Thinking of Doug (01/14/22 - 11/28/07)

"One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life. That word is love."

-Sophocles

Success

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson (American essayist & poet, 1803-1882)

Words of a former slave...

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

Attribution: Frederick Douglass (c. 1817-95), “West India Emancipation,” speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 4, 1857.—The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner, vol. 2, p. 437 (1950).

3 Favorite, Famous Poems....

The Answer by Robinson Jeffers:

Then what is the answer? -- Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history...for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.

Musee des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

When I Heard The Learn'd Astronomer by Walt Whitman:

When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

A poet's advice....

"This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men...reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem."
-- Walt Whitman

I recently read an essay in the January / February 2005 issue of "Orion" magazine. It was called "The Bridge Over Purgatory" by Jordan Fisher Smith, excerpted from his book of essays titled, "Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra". This part of the essay follows him telling about the time he responded to a call from dispatch regarding a report of a man who had jumped off a bridge to his death. When the author arrived on the scene, he found the man had left his pickup truck parked on the side of the road, with the keys in the ignition, an open beer in the drink holder, and country music playing on the radio. :

"We are all so caught up in the struggles we get into on the way to the lives we dream of, and the dead man was probably just a little farther down that road than the rest of us....
But maybe he was just suffering from the same regret we've all known at one time or another, when life hasn't lived up to our expectations. Only his was worse, and perhaps his life lacked the sweet little mitigations that get most of us through our days: bandy-legged fawns on the lawn, a soft song you hum looking out on a parking lot with a cigarette in your hand, peach-colored flowers against blue-green rock, the company of friends, children, and animals, and the terse exclamations of your fellows, which let you know you are not the only one who suffers. Everything suffers. Everything has joy. In purgatory you still have a chance; the final judgment on you and everything else has not yet been rendered. So if people are doing something wrong, refuse to cooperate. If the music's too sad, for God's sake change the station or turn the radio off. Stop before the bridge. Get out. Walk down the road. Sniff the air, and if it smells good, breathe deep."

Some inspiring quotes...

"I hold three treasures
Close to my heart.
The first is love;
The next, simplicity;
The third, overcoming ego".
- Lao Tzu, "Tao Te Ching"


The following couple of quotes are by Dag Hammarskjold. He lived from 1905 until 1961. He was from Sweden, and served as Secretary General of the U.N. from 1953 until his death.

"Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible -- not to have run away."

The next quote is from his journal ("Markings"):

“Thus it was.

I am being driven forward
Into an unknown land.
The pass grows steeper,
The air colder and sharper.
A wind from my unknown goal
Stirs the strings
Of expectation.

Still the question:
Shall I ever get there?
There where life resounds,
A clear pure note
In the silence.”