Our children no longer learn how to read

the great Book of Nature

from their own direct experience or how to

interact creatively

with the seasonal transformations of the planet.

They seldom learn where their water comes from

or where it goes.

We no longer coordinate our human celebration with

the great liturgy of the heavens.

--- Wendell Berry

It is terribly difficult to say honestly, without posing or faking, what one truly and fundamentally believes. Reticence or an itch to make public confession may distort or dramatize what is really there to be said, and public expressions of belief are so closely associated with inspirational activity, and in fact so often stem from someone's desire to buck up the downhearted and raise the general morale, that belief becomes an evangelical matter.

Wallace Stegner, This I Believe

The flexibility of his insight was of the kind that comes sometimes from not owning anything or anybody and therefore not being obliged by your interests to shape your thought narrowly. People of that kind are good to be around, though they're fairly rare even among have-nots, since the quality depends on some brains and an absence of envy.

-- Goodbye To A River, John Graves

In a time that breaks

in cutting pieces all around,

when men, voiceless

against thing-ridden men,

set themselves on fire, it seems

too difficult and rare

to think of the life of a man

grown whole in the world,

at peace and in place.

But having thought of it

I am beyond the time

I might have sold my hands

or sold my voice and mind

to the arguments of power

that go blind against

what they would destroy.

-- Wendell Berry

3/6/10

Had he flown, the storms mass would have arrived sooner, with less trepidation. To be caught bare in the surge was a blessing to him, kinder than knowing in advance. When his mind was built, he was twelve. He had never possessed trouble in mind. By eighteen, he had walked in silence for six years. Occasionally wading in joy, he awaited the solitude of life's downward slope, those final decades.

Had he flown, he'd have never known. Though each step appeared heavier, he was told it only eased with time. Days, thoughts, that notion of time was common only in winter, when it actually stopped.

Had he followed the common man's central flyway, floating in assumed complacency, he'd have never loved; his hate would seem meager. Had he never loved, his hate would be meager.

Each time he conquered another, it was a different vein of the same rhythmic pulse. The hunt always elating, the kill never satiating. A jingoist, a sybarite, he would soar those first days following a kill. He would carry that affectation till they met it head-on, till he realized his own ineptitude.

It usually arrives

after the second

layover.

When time becomes

irrelevent

and the eight dollar beers

begin to remind you

of the last time

you saw her,

or even the last time

you had sex.

You can't begin again

till your perception acknowledges

the absurdity of air travel,

the world's shortcomings.

The pen and ink,

they're everything,

once everything again means

nothing.

It's hard to sleep

when your phone's

dead,

when your pits reek

of booze.

But that's when it arrives,

when you can think

of nothing else,

when only regret can loosen

your bowels,

and the pen can move itself.