Heretical silence . . .

Friday, May 30, 2025. It's Frigg's (Freya's) day. A cool start to the day in TulseyTown, brought on by easy Northerlies. Forecasts indicate a preview of Summer with a warming trend settling in the 80's with sunny skies until the rains return Tuesday.

Art is the music we make from the bewildered cry of being alive — sometimes a cry of exultant astonishment, but often a cry of devastation at the collision between our wishes and the will of the world. – Carl Jung, in Maria Popova's The Marginalian (online).

Today is the day in 1431 that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy in Rouen, France.

Yesterday in 1914, the first poem of what would later be published as The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters was published.

On Poetry: A Spell Against Indifference

I was a latecomer to poetry — an art form I did not understand and, as we tend to do with what we do not understand, discounted. But under its slow seduction, I came to see how it shines a sidewise gleam on the invisible and unnameable regions of being where the truest truths dwell, the most difficult and the most beautiful; how it sneaks in through the backdoor of consciousness to reveal us more fully to ourselves; how it gives us an instrument for paying attention, which is how we learn to love the world more. When I first began writing poetry, it was privately, almost secretly, certainly shyly. But I have come to see that while poetry may be a language for the silent places in us, it is also a language of connection — a way of finding the intimate in the universal and the universal in the intimate — and so it is meant to be shared. – Maria Popova, The Marginalian.

Cacophony

Throw away the words.

Pray let the silence be.

Let there be of distinctions

an absence – a stillness

enveloping leaves falling to ground,

grasses talking with wind,

birdsong celebrating sunrise,

the mocking bird the moon,

the sky sharing itself as rain –

a language only microbes understand,

translating life – which has to be

the noisiest amphitheater ever –

while we call it silence.

— jab