Some people do not have to search - 
they find their niche early in life and rest there, seemingly contented and resigned. 
They do not seem to ask much of life, 
sometimes they do not seem to take it seriously. 
At times I envy them, 
but usually I do not understand them - 
seldom do they understand me. 

I am one of the searchers. 
There are, I believe, millions of us. 
We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, 
hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. 
We continue to explore ourselves, 
hoping to understand. 

We like to walk along the beach - 
we are drawn by the ocean, 
taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. 
We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. 

Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. 
To share our sadness with the one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - 
unless it is to share our laughter. 

We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, 
for everything beautiful it can provide. 
Most of all we want to love and be loved. 
We want to live in a relationship that will not impede 
our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls. 

We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love. 
We are wanderers, dreamers and lovers, 
lonely souls who dare ask of life everything good and 
beautiful. 

- - James Kavanaugh

“Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entire ly their own fault. It is what they do to them selves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find your self with out it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.”

-Frank Lloyd Wright

Old Boy
by A. Van Jordan

If one rainy night you find yourself
leaving a phone booth, and you meet a man
with a lavender umbrella, resist
your desire to follow him, to seek
shelter from the night in his solace.
Later, don't fall victim to the Hypnotist's
narcotic of clarity, which proves
a curare for the heart; her salve
is merely a bandage, under which memories 
pulse. Resist the taste for something still 
alive for your first meal; resist the craving 
for the touch of a hand from your past. 
We live some memories,
and some memories are planted. There's
only so much space for the truth
and the fabrications to spread out 
in one's mind. When there's no more 
space, we grow desperate. You'll ask 
if practicing love for years in your mind, 
prepares you for the moment,
if practicing to defend one's life
is the same as living? You'll
hole up, captive, in a hotel room
for fifteen years and learn to find
a man within you, which will prove 
a painful introduction to the trance
into which you were born. Better
to stay under the spell of your guilt,
than to forget; you've already released
your pain onto the world; don't believe
there's some joy in forgetting. 
There's no joy in the struggle to forget. 
And what appears as an endless verdant field, 
only spreads across a building's rooftop;
your peaceful sleep could be a fetal position,
which secures you in a suitcase in this field. 
A bell rings, and you fall out of this luggage 
like clothes you no longer fit. Now what to do?
You remember when you were the man
who fit those clothes, but you've forgotten this 
world. Even forgotten scenes from your life, 
leave shadows of the memory,
haunting your spirit 
until, within a moment's glance,
strangers passing you on the street,
observe history in your eyes. Experience
lingers through acts of forgetting, 
small acts of love or trauma 
falling from the same place. Whether
memory comes in the form of a stone
or a grain of sand, they both sink in water.
A tongue—even if it were, say, sworn 
to secrecy; or if it were cut from one's mouth;
yes, even without a mouth to envelop 
its truth—the tongue continues to confess.

Vulnerability

Vulnerability is not weakness, it is emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty, it fuels our daily lives. 

Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage. To be vulnerable is to let ourselves be seen, to be honest.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation creativity and change.

Driving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

By: Adrienne Rich

The Africa they never show you

The real Africa is the one they never show you. The real Africa is hidden beneath veneer of poverty and hunger and death; a cancerous mass on the face of the earth that the rest of the world term homogenous ‘Africa’. The real Africa is submerged underneath corruption and greed, underneath tyranny and an ostentatious elite, underneath the faces of the people they cannot feed. The real Africa is buried beneath shanty towns rife with dirt and disease, where children are brought up too quickly to survive. The real Africa is under a noman’s desert, bare and dry, unable to sustain green and healthy life. No, that’s not the real Africa. The Africa I know, the Africa that is reflected in the warm sunshine that you can feel burning inside of you. The Africa that shines from warm, spontaneous smile. The Africa that is at the heart of sky-high mountains and tropical jungle, of golden sand dunes nd lush green grassland. The Africa that is at the heart of different people, different languages, differnt cultures, different identities who all call this land their home. The land where moyo muti unomera pauno; where roots take hold and don’t let go, solid as the baobab tree that has always been and will always be there, standing steady and solid against the menaces of time. My Africa is where my heart resides even when I am long gone and far away, where my mind drifts to across the distance of a never-ending ocean. The real Africa can be smelt the minute you step off a plane onto African soil and feel the air calling you, beckoning you home. The real Africa is the chaos and the calm that exist side by side as honking cars zoom past on streets that run parallel to cows grazing peacefully in a field. This is the real Africa, the one they never show.


-Unknown

IF

BY RUDYARD KIPLING

If you can keep your head when all about you 
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, 
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

"Change comes from millions of tiny acts that seem insignificant." - Howard Zinn

If we truly knew that, believed that, then we wouldn’t hesitate to take those acts.  

Wake up. Day calls you
to your life: your duty.

And to live, nothing more.
Root it out of the glum
night and the darkness
that covered your body
for which light waited
on tiptoe in the dawn.

Stand up, affirm the straight
simple will to be
a pure slender virgin.
Test your bodys metal.
cold, heat? Your blood
will tell against the snow,
or behind the window.

The colour
in your cheeks will tell.
And look at people. Rest
doing no more than adding
your perfection to another day.

Your task 
is to carry your life high, 
and play with it, hurl it 
like a voice to the clouds 
so it may retrieve the light 
already gone from us. 

That is your fate: to live
Do nothing.
Your work is you, nothing more.

- Pedro Salinas

Read this. Do it.

The Sun Magazine | Your Own Damn Life

Lost and Found

by David Hollies

The first few times
Being lost was frightening
Stark, pregnant
With the drama of change
Then, I didn't know
That everywhere is nowhere
Like the feeling when a ocean wave
Boils you in the sand
But as time goes by
Each occurrence of lostness is quieter
Falling from notice
Like the sound of trains
When you live near the tracks
Until one day
When a friend asks
"How often do you get lost?"
And I strain to recall a single instance
It was then that I realized
Being lost only has meaning
When contrasted with
Knowing where you are
A presumption that slipped out of my life
As quietly as smoke up a chimney
For now I live in a less anchored place
Where being lost is irrelevant
For now, only when there is a need
Do I discover where I am
No alarm, no fear
Just an unconscious check-in
Like glancing in the rear-view mirror.

The danger of a single story

Awesome Talk

We are human equals.
We are more alike than we are different.
Take the time for a listen here on TED Talks:

Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story | Video on TED.com

You can't be at the pole and the equator at the same time. You must choose your own line, as I hope to do, and it will probably be color.

- Vincent van Gogh

ACT V

I just listened to this on NPR. It is an incredible story about bringing inspiration, life and humanity through theatre to inmates in a high-security prison in Missouri as they produce the last act-- Act V -- of Hamlet.

If you have 30 minutes, listen.

This I Believe

THIS I BELIEVE

By: Mary Tumaini   

Form Three Student

Orkeeswa Secondary School

I believe life is good to everyone

I believe life can change in a few years to come

I believe God is good all the time

I believe HIV/AIDS can be ended this year

I believe my tribe can stop circumcising girls

I believe one day I will be a youth teacher

I believe everything is possible under the sun

I believe people can stop abusing drugs

I believe people can stop killing each other

I believe witch doctors can stop their bad practice

I believe everybody on the earth can love one another

I believe we have the right to love each other

I believe nobody has to live alone in this life

I believe God loves me more than my parents

I believe my parents love me more than my friends

I believe we can respect elders, and they can respect the young

I believe we have equal rights

I believe life does not have to be complicated

I believe rich people can help the poor

I believe if you have all five senses, you are not poor, but rich.

excerpt from "Dogfish"

I wanted
the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country, I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life;
I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.


By: Mary Oliver

A Franciscan Benediction

May God bless us with discomfort at easy answers, half truths and superficial relationships so that we may live deep within our hearts.

May God bless us with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people so that we may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless us with tears to shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger and war so that we may reach out our hands to comfort them and turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in the world so that we can change what others claim cannot be done to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.

"You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks, jump over the hurdles and break through the brick walls that are always going to be placed in front of you. If you don't have that kind of feeling for what it is you are doing, you'll stop at the first giant hurdle.”

- George Lucas