Check the  meaning of what you hear,  perceive
For wild emotion alters the eyes’ view
Interpretation  un-reflected may  deceive

A gift of love can’t always be received.
Some can only give  a gift to you
Check the  sense of what you hear,  perceive

For some of  us, the facts can’t be conceived
We cannot notice anything too new
Interpretation  un-reflected may  deceive

As the wind blows off the autumn leaves
So the  mind itself can go askew
I’ll check the  sense of what I hear,  perceive

So  in the web of life, we interweave
Creating  patterns  from the many hues
Interpretation un-reflected may deceive.

We fear change and thoughts that are unglued
But talk to loved ones,do not merely brood
Check the  meaning of what you hear,  perceive
Interpretation  un-reflected may  deceive

 

 

 

Awakening in the light, I saw ripe corn
The silence held us in its gentle peace
A field beside the cottage, lit by dawn

A cat sat  on the small and daisied lawn
No cattle grazed nor any horned beast
Awakening in the light, I saw ripe corn

So my heart began to heal where torn
Expanding into gratitude, released
A field beside the cottage, lit by dawn

Just a week, yet this became our home
Cottages of pink and white eyes teased
Awakening in the light, I saw ripe corn

The new perception hit me like a storm
For if I’d never seen would I believe?
A field beside the cottage, gold at dawn

From perception, insight is conceived
And so imagined sights become our dreams
Awakening in the light, I saw ripe corn
A field beside the cottage,  beauty dawned

 

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/04/us-surgeon-may-be-forced-to-quit-uk-because-of-visa-nightmare

As someone who has needed hospital treatment, I am worried selfishly but also on account of other people.They recruited this American doctor but will not his adopted children in.It seems crazy

How do my blog readers keep a record of bright ideas they get while wakening up? Do you use a notebook or do you speak into your phone? I tried a notebook but didn;t write much into it

You can’t catch God in that butterfly net
You can’t catch God and ask him   precisely what  he said
Be you any wiser than the tide is high?
God can laugh and God  can cry

You know words are metaphors
They unlock that secret door

Be you poor or be you rich
You can’t suppress that nervous twitch

Be you lightning in a storm or a daisy forlorn
You will never be a God who weeps for the torn.

God speaks English, God speaks Greek
He speaks Hebrew as the paralytic creak.

Don’t you go and try to catch
Frogs and toads and baby cats

When you’re in complete despair
You may find that God is there.

You must walk the way of love
Then you will be hand in glove

Yet we envy, we betray
We leave malice on the auto play

God speaks nothing, he’s the word
From all humans it is barred.

When he speaks we all will know
He does not speak it just for show.

It’s more a hint than a logical proof
You can’t leave Mythos off the hook

Logos is and Logos does
Because, because , because, because.

 

Ted Hughes on How to Be a Writer: A Letter of Advice to His 18-Year-Old Daughter

 

So suggests the poet Ted Hughes (August 17, 1930–October 28, 1998) in a wonderful letter of advice to his teenage daughter, Frieda, found in Letters of Ted Hughes (public library) — the same volume that gave us Hughes’s immensely moving letter to his son about nurturing the universal inner child.

Frieda had been half-orphaned at the age of three when her mother, Sylvia Plath, died by suicide. Hughes was left to raise the couple’s two children, for whom Plath had written her only children’s books. Shortly after Frieda’s eighteenth birthday, as she stood on the precipice of her own literary career, her father shared with her the most important thing he had learned — from T.S. Eliot, no less — about what it takes to become a poet.

Hughes writes:

T.S. Eliot said to me “There’s only one way a poet can develop his actual writing — apart from self-criticism & continual practice. And that is by reading other poetry aloud — and it doesn’t matter whether he understands it or not (i.e. even if it is in another language.) What matters, above all, is educating the ear.”

What matters, is to connect your own voice within an infinite range of verbal cadences & sequences — and only endless actual experience of your ear can store all that is in your nervous system. The rest can be left to your life & your character.

 

 

Don’t watch a  lot of TV

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome

Mean world syndrome is a term coined by George Gerbner to describe a phenomenon whereby violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. Mean world syndrome is one of the main conclusions of cultivation theory. Gerbner, a pioneer researcher on the effects of television on society, argued that people who watch television tended to think of the world as an intimidating and unforgiving place. A direct correlation between the amount of television one watches and the amount of fear one harbors about the world has been proven, although the direction of causality remains debatable in that persons fearful of the world may be more likely to retreat from it and in turn spend more time in indoor, solitary activity such as television watching.^[1]

The number of opinions, images, and attitudes that viewers tend to form when watching television will have a direct influence on how the viewer perceives the real world. They will reflect and refer to the most common images or recurrent messages thought to affect their own real lives. Gerbner once said: “You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it’s a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.”^[1][2]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/

 

“Everything written in self-conscious, writerly prose, on the other hand, is now considered to be “literary fiction”—not necessarily good literary fiction, mind you, but always worthier of respectful attention than even the best-written thriller or romance. It is these works that receive full-page critiques, often one in the Sunday book-review section and another in the same newspaper during the week. It is these works, and these works only, that make the annual short lists of award committees. The “literary” writer need not be an intellectual one. Jeering at status-conscious consumers, bandying about words like “ontological” and “nominalism,” chanting Red River hokum as if it were from a lost book of the Old Testament: this is what passes for profundity in novels these days. Even the most obvious triteness is acceptable, provided it comes with a postmodern wink. What is not tolerated is a strong element of action—unless, of course, the idiom is obtrusive enough to keep suspense to a minimum. Conversely, a natural prose style can be pardoned if a novel’s pace is slow enough, as was the case with Ha Jin’s aptly titled Waiting, which won the National Book Award (1999) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (2000).

The dualism of literary versus genre has all but routed the old trinity of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, which was always invoked tongue-in-cheek anyway. Writers who would once have been called middlebrow are now assigned, depending solely on their degree of verbal affectation, to either the literary or the genre camp. David Guterson is thus granted Serious Writer status for having buried a murder mystery under sonorous tautologies (Snow Falling on Cedars, 1994), while Stephen King, whose Bag of Bones (1998) is a more intellectual but less pretentious novel, is still considered to be just a very talented genre storyteller.”