WKHardy's Blog

Wasn’t that the time when we knew that it was all around us?
We knew, didn’t we, that the heavens and the winds and
The seasons and the sea held for us The Tone.
The Tone for our careers.
Pitched high in the diamond, deep upon deep from the mountain,
Ineffable from the amber planets;
We were held in it, and it held in us, and for us,
It was all.

It sounded its laws in all that we saw.
Life and Love in all.
In that time we knew.

Now we scramble, stammering in our existence.
Now we listen, the wandering pulse.
No Tone.
Nothing fine, nothing revered,
Nothing unconsciously sublime.
The Bottom Line.
The ubiquitous, omnipresent, Bottom Line.
Not a shred of Beauty ever reaches The Bottom Line.

Back away. Back away and look.
Inch by celestial inch.
Be Orion; look as he looks.
Be close to Sirius.
Thrive among the Seven Sisters
And gaze upon our planet, on its own terms.
And look into your own globe-holding hands.
In one hand, a continent of famine, of desolation, and piety.
In the other hand, a continent of abundance, of efficiency,
and abandon.

Listen – The Tone is still, awaiting your move.
Look – The Tone watches for humanity’s impetus.
Let The Tone’s magnetic pull raise your hands.
Raise them, and raise them, and fold them together.
Wasn’t that the time?
That time has never ended.

A thorough explanation would not be forthcoming.
Not in all the ages of our lives,
Though we asked in ten thousand ways.
And when we gave up the asking, the waiting,
And searched instead through senses and intellect,
We again felt captured.
Something there is that rings in us.
That fires us, and awes us, and makes us breathe.
Makes us clasp ourselves, in, with, and through
Wonder.
Then leaves us.

So we create our glorious radiant sets of symbols,
Shining, and in shadow.
Our mantel, both displaying and beshrouding;
Do we dare to crackle free of it?
And rephrase that implanted question?
And recognize forever
The Will that in the primal formed us,
Has forever fired us,
And has forever, though it seems to beckon,
Been our own?

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The morning rose, yellow and lavender,

Calm and wet.

She turned from her misgiving window,

Paused in her musing doorway,

And passed across her grass lawn

As so many variations of her had done.

Perhaps it was the escort morning birds that

launched her.

Perhaps she had sufficient preparation at last.

Or perhaps her soul had had enough.

Certain of nothing but the momentum

She carried herself, confident,

Farther than ever before.

For the first time, she asked nothing.

At the first turn, the voices of the birds changed.

She felt herself release from urgency.

She spread herself, relaxed and broadened,

And passed her atoms among the atoms

Of all that was around her.

After that, she heard, truly heard

No voices but her own.

After that, there were no more turns.

POSTURE

This experience is here now.

Now.

It’s here, and it’s here now.

Have I feared it?

I have.

I wade now in the thick of it.

It weighs heavy on the thighs.

The torso strains for balance

But leans and continues forward.

The head is bowed, but only for a moment,

Then looks up.

All is bearable it seems, after all,

And more.

For what was false in the posture of the

No-experience

Has become integrity in the motion of the

With experience

And opens a future that would feel everywhere

Without alarm.

(untitled)

What is the charge that is given us then,

When we have seen through the Theosophists’ veils

And know that our own personal Will

Has become our finest direction,

Is nothing but The Truth,

And a child comes to us and is born

As our child ….

(untitled)

Once there were new eyes                                                                                                                       That answered time with flashes                                                                                                            And always knew why.

(untitled)

Gasping, we held ourselves at last erect.                                                                                              “Behold!” said one of the Angels. “What mortals are these                                                            Who have turned their eyes to the heavens?”                                                                                    “We who have loved until we know of nothing else.”                                                                        The words were strong in our hearts and resounded                                                                               without being spoken.

(untitled)

DRESSED IN OUR

MOST PLEASANT ARCHITECTURE,

WE SCANNED THE EMPIRE AND WE GAVE IT LIFE.

IT IS OURS;   WE ARE SO BOLD.

WE SMILED AND WAVED AND REPORTED

TO EACH OTHER.

ANOTHER BRILLIANT DAY’S WORK, WE SAID.

MARVELLING AT WHAT WE HAD WROUGHT,

OVERWHELMED BY OUR POWERFUL POSSESSIONS,

WE PATTED OUR BACKS

AND SHOOK OUR HANDS

AND MADE OUR WAYS TO BED.

DREAMING OF ANCIENT HONORS,

DREAMING OF DREAMED OF NATIONS,

WHEN AVID JOURNALISTS,

WHEN TIRED HISTORIANS,

WOULD TELL OF THE MACHINATIONS

OF THE MIGHTY,

WE, IT WAS, THEY WOULD WRITE,

WE WERE THE ONES WHO LED.

AT LONG LAST, COMING OF AGE,

THE AGE OF MANKIND

GLANCED OVER ITS SHOULDER

AT A FILIBUSTER DISCARDED IN THE WEEDS.

This is the first entry of the contents of my recently self-published book,

Once There Came A Thought

The book contains ten poems written since sometime in the 1960’s, and the lyrics to fifteen songs that I have written beginning sometime in 2002. Copies of the book may be purchased for 20.00 US dollars by contacting me –

williamhardy11@gmail.com

THE BOOK

                     Once There Came A Thought

                      Once there came a thought                                                                                                                     That evolved itself into                                                                                                                             All else that there is.

(untitled)

When a person has expanded and contracted                                                                                    Through several lifetimes                                                                                                                            during a single life-span,                                                                                                                    Laughing and reaching,                                                                                                                          Despairing, then gathering strength,                                                                                                   Becoming ever more quiet of voice                                                                                                       But forging an undeniable and far-reaching will,                                                                              Then does selection become effortless —                                                                                            Any and all choices having become beneficial.                                                                                  Loneliness does not exist.                                                                                                                        And absolute companions are unexpected,                                                                                        Even have become indescribable,                                                                                                          But are wondrously                                                                                                                                      and unmistakably recognized.

Released

On the trampled mirror, there

lay eight months of ambition.

Across the room,

The door was ajar.

On the outside step,

There lay one last footprint.

Across the air, the wake swirled.

Some time ago, I started a website called School of the Open Road, after Walt Whitman’s poem Song of the Open Road, which poem is about learning how a self grows through grasping more and more of the essence of every bit of what life in this particular world offers us. The goal of my website was to present examples of people who had become their own best teachers, one of the primary points of this blog. The website featured a nineteen-year-old man who had taught himself to play concert-level piano in about a year and a half, that time culminating in his public performance of four classic works for piano and a composition of his own. No one ever read the website. Anyway, I’ve recently had a notion that supports all of what I try to say about schools, that notion being that the internet has made schools obsolete. I try to show that true learning takes place when the learner has chosen to do the learning rather than having it pushed onto him or her. I have suggested that schools should be like libraries, where a person who wants to know or learn something can go into a building where there are rooms and equipment and even, perhaps only by arrangement, teachers to make it possible for the person to work towards his or her goal. The internet provides avenues to all of that, without the need to go to a building, or for anyone to have to set up or maintain such a building. All of my points about the efficacy of autonomous learning find their finest tools for demonstration and practice no farther away than the internet. Schools can still work for the youngest people, while they are learning the alphabet and writing and basic arithmetic and such, or that can be done at home if parents are industrious. And schools can serve somewhat in societies that have yet to afford computers in every home. But once the skills and the computer are there, and the internet provider is paid (someday, that won’t be part of the formula), any type of learning and to any degree can begin and can proceed at whatever pace the learner wishes it to go. No school necessary at all.

Just to let you know, the ideas that I’m writing about here are perhaps best followed by starting at the beginning — reading the first entry before reading the others. That first one was posted 2010/10/19 — Schools and Prisons and Crap n’ Stuff.

Okay, so the idea here is, maybe to try to put it simply, that my goal as an educator has become — and should be, as I see it — hell, I feel it, sense it, hell, I vibrate with it — the goal of all of education in any society’s system whatsoever — to help people understand, grasp, and really I should use some word like re-grasp, because we all knew this when we were the children that we were before we started school: that we are, each one of us, our own best teacher. Schools are not the centers of learning; they must be seen only as places where suggestions for learning are made.

Each one of us is our own Center of Learning. Spend as much time as you want in a school, it is you who decides how much you pay attention to what is being suggested at the school, to what extent you actually go along with the suggestions that are being made at the school, how much you really learn at the school, as a result of the school. You could just as easily be following your own suggestions, but we have all been cultivated to see schools as where we go to learn, and to regard what we do outside of schools, at least until we are eighteen years old or so, as something that is not quite as important or valuable as being in the school, doing what the school and the society says we should do there. If there were no schools, we would, each one of us, find ways of learning what we were really interested in learning, provided that the society in which we lived allowed us to do that, made it possible for us to do that, gave us the freedom to do that.

To illustrate, which means to make a picture of what it is that I’m talking about, if you haven’t been able to make your own yet: There was a time in my life when I trained in a martial art and came to the point of earning an instructor’s certification. That meant that I had had to do a lot of special sorts of training and teaching at the studio where I was a student, and then I went to a training center and did what they said I should do in order to become an effective instructor of that particular martial art, and all of this could only happen after I had spent some years practicing and training and testing and finally reaching a point where I had enough experience in the art to actually be able to do all of this extra stuff in order to become an instructor. So I got the certificate. That certificate would “expire” after three years. So a few years later I was living in a little community and some people there wanted me to start giving lessons in this martial art and so I said okay and somebody wondered if I were qualified to be a teacher or something like that, I don’t remember how it all happened, but I realized that my instructor’s certificate had expired and I said that to somebody and so somebody asked if I could still teach the lessons. As if all of the learning and training that I had done and all of the experience that I already had in giving lessons in the martial art were in the certificate. As if the center of the learning that I had done had been the martial arts studio where I did my training, and in the extra school that I went to for instructor certification, and not in me. That learning is in me, for chrissake! The learning that each of us does stays in us, and really, it starts in us, when we make the choice or feel the impulse to learn something, and decide to start learning it, then we really learn it and it stays in us. It doesn’t fade out, disappear, become invalid, become irrelevant like the information we used to get the highest score on a test at the school and then we have forgotten most of that information two weeks later. When we choose to learn something, have the personal interest in something that takes us to the point where we want to learn more about it, then we focus on it and learn it as works best for our own particular learning style, and that usually means that we learn it fast and forever.

Schools should be, and society’s should be, recognizing that, and schools should be formatted based on that — that people learn, actually really and usably and satisfyingly learn, only what they want to learn, and only when they want to learn it; that forced learning, required time in classrooms, is a waste of everybody’s time, and resources.