from Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Ferdinand Celine

Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination.All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's a novel, just a fictitious narrative. Littre says so, and he's never wrong. And besides, anyone can do as much. You just have to close your eyes. It's on the other side of life.

Lawns by Naomi Ayala

the magnolia tree I've claimed in full
April bloom & come visit
is in someone else's yard, has a surname
that corresponds to a playpen
of a parcel & its owner

and I think that lawns
are a concept of colonialist
empires, that hedges symbolize
prisons beautified
fences you cannot cross

like straps for oxen they tighten
around the back of the eyes
of your soul, wrap & bear weight
leave open sores to become
the landing strips of flies

I have turned organic fences
& frontyards in my dreams
over & over--a country-full
and know they become walls
against their will

rebel by growing every
which way so often
in the middle of the dark
that only blades can trim
their constant disobedience

Poverty by Naomi Ayala

It gives you pigeon eyes,
makes you brave
as a cracked slate
with all the weight
of a house on top.

It bids you
hold out your quaky hand
through bittersweet temptations.

You dream of it as slick
silvery fish between your hands
wide eyed & breathless
but it circles your bleeding
feet like sharks.

At evening time
between lampposts & garbage
drums turned over in the wind,
poverty is black ice...
or a train, whose departure you miss,
whistling at you in the distance.

Your will is chalky on your tongue
like aspirin
& patience hangs like frayed
dreads down your back.

Morning bends
the scalpel-sharp pain
in the rib cage,
love's sulfur-dazed eyes.

Two tea bags in your wallet
for when the day is done
& poverty at your feet
like a hungry dog
laps up the sweat of your calves.
You come & go not speaking
fumbling for a ripcord
through a thousand leagues of wild wind.

grace notes

Everyone wants to be beyond, or at least be headed in that direction. After the ashes have blown away and civilizations have been rendered faint memories, we wanna be the one with the grim satisfaction of both clearly seeing the world’s self-destruction and somehow escaping the unthinkable fate tied to it. We wanna think around our emotions, laugh about them before they become troubling obfuscations. Skip doubt and faith altogether and go straight for the full potential of naked intuition. Everyone wants to survive and attain due potential, not having been wrong about every damn thing. But we’re mostly just lucky if we can park ourselves anywhere near the sticking post of existence.

As the cover and title suggest, this record is a meditation on sensuality and passion as much as a night swim in their mysterious essence. It’s the sound of struggling about grace notes — glimpsing perfection but not daring to sully it with possessiveness. In practice and in philosophy, it seems to both welcome and spurn close scrutiny. There isn’t a moment wasted or a shred of self-consciousness on display.

From the review of Love by Amen Dunes at tinymixtapes

http://www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/amen-dunes-love

haiku by ryokan

Falling blossoms.
Blossoms in bloom are also
falling blossoms.

The Coming of Wisdom with Time by WB Yeats

The leaves are many but the trunk is one.

Through all the lying days of my youth

I waved my leaves and branches in the sun.

Now, I wither into the truth.

pure by ryokan

The rain has stopped,

the clouds have drifted away,

and the weather is clear again.

If your heart is pure,

then all things in your world are pure.

Abandon this fleeting world, abandon yourself,

then the moon and the flowers

will guide you along the way.

What To Remember When Waking by David Whyte

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

Lost by David Whyte

Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows Where you are.
You must let it find you.

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations, though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
but little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mindful by Mary Oliver

Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and crotchety–

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light–
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

The Cherry Trees by Edward Thomas

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding,
On the old road where all that passed are dead,
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding
This early May morn when there is none to wed.

Lights Out by Edward Thomas

I have come to the borders of sleep, 
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight, 
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack, 
Up to the forest brink, 
Deceived the travellers, 
Suddenly now blurs, 
And in they sink.

Here love ends, 
Despair, ambition ends, 
All pleasure and all trouble, 
Although most sweet or bitter, 
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.

There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter and leave alone
I know not how.

The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself

A Blackbird Singing by R.S. Thomas

It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark 
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes'
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.

You have heard it often, alone at your desk
In a green April, your mind drawn
Away from its work by sweet disturbance
Of the mild evening outside your room.

A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history's overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.

A Day in Autumn by R.S. Thomas

It will not always be like this, 
The air windless, a few last
Leaves adding their decoration
To the trees’ shoulders, braiding the cuffs
Of the boughs with gold; a bird preening

In the lawn’s mirror. Having looked up
From the day’s chores, pause a minute, 
Let the mind take its photograph
Of the bright scene, something to wear
Against the heart in the long cold. 

Pythian 8 by Pindar

Creatures for a day! What is a man?
What is he not? A dream of a shadow
Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men
A gleam of splendour given of heaven,
Then rests on them a light of glory
And blessed are their days.

J.T.

Cast Hexagram:

44 - Forty-Four

Kou / Compulsion

A playful Zephyr dances and delights beneath indulgent Heaven:
A Prince who shouts orders but will not walk among his people may as well try to command the four winds.

A strong, addictive temptation, much more dangerous than it seems.

SITUATION ANALYSIS:

You are ignoring a clear and present danger to your well-being.
If this threat emanated from a heavy-handed oppressor, you would see it coming.
But this danger comes to you in the form of a seduction, an amusement, a diversion, an indulgence that is eating away at the fiber of your secure little world.
You are too cocksure.
You underestimate the tribute this dalliance will demand.