~ Rumi ~ Rumi ~ Rumi ~

Find the real world, give it endlessly away
Grow rich, fling gold to all who ask
Live at the empty heart of Paradox
I’ll dance there with you, cheek to cheek.
~
The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
How blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.
~
Out beyond the ideas of wrong-doing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When
the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too
full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the
phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.
~
All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea
my soul is from elsewhere, and I am sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

"Liquid Paper" by Peter Meinke

Smooth as a snail, this little parson
pardons our sins. Touch the brush tip
lightly and--'abracadabra!'--a clean slate.

We know those who blot their brains
by sniffing it, which shows
it erases more than ink
and with imagination anything
can be misapplied . . . In the army,
our topsergeant drank aftershave, squeezing
my Old Spice to the last slow drop.

It worked like Liquid Paper in his head

until he'd glide across the streets of Heidelberg
hunting for the house in Boise, Idaho,
where he was born . . . If I were God
I'd authorize Celestial Liquid Paper
every seven years to whiten our mistakes:
we should be sorry and live with what we've done
but seven years is long enough and all of us

deserve a visit now and then
to the house where we were born
before everything got written so far wrong.

Happiness, Fatal and Otherwise

"Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy, you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness."

-- Robertson Davies

"Marsh View" by David Starnes

From a window upstairs
you can watch the earth redesign
itself as mud, tall grass, and birds
as well as light, as well you must
stay drawn to shades of green,
ideals of green, all means of gold,
of russet, rust, colors beyond
association, barely earthbound.

You wake to the world the way
it ought to have remained, without
the squatters, the first of the big spenders.
Better to spend an hour at dawn
studying tides, deferring to songbirds
than measuring even your insignificance.
The window frames it all, the world contained
in its original skin, beyond your love.

Halos, Afterglows, Coronas

"The instinctive . . . purpose of a funeral or memorial service is to reunite the people most intimate with the deceased, and to collectively rekindle in them all the special living flame that represents the essence of that beloved person . . . . Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means. The word "love" therefore cannot be separated from the word "I"; the more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind."

from I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter