Dream

I dreamed my godmother bought the local butcher shop and the two other butcher shops in the franchise. I went back stage and helped myself to some corned beef but ended up with a chunk of babka chocolate loaf. I had ridden my bicycle to the shop but it had a flat tire when I went to ride home.

Richard Jones Poem

Shadowboxing

by Richard Jones

You are the shadow, the shadow is you,
William says as we walk home from the pool
in wet bathing suits, shadowboxing.
It’s the sort of thing he says now and then,
a koan, the Zen wisdom of his six-year-old mind.
And of course what he has observed, or rather,
the enlightened perspective he is wont to teach
his increasingly absentminded, unseeing father,
is both true and useful, and I am suddenly ashamed
of the little regard I’ve had for my own shadow,
constant companion that stretches arms wide across
late-afternoon lawns, looms at night on alley walls,
or melts into nothing to hide from the noonday sun.
I would ask him to teach me more, but when we
stop on the corner, waiting to cross with the light,
I look down at the child’s shadow beside the man’s:
William’s small arms hooking and jabbing, two fists
knocking some sense into the darkness of his father’s head.

source

Human Beings

“We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves. ”
― Ben Okri, The Famished Road

Ben Okri

“One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.”
― Ben Okri, The Famished Road

Transformers

“Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.”
― Ben Okri

Repeated

“The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

Grow

“This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.”
― Ben Okri, The Famished Road

Authentic

“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.”
― Ben Okri

Stories

“Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.”
― Ben Okri

Carl Sandburg

“A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.”
― Carl Sandburg

The Moon

“The moon is friend for the lonesome to talk to.”
― Carl Sandburg

Healing

“Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays (pg.99, "The Body and the Earth")

Common Ground

“Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.”
― Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth

Grief

“I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

A Corporation

“A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.”
― Wendell Berry

The Assumption

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”
― Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

The Art of the Commonplace

“People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

Telling a Story

“Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

Wendell Berry

“There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
― Wendell Berry

Carl Sandburg

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
CARL SANDBURG