A PARAGRAPH ON KING LEAR

One reason King Lear is regarded by many as Shakespeare’s greatest play is that it deals centrally with the fundamental human dilemma of egotism vs. altruism, the perennial conflict between the demands of the self and the needs of others.  According to our most revered teachings, wisdom entails selflessness, a kind and generous concern for the well-being of others, even at the cost of self-sacrifice.  At the tragic end of King Lear, Cordelia, the play’s purest example of selfless love, lies like a sacrificial lamb in the arms of her father, dead but sanctified.  Even though the old, wretched king has now but minutes left to live, we see that he is cured of the rash, demanding self- centeredness that possessed him at the drama’s start.  This fond and foolish old man has won his way to wisdom, the wisdom of selfless love.  The tragedy is what his former folly cost.

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BOUND FOR LOVE

The dim allure of Higher Consciousness,
A subtle summoning from realms beyond
That promises an end to our duress,
Entices us to form another bond.

Relinquishing our ties to ego’s needs,
Emotion-backed demands clouding our minds,
We come to clarity as greed recedes,
Discovering it’s love that rightly binds.

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CHARACTER

The character inscribed within your soul
In time designs the features of your face,
Showing the world your gravity or grace,
And until then, you never can be whole.

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RIGHT BRAIN / LEFT BRAIN

Imagination is our right brain’s glory;

Delineation is the left brain’s story.

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RETURNING

Since Nature is so brutal, mortals crave
A supernatural deity who’ll save
Us from the terrors of mortality,
As parents once relieved our misery.

The comfort we still seek in such belief
Can never bring us absolute relief
Unless we somehow abnegate all doubt
That when we die our light will not go out.

Just as the setting sun returns at dawn
And vanished salmon come again to spawn
And seasons glide from winter into spring,
So may the soul abide, a constant thing,

     Eternally returning in its season
     Beyond the reckoning of our dim reason.

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NIGHT HOWL

O, why, O, why does Keena howl?
Is it for the full moon?
Is it because our neighbor owl
Is hooting the same tune?

But every night while we’re asleep
Our little dog lets out
A melody from somewhere deep
That puts our rest to rout.

As mournful as a funeral
Where grieving widows keen,
Her plaint is more than doggerel—
She sings to the unseen.

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BECOMING WHO YOU ARE

Who is it that you might in time become?
Do you possess a latent destiny
Which shrewd divinatory arts may plumb
Revealing clearly what you’re meant to be?

Or is it better that you not foreknow
But quest continually and ever strive
To realize the ways that you must grow,
Discovering slowly what you need to thrive?

Life’s an adventure and we all are bound
To seek ourselves, becoming who we are
By trial and error till at last we’ve found,
If we are fortunate, our destined star.

     To star in our own lives would be our glory,
      And those who do are then enshrined in story.

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