Positive disintegration

A rainy Satyr's day in a cool, breezy, thunder-lit-by-lightning-morning in Okieland. In the mailbox:

The way we define and delimit the self is arbitrary. We can place it between our ears and have it looking out from our eyes, or we can widen it to include the air we breathe, or at other moments we can cast its boundaries farther to include the oxygen-giving trees and plankton, our external lungs, and beyond them the web of life in which they are sustained. – Joanna Macy

. . . in Mexico the poor say

that when there’s lightning the rich
think that God is taking their picture.

– Jim Harrison, from “Easter Morning.” Saving Daylight, Copper Canyon Press. 2007.

Back in the Paleozoic, online wasn’t invented yet

so everyone had to wander alone & miserable through the volcanic wastes

or just glue themselves to a rock hoping someone would pass by. . .

Listen: when a stranger steps into the elevator with a bouquet of white

roses not meant for you,

they’re meant for you.

– Kim Addonizio, from “Stay.” Now We’'re Getting Somewhere. W.W. Norton. 2021.

A loving indictment . . .

It's Freya's day in full-on Summer Okieland...

If you've noticed, there've been no blog entries the past two days. Colorado cousin Dave has been in town. Great visit, highlighted by a two hour visit to the Bob Dylan Center here in TulseyTown. Highly recommended.

The flow of The Way has revealed criminal indictments for Mr. Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents fiasco. Arraignment is scheduled for next week in Miami.

Today is the 132nd anniversary of Cole Porter's birth. The Broadway musical composer was born in 1891 Peru, Indiana.

I managed to miss an item in Monday's mailbox: June 5th was the birthday of David Wagoner. The poet and novelist was born in 1926 Massillon, Ohio. Recognized as the leading poet of the Pacific Northwest for more than 30 years, he died in December, 2021 at the age of 95.

Don’t try to work this out too much with your head. Just trust the flow of the most natural, dynamic, and positive energy that’s already flowing through you. It will always feel like Love. – Richard Rohr

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven,
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

– David Wagoner, in Riverbed, Indiana University Press; First Edition (January 1, 1972)

Pathologically optimistic

It's Tews' day and the Weatherfeather has sent a Xerox of yesterday's lovely Summer day into this morning's mailbox:

The beginning is always today. – Mary Wollstonecraft.

Orson Welles' was born on this date in 1914 Kenosha, Wisconsin .

And in 1865 on this day, Sigmund Freud was born. The originator of psychotherapy was born in Freiburg, Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic).

“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.” – attributed to Freud

It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life. – Randall Jarrell, who's birth day was today in 1914 in Nashville, Tennessee

A few things likely to sap our intelligence: sleep deprivation; movies and TV shows crammed with clichés; people who automatically agree with everything we say and do. – Rob Brezsney

The pathologically optimistic are suspicious of a poem’s reluctance to sing along. But maybe useless is useful in a world blind to its own impermanence. Anger is probably the only reliable substitute for inspiration, and given what’s happening to this country, everyone should be sublimely inspired.” – John Herschel