But, smiling, takes the world in his hands,--

Seeing it good as when God first saw

And gave it the weight of his will for law.

And O the joy that is never won,

But follows and follows the journeying sun,

The racy smell of the forest loam,

When the stealthy, sad-heart leaves go home;

(O leaves, O leaves, I am one with you,

Of the mould and the sun and the wind and the dew!)

The broad gold wake of the afternoon;

The silent fleck of the cold new moon;

With only another league to wend;

And two brown arms at the journey's end!

These are the joys of the open road--

For him who travels without a load.

Desire.

It can contaminate poetry

by changing the flavor of every taste

A pointed desire will change your 

every thought

into a slave

i do not like

how it reminds me

that I am made of animal. 

Pacifism.

I am reading Lewis' essay 'Why I am not a Pacifist' 

I have not digested it yet, but am really coming to a place 

where I want to have a well articulated stance on 

man's role in exercising judgment or justice on earth,

and what the cost of abstaining really is.  And if there is a 

difference between helping your brother's oppression through

the use of force

and letting him suffer through your moral separation and 

physical avoidance.  

I do not yet know.   

Bonfire.

I have seen the spirit of hunger of wonder tonight.  Sitting around the beach fire with Folco, Roko, Tom Shadyac, Gael, Gretchen, Jaya..   Kenny and I the youngest of the group by years.   Yet we sat with our faces lit by the noon-day moon and the shared excitement of fellow callings.  I felt so touched by sincerity, and their boldness to hope in the generations.  They kept telling Kenny and me that we were their inspiration, that we were what they had dreamed of, a generation of new minded world citizens.  that shed the formulas of success for purpose.  

The most humbling experience. 

Community is not meant to be the college-isolation of same-aged piers.  Community is engaging with the minds of those at every stage of life, and building each other outrageously high when those minds are of the same cloth.  When the young man grows close to the old, every stage of life is robbed of its unknown shadow, and given the trust of navigated waters, and adventures.  And life becomes exciting, rather than a dreadful sand slipping through young hands, afraid of every passing through.  

Everyone around the fire tonight was of the same quilt, a quilt God is weaving and showed me his pattern, even just a glimpse.  Those moments when you step out from the fire light and see yourself in front of you, and are aware that you are alive and being fed.  And that will feed my faith for some time.

God is in control.

My taste and choice 

to hunt the hill with water carves

and chose to pursue 

the cherished friend

My day is my quilt

of cleaned teeth and 

accomplished this and this

it is all I own

And I can be told that

every thread is woven 

by a Loom I did not own

and I can sit beside the darkness

and know that my tastes were 

not my chosen, but instead

a choice made long ago

before even my parents were. 

And I was deported.

and found kindred callings

on rocks and pillow talks.  

And I will still call it mine. 

and the Loom will wait.  

Prov. 16:9, In his heart a man plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps.

Prov. 16:33, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.”

James 4:13-15, “Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow, we shall go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” ¹⁴Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. ¹⁵Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and also do this or that.”

Jer. 17:9, "The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?"

Rom. 11:33-36 :

33 Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

34 “For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?”
35 “Or who has given a gift to him
that he might be repaid?”

36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.

heaven

take away the desire

through achievement or rejection

and you destroy the forward. 

if I make the summit

I must quick to find the next

or I will sink and die

like the hunters in the ocean. 

when I grasp the girl

whose shape I have dwelled on

her shape will remain

for a while, and I will grow comfortable

in my ownership, and lust again

for other mountains.  

It must be so. 

We are built for heaven, 

and meant to feel discontent here.

There is a peak beyond our lives, 

that can always be leaned on in the greatest humiliation.

Although I wonder if we can exist content.

The lack of desiring what we do not have

chokes time of its air and halts.  It cannot walk. 

It makes me frightened of heaven. 

"I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene is changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness, 
And we know that the hills and trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
and the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to talk about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would hope for the the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; Yet there is faith
But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, 
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth"

-           TS Elliot, "Four Quartets"

Beside.

the way I see the face of friends

is if you have a face at all

and greater still the garden tends

if kindred turns at kindreds call.

as a secret shared before we heard

or knew we heard but woven in 

we bend our brows at spoken words

the unsaid eye caught secret men

and we find our feet beside the same mountain,

'for if they fall, one will life up the other.' 

Stone

I pray that this song is more ambiguous than it is...  but I guess hiding has never been a way to live, except that is the only way anyone lives.   

The summer rain has come and gone
I can see on the road the dust is gone
I’m surrounded by right and shaped by love
I’m covered and warm and still left cold.
I’m afraid of a decade to pass
I’m afraid of a 40 year fast
Can the water shape me like a stone
When the water is not my home

I am not going to say that I’m alone
I’m a country road in a hungry roam
I’m a gray bird in a chicken’s pen,
And I’m afraid to pray the gray is sin.
But as broken and overgrown as I become
He will not stop a promise done.
I’m just afraid of choosing gray
And a shaking head hung to say.
Shame shame shame

Can the water shape me like a stone
If the water is a home I’ve never known