You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth. ~ Anon.

Slow Lane

“Reading books is an antidote to urgency and chaos because it cannot be rushed. Every book has its own rhythm and a physical intimacy that E-mail and similar instant information can never achieve. Media glut often confuses information with understanding. Just when you seem to be most pressed, books miraculously expand time for reflection, cogitation, and mental rest.”

– Richard E. Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes.

The Road Less Taken

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware." Martin Buber

This Is How I Run

"Nature does not hurry,
Yet everything
Is accomplished."
-Lao Tzu

Stay Hungry

Ben Okri's "Mental Fight"

Is humanity exhausted?
Individuals are, nations are,
Some civilisations are becoming so;
But humanity isn't.

The hungry nations are hungry still.
The starving people dream of food.
The unfree fight for freedom.
The oppressed plan for liberation.
The small scheme for might.
The invisible prepare for higher visibility.

They are only exhausted
Who think they are.
They are only exhausted who no longer
Have a reason to strive
And dream and hope.

They are only exhausted who think
That they have arrived
At their final destination,
The end of their road,
With all of their dreams achieved,
And with no new dreams to hold.

The exhausted are those who have
Come to the end of their powers
Of imagination, who have limited
Their possibilities, who have thought
Themselves into dead ends
That they call the highest
Points of civilisations.

Those who are exhausted have lost
The greater picture,
The greater perspective.

Goals

When I Grow Up

by Sekou (tha Misfit)

Ask me now mommy.
Am I too late?
Ask me now what I want to do for a living.
Am I too late? Cause I think I finally figured it out

I don't want to do for a living
I want to be for a living

I want to be life.
I want to make things grow, and move, and breath, and reproduce, and respond.
I just want to make things respond and react and rejoice and relax and relate and release and receive
as soon as I recite.
When I grow up,
I don't want to be like those other kids mommy who want to be doctors and ballers and astronaughts.
I want to be passion, and heat and energy.

When I grow up,
I don't want to be a fireman mommy, let me be the fire
The explosion behind the soul's big bang theory that leaves in its place… desire
That burning within that gives life to the word "aspire"
Let me warm the cold souls of the despairing and heartless
Let me light the paths of those wandering in darkness
And provide children with their first definition of "hot"
And when the artists of the world have become so infatuated with ice that the whole world freezes over,
Let me be the poet that melts the ice-caps, drowns the planet, and starts this world over -
2 poets at a time like Noah…
When I grow up

I don't want to be an astronaut mommy, I want to be the space that he explores -

Not the doctor mommy, let me be the cure.
The prescription for a better life…
the way through which the sick and the shut-in can find hope, health, happiness, and healing.
I want to be the pill of which they take two, and the call that is placed that next morning.
I want to be the white blood cell that strengthens the immune system,
the clot that stops the bleeding,
the antidote that counters the poison;
I want to speak antibiotic poetry that defeats your life's viruses,
but only if you take my words in 3 times a day until the entire bottle is gone;
I want to be the perspective of the world through the eyes of an autistic child who is diagnosed with a sickness when in fact she merely sees the world with a clarity that the rest of us could only dream of having…
When I grow up

I don't want to be a preacher mommy, I want to be the word

Not the artist mommy, I want to be the art
Not the painter, let me be the canvas
Not the choreographer, let me be the dances
Not the poet, let me be the stanzas

When I grow up

I don't want to be a singer mommy, I want to be the sound!
The song you sing the way you sing it when you think aint nobody else around

When I grow up,
I don't want to be a lawyer mommy I want to be justice.
Not the philosopher, but the philosophy that the brilliant minds try to follow,
Or the brilliance in those minds,
Or even the elusive concepts that they can't quite figure out like
hope, purpose, faith… and time.

I wanna be time mommy!

So that the world will go to sleep every night feeling like they never got enough of me.
And will panic when they feel me slipping away.
Time! So that I will never feel this depression I feel now for being abandoned by it
Time! So that I will never again be before myself, never be out of myself,
Never be too late, never be too early,
So that for once in this life of unfulfilled dreams that have left my cheeks streaked from salt water erosion and my mouth pertpetually coated with the bitter aftertaste of disappointment,
for once I can be right on me!

When I grow up,

I want to be the antonym of void,
the antithesis of without,
the contradiction of silence,
the inverse of absence,
the reverse of regression,
the antilogy to emptiness,
the illumination of shadows,
the opposite of darkness…
I wanna be the opposite of darkness when I grow up mommy!

So that when the greatest poet in existence
recites the first line
of the greatest poem ever written

"let there be light"

…then I can begin.

Things As Essential As Sex

You do it to make your soul grow. This would include singing in the shower, dancing to the radio by yourself, drawing a picture of your roommate or writing a poem or whatever. Please practice an art. Have the experience of becoming.... What's important is to have the experience of becoming, which is as necessary as food or sex. It's really quite a sensation — to become.

Kurt Vonnegut

Longing

"There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to; the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body; the adjustment of the human eye to the fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century. The feeling comes, vague and nebulous, when I consider the prolonged adolesence of our species; the rites of birth, marriage and death; all the primitive, barbaric ceremonies streamlined to modern times. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is."

Sylvia Plath

"The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die."

Kierkegaard, 1845