Summer

Summer's a girl who takes you by the hand saying Come...
Birdsong in the dawn,
with each stroke of the paddles
open churned water gurgles,
mist over the pond.

this day, she whispers, not any day but this day, Come...
Bright sun pouring through
fresh new leaves hanging tender,
grass just cut from the mower,
kite spins in the blue.

right now; at the words with your heart leaping wildly, Come...
Scent through the curtains,
roses and honeysuckle,
far away water-chuckle,
night breeze uncertain.

not yet, she says wait...
        ...a butterfly kiss and she's gone.

~ Ian Barth

Zeitgeist

"No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it. Irrespective of our conscious convictions, each one of us, without exception, being a particle of the general mass, is somewhere attached to, colored by, or even undermined by the spirit which goes through the mass. Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness."

~Carl Jung (1942)

The Night-Sea Trilogy - a mythic thriller series

"Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is, because it might be a tragedy. And maybe you don't want it to be." 

~Jordan Peterson 

The Fox

My soul is a fox with a hen in its maw
And the tingle of blood in its tooth and its claw
That slips through the curtain of half-conscious dawns,
Its ears always pricked for the hounds and the horns
Of its past and its future, its life and its death,
With the kill in its mouth and the shriek on its breath,
Into mornings of calm, when there's nothing to hear
And the air is quite still, and the sky is quite clear,
And the prey is at peace, and the fox in its den
That has lived one more day in this strange world of men.

~Jonathan Steffen

(painting - The Fox Hunt by Winslow Homer)

A Quiet Place

Storytelling depends on the suspension of disbelief. The suspension of disbelief is enabled through emotion. Emotion is a response to basic biological truths. Those truths are expressed in universal archetypes. Those archetypes form the basis of traditional values. Traditional values are best expressed through the medium of story.

No Joke

illustration by Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel (1850 – 1913)

Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Joan of Arc walk into a bar...

“The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless — one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is — well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.

"…Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret. And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing. It was impossible that the thought should not cross my mind that she and her faith had perhaps some secret of moral unity and utility that has been lost."

--G. K. Chesterton