A pony reading Sanskrit . . .

It's Satyr's day here in Okieland and wheresoever you might be . . .

Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on this day in 1904

Nobel Laureate and first president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was born on this date in 1931 Privolnoye, Stavropol, Russia.

It's the birthday of Lou Reed, who would have been 81 today. The leader of the pioneering Velvet Underground was born in 1942, Brooklyn, New York

I think that everything happens for a reason, everything happens when it's going to happen...Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony – Lou Reed

Missed birthday: The poet, translator, essayist, and editor, Jane Hirshfield, was born February 24, 1953 in New York City.

Philosphy: which was once a discipline that sought answers to humanity’s most fundamental questions has become a jargon-riddled puzzle for a narrow group of insiders. –Abigail Tulenko, writing for Aeon, online March 1, 2024.

There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying … than living with sincere, active, constructive hope for the human spirit. – Maria Popova

Jus' sayin'

Living just inside the outside edge. On rare occasion on the outside looking in. I have no need to attack anyone to prove the daily surprise of my being here amid the Great Mystery that is this extraordinary world.

A poem should not mean, but be. I'll probably post this a hundred times by the time the history of this blog is written.

“It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self. Having read it, we are not who we were the moment before.... Art lives in what it awakens in us...Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.” ― Jane Hirshfield

Adapting to Wisdom – an Art Form. . .

It's Freya's day . . . a bit late to the mailbox, the muse patient with my laundry, an early buzzz from the dryer . . .

Birthdays of note:

Frédéric Chopin was born in 1810 Żelazowa Wola, near Warsaw, Duchy of Warsaw now in Poland

Robert Lowell, the poet whose work established the Confessional style, was born on this date in 1917 Boston, and twice won the Pulitzer Prize.

Another Pulitzer prize poet, Richard Wilbur, was born today in 1921 New York City.

Film director and actor Ron Howard is 70 years old today. He was born today in 1954, Duncan, Oklahoma, not a far cry from here in TulseyTown.

And, Justin Bieber turns 30 today. The pop culture icon / singer was born in 1994, London, Ontario, Canada.

Humans can and do adapt to many different environments, but that doesn't mean we do very well in all of them. What is considered “normal” in our culture is not normal for what it means to be a true human, being. Trying to understand “human nature” by studying ourselves inside our culture is as limited as trying to understand the nature of what it's like to be a gorilla or zebra by going to the zoo.

Mindful

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for -
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world -
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant -
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
– Mary Oliver, “Mindful” from Why I Wake Up Early, Beacon Press; First Edition. April 15, 2005.

Leaping slowly

In Thor's day's mailbox . . . It's Leap Year Day . . .

The voice that you “find” has always been with you.

Girls are still in a bad bargain with patriarchy: the price of relationship is keeping their true thoughts to themselves. Growing up under the influence of the dominating patriarchy, including the school experience is one of loosing touch with a deeper sense of knowing. Boys have the same experience, though their lack of awareness is more profound.

Remembering Nex Benedict

“Here’s all you have to know about men and women: Women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.” – attributed to George Carlin.

Sadly, this comment is more true than it is humorous. It points to the contemporary paradigm shift as the “patriarchy” – so it is called – gives way to an as yet defined new “weltanschauung.” I suspect many who read this blog and others you may know are aware of and embracing this transition, if not sensing it nonverbally. A fact underlying this evolving shift in our world view is difficult to face: The problem is men. More particularly “masculinity” as cultures and societies have defined and reinforced it. Under way is a necessary “reframe” of what it means to be a man. Many comments on this topic to date have arrived in the Watercourse Way mailbox via Sophie Strand's fabulous work – The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Spiritual Masculine – a most worthy, if challenging, read IMO. And in a recent mailbox came an excellent TED presentation on this topic by Gary Barker, who argues “... men are dying of manhood.” And, I would argue, our sisters have known this for a long time.

We're in this together . . . a daily reminder from Joyce Vance at her daily blog Civil Discourse