Running After My Tumbling Hat

A not-quite-doppelganger of the real thing

[johnesimpson]

Winding down an 18-year-old project...

RAMH@18: A Door Whispers All But Closed...

When I first started Running After My Hat (the blog, not the habit — that, I’d been up to for pretty much my whole life), I thought it was aimed at a specific goal: laying the groundwork for a book project. The book in question, a memoir, would come to be called something like How It Was: The Boy’s Seasons. I never did nail down the title, nor of course the book itself — not completely to my satisfaction, although I’d “finished” it, sorta-kinda, over a decade earlier…

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[johnesimpson]

Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver, a Maxim for Nostalgists, et al.: 'As It Was in the Beginning (Only Different)'

As It Was in the Beginning (Only Different)

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (#1, May, 2005):

This then is life. Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions. How Curious! how real! Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun.

(Walt Whitman)

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[Aside for Tumblr followers: this is expected to be my last regularly-scheduled Friday post, as I start the process of winding down my 18-year-old WordPress blog, Running After My Hat. Thank you for keeping up with me -- and I'm looking forward to continuing to visit here!]

[johnesimpson]

Jorge Luis Borges, Linda McCarriston, et al.: 'Take a Good, Soft Look'

Take a Good, Soft Look

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

So let us now take a critical look at the state of awakening, kensho-satori, and reexamine it from the same broad biological perspective. At its core it is change. Change means shifting from old to new. What is enlightenment’s first crucial contribution? What it sheds. What it subtracts. It destructures, deprograms and deconditions in depth. As a result, the brain becomes less top-heavy; its functions are simplified, revitalized. New systems of adaptive behaviors can develop more readily in such a reorganized brain. Accordingly, one can be cautiously optimistic about this unique capacity of the brain to shift into a wide range of alternate states. For herein resides a potential resource, a resource which could serve as the basis both for our long-range biological survival and for our cultural advancement.

(James Austin)

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[johnesimpson]

Pattiann Rogers, Leslie Williams, et al.: 'The World Is Full of Joys to Juggle (But Don't Watch Yourself Juggling Them)'

The World Is Full of Joys to Juggle (But Don't Watch Yourself Juggling Them)

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (last stanza):

The Greatest Grandeur Some say it’s in the reptilian dance of the purple-tongued sand goanna, for there the magnificent translation of tenacity into bone and grace occurs. And some declare it to be an expansive desert—solid rust-orange rock like dusk captured on earth in stone— simply for the perfect contrast it provides to the blue-grey ridge of rain in the distant hills. Some claim the harmonics of shifting electron rings to be most rare and some the complex motion of seven sandpipers bisecting the arcs and pitches of come and retreat over the mounting hayfield. Others, for grandeur, choose the terror of lightning peals on prairies or the tall collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas, because there they feel dwarfed and appropriately helpless; others select the serenity of that ceiling/cellar of stars they see at night on placid lakes, because there they feel assured and universally magnanimous. But it is the dark emptiness contained in every next moment that seems to me the most singularly glorious gift, that void which one is free to fill with processions of men bearing burning cedar knots or with parades of blue horses, belled and ribboned and stepping sideways, with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies of black-robed choristers; to fill simply with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried crockery, tangerine and almond custards, polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing walls; that space large enough to hold all invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000 definitions of god and more, never fully filled, never.

(Pattiann Rogers)

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[johnesimpson]

Life Never Sleeps, and Your Muse Shouldn't Either

Life Never Sleeps, and Your Muse Shouldn't Either

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Thesaurus Given a way would I be this; given this thing would I be this. I never knew how persons could be things, and yet we were in the vast cosmic Thing; we were little things. There were greater animations than ourselves, and to them we were things. This was a thought in the forest of —thesaurus of—my nomenclature. How often had I thought, am I alive or am I dead, never knowing what either Thingness was. These were the woods we were talking about, these were the words we were talking about, where the forest was always in the trees, where what I saw was always what I was; my words, some leaves, all bristling with my life, animate and aimée, all that was all. There was an aura, call it a halo, call it the glow of the moment of grace; there was something oracular and old, there was the show and glow, there was hello, there was yes, no, there was congenial and genial and joy. There was genius, a genie in the bottle, breath in the lungs, there was more than just being as I was: wind in the woods, a forest in my mind, the mind of my life found in the forest, the Thing being named my thing, as it was.

(Sarah Arvio)

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[johnesimpson]

Allen Ginsberg, Natalie Goodman, et al.: 'A Thing to Reach For, and Something to Reach It With: Maybe the Same Thing'

A Thing to Reach For, and Something to Reach It With: Maybe the Same Thing

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Proclamation of the actual mind, manifesting your mind, writing the mind, which goes back to Kerouac but also goes back to Milarepa, goes back to his original instructions: Don’t you trust your own mind? Why do you need a piece of paper? So writing could be seen as “writing your mind,” observing your own mind, or observe what’s vivid coming to mind. For the purpose of relieving your own paranoia, and others’, revealing yourself and communicating to others. It is a blessing for other people if you can communicate and relieve their sense of isolation, confusion, bewilderment, and suffering by offering your own mind as a sample of what’s palpable, visible, and whatever little you’ve learned…

(Allen Ginsberg)

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[quotefeeling]

“Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.”

— Theodore Isaac

[fravery]

[johnesimpson]

Mary Oliver and Margaret Renkl: 'Love Yourself, Then Forget It. Then, Love the World.'

Love Yourself. Then Forget It. Then, Love the World.

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (italicized stanzas):

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass                                              1. Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat     of the sweet grass? Will the owl bite off its own wings? Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or     forget to sing? Will the rivers run upstream? Behold, I say—behold the reliability and the finery and the teachings     of this gritty earth gift.                                              2. Eat bread and understand comfort. Drink water, and understand delight. Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets     are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds who are drinking the sweetness, who are     thrillingly gluttonous. For one thing leads to another. Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot. Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in. And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star both intimate and ultimate, and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful. And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper: oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two beautiful bodies of your lungs.

(Mary Oliver)

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[johnesimpson]

Jorges Luis Borges, Thomas Moore, Jen Cheng: 'See to Your Sacraments Wherever You Find 'Em'

See to Your Sacraments Wherever You Find 'Em

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Another Poem of the Gifts I want to give thanks to the divine Labyrinth of causes and effects For the diversity of beings That form this singular universe, For Reason, that will never give up its dream Of a map of the labyrinth, For Helen’s face and the perseverance of Ulysses, For love, which lets us see others As God sees them, For the solid diamond and the flowing water, For Algebra, a palace of exact crystals, For the mystic coins of Angelus Silesius, For Schopenhauer, Who perhaps deciphered the universe, For the blazing of fire, That no man can look at without an ancient wonder, For mahogany, cedar, and sandalwood, For bread and salt, For the mystery of the rose That spends all its color and can not see it...

(Jorges Luis Borges)

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[johnesimpson]

Mary Oliver, Stuart Kestenbaum, et al.: 'A Dance to the Lilt of the Moment'

A Dance to the Lilt of the Moment

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

You have consented to time and it is winter. The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget. You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence. But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.

(Wendell Berry)

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[johnesimpson]

Len Roberts, Debra Marquart, et al.: 'Everyday Delights (However Tiny or Grand, Light or Dark, Shallow or Deep, and Plentiful or Rare)'

Everyday Delights (However Tiny or Grand, Light or Dark, Shallow or Deep, and Plentiful or Rare)

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The Moment Walking the three tiers in first light, out here so my two-year-old son won’t wake the house, I watch him pull and strip ragweed, chicory, yarrow, so many other weeds and wildflowers I don’t know the names for, him saying Big, and Mine, and Joshua—words, words, words. Then it is the moment, that split-second when he takes my hand, gives it a tug, and I feel his entire body-weight, his whole heart-weight, pulling me toward the gleaming flowers and weeds he loves. That moment which is eternal and is gone in a second, when he yanks me out of myself like some sleeper from his dead-dream sleep into the blues and whites and yellows I must bend down to see clearly, into the faultless flesh of his soft hands, his new brown eyes, the miracle of him, and of the earth itself, where he lives among the glitterings, and takes me.

(Len Roberts)

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[johnesimpson]

Jeanette Winterson, Alvin Schwartz, et al.: 'Made Something New, Have You? Or Maybe You Just… Found It?'

Made Something New, Have You? Or Maybe You Just... Found It?

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

I’d like to be a Gecko, not permanently, but for ten minutes or so. Geckos are charming small lizardy creatures with suction pads for feet. They live vertically. Walls are their terra firma. For them trees grow sideways, hills are sky, pavements are walls. Our heads may be in the clouds but our feet are always on the ground and even if you wear spectacles which make you see the world upside down, you adjust in a day or so, and see everything the right way up. Take the glasses off and you’ll have another few upside-down days until everything reverts back to normal.

(Alan Fletcher)

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[johnesimpson]

Walt Whitman, Mary Roach, a Maxim for Nostalgists, et al.: 'It's Easy to See It Once You See It'

It's Easy to See It Once You See It

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

                         The workshop… The paper I write on or you write on, every word we write, every cross and twirl of the pen, and the curious way we write what we think, yet very faintly… In them realities for you and me — in them poems for you and me… In them themes, hints, provokers.

(Walt Whitman)

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[johnesimpson]

Kazimierz Dabrowski, Maggie Smith, et al.: 'How to Grasp the Point (Hint: There Is No Point)'

How to Grasp the Point (Hint: There Is No Point)

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Be greeted psychoneurotics! For you see sensitivity in the insensitivity of the world, uncertainty among the world’s certainties. For you often feel others as you feel yourselves. For you feel the anxiety of the world, and its bottomless narrowness and self-assurance. For your phobia of washing your hands from the dirt of the world, for your fear of being locked in the world’s limitations. for your fear of the absurdity of existence. For your subtlety in not telling others what you see in them. For your awkwardness in dealing with practical things, and for your practicalness in dealing with unknown things, for your transcendental realism and lack of everyday realism, for your exclusiveness and fear of losing close friends, for your creativity and ecstasy, for your maladjustment to that “which is” and adjustment to that which “ought to be”, for your great but unutilized abilities. For the belated appreciation of the real value of your greatness which never allows the appreciation of the greatness of those who will come after you. For your being treated instead of treating others, for your heavenly power being forever pushed down by brutal force; for that which is prescient, unsaid, infinite in you. For the loneliness and strangeness of your ways. Be greeted.

(Kazimierz Dabrowski)

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[johnesimpson]

Carlos Castaneda, Marie Howe, et al.: 'Trying to Be You Can Be Very Confusing'

Trying to Be You Can Be Very Confusing

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (in slightly different wording):

Groundedness comes in many forms: resolute common sense, daily prayer or meditation, a regular job that keeps us engaged with material realities, physical exercise, or something as simple as family life. One needs a sufficient engagement with the requirements of the so-called real world so that one is less likely to fall prey to flights of fancy or become engulfed by archetypes, repressed complexes, or manias that will make one lose one’s wits. The specter of madness haunts the spiritual search. To point this out should not be dismissed as mere pessimism or negativity...

(Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney)

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[dk-thrive]

“The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking understand themselves.”

— Federico Garcia Lorca, Deep Song and Other Prose. Translated by Christopher Maurer. (New Directions Publishing, 1980) (via Alive on All Channels)

[johnesimpson]

Cheri Huber, Cornelius Eady, et al.: 'Finding Our Way Out of a Corner'

Finding Our Way Out of a Corner

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there.

(Henry Miller)

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