From a Poet

  The Eternal World The search to find good and do good, that is where our most complexing ideas lie.  To find money and be rich, that is where most of our desires lay.  The longer we look to these things as goals, the more importance they hold in reality.  To take a thought and keep coming back to it as one who eats his breakfast every morning, or as a song we can't get out of our head, eternalizes it; it creates an image of the world based around that very idea.   The path that was taken by foot is now a highway, the spot where our ancestors sat is now a city; things suddenly take on their own gravity, we are pulled to them not so much because we believe they are right, but because they are engrained with an irresistible urge.  We are living in a world of these ideas with all of their accumulations, with all of their forces and proper universes, and yet even as that world ends we still want to carry on as if it were eternal.   Something then must be pulling all of these ideas and

  The Light Of Poetry The sun reaches a certain angle at the end of the year that is precious to the heart.  Its steadily declining light is the return of a mystic relationship that has traveled the ages of man, to be the end and purifying sentiment the earth has finally been able to shed upon us.  There is no longer the question of what is good or bad but a measure of bliss is retained in all that is undertaken.  If there is sadness, it will soon be the nostalgic glance backward upon our ignorance, and if there is wisdom, it is the reason we look upon the landscape.  And when there is poetry, it becomes sweeter and compromise found even in the hardest passages.  In the end, we find that nothing poetic is contained in the human, it comes through us as light, and the very thought brings eternity. Douglas Thornton

  The Art of Memory When we can traverse the plains of memory, stopping at each fire to warm ourselves before we start again on our journey, there is a world inside a world that keeps going on to infinity.  If we are lucky enough to hear the eternal melody that is at work in these moments, many fine hours may come upon us.   But sometimes the solace and hospitality are too much and we live with our new found companions, taking them along wherever we go, as a shadow upon our eyes.  The memories of Thoreau, or the early frontier narratives of Indian captivity, are something that I have felt eternal and unchangeable in human nature, not for any piece of information they have given me, but because my melancholy has always found peace in their environment.  For some the world is old or the world is new, but the point is that we tend to look at it through memory.  One memorable event confounds all future celebrations; we remember so as not to forget, but we do not remember that we are able t

 Here is an excerpt from The Mushroom-Hunter  recently published in The Uninitiated. The Mushroom-Hunter 'To leave something is to find It again, never In the place where it resides. It always comes back To us, even a foolish, Or a timely friend, Sees the sum of its passing In our eyes....' Douglas Thornton