6:30 a.m.,
And behind my coffee cup,
Earth sips her new skies.
How The World Works
“WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU MISS a deadline?” asked the high-school student shadowing me in my capacity as newspaper reporter.
“You don’t,” I replied.
“No, I know,” he said. “But what happens if you do?”
I just looked at him. “You don’t,” I repeated. “You just don’t.”
And sometimes, life really is that simple.
Pithyism #144
EVERY TYRANNY IS DESIGNED TO separate us from who we really are — and thus from each other.
Reb Cat’s Yoga
THE STORY GOES THAT YOGA was first disclosed to an Indian prince by a cat who consented to teach the prince the secrets of feline flexibility. Whether or not that’s true, the cat who lives with Ann & I repeatedly teaches the following tranquility-yoga. The position is called “Sleeping Hand Cat,” and it goes like this:
1. “Let C = a comforting hand-shaped anthropomorphism” — i.e., of God, or Jesus, or Buddha, or your mom or dad, or whatever best evokes your own most watchful-and-protective self.* The literality of this visioning is not as important as the feeling.
2. Lay on your left side in the most comfortable manner with a firm but soft pillow under your head. Close your eyes and focus on your breathing until you’re in a relaxed state of awareness.
3. Imagine/visualize C as the pillow beneath your head. Really feel your head cradled and protected, as though nothing can get past your protector to harm you.
4. Continue until sleep overtaketh and give way to pleasant dreams, or until you want to get up. (But why would you want to?)
_____
* Atheist fanboys may find benefit with Aragorn or Eowen. (But not from their movie versions.)
My Contribution to the Tongue Twister Effort
“CHICKEN KITCHEN.”
Pithyism #60
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF a kind word — or a cruel one.
First Graf: Moby-Dick
SO FAR, IT HAS TAKEN me two years to read Herman Melville’s classic of monomania and cetology, mostly because I don’t want to finish. And so I haven’t, yet.
It’s the language. Melville rolls so many word-clad notions around his tongue, and flips them into and between your ears with such easy fluidity, that it doesn’t matter whether or not he’s digressing (which he does, for most of the book). We fancy moderns with our choice of storytellers and interpretations know how the story goes, or at least how it ends, before we read it. That’s an advantage of sorts over the initial 1851 audience, an advantage which lets us concentrate instead on the journey — since, despite its encyclopedic treatment of whales, the men who hunt them, and the global economy resulting therefrom, we might miss the fact that Moby-Dick isn’t really about whaling at all, at all.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.