A Best Motivation for You: Being With The Way Things Are By Clearing Judgments

[postlink]https://newbestmotivator.blogspot.com/2009/07/best-motivation-for-you-being-with-way_18.html[/postlink]

The rain in Florida may be bad for us and good for the citrus crop. A canceled flight may wreck our schedule and bring us surface to face with our future spouse in the airport lounge. A forest fire may seem to destroy an ecosystem in the short term, yet renew it with vigor for the long term. When a splendid osprey eats a beautiful fish, it is neither good nor bad. Or, it's good for the osprey and bad for the fish. Nature makes no judgment. Human do. And while our willingness to distinguish good and evil may be one of our most enhancing attributes, it is important to realize that "good" and "bad" are categories we impose on the world --they are not of the world itself.

" A man goes to see his rabbi. "Rabbi", he asks, "you told us a story --something to do with praise?" The rabbi responds, "Yes, it is thus: when you get some good news, you thank the Lord, and when you get some bad news, you praise the Lord." "Of course," replies the man. " I should have remembered. But Rabbi, how do you actually know which is the good news and which is the bad news?" The rabbi smiles. "You are wise, my son. So just to be on the safe side, always thank the Lord."

A Best Motivation for You: Being With The Way Things Are By Clearing Judgments

On Rising from the Dead by Carolyn Kizer

[postlink]https://newbestmotivator.blogspot.com/2009/06/on-rising-from-dead-by-carolyn-kizer.html[/postlink]

Saturday noon: the morning of the mind
Moves through a mist to breakfast: damp from sleep,
Rustic and rude, the partial self comes down
To face a frozen summer, self-imposed;
Then, as the numb shades lift, becomes aware
Of its other half, buried overhead,
A corpse in twisted sheets, a foggy portrait
Smudged in the bathroom mirror-elegies
Sung on the nerves of a pillow-muffled phone
Nobody's home at home, the house announces.
And the head nods, nobody's home in here.
The bird of dawning silent all day long,
Nobody's home to nobody abroad:
As cars curve past the house, taking themselves
For airings, while the drivers doze within;
Anonymous dogs chivvy the ghosts of cats
Safely locked in the basement. Apples nod
Their hard green heads, lost in a blur of leaves.

Last night, in the hot house, the self sang
Its oneness, in reflection of a love.
Now the cold fragments rise, remembering;
As feudal lieges move for a missing King
Shattered on plains of sleep, they summon armies:
The midget fingers, elbows, eyes and toes,
To patch again the china egg. And horses,
Masculine cavalry og the will, prance, pull
The egg, in cobweb harness, up the hill.

So the self trots upstairs, and reunites
With its lost half, by towelling off the mirror.
Reluctantly, the self confronts the self
Ripped, untimely, from its naked bed,
The winding sheets tossed down the laundry chute.
The room's aroma: whiskey and ripe fruit
Stale with fulfillment, while picked flowers curl
Their lips, like suicides in backish water,
Soiled Ophelias, whom no breath can fulfill.

Still, air the rooms! though fruit and flowers cry,
"leave light, leave air to buds! Beyond bloom,
Who cares?" Get thee to compost heap.
Renew, the self preys to decay. Renew!
And buckles on its shell to meet the day,
Puts off the fantasy these rooms recall,
Of apple-chasing godnesses, a King
Raining his arrows in the laden trees
That, weaponless, drop their pears in sticky grass;

Goes out-of-doors, to its owan daylight domain
Where, pomegranate red, a mole on the lawn
Shriecks to the person from its several parts:
A Dionysus, dismembered by the cats
In a community of sharing: "Here! You keep
The head. I lov a bloody leg!"
They must have sung in harmony, dragging, limbs
About the yard; then left the god unburied,
The raw material of a ritual.

Last night this purring priesthood was caressed
Before the cellar lock-up: smelling gamey,
The smoke from incense-fires in their fun;
Dark-jawed from feasting, they had toyed with Kings'
Tossed organs, skinless as the summer moon!
So self and mole shared midnight, and the twain
Lay sundered on their fields. What rose again
To mend its wounds by fading Saturday?
A solar King, a subterranean mole?

Or both? Did severed parts personify
The Prince of Darkness and the Prince of Light?
Kicking, meanwhile, this body from the lawn,
Interring bits below the apple tree
Where the foot turns loose earth around the roots
And tamps it down. But nostrils of the cats
May raise the dad. So be it. What's a grave
But plunder, to a gardener? Or priest
Rooting up bones of martyrs for display.

The other body takes itself to bed,
Buries itself in sheets as thin as soil,
Dreams of the elevation of the Host:
Mole in a silver chalice; kneels to sup
The blood of the dying, resurrected soul.
But there leaping in the chancel aisle;
Stale altar flowers toss their heads, and burst
In an orgy of bloom: Communion Sunday,
With Dionysus, singing from the Cross!

On Rising from the Dead by Carolyn Kizer