So a calm day passes, and then, just as I sat to write this, we got the official alerts on incoming missile threats from The UAE’s National Emergency Crisis and Disaster. To be fair, they are doing a fantastic job on getting this all sorted and keeping us safe, but sometimes, it does unnerve you. After all, the UAE didn’t ask for all of this.
Earlier today, I also read about the testing of a Doomsday Missile (by Uncle Sam of course), that apparently, if ever deployed, will end life on Earth as we know it. Of course, why anyone would choose to do that is beyond me, but again, the events of the past few days do little to assure me that this is an eventuality with a non-zero probability.
Also read a couple (three actually) of good snippets today, that I reproduce for you below. There is also a book I heard about, called Adam’s Tongue, which speaks about (pun intended) ‘How Humans made Language, and How Language made Humans’. Will pick that up shortly.
A lot to read, and a lot to write, but at present, have to deal with the fright…of uncertainty, hate and false might, that I hope one day is just set right.
To rescue you from that amateur attempt at poetry, here are the snippets, in no particular order.
One thing you notice when you read pretty much anything written more than 100 years ago is just how impoverished and bland and limited our language has become. People spoke and wrote in a kind of effortlessly rich and descriptive way that almost no one does today. Nowadays most people write almost exclusively in cliches and internet lingo. A lot of people speak like that too.
The language contracts, our conversational vocabulary shrinks more and more over time. And the more limited we become in our language, the more limited we are in our thinking.
WHAT WILL TODAY BRING
This is the beginning of a new day.
God has given me this day to use as / will.
I can waste it or use it for good.
What I do today is important, because I’m exchanging a day of my life for it.
When tomorrow comes this day will be gone forever, leaving in its place something I have traded for it.
I want it to be gain, not loss:
Good, not evil:
Success, not failure:
In order that I shall not regret the price one paid for it because the future is just a whole string of nows.
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.