Losing them, fixing them, forgetting to put them in
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Grandmom, a therapist, Yancey
A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. Wallace Stevens
A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.
Wallace Stevens
When you’re really down, there are amazing resources that open up, psychic, emotional, ancestral resources and wisdom. Genuine suffering is never so bad. As heart-rending and bleak as it is, it pulls you to the center of creation, where everyone who has ever lived has suffered, to the great wellspring of wisdom and survival knowledge and grace.
In every spiritual tradition life is not something that you automatically have, it is something that you must choose, and what makes you choose life is the challenge of death — learning to die, not eventually, but here and now.
Seth’s oceanic desire is to remind us that no death comes unbidden, that death is as spontaneous a creation as our own lives, engineered by our beliefs, which, no matter how distorted, cannot destroy in some final deed of discipline the impulse to be.
“Rely on yourself” and “Do not rely on yourself” alone are not conflicting ideas. One must rely on what he is, but what he is is not alone.
“As a white person,” a student asks me, “are you uncomfortable teaching black literature to blacks?”
“Of course,” I answer. “Of course.”
My work is a universe complete with its own set of rules and regulations. My job is simply to follow the rules, which are unknowable, made of shadows, and are always changing.