Jack Spratt

120422 10:55
"Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it."
 
"There is but one blasphemy, and that is injustice." --Anonymous

    This attribution always brings a feral grin to my persona:
"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman." --Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
    The tuition payments, plus interest and penalties, is beyond counting, in THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS. Which unlike all other institutions of ‘higher learning’ is not, essentially, vocational.
    My orgy of reading began early, the public library my only refuge and sanctuary. The women Liberians, oracles, became fetishes in both senses. Now I have too few heart beats left to pursue the writings of those I adore fully save for their quotes as posies collected and encircled with fibers of those whose lives I’ve shared.
    I am now just past the advent of my third year volunteering at hospice. The gap within my journals & images, such as I have kept (very little) is yawing, silent, and now recognized as humiliation. What I was before, am now, will become, washed away. The fruit fly of me squashed against a headlamp of an onrushing train. . . .and humbled more by the love of those about to pass forever remembered in prayer and gratefulness.
    He lay there, last I saw, him unable to eat the food I would deliver. His face variegated and adorned with a beard reminiscent of Orthodox Icons of divines. I presume, but do not know, his passing yet. I am not allowed to record the specificity of his face but can retell the depth of “ . . . oh, you too?” discovered in converse.
    Perhaps, possibly, maybe, maybe not I write this in his honor. He is but one of many whose bequest to me is enormous, unspeakable, nakedly intimate and the only truth I now know.
    We die, each and everyone of us, the moments fled, appraised as glorious at the time when there will be no more seconds left. Not literary artifice, nor clever implication: My days are an eternity, each awakening, the dawn of a life reborn; new. Resurrection or reincarnation meld into a knowing explicit to my perception forged on the anvil by knocks, a sword become plow sheer . Grateful for them all, the blows struck, my hymn of Thanksgiving reprised.

"Virtue refuses facility for her companion ... the easy, gentle, and sloping path that guides the footsteps of a good natural disposition is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road." --Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known."