Are You For Real?

I’m starting to wonder what that is. Real, I mean. A good friend gave me a book recently, about philosophy and humour, and somewhere between those two I may have lost my point of focus. Once you start messing around with perspective and relativity, reality gets a little slippery and starts swaying like Moses’ staff in the wilderness. Good ole Reality, something that I’ve been brought up to believe is as solid as a nice cedar stick, becomes all floppy and even makes funny hissing noises..

Dreams. Are they real? Are they, as serious dream analysts say; prophetic, inner truths, issues crying out for attention? Or are they just the runaway sleepy fantasies of our over-stimulated minds?

The swami walking on the bed of coals will tell you that the mind can overcome reality. We’ll have to believe that his, at least, certainly can, since the reality of those embers putting out plenty of heat seems to have been safely ignored by his soles. (Don’t try that at home.)

Will reality go away if we ignore it? Having actually tried this myself, I can testify to the negative. My library fine stayed right where it was despite a very valiant effort on my part to deny its existence. Blaming that reality on someone else having misplaced my book did help soften the harshness of my undeniably real financial depletion..

Life is real, of that I am sure. My perspectives do seem to turn on a paradigm, but each one settles into its own groove, the good bad and ugly combining to decorate the reality of existence. Much as I might like to believe the twilight fancies dancing in my REM rest, eventually I need to wake up and embrace the real me.

I blog therefore I am... :)

Sleeping Beauty ~ Thomas Spence

WINTER ROSE

Return to numbness.
Sleep silent cottoned in black
Without light or pain or petal.
It is the winter of your dreams;
be warm in earth that hides you
And hides the world from you.
Return to numbness
And cease the climb on broken limbs
Toward futile suns.
Do not feel the starkness of your bones
Nor barrenness of sap.
Ignorant of spring pollen,

rest under decay;
Purple sweetness a tale nestled in the buds of yesterday.
And perhaps, perhaps tomorrow.
Lying deaf to prophecy think on nothing~
Nothing.

Julia Zed 2010

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I hate pruning my roses. I feel as though I'm being cruel, cutting off anything beautiful and leaving only bare thorny branches. They look so pitiful without their sprays of leaves and flowers. But it must be done; in fact I'm doing them a favour. After only a few weeks of ugliness, they begin to sprout all kinds of greenery, and before I know it there are already buds fattening and promising me hours of delight for my senses. I'm waiting for my favourite plant, the belle of them all, to sprout her first bud. She produces a deep burgundy blossom so fragrant that it makes me dizzy. I pruned her hardest of all.

When I think roses...this poem invariably pops into mind. I think it's depth, beauty and pathos are hard to match...


O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.


The Sick Rose is a poem by William Blake. The first publication was in 1794, when it was included in his collection titled Songs of Experience as the 39th plate. The incipit of the poem is O Rose thou art sick. Blake composed the page sometime after 1789, and presents it with the illuminated border and illustrations that were typical of his self publications. (From Wikipedia)