what time is for........................

 On the other hand, when you have enough confidence to take your own time, to take your time to be present, to do the work, to engage with what’s in front of you right now, it’s a gift.

-Seth Godin, from this post

Be careful what you wish for................

       We have seen the consequences of the totalitarian alternatives in which the collective is supposed to bear the burdens of life, lay out the proper pathway, and transform the terrible world into the promised utopia.  The communists produced a worldview that was attractive to fair-minded people, as well as those who were envious and cruel.  Perhaps communism may even have been a viable solution to the problems of the unequal distribution of wealth that characterized the industrial age, if all of the hypothetically oppressed were good people and all the evil was to be found, as hypothesized, in their bourgeoisie overlords.  Unfortunately for the communists, a substantial portion of the oppressed were incapable, unconscientious, unintelligent, licentious, power mad, violent, resentful, and jealous, while a substantial proportion of the oppressors were educated, able, creative, intelligent, honest, and caring.  When the dekulakization swept through the newly established Soviet Union, it was vengeful and jealous murderers who were redistributing property, while it was the competent and reliable farmers, for the most part, from whom it was violently taken.  One unintended consequence of that "redistribution" of good fortune was the starvation of six million Ukrainians in the 1930s, in the midst of some of the most fertile land in the world.

-Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order:  12 More Rules For Life

Two gifts............................

 In this universe we are given two gifts:  the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions.  Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

-Mary Oliver, from her essay on Poe in Upstream

From the mind of Poe.......................................

 I AM come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence -- whether much that is glorious- whether all that is profound -- does not spring from disease of thought -- from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in awakening, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however, rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the "light ineffable," and again, like the adventures of the Nubian geographer, "agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi."*

-Edgar Allan Poe, this being the opening paragraph to Eleonora

* [they ventured out against the sea of darkness to see what they would find]."