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I admit it. One of my attractions to solitude is the free pass it provides – a free pass from should. When you live in solitude, no one cares if you’re naked or nocturnal – as long as you’re self-supporting (sometimes tough in solitude) and not bothering anyone (extremely easy in solitude). Why would anyone [...]
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
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.
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The Lifetime Channel recently aired a made-for-TV movie entitled Georgia O’Keeffe starring Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons. In spite of excellent acting, the movie was a big disappointment to me* [see footnote], focusing primarily on O’Keeffe’s turbulent love affair with New York photographer Alfred Stieglitz (played by Irons), her ultimate marriage to him and her [...]
The Buddhists say there are eight winds. They are gain and loss, praise and ridicule, credit and blame, and suffering and joy. If you aren’t aware of them, they will blow you away like dry leaves in an autumn breeze. For example, when someone praises you, and that tastes sweet like candy in your mouth, you are being blown away by the wind of praise.
One day in ancient China a young man thought he had become enlightened. He wrote a poem to his master about how he was not blown by the eight winds. Then he sent it to his master who lived 300 miles up the Yangtze River.
When his master read the poem, he wrote “Fart, Fart” on the bottom and sent it back.
The more the young man read those words, the more upset he got. At last he decided to visit his master. In those days, the 300 mile trip up the Yangtze River was a very difficult journey. As soon as he arrived, he went straight to his master’s temple.
“Why did you write this? he asked, bowing. “Doesn’t this poem show that I am no longer blown about by the eight winds?”
“You say that you are no longer blown by the eight winds,” replied the master, “but two little farts blew you all the way up here.”
- Gary Zukav, Soul Stories, (c) 2000
“Everybody, by virtue of being a human being, is willy-nilly a metaphysician.”
Speaker: Alan Watts
Music: Svefn-G-Englar by Sigur Ros from Soundtrack to Vanilla Sky
Posted on YouTube by redliterocket4 (Matthew Segall)
Special thanks to Twitteur extraordinaire @gregorylent for tweeting the link to this video.
