Six Ideas, Five Don’t Work

Minghui Jiang

One Source of Bad Information

There’s a boy in you about three

years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty

Thousand years. Sometime it’s a girl.

This child had to make up its mind

How to save you from death. He said things like:

``Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.’’

You live with this child, but you don’t know it.

You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy

At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want

To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy

You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.

Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.

~ Robert Bly

The Fat Old Couple Whirling Around

The drum says that the night we die will be a long night.

It says the children have time to play. Tell the grownups

They can pull the curtains around the bed tonight.

The old man wants to know how the war ended.

The young girl wants her breasts to cause the sun to rise.

The thinker wants to keep misunderstanding alive.

It’s all right if the earthly monk is buried near the altar.

It’s all right if the singer fails to turn up for her concert.

It’s good if the fat old couple keeps whirling around.

Let the parents sing over the cradle every night.

Let the pelicans go on living in their stickly nests.

Let the duck go on loving the mud around her feet.

It’s all right if the ant always remembers his way home.

It’s all right if Bach keeps reaching for the same note.

It’s all right if we knock the ladder away from the house.

Even if you are a puritan it would be all right

If you join the lovers in their ruined house tonight.

It’s good if you become a soul and then disappear.

~ RB

We do in fact have an endless source of bad information. We may occasionally have one good idea in the mix but we never know which one it is. The bad ideas are almost always more attractive anyway, so we have the bad habit of wandering down the proverbial primrose path.

Sometimes huge numbers of humanity get some hairbrained idea in their heads and can’t be dissuaded by wiser souls, with predictable results. We may well be living through one of those moments.

We hate to see it happen, because so many people suffer. Not knowing what’s going to happen means we don’t know how close to home disaster will strike, as it almost certainly will.

We’ve been watching how greed and dishonesty have been gaining leverage over decades, until they managed to wrangle an arch criminal into position of top dog, which endangers us all. It’s hard to get used to all the guard rails being leveled at once, inadequate though they were. They gave us a false sense of security.

Bly seems to be saying it’s all grist for the mill, that we’re building our souls through this life, not in spite of but because it’s so full of travail and stumbles.

It may offer a bit of passing amusement that we are so woolly minded, but there is real experience in this passage. We are pierced by Reality, as much as we’d rather not be. We’d rather be left to row our little boat through the calmer eddies of life and be left to drift. Something deeper is calling, though, and that calling is pretty demanding.

Eldar Eshaliev

Over eons we may actually begin to learn the difference between true and false. Eventually we may see God. That’s the direction we were going the whole time, it’s just that we needed longer to get there than we thought. It’s not easy being blind.

Going the distance doesn’t require being too safe to live. We actually have to go through the whole thing as far and as deeply as we can. Living fully and making the full measure of mistakes are the learning process.

“The Convalescent”. Antonio Mancini

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Meditations On Living (6 book series)

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by David Price