Doing a lot more nothing

Politicians may declare that ‘we need to do more and we need to do it faster’. The opposite is true. We need to do less, and we need to do it more slowly. Doing a lot more nothing, including sleeping, would reduce resource consumption, lower stress levels and enable social relations more conducive to dignity and grace    –    Ruth Levitas   

The Sunday Morning Laugh

an atonement

Geoffrey Hill, the English poet renowned for ‘difficulty,’ said in a well-known essay that he thinks of a poem as an atonement. Actually he said ‘at-one-ment,’ to describe the coming together in the rightest way of the sound and the matter that makes of any real poem something final, something imbued with grace and sacred energy, something understood and rare as the full engagement in life’s acts is always rare.

Dave Smith
Afield with a Man and a Gun
Northwest Review vol. 49, no. 2, June 2011

Where everything is music

Don’t worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.
We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.
The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world’s harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.
So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.
This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!
They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can’t see.
Stop the words now.
Open the window in the centre of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.

Rumi
Selected Poems
Translation Coleman Barks with John Moyne