no veil of false excuses, or artful cloaking and colouring of our faults, will disguise from us our true state, if only we never neglect to consult this mirror in sincerity and with earnest prayer.
Category Archives: SINCERITY
Hypocrisy is a vicious ogre and it comes back eventually to consume its owner.
A Hausa proverb sent by Rev. Martin Dama, Nigeria
“I believe it was the great ogre philosopher Gary who observed that complexity is, generally speaking, an illusion of conscious desire. All things exist in as simple a form as necessity dictates. When a thing is labeled ‘complex,’ that’s just a roundabout way of saying you’re not observant enough to understand it.”
― A. Lee Martinez, In the Company of Ogres
August 1968
The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.
About a subjugated plain,
Among it’s desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.
– W.H.Auden
Cha mhisd’ a’ ghealach na coin a bhith comhartaich rithe. The moon is none the worse for the dogs’ barking at her.
A Dogs Soul.
Every dog must have a soul
Somewhere deep inside
Where all his hurts and grievances
Are buried with his pride.
Where he decides the good and bad,
The wrong way from the right,
And where his judgement carefully
Is hidden from our sight.
A dog must have a secret place
Where every thought abides,
A sort of close acquaintance that
He trusts in and confides.
And when accused unjustly for
Himself, He cannot speak,
Rebuked, He finds within his soul
The comfort he must seek.
He’ll love, tho’he is unloved,
And he’ll serve tho’badly used,
And one kind word will wipe away
The times when he’s abused.
Altho’ his heart may break in two
His love will still be whole,
Because God gave to every dog
An understanding Soul!
Author Unknown
http://www.wolfweb.com.au/acd/dogsoul.htm
The Land (Sydney, NSW : 1911 – 1954), Friday 11 March 1921,
There should be those among whom we can sit and weep and still be counted as warriors. Native American.
I have spent too long
telling the world the world is the world
and poetry is made of language.
Today on the Bedford platform, I began
the great poem: weeping openly on the public
telephone—the way some were staring
as they swirled past, the way some
weren’t—yes: it was truth
at last.
—Jan Zwicky
one of my favourite poems
LES MURRAY
An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow
The word goes round Repins,
the murmur goes round Lorenzinis,
at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers,
the Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands
and men with bread in their pockets leave the Greek Club:
There’s a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can’t stop him.
The traffic in George Street is banked up for half a mile
and drained of motion. The crowds are edgy with talk
and more crowds come hurrying. Many run in the back streets
which minutes ago were busy main streets, pointing:
There’s a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him.
The man we surround, the man no one approaches
simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps
not like a child, not like the wind, like a man
and does not declaim it, nor beat his breast, nor even
sob very loudly—yet the dignity of his weeping
holds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him
in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,
and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him
stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds
longing for tears as children for a rainbow.
Some will say, in the years to come, a halo
or force stood around him. There is no such thing.
Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him
but they will not have been there. The fiercest manhood,
the toughest reserve, the slickest wit amongst us
trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected
judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream
who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children
and such as look out of Paradise come near him
and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons.
Ridiculous, says a man near me, and stops
his mouth with his hands, as if it uttered vomit—
and I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand
and shake as she receives the gift of weeping;
as many as follow her also receive it
and many weep for sheer acceptance, and more
refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance,
but the weeping man, like the earth, requires nothing,
the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out
of his writhen face and ordinary body
not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow,
hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea—
and when he stops, he simply walks between us
mopping his face with the dignity of one
man who has wept, and now has finished weeping.
Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street.
from
The Weatherboard Cathedral, 1969
http://www.lesmurray.org/pm_aor.htm
Sincerity – if you can fake that, you’ve got it made. George Burns
The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954), Saturday 10 September 1932
Just to hear the magpies warble in the blue-gums on the hill. Frank S. Williamson
Those little nimble musicians of the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art.
Izaak Walton (1593 – 1683)
“Please, sir, I want some more.” Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
“There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called sleep, this is it; and yet we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us; and if we dream at such a time, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost a matter of impossibility to separate the two. Nor is this, the most striking phenomenon, incidental to such a state. It is an undoubted fact, that although our senses of touch and sight be for the time dead, yet our sleeping thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before us, will be influenced, and materially influenced, by the mere silent presence of some external object: which may not have been near us when we closed our eyes: and of whose vicinity we have had no waking consciousness. ”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
I played patiently simple melodies and basic chords waiting for home where I could sink into freedom: playing by ear.
Piano Lessons
CAMERON HINDRUM, TAS
http://www.australianpoetry.org/2012/11/26/piano-lessons/
One man gets nothing but discord out of a piano; another gets harmony. No one claims the piano is at fault. Life is about the same. The discord is there, and the harmony is there. Study to play it correctly, and it will give forth the beauty; play it falsely, and it will give forth the ugliness. Life is not at fault.
You don’t need to know all the answers. No one is smart enough to ask you all the questions.
Having a good discussion is like having riches
~ Kenya
Every scene you will ever act begins in the middle, and it is up to you, the actor, to provide what comes before.
~ Michael Shurtleff
The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.
– Keanu Reeves
If yuh eye nah see, yuh mouth nah must talk.
You must see for yourself before you talk.
“If I can see pain in your eyes then share with me your tears. If I can see joy in your eyes then share with me your smile.”
― Santosh Kalwar
If you put enough sheep together you have a herd- a force to be reckoned with.”
― Maria V. Snyder, Inside Out
Queenslander (Brisbane, Qld. : 1866 – 1939), Saturday 5 May 1923
The dissenter is every human being at those moments in his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
– Archibald MacLeish
‘In Praise of Dissent’, in the NewYork Times,16 Dec.
He realized that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious. ”
― Isabel Allende, Zorro
Wealth is both an enemy and a friend.
Nepali
http://www.finestquotes.com/author_quotes-author-Nepali%20Proverbs-page-0.htm
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. Oscar Wilde
She had lived a great deal among lies, before plumping for a small life of her own, a sincere and restricted life from which all pretense, even in matters sensual, was banished. How many crazy decisions and allegiances to successive aspects fo the truth! Had she not, one day when her costume for a fancy dress had demanded short hair, cut off the great chestnut mane that fell below her waist when she let it down? ‘I could have hired a wig,’ she thought. ‘I might also, at a pinch, have passed the rest of my life with Becker or Espivant. If it comes to that, I could also have gone on stirring puddings in a saucepan at Carneilhan. The things "one might have done" are, in fact, the things one could not do…”
Colette, Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances: Three Short Novels
“An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind.” Siddhārtha Gautama
“Theory has all too often been a zoo in which we cage the wild beasts of violence that inhabit our worlds. We then gaze at these beasts from a safe distance, we contemplate them, we theorize how they would act in their own environments – and we never go to those environments where the beasts roam freely to actually check our theories. To do so would be disastrous. It would point out the absurdity of our analyses and the illusion of safety so carefully crafted.”
Carolyn Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story
Faithfulness and sincerity are the highest things. Confucius.
Victory, union, faith, identity, time,
The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery,
Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.
This, then, is life;
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and
convulsions.
How curious! how real!
Walt Whitman
1819-1892
http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/2144-Walt-Whitman-Starting-From-Paumanok
foto – scoob and bali
THE OLD PROVERBIAL RECOVERY 