Piffka

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I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
from Second April - ESVM

A little dog danced. And the day began." Rupert Brooke

"...I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars." D.Thomas

I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind. -- W.S

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
-- Wendell Berry.

"There is no greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself. He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough."
from Dao De Jing, #46

The sea is calm to-night,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits...
-- Matthew Arnold

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
--from The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats

But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set.
EStVM

When daisies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white...
WS

Only until this cigarette is ended,
A little moment at the end of all....
ESVM

I'll keep a little tavern
Below the high hill's crest...
ESVM

Bless'd is the man in whose sequester'd glade,
Some ancient abbey's walls diffuse their shade;
R.P. Knight "The Landscape" 1794

A thousand thoughts of tender vague regret
Crowd on my soul...
Chisato - 9th Century

There is something Pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything. --George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

There is no greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself.
DDJ.46

Hugged by the woods and kissed by the sea!
Where is the Eden like to thee?
Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Emily Dickinson got so drunk on dew that she was reeling around and the angels were hanging over the edge of heaven and waving their snowy hats. It’s one of her lesser known poems.” - Nelson Bentley

"Funny, I don't remember being absentminded!"

No earthly enterprise will cloud this vision; so beware... EStVM

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. N.Mandela

The rain is falling through the mist...
B.Bramlett, E.Clapton

It is an heretic that makes the fire,
Not she which burns in't. W.S.

And I upon the floor will lie
And think how bad I've been.
from "The Penitent" - Millay

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness did not perceive it.
KJV

The innocent if lawless elf...
Theirs the spiced tears that overbrim,
And theirs the dimple and the lightsome whim.
from OF RAMA, by Melville

Sir 31:28 Wine measurably drunk and in season bringeth gladness of the heart, and cheerfulness of the mind

The one common antidote for all our hindrances is noble friends and noble conversations, which are health food for the mind. Ayya Khema, When the Iron Eagle Flies

... things that are past and things to come.
Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672)

There is always one moment... when the door opens and lets the future in.-- Graham Greene

Clearly my ruined garden as it stood
Before the frost came on it I recall... Sonnet XXXV-EStVM

The Daoists never agreed on anything and spent their days doing strange movements, like animals, in the garden and their nights drinking wine, reciting poetry....

Magic doesn't work in this new place.
Native poetry has lost rhythm and rhyme,
Familiar food is labeled a curiosity,
And hostile stares replace familial love.

The saving of our world will come... through the creative maladjustment of a non-conformist minority.
MLK -- "Strength to Love," 1963

The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love. Sir Edward Dyer

"In the dark of the moon,
In the flying snow, in the dead of winter
War spreading, families dying, the world in danger
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover."
-Wendell Berry

--The Parallelogram of Forces--
And hence no force, however great,
Can draw a cord, however fine,
Into a horizontal line,
Which shall be absolutely straight.

The trouble with you, Miss, is, you, you don't know anything about boats!
--"Charlie" African Queen

"I never dreamed that any mere physical experience could be so stimulating." -- Rose, African Queen

"Don't follow leaders" - Robert Allan Zimmerman (1941- ), Subterranean Homesick Blues

What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty,
and never see the Dawn!
Logan Pearsall Smith (1865 - 1946)

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
George Orwell 1984

...survived by eating Top Ramen noodles and drinking Gatorade...wearing a heavy red jacket with a hood and jeans"
- Said of Ruby Bustamante, five years old, who survived ten days alone in the Badlands of Riverside County, CA.

Nautical Dawn- the time at which the sun is 12 degrees below the horizon in the morning. Nautical dawn is defined as that time at which there is just enough sunlight for objects to be distiguishable.
from NOAA

Thinking of him as I might think of daybreak
And humming a tune I know.
Morning Song from "Senlin"
Conrad Aiken (1889-1973)

Go Outside and enjoy yourself... it's Earth Day!

Think not I have not heard.
Well-fanged the double word
And well-directed flew.
~ from Huntsman, What Quarry? Millay

They said: Leave your pebbles on the sand, and your shells, too, and come along,
we’ll find you another beach like the beach at Truro.
from "Memory of Cape Cod"
ESVM

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.
- Billy Collins

All that we know, all that we can piece together, of a time when all went, or seemed to go, well.
from Two Voices- ESVM

"Look at the view, young lady, look at the view." Anna Quindlen

Druid, Druid, how great webs of sorrow
Lay hidden in the small slate-coloured thing. Yeats

"Now, my friend, let us smoke together so that there may be only good between us." Black Elk

If we imagine no worse of them than they of
themselves, they may pass for excellent men.
Midsummer Night's Dream, V-1

“If you are a big tree, we are a small axe.” – Bob Marley (1945-1981)

"Not to devalue angst, but...."
Noddy

They blaze before me still, as wild
And clear, as when I was a child.
Unfinished Poem, Millay

Travel, trouble, music, art,
A kiss, a frock, a rhyme --
I never said they feed my heart,
But still they pass my time.
D.Parker

'We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don’t know."
"Reverend" Vivian Foster, the Vicar of Mirth
(sometimes wrongfully attributed to W.H. Auden)

"If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; if this is tea, please bring me some coffee."
Abraham Lincoln

"avoid the sweet seduction of despair"

Joy always,
Joy everywhere--
Let joy kill you!
Keep away from the little deaths. C. Sandburg

Listen! Now I have come to step over your soul.
...
Now your soul has faded away.
It has become blue.
When darkness comes
Your spirit shall grow less
And dwindle away.
Sacred Formula to Destroy Life from The Cherokee

Surely you are bound and entwined,
You are mingled with the elements unborn;
from Ortus, Ezra Pound

Thus the Master travels all day
without leaving home.
However splendid the views,
she stays serenely in herself.
DDJ #26-- Mitchell

To have the whole air! --
The light, the full sun...
Morning-fair, follow me further back...
T. Roethke, from The Shape of the Fire

Snug and still on a gray pillow...
Moriturus, ESVM

"...hear the music rising from them up
the long, steady falling night..."
from A Child's Christmas in Wales, D.Thomas

" "
from When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer
Walt Whitman

I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

"Of what sort are those of the present day who engage in government?”
Confucius replied, “Oh, they are so many misfits and bunglers—not worth being taken into account. To lead an uninstructed people to war is to throw them away.”
Analects, 61-62.

Away!" she cried, "Set craven doubt aside..."
Li Sao

"Some among us stagger daily through the gates of hell.
Some walk the path of heaven on the way to lunch." Joe Nation

The way was long, and winding far and wide.
Li Sao

That Pale Blue Dot....Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. C. Sagan

The roses dream with him,
of being understood in clear English, or of a large
Italian sun, or of walking forever on a
Sunday afternoon.
"The Man Called Beppino"
Pier Giorgio Di Cicco

“Fast talk doesn’t cook rice” - Marilyn Rooper

"Give up learning and put an end to your troubles" - Lao Tsu

“Fast talk doesn’t cook rice”

This enemy is the cruelest of all.

"If you want to end war and stuff, you've got to sing loud" - Arlo Guthrie

"There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats simply messing." Kenneth Graham, The Wind in the Willows

"Death is the solution to all problems- no man, no problem." - Joseph Stalin.

Vociferous wild Erinyes hear! Ye I invoke, dread powers, whom all revere; nightly, profound, in secret who retire....
Orphic Hymn 69

"I would infallibly declare myself fallible."

I hated kindergarten.

For further details, as FDR used to tell the preachers, go back to the Sermon on the Mount."

Been there. Done that. Want to go back.
<Thx Letty!>

At the ancient pond
golden frog plunges into
the sound of water ..... M. Batsuo -- Sam Hamill -- Piffka

...go up the mountain after the Moon
She is caught in a dead fir-tree.
Like a great pale apple of silver and pearl,
Like a great pale apple is she.

Cold hearted orb that rules the night, removes the colours from our sight.
Red is grey, and yellow white.....
but we decide which is right.
And which is an illusion...

The substitution of the internal combustion engine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind. WChurchill

"...and there was no one near or far
To keep the world from being mine."
Sara Teasdale

When You Were Young And Your Heart Was An Open Book
You Used To Say Live And Let Live....
Paul McCartney


There, Here, at the Marsh
The papers are full of war and
my head is full of the anguish of battles,
the ruin of ancient cities.
In the rainy light a great blue heron
lifts and flies above the brown cattails
heavy, tender, and pitiless.
Ursula K. Le Guin

The moon is at her full, and riding high,
Floods the calm fields with light.
The airs that hover in the summer sky
Are all asleep to-night.
- William Cullen Bryant, The Tides

I became aware of somebody coughing softly at my side, like a respectful sheep trying to catch the attention of its shepherd. PGWodehouse

Wilfred Allsop was sitting up, his face pale, his eyes glassy, his hair disordered. He looked like the poet Shelley after a big night out with Lord Byron. ibid.


The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Twilight (Nahant)
There was an evening when the sky was clear,
Ineffably translucent in its blue....
Sara Teasdale

Civilization is what makes you sick.
Paul Gauguin

It's just turtles, turtles all the way down.

In harmony with the cosmic sea,
True love needs no company,
It can cure the soul, it can make it whole,
If dogs run free.
Bob Dylan

Over the downs there were birds flying,
Far off glittered the sea,
And toward the northe the Weald of Sussex
Lay like a kingdom under me.
Sara Teasdale

A little dog danced. And the day began.

The bright, thin, new moon appears,
Tipped askew in the heavens. Tu Fu

"I jokes, you panic."
Dora Tagaruk

black on black, 2-door 5-speed '95 Civic EX with a sunroof and a
CD player with a removable face. The EX is the top of the line so it
has power windows, mirrors etc. It also has after-market wheels but
they look OK, and it has all-weather Falcon tires that look like they
are good for another 2 years. It has 91,000 miles.

"I jokes, you panic."
Dora Aiken (!), Barrow, AK

"... so I knocked my pledge on the head and resumed my liberty." Ticomaya quoting Twain.

They said: Come along! They said: Leave your pebbles on the sand and come along, it’s long after sunset!
The mosquitoes will be thick in the pine-woods along by Long Nook, the wind’s
died down!
They said: Leave your pebbles on the sand, and your shells, too, and come along, we’ll find you another beach like the beach at Truro.
"Memories of Cape Cod" esvm

"the moon won't use the door,
only the window..."
Rumi (translator Coleman Barks)

"Ina pic winna
Send *me* a good dinner." Encyclopedia of Fairies -- a fish fairy of Worle

"I know more about the private lives of celebrities than I do about any governmental policy that will actually affect me. I'm interested in things that are none of my business and bored by things that are important to know." Calvin - May 10, 1993

Before 1928, no one said something was better than sliced bread, because the bread slicer was invented in 1928.

Like the leaves of the forest when autumn has blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
from The Destruction of Sennacherib by George Gordon, Lord Byron

I wandered off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
ending lines to When I heard the learn'd astronomer -- Walt Whitman

And I drew a bit apart,
And I lagged a bit behind,
And I thought on Peace Eternal,
Lest He look into my mind:
from Blue Flag in a Bog-- ESVM


'How contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects'
'I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.' King of Brobdingnag
Gullivers Travels, part 2, Jonathan Swift

In the Island of Sorcerers, Gulliver was able to call up famous men of ancient times and question them, with the result that he found the world to have been "...misled by prostitute writers to ascribe the greatest exploits in war to cowards, the wisest counsels to fools, sincerity to flatterers, piety to atheists..."
quote from Jonathan Swift -- Gulliver's Travels, Part 3, Chapter 6
ref. Swift IV, 16 from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (in 18 vol/ this, vol IX). Ward & Waller, ed. 1907-11

"No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds -- November." Thomas Hood

Please keep in mind the purpose of this meeting.

“I am thankful to everyone in the history of the world who ever refrained from using force that was theirs to use.” PFK

"Truth is a pathless land....Truth is narrowed down and made a plaything for those who are weak, for those who are only momentarily discontented. Truth cannot be brought down; rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it."
Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ommen, Holland (August 2, 1929)

“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”
Haile Selassie 1892-1975 (born Tafari Makonnen)

"Truth is a pathless land." Jiddu Krishnamurti
"The great Tao flows everywhere." TTJ #34

Find joy and peace
in this very Moment.
== Thich Nhat Hanh

DEAR GODDESS, you who never kill but only change: I pray that my exuberant, suave, and accidental words will move you to shower ferocious blessings down on everyone who reads this benediction.

"Fundamentalists of course insist that, upon visiting the Christ child, the wise men ceased to be magi and became Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian. But that part is apocryphal."
- Harald Kleemann -The Sanctuary


It's the Solstice. Turn on a Light.
(mine)

There are no words to explain,
no tongue,
how when that player touches
the strings, it is me playing
and being played,
how existence turns
around this music, -- Ghazal (Ode) 1877
Version by Coleman Barks


I'm a little pimp with my hair gassed back
Pair a khaki pants with my shoe shined black

Got a little lady . . . walk the street
Tellin' all the boys that she cain't be beat

Twenny dollah bill (I can set you straight)
Meet me onna corner boy 'n don't be late

Man in a suit with a bow-tie neck
Wanna buy a grunt with a third party check

Standin' onna porch of the Lido Hotel
Floozies in the lobby love the way I sell:
HOT MEAT
HOT RATS
HOT CATS
HOT RITZ
HOT ROOTS
HOT SOOTS
Frank Zappa --Hot Rats Album-- "Willie the Pimp" -- 1971

Those who dwell...among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. . . Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
Rachel Carson

zzzzzzz


If there be grief, then let it be but rain,
And this but silver grief for grieving's sake,
If these green woods be dreaming here to wake
Within my heart, if I should rouse again.

But I shall sleep, for where is any death
While in these blue hills slumbrous overhead
I'm rooted like a tree? Though I be dead,
This earth that holds me fast will find me breath. Wm. Faulkner


“Useful trees are cut down. Useless ones survive. The same is true of people. The strong are conscripted. The beautiful are exploited. Those who are too plain to be noticed are the ones who survive. They are left alone and safe.

But what if we ourselves are among such plain persons? Though others may neglect us, we should not think of ourselves as being without value. We must not accept the judgment of others as the measure of our own self-worth.... Thus, to be considered useless is not a reason for despair, but an opportunity. It is the chance to live without interference and to express one's own individuality.” Deng Ming-Dao, modern Taoist sage

They said: Leave your pebbles on the sand, and your shells, too, and come along, we’ll find you another beach like the beach at Truro. ESVM

You knock at the door of reality,
shake your thought-wings, loosen
your shoulders,
and open.

-- Mathnavi 1: 2850-70 Version by Coleman Barks
"The Essential Rumi"

This is how it always is
when I finish a poem.

A Great Silence overcomes me,
and I wonder why I ever thought
to use language.
from Ghazal 1823, Version by Coleman Barks "Like That" Maypop, 1990

There is really nothing you must be and there is nothing you must do. There is really nothing you must have and there is nothing you must know. There is really nothing you must become. However, it helps to understand that fire burns, and when it rains, the earth gets wet.
-Zen saying

I am not detachment nor salvation,
Nor anything reached by the senses;
I am behold all thought and form.
I am everywhere, and nowhere at all-
I am Consciousness and Bliss.

I am Shiva! I am Shiva!
-Shankaracharya

"Sometimes I look at something and I think it's so wonderful.
And then I realize I was pointing out a fact
That was as obvious as the moon."
- Hsu Yun

As a flawless crystal absorbs what is placed before it, so the settled mind is transparent to whatever it meets--the seer, the process of seeing, or the object seen.
-The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, 1:41

No one wants advice - only corroboration.
The Winter of our Discontent - John Steinbeck

When my people come to colonize this planet, you will be on the protected rolls, and no harm will come to you. - Coneheads film (Beldar Conehead) Dan Aykroyd

"... or if you don't know the way,
find someone who does." Rumi

???

'Let your wheels move along old ruts.
This is known as mysterious sameness.'
Lao-Tse

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