To thine own self be true

Just waiting for the first attack when all the power grids go out and the world is cast into permanent darkness.
(Thank you military nations and your continuing desire for dominance and control.)
I confidently predict the worldwide panic and frenzy that will happen when all the phones and computers go out forever.
My God, what will people do without their screens? How will they survive? What inner resources will they draw on to distract and entertain themselves? What meanings and purpose will they have sans phones?
Yes, the world, as we know it, will fall into a last great age of darkness.
O Brace New World just around the corner with the first act of space aggression!

(From awakening student reader to textbook author and poet: A quest begins at the back of a grade 12 English classroom deep in the poetry of Hamlet….)

Much of what has given pleasure to me from age 16 on has been thinking and ideas. At first being impressed by the ideas embedded in popular music and artists like Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Gordon Lightfoot, and Joni Mitchell. Next, encountering the world of ideas through literature from grade 12 on into university years. Then teaching literature and its ideas to high school English students for 30 years. Next, creating textbooks to facilitate the same. Finally becoming a poet and blogger of ideas. I would just add that consciousness has an intrinsic part of this process–thought and ideas leading, most of all, to consciousness expansion even up to and including today.

“Not to engage in this pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.”
–Mortimer J. Adler

“An idea launched like a javelin in proverbial form strikes with sharper point on the hearer’s mind and leaves implanted barbs for meditation.”
–Erasmus

“Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”
–Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“An idea is a light turned on in a man’s soul.”
–Ayn Rand

“To think and to be fully alive are the same.”
–Hannah Arendt

“Thinking…in its higher forms is a kind of poetry.”
–Havelock Ellis

“Thinking is the endeavor to capture reality by the means of ideas.”
–Jose Ortega Y Gasset

“To have ideas is to gather flowers. To think is to weave them into garlands.”
–Anne Sophie Swetchine

“One great thought breathed into a man may regenerate him.”
–William Ellery Channing

“The revelation of Thought takes men out of servitude into Freedom.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

playing to a racist base. Many people in the States are openly racist. And race relations in the U.S. have been turned back 60 years. Emmett Till’s grave sign has been repeatedly shot up. There are Jim Crow elements starting to emerge again thanks to Trump.

So much is of the
blur, the motion
the non-stopness
of one day
after another.

The accumulation
of life-scenes
and whether one
processes them
or not, let alone
remembers.

These daze I prefer
the moment,
the extended stills
that transcend film.

In those you can
really see the details
and some sense in what
a diminished world
is, means, or once was.

It is the steady gaze,
the single photo
that speaks of
beauty and detail
for the beholding.

So much of life
is flow, the crazy
and distraction.
Less of it to do
with apprehension
by eyes, mind,
heart and soul
of wholeness.

(Clouds and trees
reflected in water.
The distant coast,
a boat
leaving a wake.
A road ribboning
up and down hills
like a storybook.
Tom Thomson
fall forests
and blue lakes.)

There is a glory
to permanence
in nature above all
on a windless day
as lived by self.

The other world,
public and restless,
a remote facsimile
of faux-connect,
beaten up by flux
and man’s desires
for “me”, ignorance,
and usage.

Sad truth
belieing a much
deeper quest
for nourishment.

No, eternity is best
a photograph
that slows time
and change
to mere notion
of perspective.

In that
soundless image,
unchanging and unchanged,
the dream, the moment,
and a far better hope
and view.

(N.B./picture showing less than 1/3 of actual view)

From the cliff behind McNally where I taught for 8 years. 180 degrees panaroma.

2nd best: from the patio and garden of the McDonald Hotel.

If you want to see geese, go to Rundle Park. Numerous geese there on the big pond and nearby grass.

No, the war never ends
only morphs to
online siege,
lies and treason
as cheese-faced
and hair-chopped guys,
bed down with
a smiley fox for
handshakes,
conspiracy
and photo-ops.

For no one in particular,
certainly not for
working stiffs,
abandoned kids,
or the common-sensers
in search of mere truth
and a broken dream.

Up here in these parts,
the head dope
licks his chops at the
bread he’ll make
selling out generations
of kids plus schools,
cities, and clean air,
carbon tax aside.

Yeah, baby, the pipeline flows
rank like phoenix* waste
as illegals crowd border forests
in search of sanctuary,
free money and
The Canadian Whim.

(*federal government’s ineffective, expensive payroll plan costing billions)

(by blog author)

Donald Trump is the Fifth Column in the U.S. for Russia. His son, Kushner, Stone, Sanders, and others were/are other members of this treasonous group.

“Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots.”
–Steve Allen

“Humor is but another weapon against the universe.”
–Mel Brooks

“Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man’s superiority to all that befalls him.”
–Romain Gary

“Among other things, I think humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit.”
–Ogden Nash

“A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.”
–Dave Barry

“A sense of humor is a sense of proportion.”
Kahlil Gibran

“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same things, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
–Clive James

“The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like iinterarching searchlights.”
–Edith Wharton

massive coleus

yellow begonia

polka dot plant

Constellation Virgo (my sign)

from my Albanian poet-friend, living and now writing here in Edmonton. I had the honor of helping with the editing of Kadrush Radogoshi’s latest book of poetry, just published in English. Kadrush is not only a significant international poet, he is a fine romantic voice; in fact, one of the last ones out there today. He is a veritable force to be reckoned with and a true gentle man of letters. A kindred spirit, indeed.