Wed 28 Feb 2018
Day three, week three – tanka*
Posted by PJ under flowers, poetry, poetry project, spring, tanka
No Comments
Archive for February, 2018
Monthly Archive
Tue 27 Feb 2018
Day two, week three – haiku*
Posted by PJ under birds, haiku, poetry, poetry project
No Comments
above the wetland–glad he’s
left my bird feeder.
*For a definition of what constitutes haiku, tanka, and cinquains, and for an explanation of this poetry project, go here.
*To see all the poems in one place go here.
Mirrored from Better Than Dead.
Tue 27 Feb 2018
Chop and carry
Posted by PJ under enlightenment, proverb, quote of the day, what the living do, zen
No Comments
Random quote of the day:
“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.â€
—Zen proverb
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.
Mon 26 Feb 2018
Free fall
Posted by PJ under quote of the day, the universe
No Comments
Random quote of the day:
“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.â€
—attributed to Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.
Sun 25 Feb 2018
Prophecy
Posted by PJ under 9/11, politics, presidents, prophecy, war, zeitgeist
No Comments
I’m not such a believer in prophecy. I give credence to premonitions because I’ve had experience with them, but grand prophecies always seem a stretch to me. Still, sometimes you can read the currents running through a society; sometimes the zeitgeist speaks clearly.
But when I was cleaning out some old files this morning, I came across this old post, “The Beauty of Moonlight,” written not long after George W. Bush launched his war against Saddam Hussein. I was not a supporter of this war. I thought it built on very shaky ground, and that it was mostly launched for two reasons: 1) because Bush wanted revenge against Saddam Hussein trying to kill his father, and 2) because the Bush Administration wanted to seem to be doing something in response to 9/11. I think the attack against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan was a direct response to that attack, but Bin Laden eluded capture and the dogs of war were baying for more and more visible and easy to hit targets. And so we launched an illicit war.
Make no mistake about it: Saddam Hussein was an evil mofo. But there are many such evil rulers across the globe which many U.S. administrations have turned a blind eye to. The attack against Iraq wasn’t about that at all, and I believe the U.S. sold a piece of its soul when we launched it. I will forever honor the men and women who fought in that war, but their honorable service was done at the behest of deceivers.
But prophecy…The first part of the post referenced above is about 9/11, the second half about the karmic debt we might have to pay as a nation for our actions in Iraq. I won’t restate it here because if you’re interested you can read that post.
The purpose of this post is to say that . . . we may currently be paying that debt. Our democracy, our “sacred” institutions are under attack in a way they have never been before. We’ve elected a Fascist and the Republican party is goose-stepping along in sync with his attack on the rule of law; hate groups are rising at an alarming rate. The good news is that we have good children who seem willing to take up the activism necessary to fight this evil, but we still have a long way to go before we can clean this mess up. And let’s be real–things will never be the same again. Once those dogs of hatred are loosed in any society they only want more chaos. It will be a long, hard fight to defeat them.
If we can.
I believe in our children. I still believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the American rule of law that once before brought down a crooked president. I was never more proud of this country than I was in the aftermath of Watergate because it proved that no American was above the law, even a president.
But I have no prophecy or premonitions to offer here. I only have hope that it’s still true.
Sun 25 Feb 2018
Day one, week three – haiku*
Posted by PJ under haiku, poetry, poetry project, trees
No Comments
Thu 22 Feb 2018
Writing something
Posted by PJ under quote of the day, writers, writing
No Comments
Random quote of the day:
“I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, ‘Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.’ She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. My daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, ‘Is he sick?’ ‘No,’ my wife says, ‘he’s writing something.’â€
—James Thurber, Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 1958, ed. Malcolm Crowley
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.
Wed 21 Feb 2018
Day three, week two – two cinquains*
Posted by PJ under darkness, poetry, poetry project
No Comments
I cheated on this. The idea had too many variables, so I turned it into a pair of cinquains.
Twilight
dark, moonless
night, two amber
eyes caper down the street
alone.
Headlights
flash and now
I see the woman all
in black holding tightly to
a leash.
*For a definition of what constitutes haiku, tanka, and cinquains, and for an explanation of this poetry project, go here.
*To see all the poems in one place go here.
Wed 21 Feb 2018
Lessons
Posted by PJ under lessons learned, love, quote of the day
No Comments
Random quote of the day:
“The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.â€
—Mignon McLaughlin, The Complete Neurotic’s Notebook
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.
Mon 19 Feb 2018
Day two, week two – haiku*
Posted by PJ under haiku, peaches, poetry, poetry project
No Comments
