Let the flood sweep
one away — out
of the shallows,
into the deeps.
Don’t ever cry;
Don’t ever weep;
Just feel the speed
Carry one on.
Surrender [Lyric Poem]
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Tag Archives: Surrender
PROMPT: 30 Things
1.) love; 2.) a glorious turn of phrase; 3.) discovery; 4.) walking; 5.) swimming; 6.) stumbling upon an interesting and / or novel idea; 7.) movement; 8.) travel; 9.) street food; 10.) quiet; 11.) health; 12.) recognition that when things are at their very worst, they must get better — because everything is impermanent; 13.) an intense stretch; 14.) Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass;” 15.) undiscovered country; 16.) the hanging moment; 17.) a mystery-laden world; 18.) a moment of flow; 19.) a mountain path; 20.) a clear stream; 21.) the way of non-adversariality; 22.) a thing stripped to its simplest form; 23.) the moment breath turns the tide; 24.) animals being animals; 25.) a brief instant of free fall; 26.) the recognition that something that used to cause me angst or fear no longer does; 27.) when body, movement, and the world fall into alignment; 28.) first contact with someplace / something new; 29.) connection; 30.) the first sign that the struggle is paying off.
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PROMPT: Health and Well-Being
Daily writing prompt
What strategies do you use to maintain your health and well-being?
Move my body. Eat my veggies. Feel gratitude regularly. Do not stick my hand down the garbage disposal. Surrender to my ignorance.
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FIVE WISE LINES [June 2025]
…we should not be too confident in our belief of anything.
cicero; tusculan disputations
No matter what plans you make,
Rumi; Mathnawi II
no matter what you acquire,
the thief will enter from the unguarded side.
Be occupied, then, with what you really value
and let the thief take something less.
Very little is needed to make a happy life;
Marcus aurelius; Meditations
it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
I possess, but I am not possessed by her;
aristippus [according to Diogenes laertius in
since the best thing is to possess pleasures
without being their slave,
not to be devoid of pleasures.
lives of the eminent philosophers]
Do not fear the gods.
philodemus; Herculaneum papyrus
Do not fear death.
What is good is easy to attain.
What is painful is easy to endure.
[Often referred to as the four cures of epicurus]
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PROMPT: Decision
Daily writing prompt
Describe a decision you made in the past that helped you learn or grow.
To surrender to my ignorance. If one can never know exactly what game one is playing, it becomes much easier to avoid getting worked up about whether one is playing it right or whether one will “win” or not.
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Accidental Travel [Sonnet]
If you can follow rivers to the sea by drifting without thrashing or grasping -- just let the flow take you upon a spree, a spree of dunk and breathe, without gasping, then you will witness all there is to know. You'll see shaky shanties and vast estates, the birds in flight and creatures: fast and slow, the weeping willows, and fish tempting Fates. If you can roll around the rocks -- always -- and never crack your head and silence all the voices saying you've reached your end-days, and never rush and never, ever stall... If you can do all this and keep the flow, it won't matter you don't know which way you go.
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POEM: Surrender
The arrogance, shoving words into rows,
try to describe someplace only god knows.
A cube of rock, turned edge skywards,
loftily defying each, and all, of my words.
Jolie laide in its craggy perfection,
free from all vanity and dejection.
When it shrouds itself in cloudy veils,
it doesn’t do so because it quails.
It demands no awe and yet has mine.
It is the sacred, sans the shrine,
and, before it, I bow.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 