Periodic comment – Moderates United

It makes me happy when I see “my” ideas out in the public domain. Obviously, it is far from clear they are my ideas–that someone read something I wrote on the internet and repeated it in their own way–and in most, quite likely all, cases are not. They are just someone else thinking the same thing.

But I am trying to build something good, and my name need not be attached. I prefer it not be, in fact. If I have influence, let it be silent, covert, hidden.

I remember reading about the church builders of the Middle Ages. Their names, by and large–the masons at least–are nowhere. But their work still stands. They kept their eyes on the prize.

I place no restrictions on the use of the content I create here, or that I created on Goodness Movement, or which I create from time to time under my real name, other than I do not want to be sued for copyright infringement for stating my own ideas. You can take them, but don’t try and take them away from me. That is my only restriction, and it is a very small one.

Here is a nice and, I think, relevant poem from Mary Oliver:

Song of the builders

On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God –
a worthy pastime.

Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside
this way and that way.

How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope
it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.

I don’t write here because I want to get an audience, or become known as a thinker, or writer. I write because I feel the same energy the cricket does. I can’t help it. It is life for me, natural, easy, obvious, inevitable.

And I want to share it with you, with the world, the way a flower shares perfume, a bird its song. I can’t value what I write here. I don’t know how. But it is offered from a full heart.

And it is offered as a meal at a table I hope I have set properly.