Desire

Desire just cheats you. It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it – but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

This is what you shall do

“This is what you shall do;
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,this is what you shall do
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families,
read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
and your very flesh shall be a great poem
and have the richest fluency not only in its words
but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

~ WALT WHITMAN Leaves of Grass

Meditation

Visiting the Graveyard –Mary Oliver from her collection entitled, “Red Bird”

When I think of death
it is a bright enough city,
and every year more faces there
are familiargraveyard

but not a single one
notices me,
though I long for it,
and when they talk together,

which they do
very quietly,
it’s in an unknowable language–
I can catch the tone

but understand not a single word–
and when I open my eyes
there’s the mysterious field, the beautiful trees.
There are the stones.

Blessing the Dust –Jan Richardson (Source: Painted Prayer Book from Blessing the Dust)

… So let us be marked
not for sorrow.when you were born
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made,
and the stars that blaze
in our bones,
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear

Meditation

by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands;
How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it
is any more than he..
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,leaves of grass
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and
from offspring taken soon out of their mother’s laps,
And here you are the mother’s laps.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and
children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.

Death Masks

I thought it might be time for another edition of the death mask series, which is little variation on the Cemetery Art Project we’re doing here.