The Paradoxical Commandments People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway. |
Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category
The paradoxical commandments
August 15, 2024Take them with you
July 7, 2024
Merry Christmas 2023
December 24, 2023The following is a copy of an email I received a few days ago.
Dear All,
HAPPIEST OF HAPPIEST WHATEVER YOU CELEBRATE SINCE ALL ARE ONE IN INFINITY.
WE LOVE YOU,
John and Mara
Take It – It’s Yours
“There is nothing I can give you which you have not already; but there is much, very much, which, though I cannot give it, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven: No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this precious little instant. Take peace:
“The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and courage in the darkness could we but see it; and to see, we have only to look. Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by their coverings, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love, and wisdom, and power. Welcome it, greet it, and you touch the angel’s hand that brings it.
“Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, a duty, believe me, that angel’s hand is there, the gift is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing Presence. Our joys, too, be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts. Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering, that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage, then, to claim it, that is all! But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims wending through unknown country our way home.
“And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you, not quite as the world sends greeting, but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day will break, and the shadow will flee away.”
—Giovanni da Fielsole (Fra Angelico) 1387-1455
Nationalist religion and universalist religion
December 21, 2023
[12/26/2023.] I wrote this seven months ago. If I were writing this today, I would include the part of George Orwell’s essay in which he includes Zionism and anti-semitism on his list of the kinds of nationalism he condemned.
The world is torn by conflict between nationalist religion and universalist religion.
By universalist religion, I mean a religion that worships something greater than anything created by human hands or the human mind, a religion that believes in love and justice for all human beings, regardless of race, nationality, sex, gender or religious or political creed.
I mean something broader than just the Universalist and Unitarian-Universalist movements in the USA, although these movements at their best have embodied the broader universalism I describe.
By nationalist religion, I don’t only mean a religion that identifies itself with the interests of a particular nation or nation-state. I mean a religion that means loyalty to a specific human collective or organization above all else.
I mean a religion that is nationalistic in the sense that George Orwell wrote about in his 1945 essay, Notes on Nationalism.
∞∞∞
… there is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word ‘nationalism’, but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation – that is, a single race or a geographical area.
It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty
By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
But secondly – and this is much more important – I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.
Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved.
By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.
Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality. [snip]
It is also worth emphasizing once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the U.S.S.R. without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit.
When one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige.
He may be a positive or a negative nationalist – that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating – but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations.
Feynman’s ode to the wonder of life
April 24, 2022The following words are from an address to the National Academy of Sciences in 1955. Get details from The Marginalian.
[UNTITLED ODE TO THE WONDER OF LIFE]
by Richard Feynman
I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves… mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business… trillions apart… yet forming white surf in unison.
Ages on ages… before any eyes could see… year after year… thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what?… on a dead planet, with no life to entertain.
Never at rest… tortured by energy… wasted prodigiously by the sun… poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar.
Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves… and a new dance starts.
Growing in size and complexity… living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing a pattern ever more intricate.
Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.
Stands at the sea… wonders at wondering… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe.
Doggerel by a senior citizen
June 30, 2021
The old crow and the young crow
May 29, 2021ABOUT CROWS
The old crow is getting slow;
the young crow is not.
Of what the young crow does not know,
the old crow knows a lot.
At knowing things, the old crow
is still the young crow’s master.
What does the old crow not know?
How to go faster.
The young crow flies above, below,
and rings around the slow old crow.
What does the fast young crow not know?
WHERE TO GO.
Sources: Spiritually Speaking & Cory Doctorow
Two poems by Billy Collins
May 12, 2021Forgetfulness
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
A few words on the soul
December 27, 2020by Wislawa Szymborska
We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop
for keeps.
Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.
Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.
It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.
It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filed.
For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.
Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.
It’s picky;
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.
Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.
We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.
Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.
It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.
We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.
Source: A Few Words on the Soul
D.H. Lawrence on showing your feelings
November 15, 2020The feelings I don’t have, I don’t have.
The feelings I don’t have, I won’t say I have.
The feelings you say you have, you don’t have.
The feelings you would like both of us to have, we neither of us have.
The feelings people ought to have, they never have.
If people say they’ve got feelings, you may be pretty sure they haven’t got them.
So if you want either of us to feel anything at all, you’d better abandon all ideas of feelings altogether.
==D.H. Lawrence
Love in the time of the sniffles
April 25, 2020
THE SNIFFLE
by Ogden Nash
In spite of her sniffle
Isabel’s chiffle.
Some girls with a sniffle
would be weepy and riffle.
They would look awful,
like a rained-on waffle,
But Isabel’s chiffle
in spite of her sniffle.
Her nose is more red
with a cold in her head.
But then, to be sure,
her eyes are bluer.
Some girls with a snuffle,
their tempers are uffle.
But when Isabel’s snivelly
she’s snivelly civilly,
and when she’s snuffly
she’s perfectly luffly.
Source: All Poetry
‘You shall love your crooked neighbor…’
January 11, 2020
W.H. Auden
O look, look in the mirror
O look in your distress
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless
O stand, stand by the window
As the tears scald and start
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.
==W.H. Auden (1940)
‘When a deed is done for freedom…’
November 30, 2019
J.R. Lowell in 1844
When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth’s aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,
And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.
Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,
When the travail of the Ages wrings earth’s systems to and fro;
At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start,
Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart,
And glad Truth’s yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future’s heart.
So the Evil’s triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill,
Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill,
And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God
In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod,
Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod.
For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along,
Round the earth’s electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong;
Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame
Through its ocean-sundered fibers feels the gush of joy or shame;
In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand,
Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?
Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet ‘t is Truth alone is strong,
And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng
Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.
CONTINUE: a poem
March 13, 2016
Maya Angelou
My wish for you
Is that you continue
Continue
To be who and how you are
To astonish a mean world
With your acts of kindness
Continue
To allow humor to lighten the burden
Of your tender heart
Continue
In a society dark with cruelty
To let the people hear the grandeur
Of God in the peals of your laughter
Continue
To let your eloquence
Elevate the people to heights
They had only imagined
THE ANGRY MAN: a poem
February 27, 2016
Phyllis McGinley
The other day I chanced to meet
an angry man upon the street —
a man of wrath, a man of war,
a man who truculently bore
over his shoulder, like a lance.
a banner labeled “Tolerance.”
And when I asked him why he strode
thus scowling down the human road,
scowling, he answered, “I am he
who champions total liberty—
intolerance being, ma’am, a state
no tolerant man can tolerate.
“When I meet rogues,” he cried, “who choose
to cherish oppositional views,
lady, like this, and in this manner,
I lay about me with this banner
till they cry mercy, ma’am.” His blows
rained proudly on prospective foes.
Fearful, I turned and left him there
still muttering, as he thrashed the air,
“Let the intolerant beware!”
The Cowboy Hávamál
June 21, 2015
Jackson Crawford, a professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, translated the first 79 verses of the Havamal, a Viking poem, from Old Norse into American cowboy dialect.
The Cowboy Havamal is full of practical wisdom that is just as relevant to the present day as the age in which it was written.
If it weren’t copyrighted, I would copy the whole thing onto my web log. As it is, I just reblog his translation. Go below the fold to get to the translated verses.
I found the link on The Tinfoil Hat Society web log.
Update 10/5/2018
Dr. Jackson Crawford evidently has taken the text of his Cowboy Havamal down from the web, but he recites it in the YouTube video above.
Also, he does make available a satirical spoof, the Tattúínárdøi Saga | Star Wars as an Icelandic saga.
Update 10/13/2018
In these two videos, Dr. Crawford discusses Viking ideals of manliness.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 