“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

- Nelson Mandela

Freedom. Freedom to what?

"To what avail the plough or sail, or love, or life -- if freedom fail? Freedom. Freedom to what? Escape, run, wonder turning your back on a cowed society that stutters, staggers, and satnates every man for himself and fuck you Jack I've got mine? To be truly challenging, a voyage, like life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea --"cruising" it is called. Voyaging belongs to the sea men, and to the wonderers of the world who cannot or will not fit in. Little has been said or written about the ways a man may blast himself free. Why? I don't know, unless the answer lies in our diseased values....Men are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of "security", and in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine--and before we know it our lives are gone. What does a man really need --- really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in ---and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all --- in the material sense. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by. The dreams of youth grow dim where they like caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed. Dedication to the sea is the symbol of migration and movement and wondering. It is the barbaric place and it stands opposed to society and it is a constant symbol in all of literature, too. As Thomas Wolfe said, "It is the state of barbaric disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which it is liable to return."

----Stearling Hayden, Wonderer, 1964

love chooses you

"Remember that you don't choose love; love chooses you.
All you really can do is accept it for all its mystery when it comes into your life. Feel the way it fills you to overflowing then reach out and give it away."

(Kent Nerburn)

the romanticist

I have eaten beef stew with silent, shabby men in cheap eateries and fingered the last two pennies in my pocket with anger and irony … I have dined most sumptuously in a spacious Park Avenue home, duck brought forth in silver dishes by a butler … I have seen $.10 movies on Times Square, seated in the first row of the balcony in shirtsleeves, smoking and laughing … under a lashing rain and gale, I have gazed at the angry mid-Atlantic for a moment, pausing in my labours … I have stood on a Liverpool street corner in the middle of a drowsy afternoon and cursed the cobbles because the pubs had closed … I have made love to women in Canada, Washington, D.C., Nova Scotia, England, Greenland, New York City, Maryland and New England … I have lain drunk in the gutter of a street … I climbed a mountain in Greenland and gazed down on the slim ribbon of Ikatek Fjord … I have toiled in the sun on construction jobs from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Alexandria, Virginia … I have attended cocktail parties in New York City penthouses … I have worked in mills … I have worked in garages … I have sold door to door … I have worked as a reporter on a newspaper … I have starved in a cheap urine-smelling room in Hartford, CT … I have dated actresses, models and social workers … I have brawled in streets, in bar entrances and in cafeterias … I have heard great symphonies and been transported … I have walked the streets, a lonely U.S. Navy gob and sought women … I have languished in hospitals and shuffled cards in melancholy abstraction … I have written reams and reams of writings … and through it all, I have always been restless, unhappy and seeking new horizons. What shall I do?

~ Jack Kerouac, The Romanticist, September 1943 (photograph Harry Benson, Berlin Kiss)

poet laureate

Today Carol Ann Duffy became the first woman poet laureate of Great Britain, and the first openly gay poet laureate. I celebrate this day, and I celebrate her wonderful body of work. I am a better woman myself for having read and digested her words. Here's her poem Valentine:

Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or a kissogram.
I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.
Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

the closing of a chapter

"The seasons remind me that I must keep changing. and I want to change because it is God's way...I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind is made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently. Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once. Life has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together...Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where the story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy."
-- Donald Miller

the creative continuum

I recently read a small article in the NY Times about Jeanette Winterson. Since winning the Whitbread first-novel award in 1985 for Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Winterson has had a prolific and wide-ranging literary career. Her columns appear regularly in British newspapers, and her dozen plus books include novels, story collections, essays and children's books. The NY Times notes that 'in some ways, Winterson's success is a triumph over her upbringing. Raised in a working-class Pentecostal household with only six books (including The Bible), Winterson writes that she "was not encouraged to be clever." But she persisted.' She says:

"Art is central to all our lives, not just the better-off and educated. I know that from my own story, and from the evidence of every child ever born - they all want to hear and to tell stories, to sing, to make music, to act out little dramas, to paint pictures, to make sculptures. This is born in and we breed it out. And then, when we have bred it out, we say that art is elitist, and at the same time we either fetishize art - the high prices, the jargon, the inaccessibility - or we ignore it. The truth is, artist or not, we are all born on the creative continuum, and that is a heritage and a birthright of all our lives."

sparks

I've been thinking about Spoonface Steinberg recently. Lee Hall - who wrote Billy Elliott - wrote a radio play called Spoonface Steinberg (which he then adapted for the stage, to much acclaim). It is a heart-warming, funny and moving story about life, death and faith, told from the view of a young autistic girl. The voice of 9-year-old Spoonface offers a unique perspective on life. She is affected by autism, and her quirky and eloquent take on the world around her is mesmerizing, poignant, and at times, very funny. Slowly it is revealed that Spoonface is terminally ill, and that the audience are witnessing the swansong of a quite extraordinary little girl:

“because when the world was made, God made it out of magic sparks – everything that there is, was all made of magic sparks – and all the magic sparks went into things – deep down and everything was a spark – but it was quite a while ago since it was made and now the sparks are deep down inside and the whole point of being alive – the whole point of living is to find the spark – and when you meet someone and say hello – or if you tell them a joke or when you say that you love them or try and help someone who is sad or injured – all these people, all they need is help to find the spark … and when people kissed there were sparks and when people held each other there were sparks and when they waved as they were going away in a car there would be sparks and they would all be prayers – they would all be prayers for the babies and the sad people with cancer – and if only you could see the spark then there was a meaning – because what was the meaning of anything? – if you were going to die, what was the meaning? – all the trees and the bushes and the famines and wars and disasters and even pencils or pens – what was the meaning of all these things? – and the meaning was if you found the spark – then it would be like electricity – and you would glow like a light and you would shine like the sparks and that was the meaning – it wasn’t like an answer or a number or any such – it was glowing – it was finding the sparks inside you and setting them free.”