It’s Day-to-Day

November 10, 2024 11:48am

A writer that I follow just announced that severe abdominal pains on election night ended with a stint in the ER and the discovery of a malignancy. The reaction?….we live day-to-day. Nothing more is guaranteed. She concluded with lines from “A Brief for the Defense”:

…. we must admit there will be music despite everything
we stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafe`s and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come. – Jack Gilbert

Yes, the years of sorrow. How to balance that with the true grasp of limited mortality and nothing beyond? To come to terms with this requires a calm stoicism that you nurture at the center of your soul.

No Special Hurry

November 10, 2024 1:46pm

I thought I had posted this excerpt, but I could not find it. I still carry in my wallet, a tattered and fading copy of this that I cut out of a student newspaper at the university of Kentucky around 1980.

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” – Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms.

Thanksgiving of the Gods

November 19, 2024 6:01pm

Thanksgiving approaches and I consider: to whom do I give thanks. My thoughts return to Rta and Maat, the concepts of truth and balance first considered by the proto-Indo-Iranian cultures and the Egyptians. Humans seem to have had a sense of right and wrong with the coming of consciousness. I suspect that the Gods arose partly from a desire for accountability. Another impetus was a recognition that our consciousness compelled us to rise above our bestial origins and to aspire to the abstract principles that separated us from the rest of Earthly creation. Even if there is NO supernatural component of the universe, we would still invent our Gods because that desire to lift ourselves from mere survival and strive for the spiritual is undeniably an important part of our species. The ability to be thankful, to realize that we are not in control, to recognize and work toward perfection – that is a way to think of God.

So, my path leads me to a broader concept of the divine in which I deify truth, justice, mercy, balance, order, and reason and I bow to these manifestations of God.