Someone posted this (can’t remember who) and it’s been a really great relief and source of rejuvenation to look at this past week. Hope passing it along will be powerful for someone else.
The Uses of Sorrow, by Mary Oliver
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
“
| — | Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967 |
A Hafiz poem for positive thinking
Who would want to live with some crickets in your room carousing loudly all night?
That is to say, either befriend all your thoughts,
party with them the best you can… or toss the rascals out.
Trickster, a poem by Joy Harjo
Crow, in the new snow
You caw, caw
like crazy.
Laugh.
Because you know I’m a fool,
too, like you
skimming over the thin ice
to the war going on
all over the world.
Thanks to my beautiful friend Lydia for sending me this, Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s Resolutions circa 1942. Makes me want to come up with an equally long list while sitting here watching a squirrel pick apart a nut outside my window.
The most interesting thing I’ve read this week. This summer I saw a book in a natural foods/health store that was about the healing power of urine. I didn’t look through it much, but I was curious about it. I’ve used urine myself for skin burning caused by oils from hot peppers, and experienced almost immediate relief. However, I did not know until reading this article that there are many diseases and afflictions that urine is good for, and that there has been so much published, peer reviewed science to back this up. Read more above.
Here’s saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY to a great friend and personal hero, Cassidy Stock. Cassidy also graduates this week from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hats off to this beautiful lady, seen above at her BFA show that I attended in October 2012. This painting was Cassidy’s submission to the show to reflect her body of work. With a striking sense of style that transports you to the pages of Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan, Cassidy embodies art in her day to day life and is interested in nearly all art forms as a writer, painter, cartoonist, glassblower, tattoo artist, and musician. Whether she is hammering on kebab sticks slotted through the strings of a guitar, drawing a mural in permanent marker on plastic sheeting, or scribbling verse at 4 am, Cassidy is a veritable fount of creativity and I look forward to whatever she may do next, out in the world at last as a College Graduate. Congratulations! I love you!
