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When Things Got Too Weird for Ripley

Notwithstanding the fact that he still received
more letters every year than anyone on earth,
including Santa Claus — Believe It Or Not —
his sinking fits of despair started to occur

with frightening regularity after the war;
on his way to the far East for the first time
since Pearl Harbor Day, he stood on the plucked
turkey-breast hull of a sunken battleship,

the Arizona, looking down at his well-shod feet
as though the rolled steel were transparent,
as if he could see the innocently disarrayed
skeletons of the young men still entombed within —

Believe It Or Not — his full, delicate lips stretched
over his protruding teeth, speechless for
the first time in fifty-odd years. Oddly, he
couldn’t take his mind off the Tibetan skull-bowl

at home, he felt the hinged roof of the bowl
under his cold, stiff fingers…

Having moved slow and steady through two readings of Nature, with nightly accompaniments of Librivox audio readings that would lull me away to sleep with visions of all the vast universal wonderments dancing in my head, it is now time to sift through my sporadic notes and swirling thoughts to try to make use of what I have come across, as I look to somehow apply to my life all that which Emerson teaches with his complexly simple essays as found in Nature.

However, as I consider such intellectual derring-do, I find myself drawn back to one of the first opportunities for learning the work provides me; one found in a most bold and faith-requiring passage from the introduction:

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable.
We must trust the perfection of the creationso far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has…

Inspired by http://sarikacullissuzuki.com/

Perpetual nature, would you
Make our lives sustainable
Teach us to live in green-forever

That sweet birds might visit our dwelling
With a clear sky and a loving future
Where energy is fostered

Without waste, pollution or hurting
Other forms of life for our own comforts
Perpetual nature, may we

Be sons and daughters of virtue
To protect you while we profit
From your natural prosperity

Let us make forests grow
And harness the power of the sun
For ecological diversity is your gift

Of millions of years, so do not
Let us take it in a few centuries
Man is selfish, but may we also

Learn to be more kind
To our keeper, our mother, our land.

There is really no exit beneath the sky. Every open door leads to another room. There is always another room.

you’ll love

you’ll lose

and let go

then love again

and sometimes even better than before

if along the way you somehow managed to grow

but taking into account the odds

you’re bound to lose once more

however, by this time, it shouldn’t be as difficult for you to move on

but if so, then a kind of sorrow soon follows

still, as long as man lives, man hopes

and so you’ll go on

waiting for your god to grant the mate your soul longs for

© Heath Muchena, 2014