the winter of my face

3.21.2025

There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

Photo by Eyasu Etsub on Unsplash

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I love the dark moments of being alive.
Darkness and light; both are needed
To turn mere existence into a life.
I love the darkness and I love silence.
Being still. Being empty.
Oh night, you dark angel!

jobe

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No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.

Barry Lopez

They tried to be immigrants
And instead were locked into camps.
No sun, just a gray ceiling.

jobe

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The kindness of Spring races
through the warm air; I breathe it in
and exhale kindness of my own.
I take Spring in my hands and splash it
on the Winter of my face. How lovely
to feel so clean, so refreshed.

jobe

A poem by Russell Edson

Let Us Consider

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....

Russell Edson 1935 — 2014 CE

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One by one, the campfires
Light up across the valley floor.
Humans on the face of the world.
Here in the Sacramento Valley, a bat
Can eat ten insects in one minute.
Mexican free-tail bats. Red bats.
Millions of them.
And on those campfires?
Some kind of game.
Rabbit on a spit. Mule deer.
The power of the tribe.
The food chain at night.

jobe

Thanks for reading this. I am beginning, finally, to heal up from my surgery, and so I no longer think it was the worst mistake I ever made, even worse than my first marriage. I see it as one of those things that takes time and work. Things that I don’t especially like very much. Still, if you want to get knee replacement, expect a couple of weeks of a satanic amount of pain.

All good things,

jobe

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