I shall eventually reclaim all my bed
The empty space is full of books I read.
But still it’s very hard to get inside
Next to the place where someone loved has died.
And so my entire house is filled with books
Or clothes and shoes and radios, please  don’t look
As bit by bit  I let in emptiness~
By gum, life’s harder than a game of chess
Then when I’m empty, I can wait for grace
Or find another man, but not in haste
As I  may be gay for all I know
It never rains but sometimes we get snow

This is the story of my washing machine.It’s a perfectly ordinary washing machine I bought 2 years ago.Like all of these, it has more programmes than I ever could need unless I married a widower with 54 grandchildren and 3 dogs and a horse that likes a clean blanket
As a highly educated person it was only natural I should lock my brain onto a 59-minute programme with a choice of several temperatures.And how I used that programme until about 6 months ago it stopped working suddenly and Hoover wanted me to buy an insurance policy for £197 per year
As the machine only cost about £250 it seemed a daft  idea so I have got by using other programmes
Then today it came to my mind that there is also a choice of spinning speeds.I changed that and was pleased to find the programme began to work again at a different spin  speed
Why did the engineer on the phone not tell me that?
Why did I not think of it myself? It would have been sensible to try different speeds but it never crossed my mind.
So at least it will save me having to buy a new one this year.
More puzzling is the amount of washing I have to do.I’ve a good mind to go back to the old ways of washing clothes more infrequently as in winter I find drying then a nuisance.
Anyway, remember to try a few changes if a  machine stops working.It might save you £300 or more
Now I have to dry the clothes!Not a day for hanging them out.It’s strange how I have never totally solved this problem.I have no tumble dryer as I have no space.So I shall drape sheets over my head and stand in front of the fire until either I faint or the sheet dries.This will be fun.

http://www.openculture.com/2018/02/the-25-principles-for-adult-behavior.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

“”But being a grown-up also meant accepting full responsibility for one’s behavior, life’s purpose, and the ethical treatment of oneself and others. See his list below, notable not so much for its originality but for its plainspoken reminder of the simple, shared wisdom that gets drowned in the assaultive noise of modern life. Such uncomplicated idealism was at the center of Perry’s life and work.

1. Be patient. No matter what.
2. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him.
3. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.
4. Expand your sense of the possible.
5. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.
6. Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.
7. Tolerate ambiguity.
8. Laugh at yourself frequently.
9. Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.
10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.
11. Give up blood sports.
12. Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don’t risk it frivolously.
13. Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.)
14. Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.
15. Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.
16. Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.
17. Praise at least as often as you disparage.
18. Admit your errors freely and soon.
19. Become less suspicious of joy.
20. Understand humility.
21. Remember that love forgives everything.
22. Foster dignity.
23. Live memorably.
24. Love yourself.
25. Endure.

Barlow the “cowboy, poet, romantic, family man, philosopher, and ultimately, the bard of the digital revolution”—as Stephen Levy describes him at Wired—“became a great explainer” of the possibilities inherent in new media. He watched the internet become a far darker place than it had ever been in the 90s, a place where governments conduct cyberwars and impose censorship and barriers to access; where bad actors of all kinds manipulate, threaten, and intimidate.”

Using the notion of fractals
I see my home is infinitely large
That’s why  a woman’s work is never done
But why does gender come into it?
And why is it not valued?
Theories are all very well
But the sheets still need washing
And the baby still cries
As if she can see her future
An infinite amount of dust
Waiting to taunt her
Boiling hankies and washing up
Try to imagine  if most MPs were women
And men washed their clothes for them
And remembered to buy bread
How would men feel?
They   like groping but feeling is not the same
Whatever their game

No still, small voice, no Burning Bush, no God
No symbols of transcendence,no   shared rites
How to die without a psalm or prayer
How to smile the last time  in your life

No Joseph with his many coloured coat
No Moses in his basket in the reeds
No Sodom,No Gomorra, that’s a joke
As that is where our path now seems to lead

No journey  through the deserts of the heart
No Faith, no  aims,no  others by our side
Where did you think the images would  part?
No holy  meal,no connections and no guide

No images of angels  decorate
No steeples will point  up to Heavenly dreams
God has left us to our sorry state
Oh, Europe, you’ve destroyed with  wars and schemes

No sacred symbols but a  heart of stone
For we  are nothing more than flesh and bone

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/10/30/mind-and-cosmos-thomas-nagel/

Ultimately, Nagel echoes John Updike’s reflection on the possibility of “permanent mystery”:

It is perfectly possible that the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations and not merely beyond our grasp in humanity’s present stage of intellectual development.

Though Mind and Cosmos isn’t a neat package of scientific, or even philosophical, answers, it’s a necessary thorn in the side of today’s all-too-prevalent scientific reductionism and a poignant affirmation of Isaac Asimov’s famous contention that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.”

Rollo May’s The Meaning of Anxiety (public library), originally published in 1950:

We can understand Kierkegaard’s ideas on the relation between guilt and anxiety only by emphasizing that he is always speaking of anxiety in its relation to creativity. Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/12/12/descartes-hope-fear/

Extract:

In a sentiment that calls to mind Kierkegaard’s insistence that anxiety powers rather than hinders creativity, Descartes writes:

When hope is so strong that it altogether drives out fear, its nature changes and it becomes complacency or confidence. And when we are certain that what we desire will come to pass, even though we go on wanting it to come to pass, we nonetheless cease to be agitated by the passion of desire which caused us to look forward to the outcome with anxiety. Likewise, when fear is so extreme that it leaves no room at all for hope, it is transformed into despair; and this despair, representing the thing as impossible, extinguishes desire altogether, for desire bears only on possible things.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/11/01/john-keats-on-negative-capability/

Quote:

“Negative Capability” — the willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with ambiguity. Triggered by Keats’s disagreement with the English poet and philosopher Coleridge, whose quest for definitive answers over beauty laid the foundations for modern-day reductionism, the concept is a beautiful articulation of a familiar sentiment — that life is about living the questions, that the unknown is what drives science, that the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.

Keats writes:

Several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason

chrome-extension://bpmcpldpdmajfigpchkicefoigmkfalc/views/app.html

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day

embargo

noun

Definition
1 : an order of a government prohibiting the departure of commercial ships from its ports

2 : a legal prohibition on commerce

3 : stoppage, impediment; especially : prohibition

4 : an order by a common carrier or public regulatory agency prohibiting or restricting freight transportation

Did You Know?
Embargoes may be put in place for any number of reasons. For instance, a government may place a trade embargo against another country to express its disapproval with that country’s policies. But governments are not the only bodies that can place embargoes. A publisher, for example, could place an embargo on a highly anticipated book to prevent stores from selling it before its official release date. The word embargo, dating from around the year 1600, derives via Spanish embargar from Vulgar Latin imbarricare, formed from the prefix im- and the noun barra (“bar”).

How d’ you start writing? I don’t know.
Once I was by Lidl’s in the snow
A song-line came uncalled into my throat
Oh,Lord, I saw an ink blot on my coat

Rorsach is a name we all  can hear
If we are unstable in our fear.
Yet seeing visions in a blob of ink
Would make me a psychotic in a blink

We are all unstable  till we’re dead
If you are a statue, don’t see red!
I get angry with my muse at night
She sends me thoughts when I turn off the light

The one I got by Lidl’s made me hunt
I had to create ten more to put in front
And then I had to write the bitter end
For cliches are so useless round the bend

And when it happens at 11 pm
I feel like saying, can’t you come again?
I don’t know what some parts might really mean
If they come to me when I am rapt in dream.

I write the ideas down on bags of flour
On novels which to read I then aspire
I write them on my wrist in my own blood
But only when I’m feeling I’ve gone mad

If I search the house for paper scraps
I find some with the ordnance survey maps
Those precious maps we bought for holidays
Not knowing we’d no time left in our Play.

I find scraps on my bed or in the hall
And some take flight and end up on the wall
If I glued them onto a large card
I’d have a collage with a message shared

Oh,start where e’er you want, like Coleridge
Or admire Hopkins and his saviour Robert Bridge
Maybe it is Bridges,I forget,
Entertaining daffodils I met.

https://magmapoetry.com/how-does-any-poet-start-writing-a-poem/
Some comments

Daphne Milne
October 7, 2013 at 12:46 pm
It’s an untidy sort of process – sometimes a line or a title comes as a gift and the poem almost writes itself. Usually it’s start writing first thing on waking up [well opening the eyes] and BEFORE I put on my glasses, like making the first mark on the blank canvas get something down to work with – or not. Always, always a notebook for the odd remark or overheard comment that could be the start of something. I have found that I have lost several useful things or titles by trying to remember them. ditto the notebook by the bed. The things forgotten may not have been any use but I am always convinced they would have been.

Henry Seltzez
October 7, 2013 at 1:14 pm
Okay, I’ll consider the question with the respect it deserves.

A word, phrase, line, something someone says, a song, a sight, a sound, a feeling, a thought, in fact, practically any random event can be the stimulus for me. Usually though what is put down quickly needs reshaping through a transformative poetics – lifted off the page – through patient editing and reworking as most of my pieces, unless they come straight out of the hand in one piece (which doesn’t happen often) – seem to lie dead on the page. The trouble then being, of course, halting the transformative poetics before the poem is stillborn or overcooked.

That’s my take on the writing process, take it as you will.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68657/how-to-and-how-not-to-write-poetry-56d2484397277

Advice for blocked writers and aspiring poets from a Nobel Prize winner’s newspaper column.
BY WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA
Introduction
In the Polish newspaper Literary Life, Nobel Prize winning poet Wislawa Szymborska answered letters from ordinary people who wanted to write poetry. Clare Cavanagh, translates these selections.

The following are selections from columns originally published in the Polish newspaper Literary Life. In these columns, famed poet Wislawa Szymborska answered letters from ordinary people who wanted to write poetry. Translated by Clare Cavanagh, they appeared in slightly different form in our Journals section earlier this year.

To Heliodor from Przemysl: “You write, ‘I know my poems have many faults, but so what, I’m not going to stop and fix them.’ And why is that, oh Heliodor? Perhaps because you hold poetry so sacred? Or maybe you consider it insignificant? Both ways of treating poetry are mistaken, and what’s worse, they free the novice poet from the necessity of working on his verses. It’s pleasant and rewarding to tell our acquaintances that the bardic spirit seized us on Friday at 2:45 p.m. and began whispering mysterious secrets in our ear with such ardor that we scarcely had time to take them down. But at home, behind closed doors, they assiduously corrected, crossed out, and revised those otherworldly utterances. Spirits are fine and dandy, but even poetry has its prosaic side.”

To H.O. from Poznan, a would-be translator: “The translator is obliged to be faithful not only to the text. He must also reveal the full beauty of the poetry while retaining its form and preserving as completely as possible the epoch’s spirit and style.”

To Grazyna from Starachowice: “Let’s take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?”

To Mr. G. Kr. of Warsaw: “You need a new pen. The one you’re using makes a lot of mistakes. It must be foreign.”

To Pegasus [sic] from Niepolomice: “You ask in rhyme if life makes cents [sic]. My dictionary answers in the negative.”

To Mr. K.K. from Bytom: “You treat free verse as a free-for-all. But poetry (whatever we may say) is, was, and will always be a game. And as every child knows, all games have rules. So why do the grown-ups forget?”

To Puszka from Radom: “Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?”

To Boleslaw L-k. of Warsaw: “Your existential pains come a trifle too easily. We’ve had enough despair and gloomy depths. ‘Deep thoughts,’ dear Thomas says (Mann, of course, who else), ‘should make us smile.’ Reading your own poem ‘Ocean,’ we found ourselves floundering in a shallow pond. You should think of your life as a remarkable adventure that’s happened to you. That is our only advice at present.”

1.10 days to a f[l]at belly
2.Get rid of worry in 5 minutes.Open Windows
3.Learn how to draw grimaces with our free art newsletter
4.Special offer: recycled sketch paper from hopeless art students.Cheap and ecological
5 Special offer: Darwant pens 3 for 2.
6 Sleep better in three days.
7 Having a nervous breakdown? Online help from highly trained counsellors.Special rate for elderly.
8.The danger of underwired bras,
9 Use the wire from your bra to fire pencil sharpeners at your enemies in the office
10 Keep your students happy.Wear red trousers and top when giving a lecture on String Theory so they won’t notice your hair needs washing.
Buy trousers click here.
11 Benefits available to ex art students who have sold all their paper.Press here or ring 999 now
12 Need a cup of tea? Ring 999 and ask the paramedic to make it for you and also to wash up
13 10 Days to a flat brain

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51002/spring-56d22e75d65bd

Spring

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)
Related

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13818697-200-mind-body-modes-of-mind-what-have-small-children-playing-with-dolls-in-as-edinburgh-nursery-got-to-do-with-buddhism-one-psychologist-says-she-has-found-a-link/

. “It is
in the second half of the book, however, that Donaldson asks herself that
‘very important question’: do the emotions develop in parallel with the
intellect?

She takes as her starting point the fact that many people report intense
emotional responses to works of art or to nature and, further, that many
also report having powerful ‘spiritual’ experiences. These kinds of experiences
interest her because, like the thinking of the advanced intellectual modes,
they seem relatively free of entanglement in ‘narrow personal goals’.

But such experiences are rarely the subject of scientific scrutiny.
So to study them, she is forced to look at how they have been perceived
in the past and how the world’s great religions, especially Buddhism, evaluate
and attempt to cultivate them.

She concludes that there are indeed advanced modes of development for
the emotions. Since these emotions are deeply significant for the people
who experience them, she calls them ‘value-sensing’. She identifies a ‘value-sensing
construct mode’, which is the realm of the arts and of religious myth and
ritual, and mirrors the intellectual construct mode with its scientific
thought. And then there is a ‘value-sensing transcendent mode’ which is
the realm of spiritual experience, and mirrors the intellectual transcendent
mode with its mathematics.

She describes these modes as ‘advanced in the developmental sense, in
that you can’t get them in the early stages of living. They are also perhaps
advanced in another sense, in that they have to be cultivated more than
the early ones. There may be flashes of either emotional or intellectual
insight, but to cultivate them you have to be systematic and disciplined
and you rely more heavily on teaching.’

Her ideal is to be able to move from one mode to another at will. We
may choose to think logically about a problem, for example, when that is
useful to us. In the same way, it can be useful to have transcendent emotional
experiences. ‘They put our personal goals into some sort of perspective.
By being more aware of our emotions and valuing them more, we might live
more happily and society might work better.’

She concludes by speculating on the possibility of a ‘dual enlightenment’
in which intellect and emotion are equally valued. If that happens, ‘we
may come to feel less embarrassed about and suspicious of transcendent emotion,
seeing it as no more ‘weird’ than the capacity for mathematical thought’.
Each of these, she says, is ‘a normal, though generally ill-developed, power
of the human mind’.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/paul-laurence-dunbar

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!

I was always aware that meeting people who enjoyed conversation was good for generating new ideas for writing and for living in new ways and that it is two way
But I find, in addition, writing to friends can have a bigger impact than I would have believed.One of my friends I knew at University and we have quite a lot on common including coming from the same part of England.Yet because our interests only overlap, each of us might say something unexpected or new which makes the other think
Another friend is Australian and the vocabulary there is slightly different.However his background in terms of religion and being another “lapsed” Catholic gives us common ground.I find that without conscious effort both of these people affect the words I use when I am writing.I am surprised what a big effect it can have.
Yet I have another friend who is not a lapsed Catholic and who is interested in the meaning of life and has studied and written about things I would find very painful like trauma and the holocaust.Yet his ideas give me new trains of thought and remind me of how different friends can be.He is still a Christian in a meaningful way.
I have one school friend and it’s really nice to talk to someone who has the same accent and knows about your adolescent years
The ideal seems to be someone who is different but not too different and that you need to feel a sense of trust with them.And they need to have an interest in you and what you do
As we get older we might mix less with people unlike ourselves so I’d advise people to at least talk to people with different ideas,views, religion or lack of.
I have a very close friend who is stunningly knowledgeable about both Art and Music and we share a common interest in cooking and music.I have someone I can ask for help or information as I am not very well up in Art History.
I imagine again it is easy to stay friends with people who are very similar to you.I am lucky as I taught people from many parts of the world so I am happy now to meet people who have moved here from other countries or people who have a different ethnic background.Because even a slightly different perspective on the world is beneficial especially if you want to write
My husband was critical of writing and he sometimes said to me if I read him one of my poems
Did YOU write that?
I think he didn’t believe that starting to write poetry after being a mathematician was a very bright idea.But on the whole he did encourage me, mainly to make me write more stories about Stan and his cat Emile and Dave the paramedic
I also recall now writing a long poetic email to a foreign friend.He wrote back,Where have you copied this writing from?
I answered,I wrote it myself.He never responded
I had the same thing when I wrote a poem about numbers which I sent to a mathematical friend.He wrote back saying,I wonder who wrote that
Don’t let it get you down if people unintentionally seem a bit surprised you can do things they didn’t know you could.
But, on the other hand, be aware some people might be envious if you learn new skills and they may say really offensive words to you.So ignore them.
I imagine then that since talking/writing to others affects my poetry it must affect our minds and so I think it’s a good idea to do new things or even walk a different way to town and go into different shops.Go to see a film that is not the type you usually see
Take an interest in people of different religions/ occupations; difference, even slight, improves how our minds work
Even using social media helps our brains as we age.So I read.
Naturally we want stability and familiarity in our lives so I am only talking of adding to that or even talking about a different topic than you usually do.Women are interested in more than recipes and men can be interested in cookery or sewing or mathematics as well as politics and drinking whiskey
The more different people and views, the better we learn always remembering a basis of trust,kindness and respect for the other person’s privacy and need for private time even if you live with them.We all need our “sacred space”
If you are shy, tell yourself people will benefit from meeting you if you can join in a conversation with just a few words.Lots of us blush or get weak knees in certain settings.Recall most people don’t notice as much as we imagine and that a lively spirit makes one beautiful

Anxiety’s a sickness like a cough
There’s no reason for the nerves and butterflies
So,we should all enjoy a gruesome laugh
When we read Trump’s tweets and hear his lies

His finger on a button like a plate
At any moment nuclear war might start
We feel the terror in our very hearts
As we feed out children,quite distraught

He said his button like his manhood’s large
We can’t see the monkey playing ball
Will he share a selfie, gross image?
Will he like an apple take a fall?

Every day we see the fruits of war
Children screaming,starving filled with fear
Will it ever end until we are
Blown up by a bomb in someone’s car

Then we see our leaders fight like snakes
Poisoning each other as they speak
Forgetting that more evil may awake
Wishing to ensnare the poor and meek

“Ruling” a democracy,they lie
They are there to steal and kill. we cry
If we choose one evil,one still hides
Waiting till it too can get onboard

Ignorant, we vote against our selves
Imagining the Empire still remains
Ignoring, we make worse the nation’s health
And makes us suffer panic and self blame

Is it sick to see reality
To be nervous when jobs are cruelty?
A courier died for he had to be
Out delivering parcels DPD’s

The poor live as if forever tense
Some poor folk are better at pretense
Hands most always tight with fingers clenched
While flight and fight make nonsense of our sense

From screen to scream the mind receives impacts
A murder or a rape or Trump’s strange tweets.
No reverie or dream survives intact

So we enjoy the hit and torture wracked?
At any hour excitement will one greet
From screen to scream the mind receives impact

And into human minds this dross is packed;
It leaves no space for silence or retreat
No reverie or dream survives intact

We will no longer suffer from our lacks
The enemy, old boredom, we defeat
From screen to scream the mind receives impact

Will one day the screen take a great crack
We will see that nothing dwells beneath
No reverie or dream survives intact

Allow us all to suffer life’s own griefs
Before we fall to earth like old brown leaves
From screen to scream our heart with pain contracts
No reverie or dream survives intact

I see the old fall and the new erupt
Like new growth in plants from rain and heat
But what is new may also be corrupt

Transitions need not be so stark,abrupt
But like a gentle tide they kind can sweep
I see the old drop and the new erupt

Life does better when shocks don’t disrupt
Though evil in disguise may stealthy creep
All that’s new may also be corrupt

Are we in this race for power still trapped
When nowhere may security take sleep
I see the old fall and the new erupt

From our hearts and minds, good will is sucked
So we lose the power to think and act
All that’s new may also be corrupt

No longer are we agents armed with maps
Agency first slumped and then it lapsed
I see the old doomed and the new excite
But what is new or strange may not be right