I’m late to my (mostly) daily readings today. As well as my own book of collected quotes and poems (which I now know is called a commonplace book), my small stack of books at present are:

• More Daily Wisdom: 365 Buddhist Inspirations, edited by Josh Bartok
• How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, Translated with a commentary by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood
• The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
• Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

I have a couple of Mary Oliver books I rotate in and out of my stack. I simply go through the book from one poem to the next, so today’s selection surprised me, reflecting how I’m feeling as I try to ignore the news from the country to the south, a place I don’t understand, and whose leaders I now somewhat fear.

OF THE EMPIRE

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Mary Oliver
from the book Red Bird, 2008, Beacon Press