[There is] no cure for the facts of life . . .
It's Odin's Day … Strong Southerlies here in TulseyTown are blowing more jetsam into the mailbox this morning … as Colorado prepares for a major snowstorm on the front range.
It's only absurd when I try to make sense of it:
Homo sapiens – us – have been around for at least 350,000 years, hominids three-and-a-half million.
AI's extinction possibilities appear to be increasing and likely to be ignored . . .
Four years ago Monday, shortly after Noon Eastern time … The true Covid toll ...
The best four-sentence answer to the question “why poetry?” I've read yet:
“One afternoon in the summer of 1994 I was driving to work and I heard Garrison Keillor read Stephen Dunn’s poem ‘Tenderness’ on The Writer’s Almanac. After he finished the poem I pulled my car over and sat for some time. I had to. That is why I write poems. I want to make somebody else late for work.” – Erik Campbell online at Rattle, March 12, 2024.
When I begin to doubt that I have what it takes to stay present with impermanence, egolessness, and suffering, it uplifts me to remember Trungpa Rinpoche’s cheerful reminder that there is no cure for hot and cold. There is no cure for the facts of life. – Pema Chödrön
Twilight Comes
… At winter's end ...The mountains
From their place behind our shoulders
Lean close a moment, as if for a
Final inspection, but with kindness,
A benediction as the darkness
Falls ... I tilt my head to study the last
Silvery light of the western sky
In the pine boughs. I smile. Then
I smile again, just because I can.
I am not an old man. Not yet.
– from "Twilight Comes" by Hayden Carruth, in Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991. © Copper Canyon Press, 1992.