"No culture has yet solved the dilemma ...

         ...how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of

the blood, the horror inherent in all life... "

-Barry Lopez

Bait

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The lines of ethics and aesthetics blur to the uninitiated huntsman,  become confused, synonymous, with the kill. The journey and the goal. Terrified of the cascade of events sure to ensue, he chooses a bowl of oatmeal instead.

“He who allows himself to be insulted

    

                                                    deserves to be so; 

 and insolence, if unpunished, increases.”

-Pierre Corneille

Stained

So where is the line? At what point are you no longer a victim, and more of an aggressor in your own abuse? When does the allowed destruction of self become the abuse of others?

It's the runoff. The pain and anger and shame in being the victim, in allowing yourself to be the victim... it overwhelms. Overfills. Spills down the sides and stains the surface for everyone who sees. Stains everything you touch, all you inhabit.

The poison, or the medicine? Which one are you? Where is your line?

“Do not be afraid;

... our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.” 

― Dante Alighieri

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Life Cycle

Are we fated beings, born to simply repeat, complete? Is there truly free will, or are we puppets, eternally bound to become the atrocities we abhorred as children, swore we would never be?

We change our children, generation after generation, we infect them. They are ill with our disregard. Our preference for television, cell phones, violence, anything but what we truly need. 

Unending Love

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times...
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers,
Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,
the distressful tears of farewell,
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man's days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours -
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

― Rabindranath Tagore

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...and i can say all of nothing after that.