Thoreau #1...

"The millions are awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life.  To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.  How could I have looked him in the face?"

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The difference between a prosaic life and a poetic life couldn't be more stark.  I love to think of life in terms of poetry.  To find new expressions to lace together with fresh words.  To abandon the dead language and lenses of rhyme and meter and to function in free verse...letting your heart surprise you and others with its ability to soar by living on the fly...that is in flight.

Political living replaces poetical living quickly.  We are strapped to systemic rituals that have been in place for so long it's hard to envision life apart from these constructs.  At times, I try to cast off the bonds of these traditions at dawn, only to find them leaking back into my system by midday.  Codes of conduct and modes of operation press in and politic for control.  The poetic life is often discarded and made sport of.

But the rich and creamy life of poetry gives meaning to truth, and how badly truth needs a meaningful facelift these days.  We have outsourced meaning.  We have downplayed it and degraded it as superfluous and inconsequential.  What a tragedy.  What a travesty.

When lives again lay hold of the divine, that is the poetic spirit that swirls around us and within us, the very Spirit that hovered over the waters in the beginning, we shall once again know life in its most robust form.  Can you feel Him hovering over you now...can you feel the poetic life hovering about you, suspended and whispering into you ear, "Come over to the other side...the road less travelled by that makes all the difference.  Come live as a poet.  Come live"?

I can.