I give myself credit for being smarter than I am. I suspect, given what I see around me in this wild and woolly world, that I am far from alone in the practice. Even owls, a favorite symbol of wisdom, are not likely as perfectly ingenious as we imagine them, but they might still be more intelligent than the half of us.
The Search Continues
Parsing paragraphs to find
The author’s complete state of mind
Is no more useful than to ask
A Word how it performs its task,
If we assume we’ve read aright
What’s only there in black and white.
The Long and the Short of It
How quickly pass the hours and days
and weeks and months and years,
And yet, how slowly pass our worries,
paranoiac fears;
This is the great conundrum that
presents in mortal time,
And quite enough of food for thought
in one quick, measly rhyme.
Art-Colored Glasses 
At least half 🙂 I’m envious of your skills once again.
Yes, even though as Ted notes below, owls are not as clever as many other birds, they’re probably *still* not quite as much the bird-brains as humans are!
I’m envious of *your* artistry, so I guess we’re even!
Cheers, my friend. 😀
Morning Kathryn. I had the pleasure of hearing owls recently and it waa such a joy. Just wanted to share that with you x
What a thrill! I’ve only ever seen any in the wild once or twice, and can think of exactly one time I’ve heard them “speak”. What a privilege. Thanks for sharing it!! Hope you’re well and happy these days, darling Claire!
xoxo,
Kathryn
Good one:) have a lovely quiet Black Friday….Janet. xxx
It’s been a decent day, but slightly less perfect than I’d hoped: despite our success in avoiding the retail rush of Black Friday, we’re experiencing “Brown Friday” at home. The main sewer on our street seems to have backed up into our whole household—all three toilets, two showers, and one bathtub. Ewww! The plumber was here briefly and couldn’t find the water clean-out on our property, so he’ll have to come with a helper tomorrow and see if they can fix things. Thank goodness I was able to catch the back-flow early enough to avoid too much effluent coming into the house with all of the water, so at least it doesn’t *smell* terrible in the house; it’s just not super convenient having to be so careful with water and drains at the moment. Haha!
So I shall meditate on magical hummingbirds and hope that the plumbers’ drain-clearing machine will whir just as magically as those wings, tomorrow. Then we’ll have a much nicer Saturday! 😀
Hope you have a beautiful weekend, my dear Janet!!
xoxo,
Kathryn
Even before I got to the notion that “we assume we’ve read aright / What’s only there in black and white” I noticed a second and unintended sense of your post’s first sentence. I read it as meaning: “I give myself credit because I am smarter than I am.” I think I was conditioned by a review I published the other day of a smartphone app that can solve a first-degree equation. As part of my testing of the program, I gave it an equation in which the right side is permanently one greater than the left side. That’s an impossibility, of course, but it’s like your being smarter than yourself. (By the way, the app just sat there and didn’t do anything with my equation.)
Mean old app. And it seems equally unfair that everybody in the world has a better chance of being smarter than me than I can be. Not that they aren’t already. Sigh. Life is so complicated. 😉
🙂
😉
I must disappoint you empress, owls are not even very smart as birds go 😉 Crow birds on the other hand are very smart and should actually have been our symbol of wisdom 🙂
I do so agree! I love crows, and I certainly know they’re wonderfully smart birds. I’ll happily support the substitution. Here’s to crows as *our* symbol of wisdom, no matter what others choose as theirs! 😀
Love your owl:)
😀 I’m sure my owl loves you, too, if he’s half as wise as he pretends to be. 😀
xo