To thine own self be true

Back from my morning bike ride. Sun out, neighboring streets as quiet and empty as ever. No pedestrians. The world to myself. And a vision of the end of the movie adaptation of On the Beach. City streets curiously empty, not a soul in sight, the wind blowing. And a poster ironically declaring from a wall that there’s still time and it’s not too late. And a memory of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” proclaiming “Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”

(left: opening page of Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting: a  rare signed limited ed.; only book of hers never published in England)

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–their power, possibilities, and beauty, is usually an interesting person.
And so it’s not surprising that creativeness with words as in writing, speaking, and expression with visuals is, likewise, interesting.
‘All we have’, so to speak, are words right from our birth to what Paul Simon called “the instant of my death”.
Quite often, of course, people abuse words (and others) through misuse and agenda-ed use of words, often to manipulate, exploit, or control. And, although, I see thru these kinds of negative applications (they’re so damned common and widespread), I no longer choose to study these or dwell with those kinds of people and situations.
My own life has had more to do with personal expressiveness, just trying to communicate clearly, and saying the things I’ve thought and felt and wanted to express in process.
I thank words, too, for their uncanny to express the richness, complexity, and intensity of life experience. Think Keats, King Lear, Hamlet, Dickinson, Woolf, Whitman, “Ode: Intimations on Immortality”, etc. It is this quality and these possibilities that have guided and elevated the quality of my life and my understanding of Life, human nature, and others.
These are the words I carry about in me, in my mind, heart, spirit, soul. It is language and its glorious expressions that have mattered most to me, reflected in my career path as senior high English teacher, writer, poet, and songwriter.
I see a lot of shallowness, frivolity, distraction, stupidity, conventionality, ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, materialism, greed, money obsession, violence, limits, limitations, and lives in chains around me out there; none of which interest me.
Instead, it is to language, thought, creativity, imagination, poetry, and the Arts, that I continue to pledge myself. Ways and means to express the conflicts, irony, paradoxes, and truths of Life. What has mattered most that I never had any doubt about valuing and believing in from age 16 on.

(An old one from the ’80s)

Until Next Year

He stands in a lane of an October night
Dark leaves blowin’ at his feet
His breath hangs white on the frosted air
As he keeps his vigil in the sleet

The light from her window glowin’ soft and warm
A long ago memory in the mist
An embrace recollected in the shadows
The closeness of a hand being kissed

Chorus:
Is my true love sleeping?
Does she think of me still
As I wait for the first lights of dawn?
Does she know I’ve been waiting
For her signal to return?
Will my true love know when I am gone?

He hesitates a moment by the street-corner lamp
And trembles, thoughts of touches he had known
Memories swell within his restless heart
With an ache that he’d never outgrown

Chorus: repeats

He stepped toward her window and he whispered her name
The shelter and her comfort, oh so near
He listened in vain to the echoes of the wind
And crept away again until next year…

Chorus: repeats

Regardless of where you are in Life’s journey, it always makes sense to follow your bliss and to remain true to yourself, feelings, beliefs, and values. Integrity and purpose will follow naturally. But always, I think, you must stay true to yourself and your essential inner child. That and take advantage of the unique, usually one-time opportunities Life offers, minimizing regrets.

In my own life, I took and always have taken Frost’s “The road less travelled by” rooted in instinct, intuition, and Nature. Like Frost, I, too, became a poet, but also a musician, music-lover, and performer, though I have always followed the Arts mainly via books, reading, literature, language, learning, music, theatre and plays, film, painting, and photography. These wide-ranging genres have been a bottomless source of learning, support, guidance, character development, and learning about myself, Life, and human nature.

I look back also and recognize the roles that destiny, character (as destiny), opportunities, choices, and dumb luck played in bringing me pleasure, knowledge, understandings, wisdom, and appreciations. Underneath it all, is an acceptance of self, others, and process.

I don’t care much for the times, the dumbing down, stupidity, wallowing in ignorance, the limited lives and choices of others, the agendas, social media bullying, and the total abandonment of authority (in any form), common sense, and tried and true processes or institutions. Increasingly, people have turned their backs on the past (except to sue) and have made Mammon their god in the nonstop pursuit of money and slavery to this obsession.

I remain a child of the more imaginative, caring, civil, and thoughtful 1950s and 1960s. (Once you’ve acquired the central values and truths of your life, it is hard to turn your back on them and just dumb down to hand-held screens as your raison d’etre.) Looking back, I’m glad I had as many opportunities, experiences and successes that I’ve had.

After retirement, I went steadily more ‘within’ and have never regretted any of the choices I made. To others, I say “Tend to your soul and the rest will take care of itself. You will eventually come to know yourself, to understand your life, and to appreciate the many positives you have already experienced.”

There are always many possibilities even in limited/limiting contexts, wrote Viktor Frankl. You always decide which ones on your palette to facilitate, to make reality. In that way, you create your own life, fate, and everything else, inside or outside yourself.

Good idea.
Ridiculous to turn Othello character into a woman relative to Shakespeare’s intentions and purposes.
Typical of pc things going on: a stupid limited/limiting agenda foisted on the play at the expense of an interesting black protagonist.. How justified and necessary was the Queen’s intention? What would have been lost of the original? Such an intention is irrelevant and terribly distracting. If the female director wanted to write her own play to explore her agenda, that would have been a better, smarter bet.

Today in Edmonton, a guy is convicted for shooting and killing another guy in an adjacent moving car over a $500 debt. But the ultimate story about money being more important than human life is still the following story.

Grocer in India beheads a couple who owed 29 cents and asked for more time to pay up.

Craziness and obsession with money = extreme violence and cold-blooded murder.
Money and the making of it is often more important than the law or lives of people.

Life can be very cheap sometimes. 29 cents for two lives, or two heads if you prefer. That’s 14 1/2 cents a head or life. The limits and limitations of some people measured in pennies. Equivalent to about what it costs for 3 plastic bags at some stores in Canada. Truly sick.

(from National Post newspaper, today)

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, if I many twist a phrase from Miss Austen, that it is never good news for a presidential campaign when people start talking about weiners.”

(The Great Pumpkin revisited)

(decorated crème de menthe pie; the 1 1/2 oz. version)

Where’s Spot?

(fun flap-book for 16 mos.)

family, fun, and a jumping horse.