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Sonnet Sixty-seven by William Shakespeare

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Sonnet LXVII

by William Shakespeare

Ah! Wherefore with infection should he live,

And with his presence grace impiety,

That sin by him advantage should achieve

And lace itself with his society?

Why should false painting imitate his cheek

And steal dead seeing of his living hue?

Why should poor beauty indirectly seek

Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?

Why should he live, now Nature bankrupt is,

Beggar'd of blood to blush through lively veins?

For she hath no exchequer now but his,

And, proud of many, lives upon his gains.

O, him she stores, to show what wealth she had

In days long since, before these last so bad.

 

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Sonnet 67

Sonnet Sixty-six by William Shakespeare

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Sonnet LXVI

by William Shakespeare

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,

As, to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,

And purest faith unhappily forsworn,

And gilded honor shamefully misplaced,

And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,

And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,

And strength by limping sway disabled,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,

And folly doctor-like controlling skill,

And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,

And captive good attending captain ill:

Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

 

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Sonnet 66

Compassion Nut

Compassion Nut

by Dane Allred

That person can’t hurt as much as I do,

Can they?

There’s no way they’ve gone through what I’ve gone through,

Could they?

There’s nothing I could do to help them heal,

Could I?

There is no way they could feel what I feel,

Could they?

It’s nutty to think I could help them out

Isn’t it?

But compassion is what it’s all about?

Isn’t it?

Then call me “Compassion Nut”.

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Compassion by Dane Allred

We have all met before.

We were in the Bright Space together before we were here.

Since you know everyone who has ever lived, or will live, or who lives now,

What excuse can we have not to have compassion for one another?

We are here to learn all we can about this experience,

And someday we will return and share our feelings, knowledge, and

This universe will know what it means to be rich or poor,

Oppressed or free,

Healthy or ill.

We will have experienced every kind of life there is to live.

But while we are here,

We only have enough love for those like us.

We don’t want to know about the others

Struggling against the evils of the world.

We don’t want to help those who need us

Because they are different than us.

We don’t want to know about the suffering

Going on all around us.

It might spoil our moment of happiness,

Or interrupt our regular routine.

The secret of those who are truly happy,

Is learning to enjoy a new routine involving someone else.

When we get outside ourselves,

And help those who need our help,

Direct those who need direction,

We will find new direction for ourselves,

And help for those problems we face.

Since we have always known each other,

There is no excuse for not reaching out,

For helping where we can,

Listening if that’s what is needed,

For doing those things for others

We wish they would do for us.

What is it that we are so afraid of?

Do we fear that connection we feel when we meet someone new,

Thinking there is something we recognize about that other person,

A familiarity we sense

A strange feeling we have met before.

A love we share

That we have shared before.

How can we not have compassion for

Someone we knew so long ago,

And have met again for the first time

In this life.

Reach out.

Find that friend again.

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Three Kinds of Buzzing Insects

THREE KINDS OF BUZZING INSECTS

I don’t know why I thought I would be a good beekeeper. But once I read the classified ad that offered a complete beekeeping setup for one hundred dollars, I was hooked.

I plunked down the money and got bee boxes, a bee suit, and a beekeeping helmet. Now all I needed was the bees. Believe it or not, you can order bees through the mail, and you pick them up at your local post office. It was a small box filled with bees, and a special holding area just for the queen. I picked it up at the post office and started my beekeeping adventures.

It really isn’t hard to do, since the bees do all the work and you can harvest the honey of their labors. However, gathering the honey is something that was beyond me. Every time I tried to get to some of the golden nectar, I was repeated stung.

As secure as you try to make the outfit, the little stingers find a way in, even if you have tried to quiet them down with a little smoke.

I guess smoke makes them worried about a fire close buy, so they hunker down and act a little less frantic. I wish I had video footage of me running from the backyard to the front slapping myself in the various places I was being stung.

I finally was able to harvest some honeycomb, but had no idea how to extract the honey. I kind of sucked some honey out of the waxy honeycomb, and even chewed on a little of the sweet wax. But that was the only production from my beekeeping efforts, and I was such a bad beekeeper that either all the bees died by the next year, or they got tired of stinging me and left for sweeter pastures.

Another stinging insect I encountered resided in the hills behind my home. I have admired the mountains behind Springville for several years, and they have a beautiful ruggedness that calls for someone to climb them.

I was only wearing jogging shoes, and I guess I was thinking there would be a beaten path all the way to the top. But surprisingly few people have ever climbed any but the most popular mountain trails around here, and I doubt fewer than a hundred have climbed where I went. The top of the mountain is called Mt. Buckley, but I went sideways up the mountain from the subdivision above us.

This route probably added miles to the hike, but it allowed me to go up the mountain through a wide pass I had been looking at for years from my backyard. From my house it looked like there was a five foot tree in the middle of the pass, but when I got to it I realized this tree was more than 30 feet tall and about 50 feet around. I have no idea how long it had to be growing there in that dry wash to reach that size.

As I climbed the ridgeline looking for places to climb higher which didn't require scaling cliffs, I passed by an amazing hillside. The dirt had sloughed off onto the mountain below and there was a wide and a long bar of dirt facing south. It must have been fifty to seventy-five feet tall, and over 200 feet long.

But the most amazing thing about it was that it was completely inhabited with thousands or perhaps millions of wasps. We have had wasp problems at my house for years, and I used to try to eliminate them. Now I just tolerate them unless they are building nests on the porch. There is no way we will ever be rid of wasps there, because buzzing in front of me was the mother lode. None of them bothered me, and I determined not to bother them by hiking up a little higher before I went farther north.

Along the way I encountered a beautiful meadow full of yellow flowers and one huge plant with hundreds of bumblebee-like insects buzzing around it. They were huge, and I was seriously tempted to touch them, just to see if they were real. I couldn't resist, and so I put my hand up to the plant and the bees climbed on my hand and flew around my body. They didn't seem threatened, since I doubt they had ever had many encounters with humans at all. We were two hours away from the nearest other human, and all they did was buzz around me and crawl on my hands. I don't know what I would have done if they had stung me and I had suffered from an allergic reaction.

I think I like wild flying insects better than the domesticated kind.

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Abundance Betterment Nov 20

This is the complete episode of "Abundance" called "Betterment" from November 20th.

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Rat Race by Dane Allred

Rat Race

by Dane Allred

Getting better’s overrated

Usually, it’s overstated

When I get better

So do you

And then I have some more to do.

This endless cycle of better and best

Puts even the best of us to the test.

When does this rat race ever stop?

Why won’t you quit? So I can drop

My act about my betterment

And just enjoy retirement?

I will quit if you will, too.

What’s that? You have more to do?

Let’s get back on this treadmill fast

And hope our feets and shoes will last.

Ready? Set? Go!

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Betterment

Betterment

by Dane Allred

Can’t we all be getting better all the time?

Does someone have to fail so I can succeed?

Does your world view include winners and losers;

Those who succeed and those who never had a chance?

It’s too bad we don’t remember more about the Bright Space.

That place we were, before we were here.

Remember?

I knew you, and everyone who has ever lived,

Or will ever live.

I recognize you, and feel that spark of familiarity

That feeling we have met before

That we spent time together in that wonderful light

Of the Bright Space.

We knew we needed to have a life of our own here.

It was the only way to learn all we needed to learn.

It was the way this universe would experience itself

Through you

And through me.

But now that we are here,

That veil of forgetfulness clouds our thinking,

And we imagine we are all separate,

Alone and away from each other,

Wandering in our own worlds.

There really is only this world.

This time when you and I happen to be here together.

We are here to succeed

To strive and to try,

To fail and get back up

And try again.

And we are here to help each other.

How sad this universe would be if there was just me

Or just you.

We would miss the chance to meet each other again

To struggle to remember how we know each other,

To try to remember we are here for each other

Because we are all trying to experience the world in

Our own way,

Get our own experience,

Find our own path,

And help complete this universe’s attempt to experience itself.

How can there be winners and losers when we are

All here on the same mission?

To find out all there is to know

To return and complete this circle of knowledge?

Maybe you are here to help me find my way.

Isn’t it great we are here together today?

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Film Follies

FILM FOLLIES

None of the film stories I'm about to relate have any sort of injury involved, so for the squeamish this may be your favorite part. If you have sadistic tendencies and have been enjoying the details of my pain and suffering, you may want to skip this section.

I decided late in life to start my cinema career. Early on I had gone to Suzy McCarty as an 18 year old, and she quite correctly told me there were way too many 18 year olds who wanted to be in films in her agency already. So I waited until I was 38, and then I started looking for film work.

I was working as an extra for a woman named Elizabeth and I can't recall the agency, but she did get me lots of jobs as extras in locally filmed TV commercials, television series and even some nationally released movies.

I recall one of the first films I worked on was called "Divided by Hate". It was directed by and starred Tom Skerrit, who decided like many others that Utah was a great place to film for not much money.

Where else could you get idiots like us, who were willing to show up and play cops and even do some of our own high speed stunts. I'm not kidding. We were a group of police trying to get a fundamentalist preacher out of his house, and for some reason this called for us to drive down a dirt road at seventy miles per hour while only feet from the bumper of the car in front of us. My car even caught on fire as the bubblegum machines used for my cop car were wired wrong.

We did get to see some cool explosions, and I was even mistaken for a real cop as someone pulled up delivering some bottled water for the cast and crew.

You really don't understand the power you feel in a uniform until you are dressed like a fake cop and someone asks your permission to park their car. In the middle of a field. Just until the water was delivered.

There were reasons for me to explain to this delivery person that I wasn't really a cop, and that he really didn't need to ask me for permission to park, especially in the middle of a field in Payson.

But the easy way out of this was to just tell him it was all right. It was a great feeling, and I didn't even have to fire my fake gun.

We must have looked imposing because there were about 15 of us fake officers standing around. The extra-coordinator decided we looked tough enough that she convinced someone to take a picture of us surrounding her. She told us to look mean, and aspiring extras that we were, we did our best to look surly. After the picture, she wrote a note on the Polaroid to her ex, stating that these guys would have something to say to him if he ever bothered her again.

I hope she mailed it.

This was an eye-opening event in my life, and besides the boredom of sitting around for most of the twelve hours the standard contract calls for you to be there, I was learning all kinds of new things. Like the way to get the birds in the tree quiet for filming was to shoot some blank shotgun shells next to the tree.

They would be quiet for a second and then start chirping again, usually after the scene was shot.

I got my first big break in this film as I was called back for second day of shooting over by the Scera pool in Orem. This time I was one of the guards, and I was to look tough guarding one of the non-descript doors to the compound. That was how the cinematographer shot it. When Tom Skerrit realized how boring the scene was, he directed me to be tying my shoe until he showed up at the door, whereupon I was to snap to attention. I thought it was a much better shot.

I even got to play the vice-principal once at my old high school, which would be disturbing to the vice-principal who was there when I was a student.

I sat in the former offices where I had done announcements as a senior, I looked up my father, my aunts and my uncles in the old yearbooks they had brought in for props. I laid the books out on the table and took a picture.

It’s a sweet memory from a place that no longer exists. A property improvement is now in the place of that old high school. I don’t know if I think it is better. Maybe just different.

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Sonnet Sixty-five by William Shakespeare

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Sonnet LXV

by William Shakespeare

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,

But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,

Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out

Against the wreckful siege of battering days,

When rocks impregnable are not so stout,

Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?

O fearful meditation! Where, alack,

Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?

Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?

Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

O, none, unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

 

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Sonnet 65