First drafts

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-storytelling-animal/201203/crappy-first-drafts-great-books

I wonder if the rise of word processing, and blogs!, we will have fewer of these artifacts for future generations? I hasten to note that having a scribbled piece of paper, or having multiple file versions on your hard drive or however you edit, makes no difference to the final product. Great writers will produce great work, no matter what method they use to get to the final result.

Still it is neat to see all the almost OCD scribbling over the pages.

The whole world is here

Unreasonably warm in March
Walking by the Capitol where buses
Perspire school children,
And office workers, glowing phosphorescent, spill
Onto the grass like dropped vanilla ice cream
This small park in the middle of the city
Is like a dandelion unseasonably
Springing up through the black road
Reaching up and out to the blue sky

The children screaming, running around
The sun-squinted smiles from their teachers
The whole world is here someone says
I smile to myself I was
Thinking the same thing but
In reverse
                   Here is where you can see
The whole world

Golden Light – a poem

Golden Light (03/16/2012)

It is
In moments like these
Like every other moment
When your Divine Light
Lights up ever cell of my body
I am aflme
A flame
Your Light revealing myself

Opening gently, unfolding
This and this go here
This and this mix together my grandmother

Hands full of flour, some on her face where
She distractedly wiped it

Revealing the intricacies of life and love

And you Beloved
Open my heart up, light up the Flame
May it spread

It spreads

Micro Story 2: Jennie

I did not look back. I would not, could not, look back. While I moved I reloaded the shotgun. After a few hundred yards, I readjusted the pack on my back. Should I risk the next town and see if I could find a better one? This one really did not help matters: the straps cut into my shoulders, and the outside pockets, which looked so cool, were either too small or too big to be of much use. But the next town could be just like the last town. I was tired of this. In a moment of distraction Jennie came back to haunt me. The look in her eyes, the gun shoved in her mouth. We had argued just moments before. her position was clear. She could always think many years ahead. I remember her making plans in Middle School, when she was 12 or 13, to buy a car. We all laughed. But for the next three or four years she saved every single dollar she got for allowance, did extra chores. She worked for that car. Now I could not stop the memories. That fine spring day at the school, with Jennie posing in front of the blue, second-hand Mustang. That was the make, model and color she wanted. By that time nothing that Jennie accomplished came as any surprise to any of us who knew her. She was more deliberate and determined than anyone I had ever met. She could, somehow, see with more clarity down the road than all of us. And once she set her mind on a goal, she would just chip away at it until she got it.

I wiped the tears from my face. Took a swig of water. Maybe she was right. She had always been so doggedly against the "Live for the moment" crowd. She called it "historical myopia." But there are times where having bad eyesight is to your advantage. Going out on a date with an ugly girl, or when the world collapses. Jennie saw it clearly. A few more decades of living on the run, scavenging what we could. And then death. Or perhaps the sudden death of an attack at night, or stumbling into a town only to find it still populated. And then death. Jennie, I think perhaps for the first time, saw death. And she knew how to get to her goal.

Me? I am too damn stubborn, too fearful. Me, I hold on to hope. Jennie never knew hope, she only knew progress. I think that now, the world is filled with the hopeful, those who shuffle around looking for a place to settle down, knowing there must be some place.

No matter how you look at it I cannot shake the thought that things will be better ahead than what I leave behind.

More on free will

http://charbonniers.org/2012/02/29/free-will-again/

QUOTE: We are not consciously making a decision; instead we are making a decision and we may be aware of some ingredients in the process. We are not in a determined world but we are in a physical one and part of it. We do not have conscious free-will – no problem here because that doesn’t mean we lack a will or are not responsible for what we do. Both determinism and free-will are straw men, red herrings, passe and flawed half-truths.

I always like when someone doesn’t simply ask if this or that tree is right, but actually questions whether we are in the right forest in the first place. On the other hand there is a danger in abandoning traditional terms – you could end up comparing apples with oranges, and never quite elucidating the issue at hand.

Also worth clicking on the linked article with More Intelligent Life.

Living bridges of Meghalaya

Decades in the making
Those who tended them might not be around to use them
Their descendants will walk on a living bridge
Made by their dead ancestors
They keep on linking the living with
The living for centuries to come
They keep growing stronger
Day by day, no matter what monsoons
Life throws at them

So, too, we

1) http://thevelvetrocket.com/2010/11/14/the-living-bridges-of-meghalaya/

Downtown by Leo Campos

I felt suddenly the weight of the downtown
Tall office buildings on my shoulders
Renew us Spirit and the whole world
I begged, my fingers holding on to the prayer rope
As if it could float

The wind blew cold
                                          blew me
Across the street away from the legless, homeless man
Who sits on the corner of the bank plaza
                                                                        begging
Not today, I prayed, not today again

A leaf scratched along the street
Like a broken heart, given up dreams
Startling me from my prayers

This winter, which never really started
And which will never end
Begging the question, undecided, passionless
This winter stands for nothing

Almighty set up your kingdom upon the world