Tagore | Saying nothing in particular

I confess that I don’t often wear garden gloves while weeding, which means my fingernails are a fright and I have to be leery of plants whose sap, once on your skin, has to be removed with turpentine. But garden gloves get smelly and have to be washed and hung on the line where often I forget about them for days. Then the sun comes out and I forget about them again and they shrink.

Sometimes I’ll get a thorn in one of my fingers and I vow to remove all roses from the garden.

Except perhaps the climbing roses. They have no thorns.

The fox squirrel hears the door open and springs into action.

“You don’t really think you’re getting out the door without giving me a peanut!”

As I sit in my chair by the window contemplating the mundane on a soggy day, so far away bombs are falling. Who knows what it will lead to. If we’re lucky, some bluster-fluster saber rattling although … it sure gets old. It sure gets old.

A few days ago a woman who’d just graduated from law school wore a hijab to a party honoring her and others at the Dean’s house. There she whipped out a portable bullhorn and proceeded to lecture the attendees on the genocide the university is supporting in Gaza. The Dean and his wife are Jewish, as she well knew. Horror upon horror, they asked her to leave. Horror upon horror, they touched her sacred hijab on the holiest of Muslim holidays when she refused to leave. Now, of course, she’s suing. It sure gets old.

– Specks of living light
twinkling in the dark. R. Tagore

In my family Easter is more about chocolate eggs than the Resurrection. But that doesn’t mean I’m an atheist or even an agnostic. I have been to church and I have been baptized; I even spent a year studying the Bible in college. Churches can be wonderful institutions, even the ones whose beliefs leave me scratching my head but

my church is wild and uncontrolled by man.

Outside, be it deep in the woods or by the sea, that’s where I feel close to the inexplicable, all-encompassing, transcendental forces which philosophers far wiser than me struggle to comprehend.

Theories about blogging differ wildly. Some insist that you put yourself out there. Don’t be afraid to take positions on controversial subjects. Encourage debate, particularly if your platform is something like kinky sex.

Others recommend extreme caution. Stay clear of controversial subjects like politics and religion. Don’t do anything to infuriate a potential buyer!

Of course, which direction you take depends on your target audience and why you’re writing in the first place. In general I’m a bit of a wimp. I share bits of my life and only dip into controversy when I just can’t stand nonsense any more. But it’s Easter and so I feel inspired to share with you the work of Rabindranath Tagore, my go-to guy for peace of mind. I was introduced Tagore, a Bengali writer and painter, at the stupid age of eighteen by a dear friend intent on freeing my mind from convention. For decades I’ve carried a copy of his “thoughts” (Fireflies) with me wherever I go. It’s beat up and stained and the spine gave up long ago but the book is out of print and almost impossible to replace.

Tagore was inspired by Chinese and Japanese “thoughts” painted on fans and pieces of silk, thus his works are not poems or haikus or even sonnets, just thoughts. Like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “let he who is without sin throw the first stone” and “love thy neighbors as thyself” and so many other thoughts by another great philosopher.