This story was originally written in January and posted but then a good friend painted this beautiful painting to go along with it. So here it is again, meaning fortified and intact.
There was a man. There used not always to be men, but this was at a time when it could be said that there was a man.
A sailor who, when his ship came to shore, left the town, the crowds, the market place.
…because the King of May is too beautiful to last for more than a month
~ Allen Ginsberg, Kral Majales, 1965
A brief summary by Words That Change.
from the Online Etymology Dictionary
1640s, “animating spirit,” from L. psyche, from Gk. psykhe ”the soul, mind, spirit, breath, life, the invisible animating principle or entity which occupies and directs the physical body” (personified as Psykhe, the lover of Eros), akin to psykhein ”to blow, cool,” from PIE root *bhes- ”to blow” (cf. Skt. bhas-). The word had extensive sense development in Platonic philosophy and Jewish-influenced theological writing of St. Paul. In English, psychological sense is from 1910.
I hear somehow you will return
and that you will not.
There is a way that both
are true: Read the rest of this entry »
I could die again in that
And you should make a gentle poetry of me
I can’t resist temptation bound
With a sweat-lacerated faced
That whipped again and again
Sumptuous in my ear
And clear
Hard-earned victory
Dispensed in our precious hours
You wilt, and make the air clear for me
I hardly knew you until now
I hardly
New
You
I am forgetting what I learned, with the people. It is to sit with them and dream, not of other things, but together. I am forgetting what I learned, at the fire side. There is no condition of life. My longing is my truest friend. It never leaves even when the ocean is thick with grief, even when the sea overspills with joy. I am forgetting.
This poem was first sent to me by a friend named Blue. It says so much about what is beautiful and courageous about human love.
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
I do not know what it is we have been offered to prepare, but I know what I am prepared to offer. It is what I can only truly give: my heart, my soul, my life. Tears for every pain swimming into a deep sea of joy. None of it shall be denied. Resurrected the phoenix takes flight.
In my eyes, you’ve already seen who you need to be. In my heart, you’ve already found for what you are looking. In my speech, you’ve already heard the perfect words and in the die cast for you, you’ve already undertaken your greatest gamble.
 | Words That Change on The Sailor and the Flower |
| Words That Change on Psyche |
 | Alexandra Coulter on Psyche |
 | Gérard on Perceived |
| Words That Change on Perceived |
