The dead past, living . . .

It's Satyr's day in thunderstorm preoccupied Okieland . . .

Forgiveness has no need to pre-empt grievance.

Today, in 1936 Wichita Falls, Texas, Larry McMurtry was born.

Ten years earlier, in 1926, Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey. And on October 7th, 1955, He read “Howl” to a gathering at the Six Gallery in San Francisco and changed the poetry world forever:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked …

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull …

– Allen Ginsberg, from Howl, City Lights, 1956.

[The] dead past has a future...reverie can send ripples not only forwards, but backwards through the waters of childhood. ... Sophie Strand

Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.

– Mary Oliver, from “Wild, Wild,” New and Selected Poems, Volume Two. Beacon Press, 2006.

The majority of our perceptions are not consciously chosen based on reasonable deduction and reflection, but influenced or wholly generated by external factors or other people throughout our lives. When we fail to consciously explore our perceptions for their actual value, we are operating programmatically and without true intellectual independence . . . Through re-integration of . . . the ancient wisdom society has lost, we can reap the benefits of psychological and spiritual wholeness . . . Since a truly scientific hypothesis cannot be correct unless it can be proven incorrect, we should endeavor to inculcate new ideas and ways of thinking [in order to] escape the rigidity of our belief systems. – Anthony Gucciardi

Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given; gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. – David Whyte