Cold front on the mountain: no time to get timid. The once-brave also perish who cannot cut the last rope behind them. Past a certain point, unless we are being the men and women we can be, we will not become the men and women we could be. Thus from strength to strength our truest path lay -- no short or easy one.


To seek truth can be to seek that which, once found, remains true forever. Thus our lives are not true; but the patterns of life are true -- find we them in a microscope or a market, one library or a loved one, the closest acre, or a familiar congregation.


Moderate justice for me please. The sophistication needed for extreme justice -- if such exists -- cannot live in the wild. In the wild, extreme justice marches the same tune as extreme injustice.


They who are too wild, love them, but keep your reserve and follow not their way.


Santa must have the most frightful backstory -- for out of what we have lost can we give to others.


The self is like that magician's box where any two opposing sides can simultaneously open. Try too many pairs at once and the structure collapses. But be flexible in opening any single pair and no gale can threaten it. That we can call strength is not breaking in the wind.


Plausibly, the spiritual side of belief, contrasted to the religious, posits that Reality or Truth is by some measure "less" than meets the eye and simple, not "more" than meets the eye and ornate. On the "less than" side there are seen books in a single breeze, and suspicious that eye toward words and writing.

                                         Per Topic and One Early Essay                                  Jerry Van Polen
Per Topic and One Early Essay


Jerry Van Polen