New Day Rising

The Lonely Lumberjack and I spend moments together on brief regular occasions. I am fond of him.

Life in the bush came with harsh struggles and dangers, I have learned , as did life behind bars. One had to be tough. One had to bear somehow, the idiotic things that so many men will do when they are gender-segregated for so long.

A man among them who knows integrity; who knows work-ethic and discipline; who knows the great powers to be harnessed from solitude and quiet and the pristine reality of natural spaces, all of which he is denied; how does he tolerate the unescapable clamor of idiocy?

Who would blame him for wanting to lash out?

Who would blame one, who has been judged harshly against the superstitions of the day, for judging others in turn for the unaccounted harm they do?

It takes some insight to detect the illegitimicies of human habit; to see the great harms in normalcy.

I suggest that this wisdom is rarer: To see that all of life is constructed for the purpose of doing harm and all these offences which surround us are natural and inevitable and born of programming necessary to our very existence, and that our own capacities, however occasional, for decency and balance are something to be proud of and celebrated and pursued and multiplied, but not to be taken for granted; not to be expected in others; not to be a cause for rage when others do not measure up to our own, perhaps excellent, but precocious, standards.

This, I would have the woodsman perceive, if I had my way.

I'm starting with the man in the mirror. I'm asking him to change his ways.
- Michael Jackson

I never yet heard man or woman much abused [who] I was not inclined to think the better of... and to transfer the suspicion or dislike to the one who found pleasure in pointing out the defects of another.
- Jane Porter

It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels but because they do not expect holiness from one another but from God only.
- William Blake (1757-1827)