Like sex, bathing, sleeping, and drinking, the effects of food don't last. The patterns are repeated but finite. Life is a near-death experience, and our devious minds will do anything to make it interesting.

Jim Harrison, "A Really Big Lunch," The New Yorker, September 6, 2004.

If he would just take a plunge (always the Realtor’s fondest wish for mankind), banish fear, let loose the reins, think that instead of having suffered error and loss he’d survived them and that today is the first day of his new life, then he’d be fine and dandy. In other words, embrace in full the permanent period of life, live not as though he were going to die tomorrow but as though he might live.

Richard Ford, The Shore, The New Yorker, August 2, 2004

Wartime Washington

Today the maples are in flames,
The breeze so cool,
I need body armor.
The world is at war,
No truce, no quarter.

The words of an old song
Go through my brain.
How did I get here?
Whose life is this anyway?

Fuck it.
It doesn’t matter.
Today the maples are in flames.
And I have body armor.

GMG

Sky Blue

At 7 am
The sun was barely up.
Three hours later,
The shadows were still long on Rock Creek.
The sky shined a perfect blue,
With a brilliance so true
It juxtaposed
The trees –
Greens, reds, browns and golds
Already a bit of a cacophony –
Showing off the earth’s odd colors.

The artist who painted this picture,
However uncaring of life within the frame,
Set the stage with great beauty.
What more can we reasonably ask
Of any deity.

GMG

A man’s usefulness
depends upon living up to
his ideals
in so far as he can.

A great democracy
has got to be progressive or
it will soon cease
to be great or a democracy.


Teddy Roosevelt

All the exotic ingredients of alchemy – all the metals and minerals and compounds – are in truth one, and that singularity is neither more nor less than the person of the alchemist himself. If the base metal is in need of purification then so, even more so, is he. Out of the corruption and confusion he must find a oneness in which nature and divinity are reconciled. Out of the unstillness of his own impurity must come the transforming power to achieve redemption.

Alan Wall, The School Of Night

October Season

Most trees still have their leaves,
Except for those on the boulevard,
Sickly from the fumes,
The sort the local electric company
Likes to “trim.”

Green leaves too,
With just fringes here and there,
Turning.

On quiet side streets,
Birds were singing
As if still in spring.

Confused about the season?

The squirrels running into the road,
Mouths stuffed with acorns.
They know.

GMG

Water

Sunlight gleaming off the water,
Water where water should be.
A squirrel lies dead on the bridge,
That it gave its life crossing.
A bit of a strange place to die,
Suspended over the water.

Caterpillar

I see the caterpillar on the parkway
Too late.
I swerve.
Think I missed it.
I don’t look back.

Two poems from a bike ride, GMG.

...conducting alchemical experiments...searching for the brightest thing, for something so luminous, even though it was hidden away at the heart of matter, that, should it ever get to be uncovered, it would have made...the sun blink.

Alan Wall, The School of Night

I believe it will always be found, that he who calls much for information will advance his work but slowly.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

Out here in the fields, I fight for my meals, I get my back into my living.
I don't need to fight, To prove I'm right, I don't need to be forgiven.

The Who, Baba O'Riley

Where is the subject and where is the object if you are operating on your own brain? The point is made by the expression “what we are looking for is what is looking.” Consciousness involves a paradoxical self-reference, a ability taken for granted, to refer to ourselves separate from the environment.

Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver for five minutes longer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What I want is
What I've not got
And What I need is
All around me.

Dave Matthews, Jimi Thing.

Fool: One whom nature has denied reason; a natural; an idiot....A wicked man....One who counterfeits folly; a buffoon; a jester....To make a fool. To disappoint; to defeat.

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary

When your elevator doesn't reach the top floor,
You have to use the stairs.

ARG

Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.

John Adams, as quoted by David McCullough in his John Adams.

What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.

Laurence Sterne, as quoted by David McCullough in his John Adams.

His understanding lies, I think, rather in seeing large things largely than correctly....In the conduct of affairs he may perhaps be able to take so comprehensive a view as to render invention and expedient unnecessary.

Franklin Alexander, describing John Adams as quoted by David McCullough in his John Adams.

I am not going to speak to you at all about the justice or injustice of your conduct. I know very well that this word is nothing but noise, when it is a question of the general interest. I could speak to you about the means by which you could succeed, and ask you whether you are strong enough to play the role of oppressors; this would be closer to the heart of the matter. However I will not even do that, but I will confine myself to imploring you to cast your eyes on the nations who hate you: ask them; see what they think of you, and tell me to what extent you have resolved to make your enemies laugh at you.

Denis Diderot in June 1776 to John Wilkes in reference to British pursuit of war to suppress the American colonies, as quoted by Emma Rothschild in The New York Review (March 25, 2004).