Where you stumble there lies your treasure.

–Joseph Campbell

These spiritual window-shoppers

      These spiritual window-shoppers,

      who idly ask, ‘How much is that?’ Oh, I’m just looking.

      They handle a hundred items and put them down,

      shadows with no capital.

     What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.

But these walk into a shop,

and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,

in that shop.

       Where did you go? “Nowhere.”

What did you have to eat? “Nothing much.”

       Even if you don’t know what you want,

buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

       Start a huge, foolish project,

like Noah.

       It makes absolutely no difference

what people think of you.

Rumi

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing it’s best, night and

day, to make you everyone else– means to fight the hardest battle any

human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

e e cummings

Life is no less complex and mysterious than it has always been. That we dwell in enormous cities, and invent and use astonishing machinery, does not simplify it, but continually reveals the dissolution of limit after limit to physical possibility. Our still tentative awareness of the great gulfs of the unconscious, in constant transformation like the marvelous cloudscapes one sees from a jet plane, must surely lead to awe, not to supposed simplicity. Therefore if our poetry is to seek truth—and it must, for that is a condition of its viability, breath to its lungs—then it cannot confine itself to…direct statement, but must allow for all the dazzle, shadow, bafflement, leaps of conjecture, prayer and dream-substance of that quest.

—Denise Levertov, “An Admonition”

The Fool

Setting out on a surprise journey, the fool is blind to the dangers and troubles all around, but the dangers and unplanned assistance and luck will balance out in the end. The journey will find you no matter where you are, sitting on your couch or on the way to work. All choices are actions with consequences, even making no choice at all. So might as well put your back to the wind knowing that the edge of the world is always just beyond the line of the horizon.

How to Be a Fool

Most likely you are standing

or moving on a well beaten path

right now look down

   thousands of footprints

in the mud and dust,

or up at the sky and trees overhead

see without time

a moment in space

 only you can speak