Signs Of Greater Age (45)

1-Seeing cultures and artifacts
that you once prized as distinctive,
particularly technologies that seemed to last,
not just lose all their market cashe,
but then become fit only for dressing the windows
of trendy retro/pseudo charity shops
of the type that last one summer and close.

2-Losing patience with the news,
beyond the headlines. Every story
seems to be a retread of past events
which in the more analytical media
you trust more they are always discovering
that the same thing happened before
-going right back to the earliest times
that there is still evidence for.    

If Respect Were A Currency,

much more than money is at present,
how much would trust be it's gold standard?

What sort of utopia would it be,
with a currency so abstract and basic?
So difficult to quantify, materially,
that it hardly seems like a currency at all?

And yet this is how hunter/gatherer societies
actually work, they are what happens
when skills vital to survival are retained
which means a society maintained
and, finally, ecology naturally sustained
for the many future generations.

No Acting Required

True charity, however small or vast the sum given,
abjures all acting, flummery, and pretense
on the part of both the giver and the recipient. 

Those Were The Days

Because the memory of a poor quality of life remains
long after the surety of financial probity through thrift has gone. 

The Impossible Peace

In the world wars of the past it was well known
that many people ate well when rationing was effective,
not that populations liked being told what to eat.

So in the peace before the next world war,
assuming it is not going to be thermonuclear,
can we collectively devise a diet that seems attractive
in spite of the world of choice and advertising,
which makes peace with the planet for it's resources?

Drink Less, Think More

I don't know which is the cause
and which one is the symptom;
the society wide abuse of alcohol
or the bland highly processed food,
and kitsch decor of modern housing.

Either way reversing into a future
in which a sense of greater distinction
in how we live and share what we have,
arrived at through relative sobriety,
is going to be harder than we think.

Putting The 'less' into 'Blessed'(1)

Less activity means less reward and less interference, less of everything,
 the more to be nearer our true selves, and help others do the same.