David Whyte

Thanks to Sarah Firth for the link

Lennon

Now and then..

Fruits of our labour

Teacher

History

Hardship

My writing is getting worse in the cold...

Habits

Fragile ideas

Books and Culture

Hello in there

Measure

The Future

From reader Lisa's review of "Uncle Tom's Cabin":

"Literature has the power to engage where statistics leave you cold, it has the power to make you feel what other people feel, and to see what abstract terms mean in real, everyday life.". 

A quote from Ms. Stowe

Krulak's Law

I remember everything

Lyrics from the last song John Prine recorded before his passing

Awakening from within

Stuff

No one's ever said it better than Carlin :)

Bukowski, Final curtain

More partial poems, written out until I run out of space.

More Reddit poetry

This time on the sculpting of the perfect human body ;)

Reddit poetry -

This thread made front page on Reddit today (3 Jun 2020)

It brought much joy, especially a description by a man who woke up early to find his significant other doing mundane stuff but gave him great joy.  Someone turned it into a poem: I had to write it out.

If you had the tools, why would you not use them?

I saw this question asked in the context of robots & artificial intelligence taking over jobs. 

"If you had the tools, why would you not use them?"

A rational question indeed. Yet, it reminded me almost instantly of a few people I know whose hobby is collecting stuff. I may have even considered labelling their predilection "hoarding" but never out loud.  Tools, in the hands of those competent in wielding them. Stuff - to use a George Carlin descriptor - for others who have no idea what to use them for but still have a deep desire to accumulate them.

In the context of organisations collecting skills, the predilection for collecting skills without quite knowing them is also pervasive. I didn't think it possible, to be honest. After all, any organisation has no room for skills that don't advance its motive - whether profit or otherwise.  

The more I observe though, the more I see organisations collecting skills that they have no idea how to employ effectively.  Robotics, automation, data science, decision science, artificial intelligence - these seem buzz words that deserve to be in the organisation but with little to no real understanding of what they are, or how they should be used. 

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Quite often you see how disengaged & disappointed employees are (high engagement survey results notwithstanding) because their primary skills slowly wither away through disuse, while their top-grade employer has them doing things a fresh graduate with some spreadsheet skills could do. 

Cracks...in everything..

My favourite Leonard Cohen songs begins thus..

Life lessons from a punk rocker

Over the weekend, I watched two videos that moved me to tears. 

The first was a performance at a famous awards ceremony. In front of an august gathering of luminaries & dignitaries & royalty, the performer froze mid-performance.  

You could hear the audience gasp - here was an accomplished punk rock musician, an iconoclast, who was like a nervous teenager who'd forgotten the lyrics to a long practiced piece. The performer stopped, apologised & asked to start again. IN FRONT OF THIS FAMOUS CROWD AT A FAMOUS EVENT! UNBELIEVABLE!   She apologised again, & said "I am very nervous". 

The performer was the legendary punk rocker, Patti Smith, performing Bob Dylan's "A hard day's rain gonna fall", in honor of his 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature.

 

The second video, thanks to the YouTube algorithm, was an interview she had with Skavlan, a Swedish talk show host. The title of the video says "I was humiliated & ashamed". Shocking headlines are clickbait. In this interview, she shared so many beautiful thoughts but two in particular touched me deeply. 

The first one was her response when asked about the "failure" during the performance that night. She says simply, "I just had to tell the truth.… I just told them I got nervous. I never get nervous, but I was so nervous, I just asked if I could start over."  

The second was serendipitous. My daughter has been asking for help with her schoolwork, mostly her writing assignments. Well, she did yesterday, & Patti Smith answered the question, how did she become such a prolific writer. She speaks simply of her discipline of learning how to write, despite the domestic chores she willingly chose for herself, disappearing from public life to focus on her relationship with her husband, Fred Smith & to raise a family.  

We watched this video together, my daughter & I. Maybe she'll remember it, maybe she won't, but in that moment, Patti Smith was the teacher we both needed in the moment- to remind us about the discipline required over a period of time to become good at anything, to be forgiving of ourselves when we failed, & that everyone of us fails, regardless of how many times we may have done it before. Thank you Ms. Smith!

So now?

The partial writing of poetry continues. more Bukowski, mostly because he doesn't seem to use capitals, which works great for my lack of capitals writing knowldege.

 I learnt a technique to get those ink drops splattered on the page: blow gently at the nib!