You Keep Falling

Photo: Jake Rajs, "Cherry Blossom," Washington DC

Love Recognized
by Robert Penn Warren

There are many things in the world and you
Are one of them. Many things keep happening and
You are one of them, and the happening that
Is you keeps falling like snow
On the landscape of not-you, hiding hideousness, until
The streets and the world of wrath are choked with snow.

How many things have become silent? Traffic
Is throttled. The mayor
Has been, clearly, remiss and the city
Was totally unprepared for such a crisis. Nor
Was I yes, why should this happen to me?
I have always been a law abiding citizen.

But you, like snow, like love, keep falling,
And it is not certain that the world will not be
Covered in a glitter of crystalline whiteness.

Silence.

---

Robert Penn Warren reads his poem "Love Recognized"

I was Made of Nows

We Make the Path by Walking by Paul Gaffney

I Was My Own Route (Yo misma fui mi ruta)

by Julia de Burgos (1914-1953)

I wanted to be like men wanted me to be:
an attempt at life;
a game of hide and seek with my being.
But I was made of nows,
and my feet level on the promissory earth
would not accept walking backwards
and went forward, forward,
mocking the ashes to reach the kiss
of new paths.

At each advancing step on my route forward
my back was ripped by the desperate flapping wings
of the old guard.

But the branch was unpinned forever,
and at each new whiplash my look
separated more and more and more from the distant
familiar horizons;
and my face took the expansion that came from within,
the defined expression that hinted at a feeling
of intimate liberation;
a feeling that surged
from the balance between my life
and the truth of the kiss of the new paths.

Already my course now set in the present,
I felt myself a blossom of all the soils of the earth,
of the soils without history,
of the soils without a future,
of the soil always soil without edges
of all the men and all the epochs.

And I was all in me as was life in me...

I wanted to be like men wanted me to be:
an attempt at life;
a game of hide and seek with my being.
But I was made of nows;
when the heralds announced meat the regal parade of the old guard,
the desire to follow men warped in me,
and the homage was left waiting for me.

Still Developing

keta /KAY-tah/ 
n. an image that inexplicably leaps back into your mind from the distant past.

"It's not just the moments that we remember. Not the grand gestures and catered ceremonies. Not the world we capture poised and smiling in photos. It's the invisible things, the minutes. The cheap raw material of ordinary time. These are the images that will linger in your mind, moving back and forth, still developing."

Keta | The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows from John Koenig on Vimeo.

The Important of Kindness and Hush

Excerpt from Fine Line: Mental Health/Mental Illness, Michael Nye's portraits of the people experiencing mental illness and homelessness in San Antonio. 

My favorite place to be is a place that I'm most safe. It's a corner in my kitchen and I've got it fixed up to look like a tree house. On my left is a window with plants everywhere and everything a person would want—books, music—that's in my safe place. 

I spend three-quarters of my waking life in that safe place. 

How is it possible to love someone that beats you up, that uses you, that degrades you? I don't understand why a parent would grab a child's hair and twist it around and slam that child into a wall. How a father's who's going  through a drought of loneliness takes one of his children and strip that child of dignity and knowledge and give that child pain. Why would a parent deprive him of food, lock them in a cabinet—why would that happen? 

I'd like to wrap my arms around someone--whether my age or older, younger—wrap my arms around someone that is going through this until they finally believe it's not their fault, they're a beautiful person. 

Kindness is more important than anything else in this world. I think that every philosopher has probably tried to tell us that. That's what it comes down to. What else are we here for, but to take care of each other? To nurture the planet. What else are we here for? 

There's a thing when we're children we experience. It usually exists in libraries and it's called the hush. Like this magic world called Hush. There's not many places now to find hush. Somethimes I really do think if every person would experience hush—even if they almost have to force it on themselves for a while—just the bird, just the wind, nothing else, hush—there would be less violence. 

---

See also:

• "Regarding the Pain of Others," To the Best of Our Knowledge, April 20, 2014
• Posts on pausing, silence, kindness, and soothing difficult emotions 

We Protect What We Fall In Love With

"Beauty and seduction are nature's tools for survival, because we protect what we fall in love with. It opens our hears and makes us realize we are part of nature and that we're not separate from it."

~ Louie Schwartzberg

See also:

• Moving Art
• Steindl-Rast, D. (1984). Gratefulness, the heart of prayer: An approach to life in fullness. New York: Paulist Press. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/11172104