To thine own self be true

The UK plane going from London to Dusseldorf, Germany that landed in Edinburgh, Scotland instead. Good to know that human pilots surrender complete control to HAL-style technology that goes wherever it wants to.

Large parts of the road system, Hawrelak Park potentially for 3 years, and now the LRT to NAIT for 4 mos. Stay tuned for even more closures. City Council has run amok. Meantime, the bike lanes in Mill Woods are still waiting for their first riders this winter, let alone years.

It is no longer for me to say for you.
You will need to fill in the blanks yourself,
to answer the remaining questions,
to find your missing peace
and decide which dream is worth
the living and dying for.

It remains but for you
to walk alone on that beach
with nothing but your thoughts.
It is up to you to decide
if touch is the best art of all
and if an old Inner Child still lives.

It is not in this poem then
that someone will smile fondly at you
and find all you say so interesting.
It is no longer the job of this poet
to free you, to whisper your name,
or tell you where all the treasure’s hid.

No, it is you alone
who will write the last poem, love,
your very own, and tell us all here
who it is that you really are.

Microplastic content.

“It is the childlike mind that finds the kingdom.” –Charles Fillmore

No hurricanes, earthquakes, nuclear winters, floods, falling space junk and meteorites, tornados, assaults, and wars will ever be stopped or prevented by your phone, an app, social media or the Internet. No meaningful relationships are guaranteed by the new technology either. The digital world is very limited in what it can actually do in Nature, the real physical world, and in significant relationships.

political censorship. (A sanctimonious, one-way, ego-centered imposition of these limited/limiting values on others.)

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”
–May Sarton

Crème de menthe on Oreo ice cream–decadent delight!

Happiness is in the imagination. What we perform, is always inferior to what we imagine.–Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.–W. Somerset Maugham, The Circle

Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.–Saul Bellow, “Nobel Prize Speech”

Recognizableness is an artistic quality which most people find profoundly thrilling.–Aldous Huxley, “Music at Night”

Art enlarges by admitting us to the inner life of others.–Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics

Half of art is knowing when to stop.–Arthur William Radford

A work of art is good if it is has sprung from necessity.–Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letter to a Young Poet”

The proper study of mankind is books.–Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

Civilization is an exercise in self-restraint.–W.B. Yeats

Verbal communication about music is impossible, except among musicians.–Virgil Thompson, The State of Music

The aim of education is the knowledge not of facts, but of values.–W.R. Inge, The Church in the World

Genius is talent provided with ideals.–W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook

Impropriety is the soul of wit.–W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook

Men die but an idea does not.–Alan Jay Lerner, The Street Where I Live

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.–Simone Weil, Gravity and Grouse

Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.–Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

The limits of language stand for the limits of my world.–Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted Harry Zohn, Karl Kraus

Literature is not about something: it is the thing itself, the quiddity.–Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

In memory everything seems to happen to music.–Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Music is the best means of digesting time.–W.H. Auden, quoted Robert Craft, Stravinsky: The Chronicle of a Friendship

Poetry is a perfectly reasonable means of overcoming chaos.–I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.–George Santayana, Little Essays

Human kind/Cannot bear much reality.–T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Most of one’s life is a prolonged effort to avoid thinking.–Aldous Huxley, “Green Tunnels”