The Wind, One Brilliant Day (Machado)

The Wind, One Brilliant Day

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

"In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I'd like all the odor of your roses."

"I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead."

"Well then, I'll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain."

The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
"What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?"

Antonio Machado

Words are too awful an instrument (Wordsworth)

Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve.

William Wordsworth, Essays Upon Epitaphs III

Benedictio (Abbey)

Benedictio: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you—beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

When all you feel is fear... (Carroll)

She tapped her chest with her fingertips. "We are born with everything in here; everything we need to be happy and complete. But as soon as things start frightening us, we give away pieces of ourselves to make the fear go away. That is the deal: you want it to stop scaring you, so you give it a part of yourself. You give away your pride, your dignity, or your courage.

"When all you feel is fear, you do not need dignity. So you do not mind giving it away—at that moment. But you will later. You willl need all those pieces later. By then they are gone though; you cannot ask them for help."

Jonathan Carroll, CarrollBlog

Into that heaven of freedom (Tagore)

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;...
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;...
Into that heaven of freedom...let my country awake.

Rabindranath Tagore

Cowardice & Obsolescence

A tyrant is a craven who fears the unknown and seeks to defeat it by force exercised as control, but there is far more that is unknown than known—and always will be—so the tyrant is always a failure and civilization develops despite him (sometimes around him), never because of him. The truly enlightened can never suffer a tyrant, because they see all too clearly that his influence is entirely destructive, based as it is upon the repression of autonomy and the imposition of the unsought and the undesired upon the ill-defended.

Progress will continue to derive, as it ever has, from the aggregate enthusiasms not of bankers or corporations but of the curious and the creative, the idealists and the idea-ists. Change is both driven and adopted by individuals, and nations and societies which recognize and defend the inherent rights of individuals and do not interfere with their broadest freedom to do as they please shall reap the greatest benefit. Conversely, those which seek to impose order on disorder through the enforcement of artificial and ill-conceived limits shall see an increasingly limited production as a result, accompanied by a slide toward social sterility and global irrelevance.

A nation shall only be moral so long as it promotes and adheres to moral notions, be influential so long as its ideas are persuasive and satisfying, be a leader so long as it moves forward. When it begins to pervert its power and wealth merely to pursue more of same, it shall soon be lost, whatever the glory of its past.