Loamy wealth of love

We think of love
Love received and given
As some sort of luxury or windfall
To fall into or out of
but love
Love received and love given
is a bank account of loamy wealth,
Of strength and vulnerabilities,
Of small lessons in compassion
Of roots turning the deep darkness to growing shoots
Love is the breaths we have breathed ... suspended
and when the dark winds buffet, the account  holds one steady
Keeps the sustenance flowing upward
Keeps us rooted
Keeps us from bowing to the direction of random gusts.
Without love accumulated, tended, nurtured, folded deep
We ride the winds of anguished directionless
Drying out and loosing structure
And we pass nothing onward.

Mouth Foam Flotsam

Tossing on the storm sea
Flung like flotsam foaming
Shrieking in the galing winds
Drowned sea weed hair sweeping
The white phosphored wave tops.

And drowning, pulled down
drifting through black waters
Alone and oh so silent waters

Then flung up and out again to rage.
These are the days
These are the nights.

Falling back into Trust

I fall back into trust
Forgetting that anything may be illusion
Remembering confidences that I believed
I fall back into trust
I fall back into honesty unfiltered
I fall back.

Tumbling in white water
Downstream slip sliding
Seeking the lee of submerged rock safety
I fall back.
Seeking only truth
Light unfiltered penetrating truth
Hearing falseness in the eddies
Smell  deceit in runnel and foam
In the deep shadow silence of lee
I fall back.

a strange explanation

 A recent email to a "colleague" (well more a boss...) called attention to a problem of using an arithmetic mean rather than a geometric mean in a metric of performance that was extremely Poisson distributed. The response was essentially 'well, you're absolutely correct but since people use this to apply for promotion we wanted to use an aspirational mean.'  I kid you not! An academic said the equivalent of  "Yes, we know it's wrong but it suits our management goals so we're doing it anyway."
Can you guess in how many ways I find this offensive?  Let me suggest the following:
not honest
manipulative
mathematically wrong
disingenuous

I'm sure there are more but it's too depressing to dwell on.

Where the 2 cents worth??

After all of the thoughts and
All of the feelings spent
Still no one right word
To speak.

Those moments when something happens and all of the pre-thought, the analyses, the distilling of emotions drop silently away while out of the mouth comes something unplanned, unexpected, ambiguous. We who think ourselves rational beings behave thus. Often, in retrospect, I see that what I have said can be taken many different ways, that the few words in that moment do not convey the actual meaning, but there are no "do-overs.". And yet silence does not convey the products of the soul either. So, as a verbally symbolic species, we are stuck. Stuck, and yet we keep on trying (at least some of us) to communicate honestly, to make the words truly stand for thoughts and feelings as they are rather than using words to try and mold others to be as we'd like them to be. When I find myself doing the latter, it is generally not because I have decided to try and remodel reality, but because I am overwhelmed by my lack of comfort with what "is"  and convulsively try to remake reality by revising the description.  I think we best make what we truly want to be by acknowledging what truly is. In the Meyer Briggs, one of the continua is a "compassion - justice" balance.  I am a strongly justice person -- I am not proud of this. I try really hard to be compassionate, but when push comes to shove, I innately choose justice. I would like to understand the nature of this.

Just to get started ...."For now we see, as through a glass darkly"

Muted sight through darkened glass
Filtered, unclear, blurred  illusion.
But through darkened glass,
seeing not only beyond
but beyond tinged within reflected.
To see through a glass darkly
Is to see a partial reflection of oneself
And so, what is beyond the glass
What needs the seeing
Is muted, unclear, filtered, blurred, illusionary
and a reflection of the self
darkly.

One's life is the material expression of one's values

Look at your life... what you like about it, what you don't. The life you live right now (especially if you're my age) is a direct reflection of your values and a direct result of your decisions. Not the diseases you've suffered, not someone else's moves or influences but your very own actions, responses, choices etc. that spring from your own values.
One can always reassess one's values... but not without facing them and their results squarely. Once one has some life under the belt, this is a humbling and sometimes frightening proposition.... but oh so liberating.