The Troubadour Podcast

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I moved to San Antonio 17 years ago and read about Mr. Boomerang in a newspaper. At 15 I didn't understand this bizarre tale. Now at 32 I think I do.

It's a story that opens as many stories do today. One day a man, seemingly without reason, leaves his wife of ten years.

But here's the strange part. One day 20 years later, he returned as if he'd never left. Where had he been? Why had he gone?

Oh poor Abysmal Dismal Mr. Boomerang.

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You've probably heard the observation "you are the product of the five people" you spend the most time with." Sounds good, right? Just surround yourself with 5 great people and voila! You'll be great too.

Doesn't work like that though. If we blindly drop one friend we are just as likely to attract a new friend of the same exact type and replay the past.

In this episode we explore Peterson's 3rd rule from his book "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos." The rule is "Make friends with people who want the best for you." To do that, however, we must attempt new strategies at finding new types of friends.

To help illuminate the ideas in this chapter I discuss:

The Poison Tree poem by William Blake

Jason and the Argonauts by Apollonius of Rhodes

The myth of Phaethon and the sun chariot.

I wish you luck in your exploration. And if you fail, 'yet nobly dare.'

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For today's Sunday Morning Poem we will be exploring "Ulysses" by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Or, on living rather than merely existing.Few poems say so much in so little space. This is a poem that touches on the very core of being human. We'll be talking about:The role of affirmations to a humanist atheistImportance of community to individualistsAnd a converse with verse on "Ulysses"

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Sunday Morning Poem: "Directive" by Robert Frost.

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Continuing our discussion of breaking the monopoly that religions hold on important emotional concepts such as Exaltation, Reverence, Glory, Serenity, and even Peace, today we will be discussing Robert Frosts directive on finding inner peace and serenity in our chaotic world.

Some who come from a strong religious background will not be able to help to see that this is just a religious poem. I do not think so. I believe it to be deeply humanistic.

Poetry and literature are the ways forward to a proper civilization. True the House of God (or as Frost puts it "the house that is no more a house," is no longer needed. We instead must not drink from a poisoned well that promise of becoming a ghost and whisking into a paradise. The paradise is here and now on this earth. We must seek that "brook that was the water of the house." That is the original source for that house that is no longer a house.

To get there is not so easy a path as sliding down a slight incline The way forward is to go backwards.

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Happy Easter! On Sunday Morning Poetry #3 I'm reading the poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats. This is a poem often thought to be about Yeats' views on life after death. But I believe it's about Art as a religion, and, specifically, about the idea of reincarnation or "resurrection in our natural lives."The coward dies many deaths, but the brave man dies but once." Julius Caesar.How can we worship reincarnation if we are an humanist atheist? How can we appreciate the death and rebirth of our own selves?Well listen in.I'll be discussion:The story of Easter according to Christianity (Christ's resurrection)The story of DemeterThe Rape of PersephoneThe story of Dionysus (Bacchus)The Eleusinian MythsCiceroThe Dionysian festivalAnd of course a converse with verse with Sailing to Byzantium.

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Last week we discussed Wallace Stevens poem "Sunday Morning," and how to create a secular "church." In his poem he rejects Christian Doctrine and celebrates the actualities of human life and the physical universe as fulfilling man's needs without any compensating hope of immortality.His solution is essentially to enjoy the sensual world and to live in harmony with nature. A good message for sure, but he neglects one critical component of the human condition: pain, suffering, misery, evil: CHAOS.Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach grapples with a similar theme to Stevens', which is the impossibility (in the eyes of the poet) of holding any religious faith. But Arnold loses his faith for a much different reason.

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Peterson's 2nd rule is "Treat Yourself Like Someone You are Responsible for Helping."

What is it about people that makes many of us more likely to take care of our pets and less likely to take care of ourselves? Or why are so many of us willing to dole out sound advice but not take it? We tell our loved ones that it's important to exercise regularly, as we sit around eating burgers and failing to exercise.

If we are to take care of any entity in the world, it seems we will do the worst job in taking care of ourselves.

In this episode I discuss the relation to Peterson's profound rule by diving into

The Myth of Prometheus and Pandora

Ayn Rand's theory of Epistemology

Leonard Peikoff's "Objectivism the Philosophy of Ayn Rand"

Richard Mitchell's "The Gift of Fire,"

And T.S. Eliot's The Little Gidding poem

I hope by the end of this you will respect Your Promethean gift.

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In this inaugural episode of Sunday Morning Poetry I go through the poem "Sunday Morning" By Wallace Stevens. This humanist poem rejects Christian doctrine while celebrating spiritual values. How can an atheist pray? Poetically

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For thousands of years the West has inculcated a "mind-body" or "soul-body" dichotomy. This is the idea that the body is inferior to the spirit, or consciousness. This dichotomy has given us religious ascetics who destroy their own bodies as well as sadism. In modern America it has given us a bizarre coyness and bashfullness to our own nudity.In this poem by Walt Whitman, he glorifies the body as equal to the soul. The poem is a song to the body electric, or our bodies that vibrant with the music of poetry.My guest, Alex Spenser of wordswithwings.com, and I had a really fun converse with verse with this poem. We also talked about the nature of art, how art affects our lives, the practicality of painting and poetry and literature. At one point in the poem Whitman talks about sex and we could not help but discuss modern male/female relationships, particularly with regards to feminism.

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Kubla Khan is a Trip man, for real. It's not surprising to hear that Coleridge was on drugs when he wrote this.I chatted with a fellow podcaster, Rhys Morgan from socialgoodpodcast.com. Rhys lives in Birmingham—England! We've never met, but we swapped travel stories (both real and metaphorical) and conversed with this trippy verse, man.Enjoy as we go to middle earth with Good ol Coleridge!