innonate » Poetry

The Single Biggest Challenge of My Future is…

Nate Westheimer — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 02:36:23 +0000

Our Future

Poetry Indeed

Nate Westheimer — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 04:53:37 +0000

I love Scott’s posts because they’re nearly always small enough to “clip” in their entirety.

Theses are good lessons. Notes taken.

clipped from scott.heiferman.com

Secrets to Fotolog’s Scaling Success:
* The site is intentionally simple.
* Popularity is driven by a base of active users, not a rich set of cool features.
* Constraints in web sites can, like in poetry, make something unexpectedly better. The rule that users are only allowed to post one photo per day creates an environment where people comment more on each others photos which creates a more engaged community. Who knew?
* Revenue generation features can be added without destroying the integrity of your site.

Prayer

Nate Westheimer — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 03:19:35 +0000

One of the most spectacular and spectacularly loaded aspects of my recent trip to Israel was my visit to the Western (Wailing) Wall, on my last Shabbat afternoon in the country.

One of the traditions of going to the wall is to leave a prayer in its cracks, as it is — for the Jewish people — the closest earthly object to God (being that the temple was built upon the rock where Abraham made his covenant with God).

Anyway, I’m not usually one to articulate my spiritually in written prayer, but earlier in the day I had gone to Jerusalem’s holocaust memorial and museum and felt overwhelmed by the issues of time and place and morality which charge that region with so much everything.

The thing I really appreciated about the occasion of going to the wall and writing a prayer was the challenge to distill all the emotions and thoughts being in that place (the memorial and the country) evoked. Prayer, I found, was the challenge of finding simplicity and clarity out of chaos. That challenge, which isn’t necessarily restricted to prayer, was one I enjoyed. It’s a challenge — to be more simple and more clear — I think we could all bring upon ourselves more often. I’d like to try.

This is what I left behind:

Let it not happen again.
May we not stand by today.
Open our eyes to all injustice,
And do not let us avert them.

Bring comfort to those who need it!
Ease their suffering and pain.
Teach who need to love again,
So this, our world, may remain.

Letter to NY Times – June 2004

Nate Westheimer — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 06:46:55 +0000

This letter, sent to the New York Times in June of 2004, is a part of the “Public Record” collection on innonate.com.
–
After reading David Halbfinger’s Tuesday, June 1st piece “In 5 Words by Langston Hughes, Kerry Aides Hear a Likely Campaign Slogan,” I began to think about my earliest attention to politics. It was January of 1993 – I was almost ten years old – and on that chilly winter day, I sat inside watching our family’s 13-inch TV.

The parade, the procession, the pomp and fair – and mostly the peaceful transfer of power from one President to another: all these things dazzled me while watching my first Presidential Inauguration as a conscious political observer. But however splendid the ordeal, there was one simplicity that most stuck out and stuck with me: the poem by Maya Angelou, “On The Pulse of Morning.” Going back a reading this poem could do us all some good.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.

America is at a crucial point in history and has changed much in the last ten years. I, for one, would like to back to the times when poets graced inaugural ceremonies, and the perhaps go forward in time to “Let America be America again.”

Nathaniel Westheimer
Cincinnati, Ohio

Mi Ventana

Nate Westheimer — Fri, 05 Dec 2003 23:46:31 +0000

Cierro la ventana y las cortinas
para que el mundo afuera
no me despierte
por la mañana.

Pero, acercándome a la pared de
cristal, huelo la verdadero mundo
en que existo. Y la cierro.

Y escucho. A nada. Extranjero de ocio en
un país que pudiera haber sido mío;
pero pudiera haber sido en otro lugar el mío.

Y todo que pudiera haber sido mío
pudiera haber sido mío en las afueras de
mi ventana.

-Me, Dec 4, 2003