A Matter Of The Wheel Coming Full-Circle

Grateful Dead: Dark Star...12/30/69

It is strange
how few people
make more
than a casual cult
of enjoying Nature.
And yet the earth
is actually
and literally
the mother of us all.
One needs no strange
spiritual faith
to worship the earth.
--John Cowper Powys
A Glastonbury Romance

Back therefore
we find ourselves returning.
Back to the wisdom
of the plough;
back to the wisdom
of those who follow the sea.
It is all a matter of
the wheel coming full-circle.
For the sophisticated system
of mental reactions
to which we finally
give our adherence
is only the intellectualized
reproduction of what more
happily constituted natures,
without knowing what
they possess, possess.
Thus between true philosophers
and the true simple people
there is a magnetic
understanding; whereas, the clever ones whose bastard culture only divorces them from the wisdom of the earth remain pilloried and paralyzed on the prongs of their own conceit.
--John Cowper Powys,
The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant


Grateful Dead: Fire on the Mountain ...12/26/81