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Antidotes to Fear of Death

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.

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Message sent from my phone

In the meantime, I wish you rest, and ease, and nourishment. And if you aren’t able to reach for those things — not all are, right now — I wish you kindness toward yourself, and the knowledge that you are not alone. Life unfurls ahead of us, more vigorous than our despair or exhaustion. We have it in us to rise to the grave and beautiful callings that have been placed before us, but only if we walk toward them together. And we will.

Krista Tippett

The parameters of acceptable expression are a lot narrower than they used to be. A written thought can be a form of violence. The loudest public voices in a controversy will prevail. Offending them can cost your career. Justice is power. These new rules are not based on liberal values; they are post-liberal.

Just America’s origins in theory, its intolerant dogma, and its coercive tactics remind me of 1930s left-wing ideology. Liberalism as white supremacy recalls the Communist Party’s attack on social democracy as “social fascism.”

George Packer – How America fractured into four parts

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

Mary Oliver, The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac (Part 3)

“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them.”

Rabindranath Tagore

Left-leaning economists were right when they argued in the early 2010s that markets do not look after themselves. But this insight was taken on board by elites to protect the system rather than transform it. Policymaking was reshaped so that the full economic might of the state was mobilised to stabilise the financial wealth of the richest. Over the past 10 years, those with financial assets have seen their wealth increase as stock markets boosted on quantitative easing steroids.

Cédric Durand