Hitching a ride, trusting a partner, marrying the same person three times
Subscribe and Save up to 45%
Ralph Earle lives in the woods near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He designs Web-based documentation for IBM and occasionally teaches poetry classes at Central Carolina Community College. His poems have recently appeared in Sufi, Wild Goose Poetry Review, and Redheaded Stepchild.
It was about the time the first / poplar leaves turn yellow. / The cottonmouth, thick as a muscular arm, / slid into the water at my feet.
The root of our contemporary industrial pathology is what I call a deep, hidden rage in the Western world against the human condition. We are devastating the planet in an orgy of destructiveness. We refuse to accept anything in its natural state.
[Economics] tries to use equilibrium concepts to model a system which is in a constant state of disequilibrium and is continually evolving. As I began to dig into all of this, I decided that economics is politics in disguise. It is simply a way of rationalizing certain decisions about how to allocate resources from the point of view of the people who have the money to pay economists: the powerful interest groups like military contractors, politicians, trade associations, and the like.
What we’ve really come to see is that healing is not limited to the body. The body may live or die, but the healing we took birth for occurs in the heart; if that quality of heart is not there, no matter what happens to the body, healing is absent.
I wouldn’t call it [my world view] cynical, I would go beyond that. I would call it a total distrust of all the cherished notions we have of progress and history — and that’s a Balkan characteristic. We can’t believe that things are going to get better, because we know from our history that they never do.
For about fifteen minutes every day I worry about AIDS or herpes or Pentagon cost overruns. It’s not that they have any great effect on me, it’s just that I am a broad-based, categorical worrier.