Saturday, September 25, 2010

Icons: What's in a Name?

A quick view of how a word can change over the years, yet there is an underlying meaning that perhaps remains the same:


Medieval Icons







20th Century Icons










21st Century Icons

















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Tuesday, September 21, 2010

I'll Be Seeing You

No, I'm not going anywhere. It's just that I awoke the other day with this song in my head. It's one of those from the Great American Song Book, of the WWII era. I can't recall ever actually sitting down to listen to it in its entirety, but would recognize certain phrases from the song. I suppose it's one of those tunes that has become ingrained into the public consciousness. I had to look it up online to learn that the music  for "I'll Be Seeing You" was written by Sammy Fain, and the lyrics by Irving Kahal. First published in 1938, it was from the Broadway musical, Right This Way.

Here's how the song came into my head: I was dreaming that I was singing the song. I was standing at the microphone and wearing a gray jacket and black tie; there was a lady at the piano, and the number began with great delight. I guess I was Frank Sinatra, or Dino (only in my dreams).

Sometimes a dream is to be interpreted, sometimes it just needs to be celebrated. So here are two renditions that I found on You Tube, representing the old and the new. Michael Buble bring a fresh new face to an old classic with this first video. In the second video, I don't know who the people are in the slide show, but the musical rendition is worth it. How can you top the great Jimmy Durante with that gravelly voiced stacato delivery and that upbeat style of his? He was the quintessential showman.













"Good night, Mrs. Calabash...wherever you are."



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Thursday, September 16, 2010

Things Fall Apart

I enjoy discussions about poetry, and I also enjoy philosophical and political discussions from time to time, but I love the way the late Charles Shultz could capture things in four frames of a cartoon. This is a newspaper clipping which I found recently that I had cut out years ago.









And here is the poem by W.B. Yeats, written in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I. Some say it describes post war Europe, some say it speaks to Yeats' belief in the emergence of a new cycle of history.


THE SECOND COMING
By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?



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Saturday, September 11, 2010

9/11: Living Through the Grief and the Loss and the Terror


I will never forget that morning on September 11, 2001. My wife called me from work to tell me to turn on CNN. All of us across the country felt the shock and the numbness. All of us felt the uncertainty of what lay ahead.

I had friends in New York City, Taylor and Susan Field. Taylor directs Graffitti Ministries which is on East 7th Street. I tried to call to see if they were alright, but of course, getting through to New York by phone was impossible for several days. I did send an email - it felt almost like tossing out a message in a bottle - I only hoped that there would be someone to read it and respond. It was weeks before I knew for sure that they were okay. Taylor later wrote a book about his ministry in New York called Mercy Streets: Seeing Grace on the Streets of New York. In it he included a very moving chapter about that day on 9/11.

I heard comments about this tragic event being the first time that terrorism had impacted upon our own land here at home. Like everyone else in the country, I watched the news each day and hoped for some resolution, some return to normalcy. Even as I was feeling the shock and the sorrow, I knew that this was not the first experience of terrorism on our shores.

On the first anniversary of 9/11, I wrote the following poem as a way to bring my thoughts and feeling together to commemorate the day. The poem is written in two voices. I have itallicized every other stanza to help keep the two voices separate while at the same time blending those voices together in a search for where to go from here.


When Towers Collapse
by Charles Kinnaird

It was an invasion
Of stealth, arrogance and deceit
That brought the two towers down
And inflicted a wound that would not heal.

                                                                                   When the steel and concrete gave way
                                                                                   Something inside gave way
                                                                                   As if the soul could drop to Sheol
                                                                                    While the body still finds its breath.


“From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever,”
Chief Joseph told us.
There is the urge to fight back,
But fighting will not rebuild the towers.
Killing will not heal our wounds.
Our songs may remember the two towers
But the towers will never be replaced.

                                                                                How will thousands of bodies ever be found?
                                                                                How will each soul be remembered?
                                                                                How will the hole be filled?
                                                                                Too many empty spaces
                                                                                Where fathers, mothers, sisters and sons once sat.
                                                                                So many empty places in too many beds,
                                                                                All vacated with the passing of a single day.


Your twin towers collapsed.
We had our own towers, so to speak.
There was the Land
And there was our Culture –
Those were the strong towers
That held our lives
And nurtured our spirits.
Our land was taken
And our culture collapsed over time
After a systematic campaign of terror.
Where is the monument that could hold our grief?
Where is the house that can contain our sorrow?

                                                                                There is the instinct to reciprocate,
                                                                                To lash back at the enemy.
                                                                                Let them taste their own bitter tears.
                                                                                Visit hate with hate.


We lived with devastation and heartache
With a wound that would not heal.
Our names still echo throughout the land:
Tallapoosa, Wetumpka, Sylacauga,
Ohatchee.
Notasulga, Tuscaloosa, Weogufka,
Chatahootchee.
Why could our daughters and sons not grow
In the lands that bear our names?

                                                                                May we never forget those whose lives were taken.
                                                                                We must learn to walk with sorrow and wisdom,
                                                                                Celebration and sadness.
                                                                                We must learn to live with grief for what was,
                                                                               Joy for what will be,
                                                                               And gratitude for what remains.


Chippewa, Tallahassee,
Minnetonka.
Chattanooga, Ouachita,
Oneida.
Our names continue to call out
Like too many empty beds.
Like so many empty homes
Our names call out.
We must learn to live with the pain
From the wound that will not heal
While we reach for the balm
That comes from living
In the hoop of the world.

                                                                            Today we walk on bloodstained ground.
                                                                            Both the blood of our forebears
                                                                            And the stain of our own doing.
                                                                            We see times of collapse
                                                                            And times of building up.
                                                                            Some days, we will fight.
                                                                            One day, we will fight no more forever.


The hawk rises
But our wound will not heal.
We may know joy
But we cannot hide our grief.
We may live with wisdom,
But we cannot erase the sorrow.
We will not erase the sorrow.


Friday, September 10, 2010

About My Father's Business


"I think the most important question facing humanity is, ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’ This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.” – Albert Einstein

A friend once asked me, "What motivated your father to be different from those around him?" Certainly that is the underlying question that motivated the essays I have written about him, and it probably influences much of my response to life. The question itself is much more effective than any specific answer that might be given. Some questions are best left out there calling to us, rather than giving definitive answers. I imagine that if my siblings were to answer that question, you would get some similarities, but many specifics would be different. So you see, any answer I give may say as much about myself and my opinions (by what I choose to remember) as it does about my father. With that in mind, I will tell you a little more about my father, "Pop," as we called him.

He was a Baptist minister and educator. Unlike most Baptist preachers, his sermons were more often taken from the sayings of Jesus than from the teachings of Paul. In fact, when I picture my father in the pulpit, I have a simultaneous image in my mind of Jesus teaching on the hillside. To this day, when I think of Christ, I see the teaching Jesus and the compassionate Jesus rather than the crucified Christ. I can thank my father for that image.

After my father died, I became especially conscious of the influence he had in his own unpretentious way. When I delivered the eulogy at my mother's funeral, three and a half years after my father's passing, I said, "Both of my parents left the world a little better than they found it. That is their inspiration and challenge to those of us who remain." It is that realization that caused me to do some reflection and to ask myself what kind of influence my own life may have.

One reason I began writing essays was to put down in writing what I believe and what I value. My thinking is that it is of benefit to me to express it, and if nothing else, my daughter will have a written record of what is important to me. I wish that my father had written things down, but he was not one to write. I have two notebooks of sermons written by my maternal grandfather (whom I never met), but not a single note or letter from my father. I have to rely on memories and recollections of what he said and did. In reality, though, memories and recollections are all that anyone has of their father.

Growing up in Centreville

Pop was born in 1910, the seventh of nine children, in Centreville, Alabama. He was born 45 years after the Civil War ended. My father's parents and grandparents had current memory of living in a defeated nation and an occupied territory, while at the same time being absolutely patriotic with an undeniable love for their country. Pop spent his childhood with horses and wagons, and as a young adult, he was a mechanic who worked on Model A's and Model T's. His father, "Lud", was a rough-and-tough rascal who made a living farming, running a black smith shop, driving a taxi, and serving at least one term as road commissioner. His mother was the local midwife who was known in the community as "Aunt Claudia."

Apparently, he knew early on that he would be a minister. Pop told us of an experience he had at five years of age. He said he was out in the yard playing and was overcome by an unusual feeling, or sensation. He could not fully describe it, but he said he knew then that he would be a preacher. He recalled that he ran inside and told his mother, "Mama, I'm going to be a preacher."

To me, this sounds like a mystical experience that would have been precocious at that age. The way I interpret it is that my father became aware that he was living in the presence of something far greater than himself, and that awareness was an uplifting, comforting experience. My father's explanation would probably lie in something I often heard him say, "Sometimes God gives us a little taste of Heaven just to assure us that everything will be alright." Compare this to Einstein's question, "Is the universe a friendly place?" My father would have said, "Absolutely!" A mystic like Meister Eckhart would say, "Without a doubt."

Pop graduated from high school in 1928. I once looked through his senior yearbook that a classmate had sent him late in life. I was struck by how optimistic his class was in their statements and dreams of going out into the world. I was also impressed with the good-natured humor I found in those pages. The class prophet said of my father, "Clyde Kinnaird thought he was going to be the next Charles Lindbergh and fly across the Atlantic. He hopped into an aeroplane and made it across the Cahaba River. He landed in a field, thinking he was in Paris." It was especially poignant to me as I read the upbeat messages of that class, knowing that those graduates in 1928 had no idea what lay ahead in 1929 when the Great Depression hit.

Moving On During the Depression

My father claimed that the Depression did not have much noticeable effect on his community because most people in their small agrarian town had very little money anyway. Nevertheless, I cannot help thinking that the Depression influenced the timing of my father's higher education. He did not go to college until six years after graduating high school. It must have been a call to ministry that motivated his going on to Howard College in 1934, in the middle of the Depression, without enough money to make it through the first year. Even then, at a time when many Baptist preachers had no higher education, my father completed college and seminary.

One person my father admired, and who surely must have influenced him, was a retired missionary to China, Dr. Napier, who came to pastor the First Baptist Church of Centreville. "Up until then, we had not had an educated pastor in the pulpit. Most pastors would come and stay about 18 months. By then, they would have preached all their sermons and would move on." Dr. Napier, my father recalled, would carry books with him to the pulpit and share with the congregation what scholars had written about various scriptures. "We had never had anything like that before."

Dr. Napier's son, Davie, also must have had some influence on my father. They were both at Southern Seminary at the same time and would often ride home together. Many times while I was growing up, I would hear Pop comment about something Davie Napier had said. Davie Napier went on to become a renowned professor at Yale Divinity School, a United Church of Christ Minister, and chaplain at Stanford University. Somewhere along the way, my father latched onto the conviction that education and religion were vital to individual and community development. If the Napiers did not instill the idea, they surely encouraged it.

A Career and a Mission

Pop said late in his career that he had essentially done mission work all his life. I think that is very true. He spent his life, by deed and example, trying to bring education and religion to the farmers, mill workers, housekeepers, laborers, and merchants of Alabama. On the one hand, I could tell that my father was often frustrated by the lack of education and the dearth of thoughtful religion among his peers. One the other hand, he demonstrated a sincere respect for people whether they were rich or poor, educated or uneducated. He brought dignity to the pulpit and to the classroom, but always related to the working class and the working poor. After all, his own family were farmers and working class people and he himself had been a garage mechanic who went off to college to "make a minister." He was never interested in moving up the social ladder. Pop considered such actions "uppity and pretentious."

He was a conservative man from the Old South who took some remarkable stands and had some progressive ideas. More important, he left his corner of the world a little better than he found it. My father understood when I left the Southern Baptists after fundamentalism had become so rampant and entrenched. I think, though, that he regretted that I was living with the same frustrations that he had lived with. I may be a little more open to change than Pop was. In some ways, maybe I am a little more tolerant, but that is only because I learned from his example of granting dignity to others and showing respect for all.

Attributes of Distinction

If I may recapitulate, perhaps I can sum up my answer to my friend's question of what motivated my father to be different from those around him:

1) He saw education and religion as two avenues for improvement. Pop had a strong commitment to continuing education and a striving toward thoughtful religion (he used to say that religion should be reasonable).

2) He believed in showing dignity and respect for every person, regardless of their social standing.

3) He believed that the Universe is a friendly place.

If I can hang on to those things from here on out, I think it would do my daddy proud.



In Memoriam: Richard Clyde Kinnaird, Sr.
September 8,1910- December 18,1996




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Thursday, September 9, 2010

A Local Hero

“The time is always right to do what is right.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.


I grew up under an apartheid system of government in Tallapoosa County, Alabama. Many things began to change in 1970 when, after years of resistance, the public schools were finally completely integrated. I was sixteen years old at the time. Governor George Wallace's segregationist anti-federal sentiments still held sway among most of the people that I knew. Both of my parents were public school teachers, so we all witnessed the anxious transition that most of us felt had been imposed upon us. It was not until 25 years later that I learned about my own father's significant contribution to that transition.

My father, Clyde Kinnaird, was Old South. He did not grow up during the Depression; he grew up just before the Depression, graduating from high school in 1928. He went on to college and seminary to become a Baptist minister. When he was 56 years old, he became bi-vocational, working full time with the Tallapoosa County School System while continuing part-time as a pastor. He was not a segregationist. He bragged about never having voted for George Wallace in his life. Neither was he a civil rights advocate. As I mentioned, he was Old South. He would probably have preferred to maintain the status quo. He agreed in sentiment with civil rights, but like many of us in the Old South, he thought things were moving too fast. He believed in "helping 'those people' to improve their circumstances," and while he was not a racist, I considered him to be paternalistic in his view toward African Americans.

In 1967, as part of the system's delay in implementing de-segregation, the county school system began placing a few white teachers into the black schools and a few black teachers into the white schools. My father was made principal of Council High School, which was the all-black school in town. I was vaguely aware at the time that my father moved the school from out of the red financially and that he worked on instilling pride in the teachers. I was also vaguely aware that he had some conflicts with the school superintendent. After his successful tenure at Council High, he was given no more jobs as principal but continued to teach in the classroom until he retired at age 66.

My father died at the age of 86. A year or so before his death, I was visiting with him when he was in a reminiscent mood. It was on that day that I learned that my father had been more of an activist than I had ever realized. He told me about driving out to the old neighborhood where Council High School had once been. He was pleased to see that a recreation center with tennis courts had been built. "I tried to get the city to do something like that 25 years ago," he told me. "I told them we need to do something to help the neighborhood and to give the kids something to do." In those days, the black neighborhood was filled with shacks occupied by people who did hard labor to try to earn a living. City Hall was unmoved. All my father had been able to do was to get a road crew to level off a field with a bulldozer so that he himself could put up a couple of basketball goals outside.

My father continued to recollect about his days at Council High School. "When I went there, the school was operating in the red, and I saw right away that a lot of the budget was going into the lunchroom because so many of the kids could not afford to pay for their lunch. I found out about the federal lunch program that would subsidize school lunches for low-income people. I went to the superintendent and explained to him that if we could get on the federal lunch program, then our school could put more money into the needs of the classroom. We could give the kids a better chance to learn."

In my father's words, the superintendent was a racist who "didn't want to do anything that would help the blacks." The superintendent told him to forget it, that the county would have nothing to do with any federal lunch program. "So I just decided to write to Washington, D.C." my father recounted. "I explained my situation to them and asked if there was any way our school could get the federal program. The next thing I knew I got a letter back from Washington stating that all of Tallapoosa County was now on the school lunch program. They sent a copy of my letter and theirs to the county superintendent. The superintendent didn't have a kind word to say to me after that, but we got the school operating within budget, and we got classroom materials that teachers had too long been without. We managed to give them something to be proud of."

Suddenly, it became clear to me why the superintendent had gone from favoring my father to giving less lucrative assignments. I also saw my father less in terms of Old South. He exemplified to me quiet ways in which change could be brought about. He had made choices that had cost him in his career, but choices that brought him no regrets. He had been able to bring some sense of dignity to professional colleagues who had seen apartheid from a different vantagepoint. I saw an old man who could look with pleasure upon the changes that had come about since 1967, and could recall with pride the unrecognized role that he had in bringing about those changes.


In Memoriam: Richard Clyde Kinnaird, Sr.
September 8,1910- December 18,1996




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Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Trust Yourself: A Message from My Father


My late father, Richard Clyde Kinnaird, Sr., was born 100 years ago today. When he died in 1996, I was aware of the legacy he left. In the weeks after his death, I had a dream about trying to put on a suit that was too big for me. To me, that dream signified a life that cannot be replaced, a legacy that I am not quite up to. I could be myself, however, and soon began to think about what part of my father’s legacy I must hold on to, and what part I hoped to pass on to my daughter. Two years after my father’s death I started writing essays, and the writing began with a story I wrote about my father’s legacy as I saw it.

R. C. Kinnaird was a Baptist minister and a great advocate of “soul competency” which was once a hallmark of Southern Baptist thought. Basically, soul competency affirmed that the individual has the ability to discern for himself or herself on matters of faith. Each person has the liberty to choose based on his/her own conscience. For my father, this concept was innate. His admonition was, don’t let yourself get hoodwinked by anyone - whether it’s the Pope, a flimflam artist, a traveling evangelist, a politician, or a television personality. Think for yourself; trust your own reason; never follow blindly.

The following is that first story I wrote in 1998. I was trying to imagine myself in the future, the year 2019, and reflecting back on 2011 (I picked 2011 because that's when my daughter turns 21 - what did I want her to carry with her by age 21?). Even though the scene is imagined, the words of my father are accurate as I remember them. The conversations with former Baptists are reflective of actual conversations I have had. I thought about re-writing this as a straight forward essay, since 2011 is almost here. Instead I decided to just leave it as it is, with the caveat that this was written from an imagined perspective back in 1998.


Watching Baptists: A View from the Future
by Charles L. Kinnaird

The year was 2011. Looking back on that Sunday in June, it was a day that could have represented almost any day of my life. On the radio, the Beatles were enjoying a renewed popularity; reruns of "I Love Lucy" could be seen on television. In the news, the President of the United States was urging leaders in the Middle East to sign an agreement that would be "an unprecedented step toward the possibility of peace in the region." And in Atlanta, the Southern Baptist Convention was having its annual meeting. According to the newspaper article, the Baptists had been debating the finer points of literal biblical interpretation.

On that particular Sunday afternoon, however, I was more reflective than usual. For one thing, my 21 year-old daughter had come to Birmingham to visit on Father's Day weekend, taking a break from her college studies. She had been questioning me about the way things used to be. I found myself reflecting on a number of things. For one, I was genuinely surprised that the conservative Republican trend was still so firmly ensconced. Maybe it was just the flip side of my own father's dismay that those New Deal Democrats still held sway on into the 1970's. I was still finding it hard to believe, even then, that there continued to be no shortage of conservative radio spokespersons to take up the cause.

What really intrigued me, though, was that Southern Baptist Convention. I read in the newspaper that there had been an attempt to pass a resolution that stated that God created the world in six 24-hour days. One pastor was quoted as saying, "I believe the Bible as much as anyone, but how do we know they were 24-hour days? In II Peter 3:8 it says that to the Lord a thousand years are as a day. How do we know they weren't thousand-year days? "

"It's plain as day right there in the text," countered a loyalist spokesman. "It says there was evening and there was morning – that marks a 24-hour period. If we start allowing that God might not have created the world in six 24-hour days, then we're just going to open ourselves up again to liberals who might say that belief in the virgin birth of Christ is not necessary to the faith."

Well, it had been a long time since I had been a Baptist, but I knew better than that. I was baptized by my daddy in Lake Martin when I was nine years old, after a revival at Jackson's Gap Baptist Church. At nine years of age, I didn't know what a virgin was, and my parents certainly didn't take the time to explain it to me before I was baptized. Nevertheless, my faith was as good as that of any who could discuss the details of virgin vs. non-virgin birth. In fact, my faith was probably stronger before I learned about virgins.

At any rate, on that Sunday afternoon back in 2011, I felt some ambivalence about the Southern Baptists. On the one hand, I was glad not to be a part of that group involved in needless arguments. On the other hand, I felt sad that Baptists as I knew them had disappeared – gone away somewhere.

I remember when I was a child my father, R.C. Kinnaird, himself a Baptist minister, would say, "We as Baptists believe in the priesthood of the believer – that means that you have what is called soul competency. You are able to read the Bible and come to your own conclusions. You have soul freedom. You don't need a priest or a preacher or a theologian telling you what you have to believe to find God."

I even remember my father would sometimes get behind the pulpit on Sunday and read the latest resolutions passed by the latest Southern Baptist Convention. Then he would tell the whole congregation, "None of you has to believe any of that. You are free to disagree with any or all points. You have the liberty to think for yourself and to draw your own conclusions."

Surveying Former Baptists

Continuing my thoughts that afternoon, I suspected that there must have been a Baptist diaspora. After all, I had left and from the looks of things on Atlanta, lots of Baptists had left to go elsewhere. I decided to begin a quest – to find out where the Baptists went and what they were doing now.

Since I had gone to a Baptist college and graduated from a Baptist seminary, I had names. I had names of Baptists, many of whom I was able to eventually track down. Here are the results of my informal, unscientific survey. I found three who had become Roman Catholic, one Orthodox, several Methodists and Episcopalians, a few Presbyterians, some Charismatics and Pentecostals. I found Unitarians (indeed I learned that some New England Baptists had become Unitarian two hundred years earlier). I found some who called themselves non-denominational, and some who had given up on organized religion. I even found some who were still Baptists.

I asked one of my friends who had remained a Baptist, "What do you think about what went on at that Convention in Atlanta?" He told me, "I never pay attention to those things. I'm going to believe what I believe anyway."

I had questions for my other friends, and I did find a common thread that was encouraging. I asked one of my Baptist-turned-Catholic friends, "What about that new pope of yours – what do you think will happen?" He answered, "With a tradition as old and as large as ours, you're going to have a lot of beauty and a lot of schluck. I'm smart enough to tell the difference between beauty and shluck." In the same vein, one of my Pentecostal friends told me, "We have some beliefs and practices that are a bit on the fringe, but God gave me a mind as well as a heart and I'm free to decide what's right for me."

In talking with my former colleagues, I took heart in seeing how many of us had refused to accept any package deal on matters of faith. I don't know if you would call it a Baptist thing, an American thing, or a modern thing, but it seemed to me that the concept of soul competency, once it is grasped, becomes a liberty and a stability that one never forsakes.

Walking in Liberty

My own daughter has never been a Baptist. During my more sentimental times, I feel a tinge of regret that she and I do not have that shared experience. However, when I look at the life she has, I can see without a doubt that she understands soul competency and she has soul freedom. For that I am thankful. It is a liberty she and I share.

For Baptists of my father's day, maybe soul competency was the new wine that burst the old wineskins and sent liberated people in all directions. We now share the happy communion of liberty, secure in our humanity.

With the year 2020 now approaching, change and diversity in America are more evident. There is a rich and vibrant marketplace of ideas and customs. Even Alabama has established Hindu and Buddhist communities of faith. There is a strong Muslim community and talk of another mosque being built in Birmingham. I may do some Islamic studies myself. I want to see how many Islamic Baptists I can find.


1998



In Memoriam: Richard Clyde Kinnaird, Sr.
September 8,1910- December 18,1996




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Trust Yourself: A Message from Bob Dylan




Trust Yourself
By Bob Dylan
(From the album, Empire Burlesque)

Trust yourself,
Trust yourself to do the things that only you know best
Trust yourself
Trust yourself to do what's right and not be second-guessed
Don't trust me to show you beauty
When beauty may only turn to rust
If you need somebody you can trust, trust yourself.

Trust yourself
Trust yourself to know the way that will prove true in the end
Trust yourself
Trust yourself to find the path where there is no if and when
Don't trust me to show you the truth
When the truth may only be ashes and dust
If you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself.

Well, you're on your own, you always were
In a land of wolves and thieves
Don't put your hope in ungodly man
Or be a slave to what somebody else believes.

Trust yourself
And you won't be disappointed when vain people let you down
Trust yourself
And look not for answers where no answers can be found
Don't trust me to show you love
When my love may be only lust
If you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself.

You, you got to trust yourself ....



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