Easter: most people will write and cite the standard phrases that get trotted out each year ... true sentiments (mostly) that bounce off our numbed skin. Yet I'm conscious of this Easter intersecting with the world like a knife plunged into the morass of personal and global events.
The penultimate line in a traditional Scottish poem goes like this: From ghoulies and ghosties And long-leggedy beasties And things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us! And so on to another poem (hat tip to Melanie Penn): THE SECOND COMING (William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? So lets remember to take the long view.
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Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
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