Sing Your Song (vol. 6, no. 4)

Here are a few things I’m sharing this month:

1. Question:

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings. – Rumi

2. Quote:

• “Nietzsche said it best when he wrote (I recall), ‘I have a song to sing and will sing it, although I am alone in an empty house and must sing to my own ears.'” – Louis L’Amour (Education of a Wandering Man)

3. Poem:

Excerpts from When We Were 13, Jeff’s Father Left The Needle Down On A Journey Record Before Leaving The House One Morning And Never Coming Back by Hanif Abdurraqib:

and this is why none of us sing along to “Don’t Stop Believin’”
when we are being driven by Jeff’s mom, four boys packed in the
backseat tight like the tobacco in them cigarettes Jeff’s mom got
riding

shotgun with us around I-270 in a powder blue Ford Taurus where
four years later Jeff will lose his virginity to a girl behind the East
High School football field then later that night his keys and pants
in the school pool so that he has to run

home crying to his mother with an oversized shirt and no pants,
like a cartoon bear, and the next day when I hear this story, I will
think about what it means for someone to become naked two
times in one night to rush into the warmth of two

women, once becoming a man and once becoming a boy all over

4. Something inspiring:

• Negative Capability – a central philosophy of the Romantic poet, John Keats: to be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” (ht @coffee_with_Keats)

5. New Blog in my Football is… series:

• Initiation: “But modernity has abandoned all this. And in its absence, boys drift—emotionally and spiritually unprepared for the atomizing impact of our hyper-connected world. Untethered, they are left to navigate a consumerist culture engineered for distraction—a culture relentlessly selling them comfort, convenience, and the musings of muscled misogynists offering hollow, counterfeit versions of manhood.”

Thanks so much. And, have a great day! – shawn