Compassion

My mission is to 'Create a world of safety and wholeness with my loving compassion.' This video makes me wonder if I'm doing enough.

Morning Poem

FIND A BETTER JOB

Now

That

All your worry

Has proved such an

Unlucrative

Business,

Why

Not

Find a better

Job.

• The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, The Great Sufi Master, Translations by Daniel Landinsky

Poem

Civilization

by Carl Phillips March 23, 2009

There’s an art

to everything. How

the rain means

April and an ongoing-ness like

that of song until at last

it ends. A centuries-old

set of silver handbells that

once an altar boy swung,

processing . . . You’re the same

wilderness you’ve always

been, slashing through briars,

the bracken

of your invasive

self. So he said,

in a dream. But

the rest of it—all the rest—

was waking: more often

than not, to the next

extravagance. Two blackamoor

statues, each mirroring

the other, each hoisting

forever upward his burden of

hand-painted, carved-by-hand

peacock feathers. Don’t

you know it, don’t you know

I love you, he said. He was

shaking. He said,

I love you. There’s an art

to everything. What I’ve

done with this life,

what I’d meant not to do,

or would have meant, maybe, had I

understood, though I have

no regrets. Not the broken but

still flowering dogwood. Not

the honey locust, either. Not even

the ghost walnut with its

non-branches whose

every shadow is memory,

memory . . . As he said to me

once, That’s all garbage

down the river, now. Turning,

but as the utterly lost—

because addicted—do:

resigned all over again. It

only looked, it—

It must only look

like leaving. There’s an art

to everything. Even

turning away. How

eventually even hunger

can become a space

to live in. How they made

out of shamelessness something

beautiful, for as long as they could.

I found the poem here.