up to camp
Author: Bill Schulz
#909
This is most viewed post on this blog. Why? I’m curious.
Sometimes I forget completely – Rumi
Sometimes I forget completely
what companionship is.
Unconscious and insane, I spill sad
energy everywhere. My story
gets told in various ways: a romance,
a dirty joke, a war, a vacancy.
Divide up my forgetfulness to any number,
it will go around.
These dark suggestions that I follow,
are they a part of some plan?
Friends, be careful. Don’t come near me
out of curiosity, or sympathy.
anomie
“Oh, God, we have been an exile in our own country
and a stranger in another land…” – Bruce “Utah” Phillips
anomie noun (Concise Encyclopedia)
In the social sciences, a condition of social instability or personal unrest resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals. The term was introduced in 1897 by Émile Durkheim, who believed that one type of suicide (anomic) resulted from the breakdown of social standards that people need and use to regulate their behavior. Robert K. Merton studied the causes of anomie in the U.S., finding it severest in persons who lack acceptable means of achieving their cultural goals. Delinquency, crime, and suicide are often reactions to anomie. See also alienation.
Participate joyfully
Photo by Genaro Servín on Pexels.com
Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.
We cannot cure the world of sorrows but we can choose to live in joy.
When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree.
The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess.
We are not going to change it.
Our job is to straighten out our own lives.
– Joseph Campbell
Hell is
Hell is a concretization of your life experiences, a place where you’re stuck, the wasteland. In hell, you are so bound to yourself that grace cannot enter. The problem with hell is that the fire doesn’t consume you. The fires of transformation do. Fire is symbolic of the night sea journey, the upcoming of shadow – repressed biography, history and traumas – and the burning of the imps of malice. Purgatory is a place where that fire is turned into a purging fire that burns out the fear system, burns out the blockage so that it will open.
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If hell is a wasteland, then purgatory would be the journey where you leave the place of pain. You are still in pain, but you’re in quest with a sense of possible realization. There is no longer despair. You really do not have a sacred place, a rescue land, until you can find some little field of action, or place to be, where it’s not a wasteland, where there is a little spring of ambrosia. It’s a joy that comes from inside. It is not something that puts the joy in you, but a place that lets you so experience your own will, your own intention, and your own wish that, in small, the joy is there. The sin against the Holy Ghost, I think is despair. The Holy Ghost is that which inspires you to realization, and despair is the feeling that nothing can come. That is absolute hell.
Find a place where there’s joy,
and the joy will burn out the pain.
– Joseph Campbell
Moral Theology
I am pleased to say I have a poem published in the May issue of The Esthetic Apostle.
https://www.estheticapostle.com/may-2019?fbclid=IwAR3UEtfIczI0nWGJySsGN-rTFB3hEDJKfdRPMSdaD5VxxRKK9ZwH-Xn9D3g
Eagle Pond Farm
Mount Kearsarge – Donald Hall
Mount Kearsarge
Great blue mountain! Ghost.
I look at you
from the porch of the farmhouse
where I watched you all summer
as a boy. Steep sides, narrow flat
patch on top –
you are clear to me
like the memory of one day.
Blue! Blue!
The top of the mountain floats
in haze.
I will not rock on this porch
when I am old. I turn my back on you,
Kearsarge, I close
my eyes, and you rise inside me,
blue ghost.
