"... But named, petted,
consenting to walk on a leash,
this ferret out for a stroll
in the public park of a small town
somewhere in America,
came to my hands as if smiling ...
I've never felt fur cloud-softer. I envied
The boy it lived with ...
It seemed neither owned nor tamed
But a creature willing to try out
the Peaceable Kingdom: to just
begin it without waiting."
Whitman: (p 229):
From his poem, "To a President":
"All you are doing and saying is to America dangled mirages,
You have not learn'd of Nature -- of the politics of Nature you have not
Learn'd the great amplitude, rectitude, impartiality,
You have not seen that only such as they are these States,
And that what is less than they must sooner or later lift off from these States."
Terry Hauptman: (p 43):
"The Serpent Mounds (built by the Adena Tribe 100 BC and 700 AD) consist of an effigy mound and three burial mounds. The serpentine effigy nearly a quarter mile long represents a gigantic serpent in the act of uncoiling..."
John O' Donohue: (p 65):
"The loving eye can even coax pain, hurt and violence toward transfiguration and renewal. The loving eye is bright because it is autonomous and free. It can look lovingly upon anything. The loving vision does not become entangled in the agenda of power, seduction, opposition, or complicity ..."
Thoreau (p 283):
"From the hearth the field is a great distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves ..."
Rumi (p 75):
"You own two shops,
And you run back and forth.
Try to close the one that's a fearful trap,
getting always smaller. Checkmate,
this way. Checkmate that.
Keep open the shop
where you're not selling fishhooks anymore.
You are the free-swimming fish."
Final note to the reader: I realize this may be useful and interesting and even healing to some and not at all to others. As I explain to my brother above, I do not regard these lines as random but to have oracular value and relevance to the questions I asked in the aftermath of the election and Trump's rise to power. To appreciate how this may be explained in terms of the principle of synchronicity, I refer the reader to Richard Wilhelm's translation of The I Ching, specifically Jung's Foreword and to Jung's Collected Works, Vol. 8.
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