“Nothing is got for nothing.”
 …..– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What goes around, comes around.”
Emerson on the street. Just the way it is.
Get up, walk outside, look around –
do you see it, this muck we name existence,
this life we live: turn around in your flesh,
start again, think again, be again
something other than you are:
Emerson called it Self-Reliance,
becoming other…
on the street they just call it
“becoming real, man…” That’s all.

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff’s talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush—and that was all.

from Robert Frost’s…