impulse and excess

 

freedom and responsibility

freedom can be a wonderful reality

within which to move,

the individual empowered to follow first impulse,

without any governor restricting desire,

freedom can thus be to soar above it all,

without limits, the "imaginary lines" that Whitman described,

that seek to keep a person from being one's "own master,"

yet in our world we are connected to that larger than us,

we can be constrained by what is right,

by other people, and creatures, and realities,

who add their voices to our inner direction,

real lines that should softly, but firmly, hold us,

in decision-making that is beyond our first impulse,

somehow we need to find a way forward

that both honors our freedom and restricts our excess,

the story of Genesis describes God's gift of free will,

and also the harsh result of indulging self

in defiance of obedience to a defining divine rule,

we mature into understanding

as we learn consequence for our actions,

an Indigenous prayer I invoke often

counsels us to both live the freedom of the eagle,

soaring in the sky,

and to also live the limitation of the ant,

which crawls on the ground,

freedom, at its best, should be tempered away from excess,

we can then live with balance, and thus with wisdom.

by Henry H. Walker

August 31, ‘26

The Greek in us

 

messages of the movie

Christopher Nolan must have felt called 

to the defining story of The Odyssey,

we of the West trace the essence of who we are back to the Greeks,

and this story sings of those beginnings,

at its worst it sings of male dominance and violence,

the misogyny and arrogance that Agamemnon preaches,

he who had no problem sacrificing his female child

for good sailing wind, to get him to the battle,

he was shocked at being killed by the mother of the murdered child,

in his world Zeus disempowers nearly all of the Earth Goddesses

to whom the Greeks prayed before the new power structure,

in this new world, economic greed is at the heart of most of our wars,

imperialist Rome the model for how to treat other cultures,

to consider them to be as fodder for the beasts

of our selfish assertion of will:

pillage, rape, the sacrifice of our soldiers,

the price we pay for how clever we are,

how good we are at asserting our selves upon the world,

as Troy is being sacked, we are forced 

to notice the heavy price being paid

as we are one with the revelatory shock Odysseus feels,

Nolan knows that we need 

to revisit this founding story,

to look at our past,

to look at our present,

to look at the future that calls to us,

and figure a better response 

than keeping to the same path,

it is easy to quibble 

about how he might have made 

different choices with the movie:

of cast, of costume, of language,

of what to include,

of what to exclude,

instead it is far better to intensely watch the movie,

as I did for a second time this week,

and to consider the message emblazoned in every frame:

that the Odysseus within us

should know the price of our arrogant willfulness,

of our submissive yielding to a tyrant as leader,

instead we should do what is right

for the sake of those who gave their lives

so that we can be where we are now,

Nolan's film argues that the way 

we treat visitors, the way we treat those different,

is key for us to be ourselves at our best,

we need to be saved from the consequences of our insularity,

of our dependence on a dominating father figure,

of reverting to identity solely through the tribe,

Nolan hopes that we will 

wake up from the Olympian dream,

and create a future 

that is far more inclusive, transcendent,

than what the lesser within us keeps choosing,

how ironic that one of the great gifts from the Greek uplift of culture

is the understanding that we are not stuck in cycles of history,

that we can overcome adversity,

the Greek in Nolan reminds us 

that we can find a better way forward.

by Henry H. Walker

September 2, ‘26

who I am, with gusto

 

new paradigms

retirement first feels of absence,

the laying down of work,

a laying down of a self-definition

that requires self-worth to result from one's career,

the presence of other ways of doing, of other ways of being,

can take a bit of time to find and accept,

new paradigms need to be constructed,

the new school year is just starting,

and I am no longer part of it,

relationships, photos, no longer my charge,

when I began my journey as a teacher,

I wrote that the goal of a teacher is to make yourself dispensable,

that if you help the learner enough,

they will assume responsibility and supervise their own learning,

their education within their own control,

I am working to feel something like that now,

that the vital work of creating and maintaining a middle school

is well in control with the staff there, without me,

maybe now my charge is to let go

and trust in the next generations 

to continue the tradition of Friends School,

to help every student and staff 

come into the power that is their birthright,

I want to spend the time I have left

on whatever calls to me now,

whatever connections to support,

whatever order to assert:

whether in house, or yard, or garden, or internally,

as in the writing that still calls strongly to me,

to think the good thought,

to assert myself with actions and words,

like with this poem,

to use my now near eight decades

of experience, of thought, of love,

to make a difference for the good,

in this world I dearly love,

I can still live for the good,

for nature,

for myself,

for the future,

and for the past,

I can figure who I am with gusto. 

by Henry H. Walker

August 29, ‘26

guilty comfort

 schadenfreude

schadenfreude, 

a German word for taking delight 

in the misfortunes of others,

there's no English word

for this reality of connected thoughts

that speaks to a truth

into which it is easy to fall,

another example of the power of language

to make a reality that was only nebulous before,

those of us speaking English

could already secretly delight in the sufferings of others,

but only schadenfreude expresses

what is at the heart of such feelings,

I have the teams I love and support,

I also have the teams I do not like,

when one of those teams did well yesterday,

I missed the inner delight in their loss,

in their misfortune,

I miss the guilty comfort of my schadenfreude.

by Henry H. Walker

August 30, ‘26

written by. . . ?

 

who writes us?

I like who I am,

though it challenges me to have a psyche

only sort of in conscious control,

a psyche easily swayed by emotions:

the laugh and the tear,

confidence and despair,

each an easy step from the moment,

each but a nudge from the other,

the man in me always wants to tough it out,

to control, to act upon the world,

make myself responsible, indispensable, for any move forward,

the breaking through to new lands,

the assertion of will upon the world,

those places within which I feel myself important, and of worth,

other parts of me want to connect with

and to honor others, too,

those who share the world we both love,

those who see a larger picture,

one in which the move forward

should be of a collective wisdom,

my ego helpful, but not determinative,

this part of me seeks to expands who I am

to be also who you are,

our older granddaughter talked of characters in books

and of how the female characters, who are written by a woman,

are often fuller as people than many women characters written by a man,

true to who they are, and also true to who they can be,

if released into what is possible and right,

my mother wrote much of who I am,

I hope to choose and embrace both who she was

and also the lonely, loving gifts of who my father was,

of how he worked hard to do his best 

and to make family and world better,

I want to honor that drive to act, to build,

to forge a path upon the world

that leads to a better place,

I want to also connect with partners

who have a vision of what can be,

and the energy to work to make it so,

in the stories I hope to live, and to have lived,

I want to use both the drive to do,

and the gift to honor how collective any step forward must be

in a better world that works hard to balance individual and group,

the parochial and the universal,

within which all the pieces of one's self

can come to consensus and into resolution,

I hope enough of us can be full characters

so that we can find ourselves together

and step into new lands sure enough 

of the totality of who we are

to create an improved world

that honors the best within us.

by Henry H. Walker

March 18, ‘26