a primitive world

Photographer Unknown

I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.

Emily Dickinson

Surviving this primitive world.

People, through finding something beautiful, find something else unbeautiful.

-Lao Tzu

You make a man out of meat and machines and ocean sounds, you give him a name and the skin of a reason, and then you send him out into the world of money and deceit. The world of distress. Standing next to him, other men look beautiful, as if their souls are gossamer and delight, as if their hearts are pocked with starlight. That's an illusion. the souls and hearts of other men are no different, not better, but equal. 

You then make a dream from old sheets of plywood and a forgotten scheme. Once painted, it doesn't look half bad, but of course, it is. You nail this plywood to the wall of your father's house, to cover the hole he punched one night in 1970, drunk and enraged. Now the dream is doubly beautiful, and the hole, like your oldest wound, is hidden. That's an illusion also. Nothing is really hidden very well. 

Meat and machines. Oceans sounds and a name. Plywood and alcoholism. Things that stay hidden. Illusions. Your world is primitive, friend, and only you can bring it up to date. If you dare to. 

James Lee Jobe

Hammer your thoughts into unity.

William Butler Yeats

Ain't No Grave - Crooked Still

These houses of flesh and bone.

The breath of life moves through a deathless valley. 

–Lao Tzu

We live in these houses of flesh and bone 

Walled in by the soul of our own existence 

Roofed by that love which we can create 

With our own hearts, our own experience 

In time, we leave these houses and move 

Into the atoms of some other far moment 

A moment beyond our measure and sight 

As if we only continue on in the passing 

Of one second into the next, in between 

The breaths of our different thoughts 

Here, we are men, we are women 

There, we are the beams of light sent 

From one heaven to another heaven 

And there millions of these heavens 

And the beams of light illuminate the road 

That our souls walk through space 

James Lee Jobe 

How many deaths of other people’s children by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) at peace? To that question I answer: None. Please, no children. Don’t kill any children for my benefit.

Wendell Berry

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James