Tag Archives: Yin and Yang

Yin, Yang and the Sea: Sunday Swirl Wordle 528

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This boy hand casting his line seemed to be either saluting or cursing the ocean.

Yin, Yang and the Sea

The sea strikes turquoise dissonance, then shhhsh’s it away,
releasing all the tension pent up by the day.
It speaks an easy language as it rolls along the bay,
but as often as it visits, we know it will not stay.

One by one, the waves roll in, devoid of parity.
They cannot seem to achieve any regularity.
With macho strokes of fury, they claw at rocks and beach,
gouging out in anger all that they can reach,
then turning female, lap the sand with gentle licks of tongue,
smoothing all the sand back that formerly it flung. 

The sea spreads riches on the beach, then takes them back again.
Theme after theme played out here in a continual spin.
Smoothing and then rippling, blue deepening to black,
all the sea might take away, one day it will bring back.

For the Sunday Swirl Wordle 528, the prompts are: turquoise, dissonance, tension, easy, one, female, shh, with, stay, themes, release, speaks

 

We Seem Meant to Argue

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Time for change?

We Seem Meant to Argue

We seem meant to argue, to disagree and fuss––
to call each other s.o.b.’s, to blather on and cuss.
Somehow the world needs movement––the hurricanes and tides.
In every situation, there must be clans or sides.
There is a natural movement toward the pack or cult or gang.
Each game needs an opponent, and every yin a yang.

It may be named a congregation, a party or a cause,
but still there will be discord. There always is, because
there is something within us that draws us towards division.
Every peace march draws its crowd screaming in derision.
Some force within the universe that knows the whole of it
has decreed that everything has its opposite.

So though we may crave unity and hope one day to coin
accord between the nations, and for hearts and minds to join,
the truth is that the universe is like a pendulum.
For every radical event, the opposite will come.
if we just wait long enough, it will be peace’s turn,
but in the meantime hate will pillage, conquer, rape and burn
.
We would have it otherwise, but hope won’t make it so.
We may unite in nations, but we’ll still go toe to toe:
nation versus nation, like street gangs in a rumble.
The most sincere peace accord eventually will crumble.
Mere wishing will not bring on peace, but we can make a start
simply by appealing to that attitude of heart

that chooses to forget and start that upward swing
that can pull the whole world with it as it takes to wing.
The answer to the hatred is to start out one-by-one
to try to make the choices to set discord on the run.
To choose the dark sides of ourself is an act of treason.
We must conquer our own petty hates and choose to live by reason.

Today’s prompt is “Argument.”

In Spite of Our Wishes for All Good

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The real world is complex and sometimes none of the choices we have are good ones. If Attila the Hun is coming through, it’s not a matter of being moral. It’s kill or be killed.
                                                                                                                –Theodore Postol

DSC00419 (1)
In Spite of Our Wishes for All Good

It seems for every good in life, there exists an evil.
Tomatoes suffer mildew and cotton has its weevil.
As north has south and light has dark, it seems the world is run
by drought balanced with rainfall and dark replacing sun.

It isn’t how we’d have it if the choice were up to us.
Who wouldn’t rather have the joys of life without the fuss?
But anima and animus and yin and yang are what
seem to keep our lives out of the same old rut.

As much as we might put off death if we had our druthers,
without it there would be no room for more sisters and brothers.
Would that the inevitable could just be delayed,
the game would turn out more like we wish it could be played,

but somehow the world’s demons like Isis and Attila
are the bitter flavors that balance the vanilla.
The words I write are hard to take when evil in this world
is visited on those we love and sadness is unfurled.

We all agree it isn’t fair that one should have good luck
while others suffer pain and sadness, buried in the muck.
Many try to change it but the changes never stay.
Night often cancels out what we’ve achieved by light of day.

The religious live on faith, but others curse the day
that they were born into a world that’s so suffused by gray.
For light and dark are always mixed in varying combinations.
Each day we choose our focus: good or abominations.

Those who focus on the bad confront it for us while
those others of us plant the crops and fix the broken stile.
Some preserve the joys of life while others fight the ills.
Some swallow the honey and the others bitter pills.

In this as well we find that nature provides opposites.
Some farm in the highlands while the others mine the pits.
But all are necessary for the progress of the whole,
for as the world keeps spinning, it functions as a bowl

filled with all the opposites the universe provides––
that force that makes it necessary that we all choose sides
and pull or push to keep the carousel securely spinning.
It would seem that in the good life, there must also be some sinning.


About the Picture:  I just wrote this as a comment to a friend on Facebook who said she liked the picture above.  After I’d posted it I decided others might be interested in the story, so here it is:

  • Since I have a bad reaction to the sun, I get up at 6 and walk on the beach in the dark, then return by the time the sun comes up over the buildings and trees, so there are very few people on the beach when I walk. This stranger I’d passed on the beach a few times came up one of my last days there and pressed a starfish into my hand…small, orange, beautiful and yes, dead. He said he’d had three for me the day before but hadn’t seen me and asked where I was. This from an utter stranger who I guess had noticed me picking things up each day and stowing them in my bag. I still have the starfish. Yes good things happen.

    Actually, I had been frightened when I saw him from far away carrying a machete because a madwoman had attacked my neighbor the day before and I couldn’t see who it was and was afraid it was she…I was getting ready to jump in the ocean and swim out from the shore when I realized it was not a woman but a man with the machete! And felt relief. What a funny juxtaposition of normal fears. And then after all that, he gave me that wonderful and thoughtful gift. This is why I chose this photo to illustrate my poem.

Wicked witch. Today’s Prompt: Wicked Witch–Write about evil: how you understand it (or don’t), what you think it means, or a way it’s manifested, either in the world at large or in your life.

Yin and Yang

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                                               Yin and Yang

I wrote about Yin and Yang in a much earlier post that hardly any of my present followers read. Go here to read that poem: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2014/06/21/changing-lines/

*https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/yin-to-my-yang/

Changing Lines

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Changing Lines

Would passion carry the same voltage
or heartbreak the sting
if from the beginning we knew
that every extreme
brings us a step closer to its opposite?
It is that great pendulum of the I Ching—
that flowing from the yin to yang—
that foretells the fall of great regimes
glorious in their altruism
who, reaching their apex,
must head back again
towards cruel tyranny.

If we’d known this from the start,
each Summer Solstice would become
a day of mourning,
knowing that having reached one summit,
there is no further height to climb to.
And tomorrow, the start of our slow descent
will bring us closer to that other summit
where dark will reign.

Part of the power of youth’s sweet ecstasy
as well as bitter heartbreak is that it seems as though
they’ll last forever.
This is the spice of life.
Its bread comes later,
as we recognize that
everything,
everything                   everything
changes          into its
opposite.

Since today is June 21, today’s prompt was to write about the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.