Our society seems to have a fixation recently on the “walking dead”, vampires, and Armageddon. With all that to worry about, ghosts have become almost passé.

But, as quickly as our society has been evolving in recent years, ghosts are all around us. We just haven’t noticed. The “tall grass” hides their arrivals and departures. And perhaps, as we become more dehumanized as a society, we find it more difficult to maintain sentiment and attachment for the people and things that were once important in our lives. They slip away unnoticed while we focus on the “business” of our days.

Then we wake up in the night and find ghosts all around us. They are the halos of things once beloved or constant in companionship that faded from our view.

Is it a better world with so many new ghosts stirring in the evening air and forgotten in the morning world? I wonder.

Ghosts is a new poem.

Glenn K. Currie

Ghosts

Tall grass muffled their departure

                                         So that I hardly knew they were gone.

Sometimes I think I see them

Running along the edge of ancient forests.

Their hooves pound the hollowed earth

That falls away even as I watch.

The ground shifts, the planet spins,

And they are swallowed whole.

Their graves are the caverns left

By the needs of their successors.

Their replacements rage across the land,

Arriving in spectacle, burning the air,

Eating the tall grass of their ancestors.

 Glenn K. Currie copyright 2015

The happiest people I know seem to have the good fortune to be able to use both halves of their brain. They see the world in colors and have a sense of humor (which means being able to laugh at themselves as well as others). They are not so smart that they are sure everyone else is wrong and yet they have the great gift of common sense which helps them avoid falling into the traps that screw up so many lives.

You can have a 160 IQ and never really be satisfied if it is all concentrated in one particular area. I know a lot of stupid, unhappy people who are genius IQ.

One of the problems I see in our modern approach to education is that we are raising our children with way too much emphasis on the technical and analytical sides of education. We are teaching them to be imperfect computers and then wonder why they live inside the little versions that surround them. If they never learn to utilize the other half of their brains they will lose their humanity. We are deemphasizing the “social sciences” in our educational institutions to a very dangerous degree. When we do this we lose the study of human learning (history), human nature (psychology), human interrelationships (all of the above plus geography), human motivations (all of the above plus philosophy), and human expressionism (all of the above plus art, literature, etc.). Without these we lose the understanding of what it is to be human.

All of these skills are necessary to develop the most essential part of learning if they are to be successful in life. You must have perspective.

The truly successful people that I have met in the art of living life have all understood the importance of balance, perspective and the art of understanding the “nuances” of life. And you don’t have to be particularly wealthy to make good judgments and good decisions at key points. It is important, however, to be equipped with an education that lets you see the world with both sides of your brain.

I worry for our future when I see so many elected officials without that balance: People who are smart but not necessarily in a balanced way. And I worry when I see so many followers who share those problems. If we lose our ability to bring “common sense” to the decisions that we make as a nation, we will fail as a nation. We will be faced with competing with robots, and lose our humanity. I fear this is already starting to happen. Our warring political parties need to put away the pettiness and gather together to teach our children to once again become human.

Glenn K. Currie

p.s.I am sorry that I have not been able to post here for a while but I have, and have had, pneumonia and my energy level is very low.

Susanne and I just returned from a cruise and one of our stops was Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston is a beautiful city which still retains some of the flavor of the antebellum era.

We often think of the Civil War as ancient history. It was a period that defined us as a nation but also marked the loss of so many of our citizens in a brutal conflict.

It does not seem so far away to me, however, when I walk the battlefields and visit cities like Charleston. There is only one degree of separation between me and that war. My great grandmother was a small child in 1865 and occasionally spoke to me about what she remembered of the soldiers returning home, and the impact it had on her life in a small Maine village.

The war drained the economies of both rural and city areas in the north and south. It chewed up young men like cordwood in a bonfire, and left families and farms unable to function.

She talked to me of watching young men, now old, returning from the battles .

Homecoming-1865 is a new poem I have written about her recollection of one of those incidents. The event still resonates with me 150 years after the fact, and I dare say there is probably no degree of separation from the emotional journeys that are traveled today by many of the soldiers we send to war.

Glenn K. Currie

 

Homecoming-1865

 

She stood barefoot in the dirt road

Watching a blue scarecrow approach.

The straw was missing from one arm,

And his bearded face framed eyes

Of anthracite that burned the light:

Leaving it in ashes.

 

Dust devils swirled around his legs,

Trying to swallow him, but their assaults

Fell beneath his plodding steps.

He passed the little girl without a word,

Disappearing slowly over the hill,

One of many ghosts, dead and alive.

 

Her mother said the young men

Were returning from the war.

They would help bring in the harvest.

When the child asked if this would be

A celebration, she replied,

“Perhaps the end of mourning.”

Copyright 2015 Glenn K. Currie

I am traveling right now on a cruise ship where we don't have access to Wi-Fi consistently so will probably not have a new post on my blog until sometime around the 16th or 17th of April sorry