I decided that everyday should be a day of new birth, every season a respresentation of the cycle of life and death... here there is both living and dying.... being born into the world like new sprouts of leaves thirsty for the water and sunshine that showers upon this earth, and there is the withering away of the trees and the grass in fall to remind us that everything must perish... this universe it doesn't immaculately care... but there will always be the promise of a new beginning, a radiance unforseen when all seems to have been laid to waste. It's never too late to begin your life again. Sometimes you have laid a good foundation for it, but it begins in the morning when you get up and crawl out of bed like the Leo Kottke song. And just like Curly said in the Money Pit, if the foundation is good then everything else can be fixed. Good days and many blessings to all our fellow travellers out there, today's a good day to be human, that's the least we can expect and the greatest we could have hoped for.

The only true currency in this bankrupt world... is what you share with someone else when you're uncool. -Lester Bangs, Almost Famous

Just remember what old Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big old storm right in the eye and says, "Give me your best shot. I can take it." -Jack Burton, Big Trouble in Little China

I go back to this poem time & time again, one of the most beautiful prayers I've ever seen anyone write that didn't get canonized. People should make laminated bookmarks or frame pictures of it. Naturally number one stands out in my mind, and could pretty much stand alone by itself,
John Berryman:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178869

We went to see Regina Spektor last night at Sokol and I would have to say the crowd was unruly. I joked with a girl in the audience about how I could very easily bulldoze my way to the front, since most of the crowd were females. Females with drunk boyfriends lurking toward the back near the bar. I don't think I really noticed any of this at first because I was really apprehensive about seeing her perform, but somewhere in the middle of probably her fourth or fifth song she asked the audience if they could keep it down, "I'm not lip syncing you know." I think she was right to ask that to some extent, as she is not the type of artist that you can just sort of listen to while you're catching up on Sports Center highlights... not in the least. Sokol always seems perfect for shows like hers because of the intimate vibe that comes from being in that old building, with its long history of elegant music acts. It was no different for her if people would have been able to get over themselves and their obvious self-absorption. The woman sits down and begins playing the piano as if she were just messing around in her parlor. She flitters out sweet melodies from the stage and bats her eyelashes, sometimes, as Brooke pointed out to me, having her eyes lightly shut as she plays each note and sings each lift and octave... I was familiar with a few of her songs but not all, so I could keep the objectivity I needed to truly appreciate that here was talent, here was a presence that pulled us all in. Just focusing on the lyrics, I'd here lines that rang with a graceful truth... then on a few songs, I'd find her telling kitschy (her own oft-used word) and sometimes gentle stories no doubt about personalities or situations she had known throughout her still short life. Graceful was how I would describe her if I had to use only a word. Full of gentle lightness and being, radiating out from that tender muscle that seems to beam from her ribcage is the closest sentence I could use to frame her essence...

I want to sing to you my love
My only love and happiness
Don't be so blue so blue my love
This too shall pass this too shall pass

But tell me, what have I done to deserve you?
Must have done something cause that's how it works
Must have been kind to kittens and birds,
In a previous life must have thought happy thoughts...

I found myself with tears of joy, leaping inside when she would work out a refrain, how she had found those phrases which it seems so many solid songwriters are able to bracket as the words they most want to be remembered by... word they long to fill the air with.

I couldn't help it, thinking that here is a new shining star, coming from somewhere East, I know that part of her descent is Russian/ Eastern European and that this woman has the power to influence another age if she chooses, endless troupes of lovestruck teenagers or twenty-somethings, idealists yearning for love or the capacity or the wherewithal to understand or care about love... for me, I watched my own lover's expressions intermittently throughout the show, watched as she perked up at certain songs, mumbled the words to others, expressed joy, sorrow, wonder, hope, love. The last of all being the greatest. The greatest of all being love.

And with that I leave you with some thoughts to share, courtesy of Miss Regina Spektor,

Samson came to my bed
Told me that my hair was red
Told me I was beautiful and
Came into my bed
Oh I cut his hair myself one night
A pair of dull scissors in the yellow light
And he told me that I'd done alright
And kissed me till the morning light
The morning light
And kissed me till the morning light.

Brooke tells me this song reminds her of me,  and ofttimes I haven't the foggiest
idea of what people are seeing.   More and more,  I'm focused on how I'm trying to
live my life to the best of my ability rather than how people see what I do.
But this idea of Samson strikes me this time, as I am a person trying to stand,
trying to be the rock,  and along comes this woman who is so wonderful and complete
and she's Delilah,  al she wants to do is cut my hair to expose the beauty within me,
and to see me pure, as I am,  but if she cuts my hair,  it renders me vulnerable.
I don't know.   Why doe sthe Bible keep coming back to me?  The Old Testament and its
stories.  Sometimes even the New Testamnt, stories about Jesus.  

Napping Father

I remember watching my father sleep
his mouth open, sometimes, during
what for me was apocalypse, great battles
in my mind, and he would flinch sometimes,
open his eyes, that moment of recognition,
then fade, surrender back into sleep again.

I would think this great man has lived
a hundred years through me, and has whittled
it all down to how or if you can sleep through anything,
despite all the tragedy or infirmity, that though
it be fitful, you must sleep, you must give that to yourself
in order to carry on with the rest of our nonsense.

But for me, I would be nerves on the outside of my skin,
and there is this pillar, the strength of all the world,
and if you asked him, he'd laugh, maybe roll his eyes,
which would tell you it wasn't really like that, that the sleep
was really something like exhaustion, it was about surrender
by default because you can't raise your fists to the world everyday.

when the real comfort is in knowing that
all things are in order for a man, no matter what this world
gives us, no matter where we're punched, that you live
with the choices you've make, and you protect them,
if only by trusting that someone you love can watch
you fall asleep and feel like the world isn't ending,
that it's okay to sleep in this place he's made for you.

"it's interesting how you sometimes have to leave home before you can ask difficult questions, how the questions never come up in the room you grew up in, in the town you were born. it's funny how you can't ask difficult questions in a familiar place, hiw you have tostand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal. it is rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads, our hands with five fingers, the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain." -Donald Miller, from Through Painted Deserts


But Love makes us do things that defy reason, it can really set us through the wheel, it can make us want to do things we would have no account for in doing... why would you want to deprive yourself of the chance to be happy? Is because of the need to fight, regardless. Void of anything you ask or beg of anyone else, or whether your wishes are granted, there is still that need to fight. Because it's in your nature. Resisting the dying of the light. But the fight alone proves that we have not given up on our ideals. Fighting alone can prove the you still very much want to devour all that now occurs.

links for eliza griswold's poems whom I read and was struck by their direct relationship and voice and tone to present circumstances

http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/bulletin_mag/articles/35-23_griswold.html
http://www.versedaily.org/wisdomteeth.shtml
http://www.smallspiralnotebook.com/bookreviews/2007/05/wideawake_field_by_eliza_grisw.shtml
http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=13664

3 October. I began my day with fear. It is my lot. I think there are days when I am spared of that. I am sure I have had those mornings. But I have made much of the practice of talking to it. It's like the grumpy neighbor that you must deal with on the way to the car, on the way to work, before you can get back to the daily business. It is that unnamble thing that I must overcome each day when it elects to appear. Maybe all of us have it because it is our cross to bear in being human. Maybe you have palsy in your right leg, maybe you have a bum hip or a terrible pain in your back. I'm never sure, but knowing that fear is my enemy. A growly grouchy neighbor, growing weeds next door. Drinking beer at six am and talking to his wife at the top of the lungs through the screen. At any rate, I prayed that the fear be removed. I prayed long and hard that the fear be removed and it was. I stood at attention waiting for a power greater than me to grant me some kind of solace... some answer that would allow me to not be gripped by the fear. When I know the hand of that something other has intervened, I know it. I still think of the long windy arguments of Hume, the rebuttals of Russell... but I side with Heidegger, Nishida, Emerson...just less fiery, wanting to be placated by the power of Now.

http://www.poetseers.org/contemporary_poets/poet_laureates/robert_hass/robert_hass_poems/meditations_at_lagunitas/