Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 866-868

Consider animals: how just they are, how well-behaved, how they keep to the time-honored, how loyal they are to the land that bears them, how they hold to their accustomed routes, how they care for their young, how they go together to pasture, and how they draw one another to the spring. There is not one that conceals its overabundance of prey and lets its brother starve as a result. There is not one that tries to enforce its will on those of its own kind. Not a one mistakenly imagines that it is an elephant when it is a mosquito. The animal lives fittingly and true to the life of its species, neither exceeding nor falling short of it.

He who never lives his animal must treat his brother like an animal. Abase yourself and live your animal so that you will be able to treat your brother correctly.

C.G. Jung,

Red Book

“Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?"

Ron Koertge

from Fever, 2006

Red Hen Press

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave

 your house or apartment. Go out into the world.

It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap

 one is best, with pages the color of weak tea

 and on the front a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than

 three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware

 any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks

 across the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.

 And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle

 where a child a year or two old is playing as his

 mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.

 The title, the author's name, the brooding photo

 on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray

 book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher

 it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower

 falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody

 in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh."

Then start again.

 

Better to be stoned in the plaza than to turn

The mill that squeezes out the juice of life,

That turns eternity into empty hours,

Minutes into prisons, and time into

Copper coins and abstract shit

Octavio Paz