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
Here are the opening lines of a poem entitled: Wapiniwiktha; The Prophet's Exile-- published in Woodland Poems. There is a force connects one to the end Of all things, that before the end We may learn of it, and to us define Of beauty, love, philosophy; To make of intelligence more than what It is—divine—and by that broad Effort leave a trace upon the present Of which all must experience: The loss thereof; a loss that we may count As meaningless until it fools The heart of a greater man; the repute Wherewith, from his maternal tribe Outcast, the prophet Wapiniwiktha Was lately stung. Douglas Thornton