A poem
And so we dance
through our portion of days…
keeping particular rhythms
inside the ups and downs.
Swooping, gliding, gyrating,
p a u s i n g.
Giving and taking,
fighting and flowing,
reaching and pulling.
It is too much.
It is not enough.
It is all we can do,
swirling across our opus.
Kurt Vonnegut on hate
Today I was reading the latest newsletter from Nikita Gill on shaking loose from personal cell phones. One of her (very good) points was that click bait is designed to generate anger, which in turn will keep us online to read more. That made me think of a post from the inimitable Maria Popova about Kurt Vonnegut. She reminded me what a remarkable thinker he was and how much I wish far more of our online content was filled with his words. Speaking of anger, here’s a portion of what he said to a graduate class in 1978.
“ As a member of a zippier generation, with sparkle in its eyes and a snap in its stride, let me tell you what kept us as high as kites a lot of the time: hatred. All my life I’ve had people to hate — from Hitler to Nixon, not that those two are at all comparable in their villainy. It is a tragedy, perhaps, that human beings can get so much energy and enthusiasm from hate. If you want to feel ten feet tall and as though you could run a hundred miles without stopping, hate beats pure cocaine any day. Hitler resurrected a beaten, bankrupt, half-starved nation with hatred and nothing more. Imagine that.”
I highly recommend Popova’s newsletter, The Marginalian, at http://www.themarginalian.org. And here is a link to just one of her posts about Vonnegut, which is worthy to be read in its entirety: Kurt Vonnegut on Reading, Boredom, Belonging, and Our Human Responsibility – The Marginalian.
Oh, and another thing Gill said, crediting her grandmother: put down your phones, go outside for a long walk and “find peace in a less noisy life and ‘taking breaks from the opinions of others.’” Breathe in the day, breathe out the anxiety.
Her face, the gaze so like my father’s that I feel a pang.
Her sturdy spirit pushes against
her unreliable body and sputtering memory.
We smile around the room,
genetics pull us close as we count the years
and treasure the minutes.
How is Auntie Pam, we ask?
How is your father, they ask?
Auntie, uncle, cousins, nieces,
sharing jokes and cups of tea
and stories of good days and
surgeries and babies and weather
and all the bits and pieces of life
that knit our tributaries into one river.
Genetics pull us close as we count the years
and treasure the minutes.
He’s a darling little pork chop, we say of
the newest baby, all smiles and cowlicks.
He’s able to travel again, we say of
our aged father, rallying his body for the trip
to see and hold that baby, his great-great grandson.
We talk about blue eyes and green,
and the names of generations gone,
and how mother and daughter were
buried together because they were never apart in life
and it seemed right.
And yes, we will go and visit the place
where they lay in their forever embrace
while we are in England gathering up
and tending to our roots.
Literary wanderings 