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AFTERWORD

Gentle Reader,

What you’ll find below is an upside-down anthology of sorts: a journal of my frequent nightly musings from January 2008 till now, in reverse order.

Much of what I write here is verse in traditional rhymed iambic pentameters, old fashioned in form but contemporary in topics and idiom. It asks to be read aloud so that the effects of rhyme and meter may be felt.

Sometimes I write brief prose essays, but even my verses are essays, or attempts, pursuing a line of thought to some conclusion, though more sonorously than those in prose: discursive verses, I call them.

In either case, you’re the reader over my shoulder as I write, which makes my writing different than when I have no audience in mind but only a vague urge to express. So I thank you for whatever attention you give my words and thoughts and feelings because you might so easily attend to something else, and you soon will.

To beguile you to linger longer, though, I’ve coupled most of my compositions with a photo or image I’ve taken or borrowed, which sometimes corresponds with my words of that day.

Thank you for visiting here. I hope you enjoy your stay and are moved to come back soon.

—Alan Nordstrom

*

MAKE BELIEVE

Between the realms of Knowing and Believing
Lies Make Believe, a magic kingdom of
Enchanted fantasy beyond conceiving
Except through wonder, marvel, hope and love.

Just as ’twixt night and day exists a zone
Of twilight in which ecstasy abounds,
So in the mind Imagination’s throne
Amazes reason and plain sense astounds.

How do you go there, how do you escape
The dismal region of the everyday?
How can Imagination change the shape
Of sorrow and despair, turn toil to play?

Just close your eyes and dream and you shall see
How fantasy remakes reality.

*

DAWNINGS

When wafted by a transcendental gust
Above my ordinary maundering,
Then elevated past the realm of rust,
My rising spirit feels inspired to sing.

The weight of daily gravity and care,
Distractions by the multiplicities,
Drag down my struggling spirit to despair
And plague my hapless soul with sad disease.

Yet only by intentional design
Invoking the conducive mode and mood
Will my lost soul and wandering mind align
To celebrate their altered altitude.

Thus here I come, before the morning’s dawn,
By otherworldly mystic whispers drawn.

*

A CLEARING

As out of all the passing scenery appears
One rectangle to frame and photograph,
Sometimes my mind’s miasma brightly clears
To show a grain of truth amidst the chaff.

These sudden moments of illumination,
Of contact with a keener way of seeing,
Befall uncalled for and do not occasion
An obvious transformation of my being.

The best that I can do to bid them come
Is to sit quiet in the pre-dawn dark,
Pad on my lap, letting my fingers drum
On the chair arm to help a vision spark.

The readiness is all, and patient waiting,
For me to meet the mystery of creating.

*

NOSCI TE IPSUM

What is it I have yet to learn about
Myself that I should know before I die?
Of all those things that still remain in doubt—
The what, the where, the when, the how, the why,
And most of all the who—what do I need
To comprehend or understand or find
To satisfy the contract I agreed
To carry out, the one that I designed?

For so it is, I’ve heard: we cycle through
Life after life, each time to find out more
About ourselves and do all we must do
To learn what our bright consciousness is for
Until at last we fully realize
Our true identity without disguise.

*

WHAT ARE WE DOING WRONG?

“We” is we human beings, or many of us.

“Doing wrong” means not doing what it would be better to do, means making harmful decisions and means behaving unwisely.

My reason for asking what we are doing wrong is to focus our attention on reasonable, sane alternatives to our present perilous practices. It is to offer sensible options, compelling enough to persuade us to change our minds, our attitudes and our actions.

Here is my initial list:

(1) It is wrong for any human being to lack the means to thrive in health of body, mind and spirit.

(2) It is wrong to use violence against sentient, conscious creatures, and the more so the higher up they are on the evolutionary ladder.

(3) It is wrong to deplete the viability and multiplicity of life forms on Earth, especially by human over-population and by unnecessary resource demands.

(4) It is wrong not to make urgent personal and collective progress in developing our sciences for comprehending all aspects of knowledge (of who, what, where, when, how and why), and of becoming more fully and capably conscious.

(5) It is wrong not to act to rectify the foregoing wrongs to the fullness of one’s growing abilities (a sin of omission).

More to follow . . .

*

A UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN GOALS

(a proposal)

1. To institute the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) worldwide.

2. To institute the Global Ethic (1993) worldwide.

3. To prioritize the pursuits of science and humane technology under the guidance of wise values.

4. To develop a Science of Wisdom that guides the wisdom of science by its ever-refining values.

5. To articulate and institute an Ecological Ethic (developed from the Earth Charter of 2000) respecting the rights of all life forms on Earth to be protected from despoiling by reckless and predatory human behavior.

6. To articulate and institute a Universal Declaration of Diversity to protect against arbitrary motives of conformity and regimentation beyond the dictates of wise values, and honoring nature’s tendency to innovate and proliferate experimentally.

*