let us consider foxes eating corn
May you gain strength proportional to the strangeness of the times.
Number 16: Fox fires at Oji (oji no kitsunebi) by Utagawa Hirokage. Public Domain.
Let Us Consider
by Russel Edson
Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his
sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;
or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping
her shadow off a wall....
Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’
tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips
in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given
to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which
saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in
vanity....
Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,
whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man
who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for
dessert served himself a chilled fedora....
from The Rooster’s Wife by Russel Edson (BOA Editions Ltd., 2005)
Creative Invitation
As things are surging in absurdness, let us let the surreal sing, a gold coin dropped from the jaws of a dog. Familiar maps falter in our society. Kings of malice (both at home and in the land of holy books) try to slash the outraged, courageous collective heart of the people. O but we are more nimble, more durable, more determined to protect our fellow humans and the life of Gaia.
On my keyboard, the back and forward arrows have fallen off. I tried to mash them back on, to no avail. A little beam of light comes from the inside of the machine where the black keys were. Is this my lesson?
If you were to abandon logic, as a way to make a new map, what would you describe?
Finish one or all of these sentence stems.
Let us consider the woman who…
Let us consider the men who…
Let us consider the armies who…
Let us consider our one and only…
Let us love in the way of…
Utagawa Hiroshige
Let us thank you for bringing our awareness on all the things we can celebrate or commiserate with rather than confront only the grief of the moment.
Let us give thanks for the friends, colleagues who have enriched our lives. And let our hearts be filled with a vast reservoir of love and caring that we can send out, share and breathe in as we try to survive the outrageous greed, lies and broken trust we are facing at this moment in time.
Let us pray for justice to be delivered according to the evil acts, and let us expand our hearts according the love and kindness and healing that we choose to send out, whether in thoughts or prayers or words of kindness or restraint or firm guidance to overwhelm and smother and drown out evil as it arises. Let us be brave and kind and firm in our resolve to uphold decency, honour, kindness and where necessary, retribution. Let us not be victims nor evil doers. Let us radiate strength and calm and powerful healing energy... as we surely can.
.
May the universe and our chosen higher powers, friends and loved ones be part of us as we walk this unknown road, tall, brave and unified.
Let us consider armies who disassemble and reassemble balloon animals, and carry oversized paper flowers into battle, spreading confetti pollen on their adversaries; where those who giggle first lose, and are then responsible for blowing up more balloons for the balloon animal exercises.