the cattle prod of random fate

You get the strength from the pain. That's what I know, no one ever told me that. Maybe, in some perverse manner, Nietzsche was right...what doesn't kill you does make you stronger.

It doesn't mean life is always hearts and flowers...but if you stay strong, there are those moments. I recall one of my own poems:

My Life

My life. It is my life to make of it what I choose.
I will win, and lose
and smile more often than not.
Courage will give me hope. Hope will give me
strength. And strength
will give me the courage to seek new truths.

And I will never love without a sense
of wonder and awe at the
infinite possibilities within the human heart...
and the beauty of dreams, held iron and ironic
within even the most tragic
fall from grace and the dreams of the damned.

And I will not be given to despair, for I have stood
in fires I could not fathom
and held my breath until death seemed sibling
to the pain within my soul. For this experiment
of my life will have validity
within the scientific method of the universe.


William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.

The emotional impetus was a period of great aloneness in Venice Beach. Karla had told me we wouldn't work out, the Panther...God knows where the Panther was that week...others had either come and gone or had not yet shown up. The intellectual underpinning was a thought from C.S. Lewis' masterpiece "The Screwtape Letters" or, more precisely, "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" in which, in the course of a commencement speech at Tempters' College, Screwtape offers the opinion that every person is born an "experiment of God" to see if we will choose good or evil. He presses the point it is those who choose to merely react to their environment, not choosing to side with one pole or the other of the moral compass, who are the "failed experiments".

I was just listening to Dave Matthews' Band - "Crash Into Me"...that song always invokes Venice. It invokes a period of rediscovery and mystery in my life, the phoenix time of ashes still settling.

Yes, I have screwed up a fair number of times in my life, but I always get back up and try to find the right path. Hard lessons are usually the swiftest to learn, but still require a time of the tutelage of pain.

Much to do today...Mark Rockeymoore has presented me with some great soundfiles of my guest this week on FROM OUT OF THE CITY, Aberjhani, and I plan to give him a great show this weekend. Time for purpose.

Yes, Sisyphus is the happiest of men. And the cattle prod of random fate only strengthens his resolve.