by Richard Subber | Aug 30, 2019 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Tidbits
Think about your own well-being…
Here’s one for your reading list
Tribe: On Homecoming
and Belonging
by Sebastian Junger
In his Introduction, Junger says:
“Robert Frost famously wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. The word ‘tribe’ is far harder to define, but a start might be the people you feel compelled to share the last of your food with…
Tribe is about why [treating someone like a member of your tribe] is such a rare and precious thing in modern society, and how the lack of it has affected us all. It’s about what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty and belonging and the eternal human quest for meaning.”
It doesn’t take him too long to get right to the point, quoting from a 2012 journal article:
“The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment…that maximize[s] consumption at the long-term cost of well-being. In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.”
Here’s the thing: if you read that last sentence without saying some of the words right out loud, maybe twice, with feeling and with some awareness of despair, well, maybe you should grab the CliffsNotes version and save yourself some time.
Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, New York: Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2016, xvi-xvii, 23.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.
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Book review: Lord of the Flies
Never more relevant…
by William Golding
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Aug 22, 2019 | My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
I hear this clarion music…
Stone things
The stony silence in the great field
is a song whose words I do not hear,
yet it beckons…
The stones have no voice
but their music rises from the resonant earth,
a mix of ancient chords,
the glacier’s pulse for tempo.
The dull and dirty stones sing and sing,
their harmony in millennial measure,
their harmony in lasting sameness,
each with each,
and in their nature, enduring without change,
without distinct past and future,
with truth only in the moment,
perforce, with almost perfect resistance to change
in lieu of elegant quickening spirit.
The stones experience only place as variety,
they are stone-like in whatever aspect,
whatever space…
Their singing is a song of self, of steadfastness,
of strongest will to be.
The stones do stone things wherever they may lie,
in sheltering earth,
or cast aside from a garden,
in cairn, in wall—
the stones ever cling to their stony ways.
So. This is for learning.
I heed this clarion music of the stones,
and I will welcome each new place
and learn to be me there.
June 3, 2016
My poem “Stone things” was published in my first chapbook, Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups. You can buy it on Amazon (paperback and Kindle), or get it free in Kindle Unlimited, search for “Richard Carl Subber”
Published November 18, 2016, in The Australia Times Poetry
I step right into the breach here. I suppose stones have distinct personae, each one unique, durable, resisting almost every change except a change of place—and that’s good guidance for all of us, most days…Cleave to your loves and your plans and your special pleasures and your sense of the right things, but don’t miss an opportunity to go to a new place and find out how you can be you there.
My nature poem “Stone things” was inspired by “The Stones” by Wendell Berry.
I have discovered the poetry of Wendell Berry. If you like your poetry straight from the shoulder, wholesomely explicit, tapped into a love affair with nature, and expressly literate, then get one of his books and take a look.
Here’s a taste:
“I owned a slope full of stones.
Like buried pianos they lay in the ground…
an old music mute in them…
I broke them…and lifted them in pieces.
As I piled them in the light
I began their music…
The stones have given me music…
They have taught me the weariness that loves the ground…”
From “The Stones” in New Collected Poems by Wendell Berry
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
A Farewell to Arms (book review)
classic Ernest Hemingway
with relentlessly realistic dialogue…
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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Aug 14, 2019 | Politics, Tidbits
tiger rules are different…
“When you starve with a tiger,
the tiger starves last.”
another insight by Pogo, comic strip character
created by Walt Kelly (1913-1973)
This deeply intuitive advice is a bit whimsical perhaps, but it’s potent.
We seem to be in many end-game scenarios right now, and it’s worth remembering that lots of people don’t play by the rules in the end game.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Cradle Place
by Thomas Lux
poems wrapped in a wet rag…
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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