Its A Beautiful Day

The trident spears, with gilded shaft ends gleam.
The feather-figured shield, of beauty rare,
He holds before him, all his foes to dare.
– The Hsiao Jung

So much gloom. So many bills to file, including my car insurance (was AIG, now 21st Century Insurance). A billion dollar bailout, and they jack my rates $1,100, semi-annually. Fucking lovely.

So as I organize sudden catastrophe and simple cares into their neat little piles and file them I pop on blip.fm, and before I write the last painful zero in the checkbook I find myself wearing my Carnival hat, whirling like a dervish to the music, mindlessly happy for a moment. I step out on to the porch. Its A Beautiful Day.

The shield of beauty: this quote from Sun Ra keeps popping into my mind lately. I will never know if he took it from an old Asian poem above or if it spontaneously came to his lips out of necessity, a phrase the world needed to know. It doesn’t matter. The message is as old as Arjuna: life sucks, but its what you are called to do. Best get on with it and make what you can of it, knowing we were never meant to survive.

Time flies. We had best do the same, while it is yet a beautiful day.

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