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Tag: wisdom

The Tipping Point

Published on May 15, 2025

We reached the tipping point
when male pattern baldness
and erectile dysfunction
became more important
than curing cancer
or infant mortality.
When all the television shows
about poor people
in situation dramedies
were replaced by “reality” programs
about the hard lives
of people born or married
to wealth and power.

We’re obviously not a culture
that values wisdom:
our elderly are packed off
to nursing homes
or left to dodder around
the halls of congress
with their mighty hard-ons
and full heads of hair.
No one’s passing on their knowledge,
hoping their children
or children’s children
will learn how to run the world
better.

We use our money
to build prisons and graveyards,
then refuse to throw
the folks who belong there
into these investments.

We practicing not letting go:
keeping up with the Joneses
dying with the most toys
while the rest of the world
starves to death.

15 MAY 2025

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The Road to Find Out: cyhydedd hir

Published on May 8, 2025

When do you find out
what life is about,
without any doubt
of its meaning?
How does it appear,
when you see it clear
and without your fear
intervening?

How do you just know?
Does a bright lamp glow,
or a fresh breeze blow,
giving you insight?
What do you do then,
in that moment when
you first awaken
into sunlight?

Who will you meet there,
out in that somewhere
beyond today’s cares
and your worry?
How will you know who
sees things like you do,
so clearly what’s true
and not blurry?

08 MAY 2025

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Prajnaparamita

Published on June 25, 2024

With what great faculty would you describe
a something that is nothing in itself –
an emptiness that does not rise or fall,
but is and isn’t, both, at the same time,

and lights, but doesn’t land, adrift in time
(which is not quite a ribbon, nor a wheel),
a thought that thinking has no way to grasp
or shape into a solid universe.

Beyond, beyond, beyond what is beyond;
if you can see it, do not trust your eyes.

25 JUN 2024

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The Tuition of Wisdom

Published on June 17, 2024

True knowledge is free;
it grows like roadside flowers.
Who can afford it?
The trick is letting it go
so it can keep blossoming.

Paying tuition
at such a school is so hard:
you owe attention.
You can’t write a check for that;
your life is not accounting.

17 JUN 2024

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If Seeking: rionnard tri-nard

Published on May 3, 2017

If you would seek wisdom,
the walls of your prison
must be made a prism.
To purify vision,

let light begin creeping
like mice, softly sneaking,
almost still half sleeping –
if wisdom you’re seeking.

03 MAY 2017

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The wise men all say look within

Published on November 14, 2016

The wise men all say look within; and still, we focus outward. Is it because we’re deaf, or stupid? Maybe we’re just cowards.

In so many ways, our memories are like poetry: distillations of images that if given too much solid detail become stodgy, boring and definitely unmusical. Show, don’t tell; as if in telling too much, you’re actually hiding behind an edifice of words and not revealing the soft, white underbelly everyone suspects is there.

And how far back does a really accurate memory go? How useful is it to remember everything in detail? If a manic-depressive were to actually appreciate while at one end of the spectrum the absolute height or depth of the opposite cycle, how even keeled they might become! Like the mystic story of the king who wished to have something to both sober him when he felt too happy, and intoxicate him when he felt too dry, and was eventually given a trinket inscribed “this too shall pass”. Is there REALLY a middle way?

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