why is it that some people get all the breaks
while the rest of us have to suck it up
almost from the day we are born? Let’s just say
I came on the scene with even less than
a homespun face; and though my parents tried
to make up for what I lacked in physical beauty
by encouraging me to cultivate my mind,
there’s only so much one can do. Living
from paycheck to paycheck, from dream to dream,
I know how to improvise, invent; I’m a whiz
at make do. I go to free concerts in the park,
know my Horace, Marx, and Descartes—
But what gets my goat the most is how those
that graze on the fat of the land get such glee
from trampling everyone else underfoot. Today
I read that not all water lovers are buoyant in
the same way— You betcha. But I too want
to rise to that brilliant and beautiful blue,
that fluid surface where all kinds of bodies
might feel seamless and new in their skin.
In response to Via Negativa: Lotic.
“Often they sat together in the evening on the tree trunk by the river. They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, of perpetual Becoming. And it sometimes happened that while listening to the river, they both thought the same thoughts, perhaps of a conversation of the previous day, or about one of the travellers whose fate and circumstances occupied their minds, or death, or their childhood; and when the river told them something good at the same moment, they looked at each other, both thinking the same thought, both happy at the same answer to the same question.”
— Herman Hesse Siddhartha
Translated by Hilda Rosner
via Such Stuff