Chapter 129 - The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)


XXIX

Who does not want to stay forever young?
Every rose fades, get over it.
No drama, just fact.

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The wrong bait catches an empty hook.

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Set too high a goal and people will not bother trying.

* * * *
Those who imitate lack the inclination to be original.

* * * *
You are the church.

* * * *
You only need a guru if you are not ready.

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How can anyone’s love ever be enough
If you have not learned to love yourself?

* * * *
Isn’t your own soul enough?
Why would you need another’s?

* * * *
What makes you believe your version of history
Is anything more than a random hodgepodge?

* * * *
Satisfaction is a personal issue.

* * * *
Never let it be said that god lacks imagination.

* * * *
Where can words ever really take you
That you were not already forever?

* * * *
Just another irony of being alive
Is that in order to be still you must move,
And in order to move you must be still.

* * * *
Your will be beckoned when it is time.

* * * *
Coincidence just sort of happens.

* * * *
History notes many instances
What risks messengers hazard.

* * * *
Where is the difference between
Earth, wind, water and fire?

* * * *
Why cast your lot with any ist or ism,
With any limitation, with any limited view?

* * * *
Even the truth is a lie.
Even a lie is the truth.

* * * *
The vast indifference need not be a downer.
It can be quite amusing with the right frame of mind.

* * * *
What is this need so many have
For meaning and purpose?
Why isn’t existence enough?

* * * *
We are all prisoners of gender.

* * * *
What you think of anyone is your own business,
And does not matter one iota, or spawn
Any real difference whatsoever.

* * * *
It ain’t about you or me.
It’s about us.

* * * *
Intuition comes to those who pay attention

* * * *
We so admire and envy ambition,
Yet where does success so often lead
But injury and anguish for so many
Who are trampled in the process?

* * * *
See the godness in you.
See it in everything.

* * * *
It wrote itself through you as witness.

* * * *
Choice?
What a laugh.
What a cry.

* * * *
Benign artifice burns to a crisp
When the fire rages.

* * * *
Does the ocean care?

* * * *
Image is deception.

* * * *
Whether locked or open,
The door will tell them quietly enough.

* * * *
The rock, so still, moves
Until it washes away.

* * * *
Once you feed the beast,
Its insatiable hunger demands more and more
Until you are spent and blow away like an autumn leaf into a snowdrift.
The masses remain unfulfilled despite all your glory.

* * * *
You may often not feel like godness,
But that must mean even god has bad days.

* * * *
Who does not pay a price for their birth?

* * * *
Sometimes you finally realize that some things
Just aren’t worth putting up with anymore.
Infinite patience is a pleasant hope
Whose time has yet to arrive
In all but the most rare.

* * * *
Women jabber about relationship, clothes and children,
Men about money, sports, hunting, gambling and sex.
What in god’s name do the sexes have in common?

* * * *
To have come through
What you have come through
Is, indeed, a miracle.

* * * * *
Father, brother, mother, sister
Who art in heaven, hallowed be thy names.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.

* * * *
Know everything until you can know nothing.

* * * *
Minding your own business,
The thoughts keep bubbling
No matter where or when.

* * * *
The less you want from any of it,
The more at peace you will be.

* * * *
Experiments tend to supply further answers and questions.
Sometimes the answers are non-answers, and often
The questions supply only more questions,
Some of which have no answers.

* * * *
Another beautiful face.
Another gorgeous body.
Yawn.

* * * *
Become the smoke of maya.

* * * *
Is it even possible for everyone
In the game of life to be a winner?

* * * *
You are an antichrist as Jesus himself was.
The true church has ever and will ever be within.
Any lesser foundation cannot help but be incomplete.

* * * *
Can violent revolution ever cure what ails us?

* * * *
Do you suppose anything’s possible?

* * * *
An audience limits those who require one.

* * * *
Disregard the enemy without.
Find the friend within.

* * * *
Across the universe of imagination,
Angels sing and demons howl,
The unison sounding Om,
The great mystery, one.

* * * *
What a confused world to bring a child into.

* * * *
Truth seems paradoxical
To those caught up in words.

* * * *
Is the universal sound Om or Mo?
Dang, I cannot remember... again.

* * * *
What is contentment
But the cessation of passion.

* * * *
Do you really need to see it all
To know it completely?

* * * *
Keep running, please keep running
I don’t really want to catch you.
The chase is just enough.

* * * *
To see and not go insane.

* * * *
You do this for the other godfolk.

* * * *
Refuse to worry.

* * * *
Can you transcend your genetic pattern?

* * * *
Can you break the universal weaving?
Hah!

* * * *
The guys with the bigger laws win.

* * * *
Why should a woman’s leg
Be more enticing than a tree trunk?

* * * *
What patterns the gene?

* * * *
So you haven’t figured it out yet.
Oh well.

* * * *
To be free not just of your pain
But of pleasure, as well,
Now, that’s freedom.

* * * *
Don’t even think about it.

* * * *
Feel free to be your Self.

* * * *
Same old ho-hum.

* * * *
What’s the point?
What’s the no-point?

* * * *
You need not perform
The same old song and dance.
You do not require the mirrors anymore.
Neither applause nor jeers
Need be a concern.

* * * *
The trick in war is to hit your opponent
Harder than they were expecting.

* * * *
What so many seem to call civilization
Is just a big win-lose monopoly game.

* * * *
This has got to be some sort of joke.
This pathetic dream cannot be for real.

* * * *
How difficult it is
To pretend something
In which you do not really believe.

* * * *
Humanity is bound by its countless limited visions.
To survive it may need discern the one common to all.

* * * *
The world has ever changed.
Humanity has only briefly inflicted
Temporary scratches upon the surface.

* * * *
Transcending consciousness
Is merely releasing what is no longer necessary.
You have seen what there is to see.

* * * *
It is very much a solitary journey,
And each finds their own route
To the source of all dreams.

* * * *
It is not so much a matter of you
Becoming whatever you believe it is
As it is letting go what you think you are.

* * * *
What vain pretense is worth
Denying your divine origin?

* * * *
Vain pride is the linear mind’s baseline.
With it as your crutch you condemn yourself
To the blindness of the eternally damned,
Those to whom time is the imagined
Cornerstone of this brief dream.

* * * *
What loyalty does the scribe have to time?
Enough to write this silliness about the silliness.

* * * *
So many so busy making a statement
About one vain thing or another.
How blind we ever are
To where pride always leads.

* * * *
These words address
That slim segment of humanity
Capable of examining their limitations.

* * * *
Fair would be fair if everyone agreed what fair is.

* * * *
Concepts are not capable of being ends in themselves.
They should be considered servants, not masters.
Consciousness is a touchstone of reality,
And can never be reality in itself.

* * * *
Most cannot begin to comprehend
How appalling the fall must eventually be.
No climb is without the journey down.

* * * *
Extinction is an option.

* * * *
Humanity’s rise and fall
Will probably graph like a
Single heartbeat from an EKG.
A short-lived flurry of consciousness
In the eternal drama of it all.

* * * *
In any wager, the gambler calculates probabilities.
What are the real odds, what are the real outcomes
On all the ventures humanity is staking its future on?

* * * *
Conveniently forgotten again.

* * * *
The world changes one soul at a time.

* * * *
Find love wherever it finds you.

* * * *
Who are you to stop a soul
From sleeping through eternity.

* * * *
Take the romance out, and what have you got.

* * * *
Got to do it the first time to know.

* * * *
The only point of reference
In any given eternal part
Is that still point within.

* * * *
Rediscover it each time anew.

* * * *
Good thing your criminal mind yet known.

* * * *
What do you really know
Without whatever authority
Upon which you so depend?

* * * *
It’s just a matter of time.

* * * *
Give it all to whatever game you’re playing.
Don’t save it for the poor sportsmanship afterwards.

* * * *
Taking on the separations of the world is a heavy weight contention.


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The Stillness Before Time (Compendium)
© Michael J. Holshouser 2009
World Rights Reserved