The Beginning and The End Do your duty and live well--hard to understand yet easy to do. Live with your duty and do well--easy to understand yet hard to do. We are often presented with this conundrum. The search of a whole lifetime comes down to what is right, but what is right changes infinitely over a lifetime. When I finish my day, sometimes there is a noble aspect that looms over what I have done, giving me a confidence to carry on in my endeavors, then at other times everything seems worthless, things happen and I am just a part of some growing confusion. 'The rain, Once the light has restored Its nature to the leaves, Forgets the joy of its burden To leave the rest of us in peace...' (Excerpt from Day-Keepers published in The Uninitiated ) Light and dark, rain and sun, good and bad, the extremes of everything that is imaginable take place here on this earth; their consequences, their moral aspect, take place in us; we are at once a part of the earth and of th
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