You do not have to be good: Poem

  Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You have only to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

a blue true dream of sky: Poem

my thought for the day:

'i thank you God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes'

excerpt from poem by ee cummings

Perspective: the ant, the bee and the kestrel

 

One of the reasons I love watching foreign films and travelling, is to see how others live and view the world - often so differently from myself. It stretches, widens and broadens my perspective.

 Sometimes, when I'm really stressed or tired or feeling overwhelmed, I like to watch ants scurry along invisible paths on the pavement, or bees in their incessant search for nectar, or kestrels hover, poised, in the sky above me as I drive to work. It reminds me that around me, all the time and everywhere, there are millions of non-human dramas unfolding. These dramas may seem insignificant to us, but to the ant, the bee and the kestrel they are a matter of life and death. Their life stories are as vital and as important and all-encompassing as ours are, depending on whose perspective you take.

 

To be Nobody but Yourself

 'To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest human battle ever and to never stop fighting.'  ee cummings

 

Lately I've been thinking a lot about peer pressure. 
 
It's not just something that teenagers encounter.  And it doesn't stop when we grow older, although it often seems to lessen, thankfully. My stories are often about people who are a bit different, who don't necessarily 'fit in' with everyone else. (Although being 'different' can sometimes become a label in itself, a way of feeling special and justified about being unlike everyone else. There is a balance in there somewhere.)
It can take quite a while to find out who you are, to live within the boundaries of your personality, and at the same time to not be defined by it; to realise that who you are is so much greater and so much deeper than this. Young children tend to live naturally from this place of being 'truly themselves' - expressing a distinct personality yet living so purely in the present that they haven't yet made an 'identity' out of it; they haven't limited themselves by it.