Pure-hearted geese . . .

In Freya's day's mailbox . . .

Your life doesn’t have to be in turmoil to write … but you need to be outside of it. That’s why a lot of people, me myself included, write … when one form or another of society has rejected you. So that you can truly write about it from the outside. Someone who’s never been out there can only imagine it as anything, really.

The world don’t need any more songs [or poems, novels, paintings]… As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain’t gonna suffer for it. Nobody cares. There’s enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probably, each of them, a hundred songs, and never be repeated. Unless someone’s gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That’s a different story. – Bob Dylan in Maria Popova's Marginalian

One must lose sight of the shore, sometimes for quite a while, in order to discover new lands. – André Gide

Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It’s restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. [There is a way where] we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down. —Pema Chödrön

The hanging man

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.

I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid:

A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.

If he were I, he would do what I did.

Sylvia Plath, in Ariel, Faber and Faber, 1968

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

– Mary Oliver, from “Wild Geese,” Dream Work, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.

Alone together under the stars

It's Thor's day. In the mailbox this first day of 2023 June:

The English poet John Masefield was born on this day in 1878 Ledbury, England. He was the U.K.'s poet laureate from 1930 to 1967, second in duration only to Tennyson.

The root of suffering is the pain of separation, the fears and loneliness that arise when we have forgotten our intrinsic belonging to each other and to all of life. It's easy to have this illusion that you're home alone and others are out there engaged and doing things. But take a moment to reflect and imagine how many people are also in their own spaces looking at this email through a screen, from countries all over the world.

As you sense other readers, know that none of us would be here if we didn't have a longing to connect. You might mentally whisper "we are friends".When I reflect like this it helps me shift from feeling separate to the sense that we are all connected, and sometimes we're alone, together. – Tara Brach

Sea-Fever

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,

And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking,

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

– John Masefield

Throwing stones on an open road

It's Odin's day and the mailbox was packed with home-town items . . .

One of, if not, the most severe incidents of racial violence in U.S. history occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, beginning on May 31, 1921, and lasting for two days.

Martin Scorsese unveiled “Killers of the Flower Moon” in Cannes on Saturday, debuting a sweeping American epic about greed and exploitation on the bloody plains of an Osage Nation reservation in 1920s Oklahoma just a stone's throw from downtown Tulsa. The expansive cast included Cate Blanchett, Salma Hayek, Paul Dano and Isabelle Huppert.

The U.S. has had an continues to experience sorry instances of mob sadism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. All, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’ Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism cannot come to America; after all, we once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.

MAGA is fascist. Jesus was not.

History tells us that Albert Einstein was a brilliant genius. After his death, the brain of the pioneer physicist was saved and studied for years in the hope of analyzing the secrets of why it produced so many great ideas. Science writer Stephen Jay Gould provided a different perspective. He said, "I am less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

History also tells us that Walt Whitman was born on this date in 1819 West Hills, Long Island, New York

Long, too long America,
Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn'd from joys and prosperity only,
But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,
And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are,
(For who except myself has yet conceiv'd what your children en-masse really are?)

– Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass

Behold through you as bad as the rest, behold a secret silent loathing and despair . . .

No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession,
Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes,
Formless and wordless through the streets of the cities, polite and bland in the parlors.

Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of itself.

Speaking of any thing else but never of itself.

– Walt Whitman, from Song of the Open Road, 13