All paths lead nowhere, so choose a path with heart. – Don Juan
a path with heart
Author: Bill Schulz
a world of fugitives
In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away. – T.S. Eliot
The Hero With One Face – David Wagoner
They chose me, not that I might learn,
But only because I was born,
And gave me amulets of clay,
Some armor and a brief goodbye.
And at the threshold of the pool,
The looking-glass, the spoiled well,
The hole beneath the whirling tree,
I waited meekly. They called me.
I turned a corner, and was there,
Where all the other places are:
The other side of the cupped moon, Oz.
Heaven-Hell, and the Unknown.
I had too many purposes:
Although they hadn’t said, “Find keys,
Find maidens, answers, and lost loves,”
I knew they wanted these themselves,
And I was bound to seek them all
Or be transformed, or die, or fall.
All the horned gods soared by and looked,
Hoping to stain my smallest act.
And there were beasts: three-headed dogs,
Gorgons, ghouls with whirligigs,
And dragons both alive and dead
For me to master, and I did.
I did, and O they brought Her in:
My Mother, the Queen upon a throne,
The Circe with a mouth to fill,
The witch already beautiful.
How could I know Her without pain?
I turned: there sat the evil King,
Betrayer, jealous brother, God.
I loved him much more than I should.
Then Glory rattled from a cloud,
The deaf-and-dumb rose up and cried,
Cripples came striding, golden fleece
Fell from the holy air like lace,
And broken curses rained, and time
Gave birth, gave birth, and returned home
Where all of the unmade desires
Are made at last. And I felt worse,
And I was elected to a boon,
A final wish for every man.
I chose what I was told to choose:
They told me gently who I was.
It scarcely mattered. I lay down
And ate the lotos, kissed my crown,
And gazed at Ozma, Beatrice,
And sighed, and was content with this.
But no—two-legged horses came,
Ogres, winds, and mothers-in-loam,
Provoked husbands with their wives.
Little people with long knives,
The shadows of the underworld;
And all my journey was recoiled,
Drawn back to the uneasy place
Where each benign beginning is.
Now, like Ulysses, master of
The world under, world above,
The world between and one beyond
Which was not near enough to find—
I wait, and wonder what to learn:
O here, twice blind at being born.
Evening by Rainer Maria Rilke
The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;
and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises;
and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
growing old
Bertrand Russell on how to grow old – Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.
A king sent you…
A King sent you to a country to carry out one special, specific task. You go to the country and you perform a hundred other tasks, but if you have not performed the task you were sent for, it is as if you have performed nothing at all. So man has come into the world for a particular task and that is his purpose. If he doesn’t perform it, he will have done nothing.
Rumi
the still, small voice
H. Nouwen –
Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, “Prove that you are a good person.” Another voice says, “You’d better be ashamed of yourself.” There also is a voice that says, “Nobody really cares about you,” and one that says, “Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful.” But underneath all these often very noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, “You are my Beloved, my favor rests on you.” That’s the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort; it requires solitude, silence, and a strong determination to listen.
That’s what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us “my Beloved.
run
Run while you have the light of life…
John 12:35
looking calmly at myself
I shall now try to look calmly at myself and begin to act inwardly, for only in this way will I be able as the child in its first consciously undertaken act refers to itself as ‘I,’ to call myself ‘I’ in a profounder sense.
Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals
Emerson
On reading Shakespeare, “I actually shade my eyes.”
Edge of Atlantic 