The fundamental values of a true community are elsewhere: in love, poetry, disinterested thought, the free use of the imagination, the pursuit of non-utilitarian activities, the production of non-profitmaking goods, the employment of non-consumable wealth - here are the sustaining values of a living culture.— Lewis Mumford
Once you know
You can’t actually make it right
You sit in that
At first you think
Yep
This’ll kill me
But
It doesn’t
How bizarre
Wholly unexpected
Stewing in it
This ridiculous wrongness
Waiting
Then
Suddenly you’re watching yourself
From outside
And….wow
You’re ok
Clearheaded
You can see
Really see
This action I choose
It’s the best available
I can’t make it right
Not this time
And
That’s alright
I don’t hate me for that
This is a taste of freedom
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
We can numb it with
ice. It might take time.
But o’clock we’ve got.
And at absolute zero,
frozen stares and
charges flow in pairs,
with even the halting
halted on stairs, and
hate might as well
be a popsicle stand
and it’s loving
standing still,
by the way.
The efficacy of religion lies precisely in what is not rational, philosophic or eternal; its efficacy lies in the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary.
Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh — that is to say, over fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of sickness, of isolation, and of death. There is no serious piety without heroism. Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage.