Sight vs Concentration

Appearance may capture the eye
but character is what wins the heart.

Comfort Through Historical Misery

A friend and I used share jokes
about 'cupboard love as spirituality'.
It was the vice that Jehovah
abhorred most of all in his people
and yet it became the basis
on which he was worshiped.
Loyalty inspired by land ownership?
You bet! Even if it took 40 years
and many battles and divisions to do it.
Kingship which would lead to ruin?
That too! And if Jehovah did nothing
for his people then still his people
would worship him with their quid pro quos,
little realizing how much he loved them best
when they argued, and wanted, less.

Neither of us could bear to contemplate
all the blessings stolen, bartered and stymied,
throughout the length the Book Of Genesis.
Those lives were too miserable for comfort.

But those stories in endurance
made me realize that if we create
a good will now that can be shared
then we can live more fully by it.
   

A Small Loss For The Universe

Being so uniquely adaptable
in so many circumstances
is the human miracle du jour
that is also Planet Earth's
self defining tragedy.
I hope life on other planets
is less miraculous.

Like Empires,

when civilisations insist on being formed, they take a long time to build.
When they are founded both come to rest over-and unintentionally bury
-'uncivilised' origins. A civilisation has to decline to catch the hindsight
that what it is built on was actually far richer, more durable, intelligent
and creative than it appeared to be when it became the foundation for an unkown future.
Perhaps the trait that most defines humanity is that to build
we have to be blind to what we have, blind to the remains of what we once had,
and have since destroyed by building over it, to make way something else.
All progress is short term, a temporary change in how relatively near
or far and near sighted we are at the time we look at a present,
where our focus is never truly centred and fixed.