Author: itoccurstocp

Photo taken of the tower at Union Station in Portland, Oregon on a morning run. Thought provided by two recently observed random acts of kindness.

Photo taken last week on a run. You are looking at the Colorado River and downtown Austin. The curved building (occupied by Google) adds a lot to the ever-changing skyline.

Carver’s entire poem can be found at

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/154788/happiness-5faad60c4b697

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Lost – David Wagoner

“…You are surely lost.

Stand still.

The forest knows where you are.

You must let it find you.”

Whole poem here: https://onbeing.org/poetry/lost/

Impermanence.

That word jumped out at me today, perhaps because I read it in this sentence in haiku mind by Patricia Donegan:

“If we could expand our vision and really understand the truth of impermanence we would be enlightened on the spot.”

From my on-line dictionary:

“Impermanence” – the state or fact of lasting for only a limited period of time 

I don’t know about being “enlightened on the spot,” but I think if I truly understood “the truth of impermannennce” I’d for damn sure be a bit wiser.

I know I have used this poem before, but it is a favorite, and every onoce and a while I take a photo that draws me back to it — like this one taken a few weeks back in Galveston.

From Howard Thurman, Deep Is the Hunger, this prayer, O God, I Need Thee:

I Need Thy Sense of Time

Always I have an underlying anxiety about things.

Sometimes I am in a hurry to achieve my ends and am completely without patience. 

It is hard for me to realize that some growth is slow, that all processes are not swift. 

I cannot always discriminate between what takes time to develop and what can be rushed, because my sense of time is dulled.

I measure things in terms of happenings. O to understand the meaning of perspective that I may do all things with a profound sense of leisure – of time.

Photo taken a few weeks back in Galveston. In this case, the “apple” is the Astros World Series Championship. Your apple today?

Thank you — it did!

This line from September, the First Day of School by Howard Nemerov:

“I know my hope, but do not know its form.”

True, no? I have in my mind what hope, or distress, or success, or failure… would feel or look like. I have formed some mental concept of what form they might take in a given circumstance, what might be “good” and what might be “bad.”. Yet what I have in my mind is nothing more than that, a concept, a thought, my own mental construct. I create those despite my experiennce that life constantly surprises me in its delivery. Sometimes “failure” has arrived looking like “success,” or as often, “success” arrives looking like “failure.”

“I know my hope, but do not know its form.”

Photo of a recent Austin early morning sky. The dappled pinkish hue in the sky doesn’t show up as well in the photo as in person, but then that may be part of DeMello’s point. Text from Anthony DeMello One Minute Wisdom.