Knowledge

My philosopher friend is explaining again
that the bottle of well-chilled beer in my hand

might not be a bottle of beer,
that the trickle of bottle-sweat cooling in my palm

might not be wet, might not be cool,
that in fact it’s impossible ever to know

if I’m holding a bottle at all.
I try to follow his logic, flipping the steaks

that are almost certainly hissing
over the bed of coals – coals I’d swear

were black at first, then gray, then red –
coals we could spread out and walk on

and why not, I ask, since we’ll never be sure
if our feet burn, if our soles

blister and peel, if our faithlessness
is any better or worse a tool

than the firewalker’s can-do extreme.
Exactly, he smiles. Behind the fence

the moon rises, or seems to.
Have another. Whatever else is true,

the coals feel hotter than ever
as the darkness begins to do

what darkness does. Another what? I ask.

—Philip Memmer

On Children

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

 - Kahlil Gibran, On Children (selection)

Freedom to Morph

I have returned from places
       where I beheld myself
and realised that it is mainly us
       that matters!

We are all a society, we all
       create the system and we
watch one another. We are all
       involved in the fear that keeps us at a
       standstill.

For all of us I entered the places
       that others fear to enter and perceived
the vanity, the absurdity of obedience.
       How frail and how easily abused
       is that which should serve us.

We are not numbers,
       we are not biometric data,
so let us not be mere pawns
       in the hands of the big players
on the game board of these times.

If we do not wish
       to fear our own face,
we must save it!

-- Zthoven, a Czech art collective,
describing it's recent undertaking, Citizen K
(arranged quote)

Where

The effort to know a place deeply is, 
ultimately, an expression 
of the human desire to belong, to fit 
somewhere.

- Barry Lopez, The Invitation
(arranged quote)