One Will Never Experience Or Know Everything

Life Encompassed

How often I have said,
“This will never do,”
Of ways of feeling that now
I trust in, and pursue!

Do traverses tramped in the past,
My own, criss-crossed as I forge
Across from another quarter
Speak of a life encompassed?

Well, life is not research.
No one asks you to map the terrain,
Only to get across it
In new ways, time and again.

How many such, even now,
I dismiss out of hand
As not to my purpose, not
Unknown, just unexamined.

Donald Davie from Collected Poems

Mark Jarman, in Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry, comments: This poem reminds me of the limitations of critical understanding and opinion, and also of the importance and necessity of growth in the life of the mind.

Who's in Charge?

God has not gone on vacation and left you in charge.

Proud, Arrogant . . . Llamas??

In South America the llama serves as the cultural metaphor for pride. To keep a heard of llamas corralled, you don’t even need a fence. All you need is one rope circling around the herd to keep them enclosed. Just by placing it at a height beneath the head and base of the neck, the llamas are secured in this makeshift pen. Rather than stooping beneath the rope, the llamas stand tall, but remain captive. They either refuse or are physically incapable of bending their necks, and thus are seen as a symbol of arrogance. (p.61)

--From Uprising: A Revolution of the Soul by Erwin Raphael McManus