In the “No Opinions – Law of Compensation” sub- category within the Alliance, I came across this comment made by Tobie Steyn:
The danger of opinions and the blessings of giving and receiving goes hand in hand. The more you do of the one the less you have of the other. The choice is yours. I choose wisely.
Interpreting this to mean the less time spent offering up personal opinions, the more time made available to give a gift, which may be “a complement, a prayer, a trinket, or a flower”; so, why not use the time just saved to give such a gift immediately? Keeping in mind that a complement is an opinion of sorts, I replied thusly:
Your melding of ideas fits our lesson well! Opinions fraught with danger should clang a warning bell, For without such devices, it’s sometimes hard to tell, If words will be heaven sent, or coming straight from hell! To know the law of compensation, keeps the worse from sneaking in, To steal away our time this way, we may as well call sin. Without meaningless chatter, comes greater peace of mind, In all that space resulting with opinions left behind. Is fertile ground for planting, a rose can thrive and grow. With petals full of lovely, the sight and scent we know. Was it Emerson or God himself, took nature’s beauty, combined it with the beast? As careless hand or hapless finger yells naught of dewy splendor, but what we like the least. Like most opinions, this unwelcome thorn pricks he who gives and he who takes; But give that thorn to a boy with a box of clay, a triceratops dinosaur he makes. Upon this contradiction does well the keen observer’s eye settle down to rest. That heart-felt complements mean much, much more than a flower—even at its best!
Deciding to read some more within the alliance, I chanced upon another interesting nugget left by gail.hinrichsen:
Oh no, I can’t seem to open my mouth without spewing out an opinion??? This is harder than I thought.
So, I replied:
God, Gail, I just got this incredible cartoon vision, based upon what you have just said.
In the first scene, there you are watching MKMMA webcast number five, while Mark is giving us the “no opinion” assignment.
In the next scene, you have the palms of both hands squarely centered over your mouth, as if trying to keep something inside from getting outside; and you are lying on your bed with some additional squiggly lines around your body, making it obvious that there is a whole lot of shaking going on.
In the next scene, everything is pretty much the same, except now, your head has grown to the size of an over-inflated beach ball – and if you look real close, you can just see part of an “o” – and even an “op” – struggling to peek out under the weight of your sweating palms.
In the last scene, we see you are back to normal, sitting peacefully at the end of your bed with a huge smile of relief showing the world your pearly whites; while in the background Mark J is obviously beside himself with laughter heading out your bedroom door, in his hand a huge needle or pin or ice pick, perhaps — something big and sharp, anyway; and out of his mouth comes one of those cartoon bubbles with the words: “Didn’t I tell you how easy it would eventually be?!” J
And with that, I’m off to post #3.
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