elkit in wonderland

Kindness

Isn't it time I posted poetry again?

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

______________________________Naomi Shihab Nye, found here

The Kids Are Alright

dervala writes:

The truth is, I’m not envious of my friends who have children. I’m envious of the children who have my friends.

So nice to see her writing again!

Modern Love, Gets Me To The Church On Time

Andrew Sullivan:

Allowing others to be other is what we call modernity. In my view, it is worth defending. And that's why I think of myself as a conservative rather than as a reactionary. I like the pluralism of modernity; it doesn't threaten me or my faith. And if one's faith is dependent on being reinforced in every aspect of other people's lives, then it is a rather insecure faith, don't you think?

It's the End of the World As We Know It

Note to self:

Venient annis secula seris,
Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum Laxet,
et ingens pateat tellus,
Tethysque novos detegat orbes;
Nec sit terris ultima Thule.

       Seneca

(There shall come a time, in the last days,
when the ocean shall loosen the bonds,
and the whole globe shall lie open,
and a new Tethys will find new worlds,
and Thule will no longer be world's end.)

All I Need Is Everything

And here's another quote I like - this is from An interview with Nell Newman, creator of Newman's Own Organics:

I was a vegetarian for three years as a kid. Now I am a "flexitarian." My friends say it's a PC name for hypocrite. I eat a little bit of everything. Ninety percent of what I eat is organic, and any meat I buy is organic, but when I go out to dinner, I don't always investigate the ingredients. I don't say no when I go to a friend's for dinner and they've prepared a non-organic meal.

A flexitarian. I like that a lot.

If Dirt Were Dollars

Cliff Brooks goes to see "This Filthy World – Dirtier and Filthier" by and with John Waters, who says:

“I define success as being able to buy whatever books you want without looking at the price, and not having to be surrounded by assholes.”

World Where You Live

Doc Searls Weblog · When social media are neither:

the online world has both social media and social habitats. They are different, even when they overlap. Twitter is a social medium. Facebook is a social habitat. Twitter is a new breed of Web site/service that grew out of blogging. Facebook is a walled garden: a place you have to go to be social in the ways it facilitates and permits. In this respect Facebook is AOL 2.0. By calling both “social media” we blur distinctions that are necessary for making sense of highly varied progress (or movement in less positive directions) in the online world. We need a Linnean taxonomy here. And we don’t have one. Yet. For those so inclined, that’s an assignment.

In The Clearing Stands A Boxer

dooce knows a boxer dog who will

give you giant, wet boxer kisses which resemble less a kiss than a car wash.

Motherland, Cradle Me

PAGE: I see. Now what do you say to people who maintain that publicizing these allegations of yours is - well, not in the best interests of this country?

QUARREY: You don't serve your country by sweeping unpleasant facts under the carpet. We're not exactly the most popular nation in the world right now, and my view that we ought to put a stop right away to anything that's apt to make us even less well-liked.

Right on the money, isn't it, the exchange between reporter Page and scientist Quarrey? That's what I thought when I read it last night, so much so that I marked the page (26, for those of you who are counting).

It's from John Brunner's science-fiction novel "The Sheep Look Up". It was first published in 1972, and I am glad to see it in print again. It's just as timely as it was when I first read it.

You're One Of God's Better People

"If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people."

    Robert Louis Stevenson

Found on the O'Reilly Radar, in Surprises on the Bookshelves of CEOs.