much emotional
content occurs before we
are nineteen, twenty

Probably everyone feels this on their first true flight from whatever nest, but it is no less real for being so universally shared!

We all have mothers and fathers, and what sweet anguish, sometimes terror, there is in those names.

If you give it much thought, the skeleton of life is stupendously ordinary.

So much of the emotional content of our lives seems to occur before we are nineteen or twenty, doesn’t it?

After that, especially by our age, we seem like stone walls, mortared together by scar tissue.

The whole point is not to be.

From all my reading done in construction camps throughout the world, the main point or challenge is to stay as conscious as possible, absurd as that seems.

Sundog: a novel : the story of an American foreman, Robert Corvus Strang, as told to Jim Harrison by Jim Harrison (Washington Square Press: New York, 1989).

I guess I mean this
if lived well … then just as true …
is the peace you feel

Adapted from the book, I See You’ve Called in Dead – A Novel by John Kenney (Zibby Publishing: New York, 2025), where Mr. Kenney writes: (Tim, the landlord and friend of Bud, the hero of the novel, is speaking)

I don’t really know what I mean either.

I guess I mean this.

That at the end — and I’ve had the privilege to be in the room with a few people now, my parents, two friends—I think, and it’s just a guess, but I think we let go of everything and the true nature of experience falls over us.

This … miracle that is existence.

Which we layer with so much.

With anxiety and fear and greed and smallness and what’s next and hurry up and I’ve got a meeting and all the … stuff … that gets in the way.

I’m not saying we should all go live like a monk.

I’m saying that if you haven’t lived the life you want, if you haven’t loved life, then at the end, I think a deep and very sad regret comes over you.

But if you have, if you’ve lived well … friends and family and … if you’ve lived … then just as true is the peace you feel. I’ve seen it.

Does this make any sense or do I sound mad?

With anxiety and fear and greed and smallness and what’s next and hurry up and I’ve got a meeting and all the … stuff … that gets in the way.

Does this make any sense or do I sound mad?

Mad, not meaning angry but crazy.

I think the passage makes, if anything, too much sense.

Maybe that’s the craziest part of the passage.

The Moth and the Star

A young and impressionable moth once set his heart on a certain star. He told his mother about this and she counseled him to set his heart on a bridge lamp instead. “Stars aren’t the thing to hang around,” she said; “lamps are the thing to hang around.” “You get somewhere that way,” said the moth’s father. “You don’t get anywhere chasing stars.” But the moth would not heed the words of either parent. Every evening at dusk when the star came out he would start flying toward it and every morning at dawn he would crawl back home worn out with his vain endeavor. One day his father said to him, “You haven’t burned a wing in months, boy, and it looks to me as if you were never going to. All your brothers have been badly burned flying around street lamps and all your sisters have been terribly singed flying around house lamps. Come on, now, get out of here and get yourself scorched! A big strapping moth like you without a mark on him!”

The moth left his father’s house, but he would not fly around street lamps and he would not fly around house lamps. He went right on trying to reach the star, which was four and one-third light years, or twenty-five trillion miles, away. The moth thought it was just caught up in the top branches of an elm. He never did reach the star, but he went right on trying, night after night, and when he was a very, very old moth he began to think that he really had reached the star and he went around saying so. This gave him a deep and lasting pleasure, and he lived to a great old age. His parents and his brothers and his sisters had all been burned to death when they were quite young.

Moral: Who flies afar from the sphere of our sorrow is here today and here tomorrow.

to sleep the sleep of
the apples, get far away
from the busyness

I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

I don’t want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,
how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.
I’d rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for
nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn
with its snakelike nose.

I want to sleep for half a second,
a second, a minute, a century,
but I want everyone to know that I am still alive,
that I have a golden manger inside my lips,
that I am the little friend of the west wind,
that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.

When it’s dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me
because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,
and pour a little hard water over my shoes
so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.

Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,
because I want to live with that shadowy child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

Gacela of the Dark Death by Federico García Lorca, translated and edited by Robert Bly, and published by Beacon Press in Selected Poems: Lorca and Jiménez. © 1973 by Robert Bly.

Kind of sums up 2025 in many ways.