Perspective (A man saw a ball of gold in the sky)

A man saw a ball of gold in the sky;
He climbed for it,
And eventually he achieved it -
It was clay.

Now this is the strange part:
When the man went to the earth
And looked again,
Lo, there was the ball of gold.
Now this is the strange part:
It was a ball of gold.
Aye, by the heavens, it was a ball of gold.

-- Stephen Crane

Purpose

Life will break you.

Nobody can protect you from that, and
living alone won’t either, for solitude
will also break you with its yearning.

You have to love.

You have to feel.

It is the reason
you
are here on earth.

You are here to risk your heart.

You are here to be swallowed up.

And when it happens that you are
broken, or
betrayed, or
left, or
hurt, or
death brushes near,

let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you
in heaps, wasting their sweetness.

Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

The poor folks

"Wonder what the poor folks are doing today?"

He let out a sigh
and settled back on his overturned bucket,
as relaxed and satisfied
as if he were reclining in an easy chair
and putting up his feet.

"Who?" I asked, the first time I heard him say this.

"Those poor folks
who have so much
they don't know what to do with it," he said,

gesturing expansively around the small room.
Here was all he required in life, almost within arm's reach:
food, warmth, tobacco, good company.
What need had he of anything more?

-- T. Louise Freeman-Toole, writing about her friend Dave, an old-timer from Eagle, Alaska

What we want

It isn't normal
to know what we
want.

It is a rare
and difficult
psychological achievement.

-- Abraham Maslow