From a Poet

May 15th, 2014


Hope comes at the end of the day and the whole body is lightened.  The day is over and the mind no longer subject to its suffering.  Yet body and mind are never so long inconsistent to one another except when the thought believes itself an extension of action.  For it is then that the end must come, that we seek with great anticipation the habitual comfort that has been hidden in our liberation from the burdens we are constrained to undertake.  Hope comes and with it the insensitive eye that we are one with our nature, but nature does not await the future, it waits upon no ideal moment.  The thought and the action are not a part of striving toward our nature, but merely obscure it by searching--for how often have we not found that the dullest and most distressing moments in hindsight become the happy and most eventful memories of our past?
Douglas Thornton

May 8th, 2014

Worry and apprehension are seated in every task we undertake, becoming a responsibility in themselves, that it is a pleasure to see falsely and have them crumble before us, finally knowing of their misguidance.  Yet it is often that this delusion comforts the appearance of judgment, leaving us open to the possibility that anything we choose will eventually become true.  Sometimes there is not enough powder in the gun and our plans do not follow through simply because of a too great apprehension of missing the mark; sometimes there is an unmistakable and deadly precision, that we are at a loss of how to describe our arriving at such an outcome.  The problem is not that worry and apprehension are inherent in the decision, it is that the decision asks us not to swerve in our judgment, whereupon worry and apprehension become the figments of our imagination.  This is the conditioned; what every fact, right or wrong, enforces us to realize everyday in our daily habits--to feel…

April 30th, 2014

Those things that take the most energy from us are usually those things that are never present.  'The height of the flood matters not if it goes over the man's head,' said William James and such is the experience of daily life that we are content to see our doubts swell to such an uncontrollable level that we will believe ourselves little fish before we think that we are drowning.  It is easy to see the limits of our existence, our thoughts, and our words, not set up by us, but being mirrored outwardly, because the little faith we give to what others think of us is almost all too often more perceptive than what we think of ourselves.  Illusion holds the faculties and opinions we are instilled with to be correct, or at least able to arrange unknowable and uncontrolled matter into something that is digested and turned into energy--but that is where the mind chooses to rest, in false equality, being convinced of untruth so that the world is acceptable for the…

April 29th, 2014

Wisdom is often accepted to stand for little in the times it is most necessary, leaving preference to the wanderings of mind that emit our notions of blame and discontent.  A phrase from Aurelius, or any other sage of the past, has at times whispered a solution to the situation at hand, having only to apply its advice and thereon proceed in tranquility, but in the end I have found myself more willing to sulk in my misconceptions, as a point of taking misfortune in place of something outside of my nature.  Have not the ways and pretensions of mind, for so long embedded in our habits, condemned us already to an easily conceivable fate?  Where we stand with a person or group depends on the attitude we take: to stand apart and go unnoticed is an aggression towards the common and the undertaken, so that we ultimately concern ourselves with those people who put forth the same pretensions.   'Don't be carried away rashly by the appearance of things!'--For there i…