Why do you treasure your voice when to be one thing is to be next to nothing? - Louise Glück

Despair in our culture tends to produce wild activity: change the job, change the partner, replace the faltering ambition instantly. We fear passivity and prize action, meaning the action we initiate. But the self cannot be willed back. And flight from despair forfeits whatever benefit may arise in the encounter with despair.

A word drops into the mist
like a child's ball into high grass
where it remains seductively
flashing and glinting until
the gold bursts are revealed to be
simply field buttercups.

Word/mist, word/mist: thus it was with me.

I am suspicious of my existing ideas, my conscious thoughts and convictions. They are what I need to get beyond, into ignorance and after that, with luck, discovery.