STILL CRAZY, AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

I'm hearing Simon and Garfunkel again: "Still crazy, after all these years." Well, yes, I am, and especially so after the "holidays." I haven't been getting better at them, but I've got a new plan for 2009 that I'm implementing with a vengeance.

First and foremost, there is going to be no more waiting for things to "slow down," "clear up,"for time to expand so I can do the things I love but haven't been doing. In 2009 I am taking on time: time and delay and procrastination and waiting and "worry."

Here's a response from my friend Anne Steel who wrote to comment on the Dec. 6 post in which I quoted my friend Norma on the subject of "worry." Here's Anne:

Hello my friend!
I have a response to your blog of December 6 in
which your friend says "We worry, we worry, we worry, and then
we die." It is a poem by 14th C Persian poet Hafiz,
in a book of his poems sent me by my sister-in-law
Donna this holiday. Here it is!


THE SUBJECT TONIGHT IS LOVE

The subject tonight is Love
And for tomorrow night as well,
As a matter of fact
I know of no better topic
For us to discuss
Until we all
Die!

Love,
Anne

****Part of my email conversation with Anne included this poem by Matthew Arnold, a poem I've always loved, one never more appropriate than it is tonight, 31 December, 2008 (though you might want to lop off the final two lines):

DOVER BEACH


The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;--on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the {AE}gean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

**************

THERE'S A REASON I'M GIVING you these two poems together: they say the same thing. Arnold and Hafiz are reminding me of what I learned (I thought so thoroughly at my mother's deathbed) in 1991: there is no more time for anything but love. Look at the news, look at your friends and neighbors aging, suffering, dying, your world torn apart with violence; LOOK IN THE MIRROR. When you're listing priorities in the midst of all that's difficult, there is but one answer. Do as Alachua's Deacon Lawson said, practice this "religion of love" everywhere you go. Don't stop. Stuff every free minute or crevice with love. Don't stop. Don't stop. Don't stop.

[Learn more about Hafiz at www.poetseers.org/poets/14th-century-poets]
[Learn more about Matthew Arnold at www.poemhunter.com/matthew-arnold/]