It’ll make it a lot easier to stop judging every one else, if I first stop judging myself.
Judging
Month: May 2019
Quotes (321 Quote Me Challenge)
The best lack all conviction, and the worst keep sharpening their claws, peddling their dark fictions…
Andrew Bird (from the song Bloodless, 2019)
Paraphrasing/Referencing Yeats(?)
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
WB Yeats (The Second Coming)
So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give expressive meaning.
Aaron Copland
This post is a response to today’s 3-2-1 Quote Me Challenge, a challenge which was initially set up by A Guy Named Bloke And K9 Doodlepip
Thanks Ben Naga for inviting me to take part in today’s challenge.
The first quote immediately came to mind because I had just picked up A Vision by Yeats at the library, not because I’m some intellectual elitist, in fact I know that most of it will fly right over my head, but something about it spoke to me, said that there’s a reason that particular book jumped off the shelf. Anyway the next day I was looking up Yeats to find some supplementary reading for what I later found out was quite a massive project (which is A Vision). When I came upon the quote and instantly recognized it from the song. So i thought being given a quote challenge it was kismet.
Then struggling for a second quote more in line with the theme of expression I nearly gave up when this morning I found myself on the roof of Wild Ginger in Downtown Seattle looking at the side of Benaroya Hall was the quote engraved in stone! Ha, if that’s not the universe slapping you in the face I dont know what is!
Expecting too much
My own expectations of myself leads to judgment. Judging my family to live up to the expectations that even I cannot meet.
Expectations form Judgments
both inside and out
and if you happen to see
my parentheses, please,
give them back. Judgments
take shape both inside
and out, without dictation,
dictating the course of future
events. Corkscrewing,
worming into the heart.
Living
Living
with the knife between your teeth
bloodshot eyes
sweat on the brow
'Here's Johnny'
type living
that must be
real living.
clenched fist
razor blade scrapping
knuckles
bruised and ragged
a tireless workshop
of words
always going 'round
each other with words
'round each other with fictions
isn't it funny how words
can stroke
can bury
Living
real living
you don't even know what real living is
nobody does
itching
the scratch
temptations'
callous hands
busy at work
-always at work
and you call yourself
a liar and you call
yourself flames
and you stroke
and bury
and stroke and
bury
until there's no more
weight left to carry
Wake Up!
you dance with
last nights hallow
memories
of dreams
putting distances
between
you and your loved ones
trying your damndest
to live up to someone else's
ideal
Wake Up!
wriggling
like a trout
plashing
the waters
ripple
lungs
balloon
expansive now
the waters rising
touching
the tip
of your nose
and there's no
where for your feet
to touch
Wake Up!
it's 6 o'clock tomorrow morning
time to get up and go to work.
Selfless: Weeds
A weed is pervasive, in its environment it annihilates any competition so as to eliminate variety. In the mind weeds manifest in the form of selfishness. Thoughts, actions, words, from the standpoint of the self, the individual, destroy the variety that comes from selfless thought, words and deeds.
Spring cleaning
I’m looking at this mess beside my bed and I’m thinking: if I were to die today, in a heap on the bathroom floor, this is what I’ll leave behind. This will be my kids’ inheritance, they’ll have to clean up my mess, and their own. Serves them right for all the socks on the floor and dried cereal in bowls.
It’s an amazing trick i do;
i clean up the signs of aging in my sink,
in the bed, and all over the house.
And yet somehow i still convince myself
that i’m the same as i was ten years ago.
Break it Apart
Why
oh why
Do I
Have this
poet’s heart.
Why
oh why
Can’t I break it apart.
For so long I’ve tried
I don’t even know why
For so long
I’ve cried
from this
unfulfilled
destiny.
Oh why
Why
oh why
The artist’s dream
buried deep
inside of me
and no
matter how I try
to crush everything
it still remains oh
Why
I don’t even know why
oh why
This poet’s heart
This broken heart
intertwined
in this
eternal dance
oh.
Experience
Living for experience is living for yourself. Living experience is living for others.
Experience was a way of communicating between things that are separate, but having an experience becomes less important as we realize the intrinsic togetherness of all things. The realization of interconnectedness is living fulfillment, not experiencing fulfillment.
Rodney Smith, Awakening pg. 193
The Northern Flicker calls for his mate (but I selfishly assume it has something to do with me) from the lamp post. He calls and waits patiently before taking off, flashing a brilliant turmeric underwing across the street to the tip of a cedar and continues his search. The flicker is curious because it’s a woodpecker, but unlike most woodpeckers it is tan with black speckles on its breast. He has a white tuft that when he takes for flight, or hops around foraging, he looks like a bunny skittering for the bushes. His calls are finally returned, it seems, in the cedar across the way. And so his journey has found its completion, I have no clue from how far he came, how many trees he hopped from, how many lamp posts he drummed, to get to this stage of his journey, but it seems that he will begin nesting. No longer will he only forage for himself, only burrow for one, only to protect himself.
The flicker is declining throughout the US perhaps they have taken my attention, put me under a spell, so that I might do something to help their survival, at least in this part of the neighborhood. Or perhaps coming across these magnificent animals is a sign that things are changing, a shift is coming and all I have to do is accept it. Holding on to old concepts of self for so long that giving them up and shifting consciousness is messy business. The flicker drumming the arrival of change, the chorus frog singing his song of rebirth and renewal. All I have to do is listen.
I’ve been coming across this idea a lot lately…
Joseph Campbell Episode 1 “The Hero’s Adventure” (The Power of Myth series on Netflix)
The hero’s journey ends with the giving up of oneself for the sake of another, the letting go of the ego, and the giving up of one’s self, for the sake of another person. Is there a more difficult and beautiful thing to accomplish?
In This Round
To be read in the voice of Escanor
Stuck in this round, I shall nail this final nail in my father’s coffin, and bury him. Then I will finish what he could not.
For those curious Escanor (with a different link) is a character in the anime 7 deadly sins. My son has been watching this and so I have invariably heard and seen some of this show. I asked my son to tell me an anime character who has the deepest voice and he gave me Escanor.
As I believe in myth, I found it interesting to know that this character is symbolic of the nature of this short myth. The lion (which also is my astrological sign) is his sign as he is prideful, he was disowned by his parents and (like me) he wages a war within himself for power via (self) control. As I believe in myth, I also believe in the power of the symbolic and the coincidence that these symbols pop up in our life are no such coincidence at all, rather a journey.
Stories for Strangers
I watch myself make up stories about complete strangers and willingly accept the stories as true. I wonder what stories I tell to myself about myself, and does that make me a stranger to myself?
Driving to work
on the first spring of my life.
