Sanskrit read to a pony

Still enjoying Tumblr - and intuitive wandering through the minds and imaginations of others.

Come view "Wait - what ?"

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“There’s a lovely freedom in momentarily stepping back into the privilege freely taken by children, finding the gap in the cyclone wire fence and sauntering along in that heightened state of casual alertness, just having a good look around.”
- Susan Murphy
The Secret Life of the Street


“So one day, a few years ago, I was in a car, on my way to the airport. I was really, really low, on many medications, and pulled over, I reached behind to my valise, took out the pills, and threw out all the drugs I had. I said, “These things really don’t even begin to confront my predicament.” I figured, If I am going to go down I would rather go down with my eyes wide open.”

— Leonard Cohen, on giving up medication. (via whokilled)


“ Follow your heart, and you perish.
Margaret Laurence.
(via whokilled) (via smut-to-go)

“ Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.
Lou Reed
(via devilduck)

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Streaming Through Widening Channels

I Want to Free What Waits Within Me

By Rainer Maria Rilke

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

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Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

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from ESCAPE INTO LIFE; Journey into the Red Book:

In his attempt to nail down what is missing in the Christianity of his time, Jung emphasizes the need for a form of spiritual madness, which he equates with “divine life”. He writes,

“[t]o the extent that Christianity of this time lacks madness, it lacks divine life.” Jung distinguishes between “divine madness” and psychological, “human” madness, and references Socratic and Neoplatonist attempts to distinguish different forms of divine madness and their utility in stepping outside the dominant wisdom of the time to attain higher forms of self-awareness and self-knowledge.

**

Jung does not go so far as to say madness is necessary to attain high states of exaltation. But he talks about the need to be able to straddle this line of madness and sanity. He emphasizes the importance of being able to return to stability in the spirit of the times. Without this one would lose the ground needed to reach the full state of individuation. Jung in fact describes his own journey by saying:

I had spoken to my soul during 25 nights in the desert and I had given her all my love and submission. But during the 25 days, I gave all my love and submission to things, to men, and to the thoughts of this time. I went into the desert only at night.

MORE>>>

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Me to my brother on the phone this evening : "Come down off that ledge....."

http://newmexicoindependent.com/46247/domestic-partnership-bill-on-life-support

"Daniel ended a beautiful talk with, 'to the Catholics I say..... to the evangelical's I say......" all founded on scripture.....with real fire behind it....we had about 200 people, alot of youth and plenty politicians....

Support is good, our testimony yesterday was over the top beautiful and organized and respectful....and their side actually threatened the Senators with something like...."if you pass this bill, we're going to do to you what we did in Mass..." Mary Jane G., bless her heart said "AND I DONT appreciate being threatened!" looking right at the woman to made the threat....Jill N. was the woman who said that, with her steel gray hair and her little pink suit, I leaned over to Ellen N. and whispered the little song that they play on the Wizard of Oz every time the wicked witch is on screen..."di da, di da, di dah dah, di da, di da, di dah dah." Fortunately we were in the back of the gallery so her reaction wasn't captured on camera.

Who say politics ain't fun!

Anyway I'm not about outcomes this session....just doing the best we can do...and right now we are killing it! we're managing the press beautifully, they are really broadcasting our message....and the testimonies and phone calls are coming in....what else can you do?

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“ There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.

Frank Zappa
(via devilduck)

Tumblr

janitoroflunacy:

Don Lawrence

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For those of you who visit me here: I am hanging out over on Tumblr these days.

Come and visit me there ?

Wait - what ?

Just Go Dance In the Back

Jack Delano: Tap dancing class at Iowa State College, 1942
(via trialsanderrors)

From a friend:

"The nuns in the convent pray for 5 hours straight. Mother Superior said to me: "I know you can't do that - You can't even do an hour.

Just go dance in the back."

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Our Strange Brain Structures

Making Compassion Flourish

Dacher Keltner studies human nature:

[We can] see the great human propensity for compassion and the effects compassion can have on behavior. But can we actually cultivate compassion, or is it all determined by our genes?

Recent neuroscience studies suggest that positive emotions are less heritable—that is, less determined by our DNA—than the negative emotions. Other studies indicate that the brain structures involved in positive emotions like compassion are more "plastic"—subject to changes brought about by environmental input. So we might think about compassion as a biologically based skill or virtue, but not one that we either have or don"t have. Instead, it"s a trait that we can develop in an appropriate context.

Virtue is acquired. Love is learned. Forgiveness is a strain. This is why I believe that Jesus came to help us.

Permalink

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Brain News from Mind Hacks

2010-01-29 Spike activity:

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

io9 has a great brief summary of a citation analysis that describe how neuroscience became a major scientific discipline in just one decade. Interestingly, it didn't happen in the Decade of the Brain.

The ability to resist temptation is contagious, according a new study covered by The Frontal Cortex. I suspect this means I am patient zero of giving in to temptation.

Salon has an interview with psychologist Susan Clancy about her new book 'The Trauma Myth' on child abuse, which is likely to be both important and controversial. The comments are a mix of the insightful, angry and loopy.

This chap might have found a photo of Phineas Gage from before his injury.

Radio 4 has a good documentary on 'Super Recognisers' that will disappear off the face of the earth in only a few days if you miss your chance to listen to it.

The Prison Photography blog is excellent.

NPR has a brief segment on new evidence suggesting that heavy drinking in teenage years may have a lasting impact on the brain.

Special therapy bears work through mirror neurons (what else) according to a bizarre claim unearthed by The Neurocritic.

NeuroPod has just released a new edition covering optogenetics, AI cockroaches, stem and grid cells.

Does time dilate during a threatening situation? asks Neurophilosophy.

Science Daily reports that thinking of the past or future causes us to sway backward or forward on the basis of a new study.

C.G. Jung's famous 'Red Book' has finally been published and Brain Pickings has a fantastic review and preview.

The Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry has launched a new podcast which is aimed at clinicians and is. a. bit. stilted. but sounds promising.

There's a good piece about the new and not very effective female 'sex drug' flibanserin in Inkling Magazine.

Horizon, the flagship BBC science programme, recently had an episode on the Big Pharma, medicalisation and disease mongering. Apart from some minor pharmacological dodginess (ADHD a 'chemical imbalance', Ritalin a 'clever pill') it's excellent and features our very own Dr Petra. Torrent here.

A new study finding people's personality is reflected in their internet use is covered by the BPS Research Digest. See also a new study finding social behaviour is similar both online and offline.

Quirks and Quarks, the excellent Canadian radio show, discusses kuru disease immunity in cannibals.

Why is there no anthropology journalism? asks Savage Minds.

The Economist covers a new study finding that the more widespread a language, the simpler it is, suggesting that that languages become streamlined as they spread.

Incoming! APA press release forewarns of imminent clinical psychology fight: psychodynamic therapy best says not yet published meta-analysis.

PsyBlog has an excellent round-up of 10 studies on why smart people do irrational things.

The secrets of looking good on the dance floor and research on the psychology of social dance is covered in Spiegel magazine.

Life magazine has a gallery of famous literary drunks and addicts.

The US is quietly abandoning the 'war on drugs' according to an article in The Independent. Does this mean the expansion of military bases in Colombia is to be re-justified as part of a war on salsa music? Kids told to 'just say no' to fake tans and enthusiastic rhythm sections.

The BPS Research Digest reports the development of what could be the first anti-lie detector in neuroscience.

Bootleg Botox, a potent neurotoxin, could be a weapon of mass destruction according to a piece in the Washington Post.

Wired reports on the Jan 25th anniversary of the first recorded human death by robot which occurred in Flint, Michigan, 1979.

The marriage market and the social economics of high-end prostitutes are tackled in a new study discussed in Marginal Revolution.

—Vaughan.

The Women ctd.

Daily Dish

A reader writes:

If that's what you call feminist, then what you Christians call the "Old Testament" beat you to it.

Early in Genesis, Sarah tells Abraham that Ishmael must go. Abraham, the archetype of hospitality hesitates and asks G-d. G-d tells Abraham: listen to Sarah in all that she says. Note, not listen to Sarah in this instance, but in "all" that she says.

Next generation: Rebecca is pregnant with twins; G-d tells her that the younger will serve the older. In the meantime, Isaac can't figure this out and attempts to bless the older. Rebecca who is wiser, pulls the switcheroo on him.

Two generations later: the story of Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar -- the latter's subterfuge ends up with Judah declaring "she is more in the right than I", and their union produces the line from which will come King David, the David line, and Messiah. Later, during the rebellion at the Golden Calf -- only the men were involved. The women knew better (and get their own holiday for their non-participation).

In case after case , the women are right -- centuries, nay, millennia, before the New Testament. This is no big revelation -- any school kid who's gone to private Jewish day school knows the above.

Another writes:

Interesting stuff, Andrew, but this won't fly:

when she brings it up he dismisses her, calling her “woman”

In addition to making Jesus dismissive of his own mother, it is a misunderstanding of the word translated as woman. gynai, the vocative of gyne, is not dismissive. In Shorter Lexicon of the Greek New Testament, F. Wilbur Gingrich says it "is by no means disrespectful, but there is no satisfactory English equivalent for it, and it is best to omit the word in translation." (something which Bible translators, believing that every word is from God, are reluctant to do)

The Liddell & Scott Greek–English Lexicon (ninth edition) cites Euripides, Medea 290, where Creon addresses Medea, and it says the vocative is a term of respect or affection. Certainly, no one in his right mind would be dismissive of Medea. And in fact Creon says here that he fears her and her threats and is taking precautions.

Apart from that, the Cana story has a delightfully understated insight into Mary and her relationship with her son. After he appears to put her off (John 2: 3–5), she simply turns to the waiters and says, "Do whatever he tells you." She knew him better than anyone else ever has.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry disagrees with my characterization of his post:

I’m not even sure what Mr Sullivan is referring to here. Women in the priesthood? Contraception? Abortion?

Suffice it to say that while I appreciate that Mr Sullivan apparently thinks he is more qualified to decide what is “un-Christian” than the Catholic Church I don’t believe the Church is pernicious or not Christian. And I don’t want anyone (if there is a single person alive who cares) to infer otherwise from Mr Sullivan’s post.

He continues in the comment section:

I think most non-Catholic Christians would agree that, even though they do not accept its authority, the Catholic Church is Christian, and even would agree that, in fact, even if they may disagree with it about a bunch of stuff, it knows more about what Christianity means than Andrew Sullivan. I think most Orthodox Christians would agree with that, as well as most high-church Protestants, and a good chunk of Evangelicals — while acknowledging that they think the Church’s magisterium is wrong about this, that and the other thing.

I’m not asserting that the Catholic Church is the only authority on deciding what is or isn’t Christian (the Church itself doesn’t think that non-Catholic Christians aren’t Christians), only that it’s a bigger authority than Andrew Sullivan.

Which seems pretty straightforward to me.

Once again, an argument not on the merits of the case but from mere authority. In my view, the Catholic church's subjugation of women by an all-male caste of powerful figures deeply distorts the message and actions of Jesus.

(Painting: Rebecca and Eliezer by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, 17th century.)

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Yes - when the story is ONLY told by men, it overlooks other points of view. If only we [a communal "we" could grow large enough to encompass all and drop the defensiveness..]

In Each Minim Mote ..

far past the frozen leaves,
the haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.

~Bob Dylan

With Ruins

Choose a quiet
place, a ruins, a house no more
a house,
under whose stone archway I stood
one day to duck the rain.

The roofless floor, vertical
studs, eight wood columns
supporting nothing,
two staircases careening to nowhere, all
make it seem

a sketch, notes to a house, a three-
dimensional grid negotiating
absences,
an idea
receding into indefinite rain,

or else that idea
emerging, skeletal
against the hammered sky, a
human thing, scoured seen clean
through from here to an iron heaven.

A place where things
were said and done,
there you can remember
what you need to
remember. Melancholy is useful. Bring yours.

There are no neighbors to wonder
who you are,
what you might me doing
walking there,
stopping now and then

to touch a crumbling brick
or stand in a doorway
framed by the day.
No one has to know you
thing of another doorway

that framed the rain or news of war
depending on which way you faced.
You think of sea-roads and earth-roads
you traveled once, and always
in the same direction: away.

You think
of a woman, a favorite
dress, your old father's breasts
the last time you saw him, his breath,
brief, the leaf

you've torn from a vine and which you hold now
to your cheek like a train ticket
or a piece of cloth, a little hand or a blade -
it all depends
on the course of your memory.

It's a place
for those who own no place
to correspond to ruins in the soul.
It's mine.
It's all yours.

Li-Young Lee

**

Opening Words

I believe the earth
exists, and
in each minim mote
of its dust the holy
glow of thy candle.
Thou
unknown I know,
thou spirit,
giver,
lover of making, of the
wrought letter,
wrought flower,
iron, deed, dream.
Dust of the earth,
help thou my
unbelief. Drift
gray become gold, in the beam of
vision. I believe with
doubt. I doubt and
interrupt my doubt with belief. Be,
beloved, threatened world.
Each minim
mote.
Not the poisonous
luminescence forced
out of its privacy,
The sacred lock of its cell
broken. No,
the ordinary glow
of common dust in ancient sunlight.
Be, that I may believe. Amen.

Denise Levertov

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1302.html

Obama and Afghanistan: the poverty of Niebuhrian ethics

from Crashingly Beautiful
on tumblr

Obama and Afghanistan: the poverty of Niebuhrian ethics

by Kim Fabricius (originally printed in this month's Reform magazine, as a response to Ron Buford)

Jesus said, “Love your Niebuhr.” Or so Ron Buford would have us believe in his standing ovation for Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam – oops, I mean Afghanistan. (Sorry about that: we Americans have a lousy sense of world geography, not to mention an inexhaustible ignorance about regional cultures and histories. Which is why wherever our expeditionary forces go, even as they blow away one demon, there are always plenty more to take its place). Certainly, as Mr Buford notes, Obama loves his Niebuhr – his Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971). In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the president liberally deployed the language of the influential American theologian.

The appeal of Niebuhr’s social ethics is clear: it’s the Yankee pragmatism and “realism”. But its rich pickings for Obama cannot disguise its profound theological poverty. A loyal two-kingdoms Lutheran, Niebuhr was completely candid that the ethics of Jesus has no moral purchase in the realm of power politics.

That the gospel redefines what is “real”, and what is possible and practical; that in his life, death, and resurrection Jesus has actually inaugurated the eschatological transformation of the world; and that the Holy Spirit is now present and active in bringing God’s new creation to perfection – these facts of faith simply do not factor in the moral calculus of Niebuhr’s finally quite pagan and pessimistic reading of geopolitics. Hence the cynical reduction of the option for Christians, in the face of evil rulers, repeated by Mr Buford, to either blessing US military interventions or “doing nothing”. As if the way of non-violence were unreal, as if radical pacifists were political layabouts! On the contrary, as Niebuhr’s theological nemesis, the radical Christian pacifist John Howard Yoder, acutely observed, it is not the wielders of swords but the bearers of crosses who are ultimately “working with the grain of the universe.”

Of course even on the grounds of Niebuhrian realism the war in Afghanistan is widely, expertly contested as not only unjust but also tragically self-defeating. Obama’s Vietnam? Interestingly, Niebuhr himself, always ambivalent about President Johnson’s war in southeast Asia, ultimately confessed, in 1967, that “For the first time I fear I am ashamed of our beloved nation.” However the essential theological point for Christians is this. The central premise of Niebuhr’s social ethics is that the nation is the bearer of history. But the premise is false (a point made by Lawrence Moore in his splendid January Bible study on the “wilderness”). According to the New Testament, it is the church, the body of Christ, which transcends all national identities and loyalties; the church, however impotent it may seem, that is the true bearer of history. Unsurprisingly, Niebuhr is deafeningly silent on the subject of ecclesiology. For Mr Buford too, it would seem, the church is here, not to be a counter-political community, but, at best, to tweak the conscience of the state.

Even when Caesar is a good guy – and I take Obama to be a good guy, despite his idleness over Israel and his hyperactivity in Afghanistan – it is always a bad idea for the church to hitch its wagon to his military-industrial express, and to concede that, when push comes to shove, Christians may have to behave in ways that contradict the commands of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And there you have the ultimate tragedy of mainstream American Christianity, liberal as well as conservative: it thinks it can serve two masters. In that respect, even Obama remains mesmerised by the heathen myth of American exceptionalism.

Posted by Ben Myers
Faith and Theology

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KtBlog / The Communicant

Humanist Chaplains: Casual Authority

by Mary Valle

From the Handbook For Humanist Chaplains:

Art: keep it nonspecific. Nongendered humanoids in joyful poses are ideal.

Furniture: In keeping with the idea of nonpatriarchal conversation, avoid wing chairs, club chairs, anything throne-like. Modern, airy, nontraditional shapes suggest an openness and mindful “today” outlook.

Dress: Obviously, up to you. A nice dark pair of (new) jeans is always appropriate in a campus setting; a collared shirt isn’t necessary or even desirable (again, with the inferences) but you might want to throw on a blazer just to give yourself a little casual authority.

Footwear can be tricky; something between Birkenstocks and Oxfords is ideal. A new hiking shoe or cowboy boot is substantial yet friendly.

(source)

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quantumpossibility:

“Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, a dream.”

—	Diamond Sutra

RIP Salinger

"I know I can leave this or any other matter quite to your discretion, Bessie; my God, you are as admirable as you are lovable! As well as not sending him any more tablets with lines for his stories, also absolutely do not send him any tablets with very flimsy paper, such as onion skin, as he merely drops this kind in the garbage can for general disposal outside the bungalow. This is wasteful, to be sure, but I would appreciate it if you did not ask me to step in a delicate matter of this kind. I am hesitant to say that certain kinds of waste do not offend me; indeed, certain kinds of waste tend to thrill me to the marrow.

Also worth keeping in mind, it is this chap's leonine devotion to his literary implements, I give you my word of honor, that he will eventually cause of his utter release, with honor and happiness, from this enchanting vale of tears, laughter, redeeming human love, affection, and courtesy. With 50,000 additional kisses from the two looming pests of Bungalow 7 who love you, Most cordially, S. G. " - "Hapworth 16, 1924," Salinger's last published work, from the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker.

A collection of other stories here and here.

In today's culture of pornographic celebrity, in which fame is the supreme currency, Salinger's pursuit of total anonymity remains an inspiration, a reminder of what matters, and a reminder of what disappears.

Permalink via Daily Dish

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“Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”

—

J.D. Salinger, from The Catcher In The Rye [ January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010 ] ** uncertaintimes reblogged crashinglybeautiful: “Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.” — J.D. Salinger, from The Catcher In The Rye (via brighter) (via crashinglybeautiful)

idon't know ...

from flickr the the fabulous John McNab's photostream

From a thread on fb

M.K.:I want a vacuum that can be remotely operated over a 3G network to clean my house while I'm at work. the iSuck perhaps?
CH: Hilarious! and really possible!
J.C.: iPolish
S.R.S.: You need a Roomba. They're great
S.G.: iWish!
J.C: iLazy....
K.W.: hilarious and, can it dust and do laundry too? I mean, really, let's go for broke here!
M.H.: Could it write my sermon?
C.S.:Dishes, please dishes, too. iScrub.
T.E.: I'd settle for it having a perfect martini with 2 olives waiting for me .... ilush
C.T.: You need a Roomba
N.Y.S.: How about an app that will just go to work in my place?
J.P.: iSilly
S.M: Personally , I'm looking for the iCook
S.V.D: I love that ... If there's a product named "iSuck", it'd be hard not to buy it. Of course, there'd need to be a uSuck too.
C.T.: Maybe a WiiSuck?
E.S.: Hilarious thread! ilaugh!

All The Way to Heaven Is Heaven

Heaven 1 - A Very Nice Hotel by D. Cecil : "We arrived in the evening. A hike was planned but I couldn't get my gear on right and I was tired so I stayed behind. Someone waved from the hill. I knew I’d see them again soon. It did not seem odd that our room had only one single bed. "


Just paid a call to an online friend [flickr] only to find out that he has died.
Shit.

Go and visit Donald Cecil's Magical Photostream, including his memorial slide show

Some of my favorites are
The First Star
Hospital visit
You Won't , as in "You won’t eat if someone else is hungry.
You won’t rest because someone might need you.
You have lived for months surrounded by pain.
And you won’t get any morphine.

You have my undying love and gratitude. "

and
Christmas Eve 2008

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“all those who walk through
the night undecided –
i ask you Lord
to be with them,
not to be cruel,
to forgive them their
restlessness
and their vices,
that you send
them a crack of light
from under a
doorway and
not let them fall through
the darkness into
that greater darkness
which lies beyond the
night and is endless”

—	Prayer by Stanislaw Borokowski (via hotelnewbabylon) and "All that matters is what you love and what you love is who you are and who you are is where you will be when death takes across the river." --John Squandra

The Women

Sullivan

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry explores the New Testament:

The Gospels often show how, in the context of a patriarchal society, women played a very important role in the early Church. It is Mary who initiates Jesus’ miracle, and when she brings it up he dismisses her, calling her “woman”. Throughout the Gospels, whenever the men dismiss the women, it is later found out that the women were, in fact, right. After Jesus is resurrected, it is women who first find the empty tomb and, when they report this to the Apostles, they are first dismissed. In a matter of days, the Apostles, the leaders of the Church, have forgotten Jesus’ words about rebuilding the Temple, but the women remember, and accept the revelation. And it is the women, of course, who are right.

And this, of course, makes the modern Catholic church's refusal to grant women the full equality Jesus did all the more pernicious and un-Christian.

(Painting: El Greco's imagined Mother of God.)
Permalink

*

Making a Fist
Naomi Shihab Nye

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

*

A dream, a banishment

Hungry ghost:

seek your snack

elsewhere!

[Mary K. Valle]
Instant Poetry

Addicted To Harmony

from my flickr page

"Notice what you notice.
Catch yourself thinking.
Observe what's vivid.
Vividness is self-selecting."

- Allen Ginsberg
Mind Writing Slogans


*
The only way you can endure your pain is to let it be painful. [89]

One kind word can turn over all of heaven and earth [53]

We have to study with our warm heart, not just with our brain. [42]

Moment after moment, completely devote yourself to listening to your inner voice. [59]

When a tree stands up by itself, we call that tree a buddha [77]

Because things don't actually go as you expect, there is suffering. [84]

Most problems we create because we don't know ourselves [137]

In reflecting on our problems, we should include ourselves [131]

Don't say "too late" [158]

Instead of criticizing, find out how to help [196]

Life is like stepping onto a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink. [202]

When you say "Wait a moment" you are bound by your own karma; when you say "Yes I will" you are free [249]

-From "Crooked Cucumber" by David Chadwick

**

Already the ripening barberries are red,
And in their bed the aged asters hardly breathe.
Whoever now is not rich inside, at the end of summer,
Will wait and wait, and never be himself.

Whoever now is unable to close his eyes
Absolutely certain that a crowd of faces
Is only waiting till the night comes
In order to stand up around him in the darkness --
That man is worn out, like an old man.

Nothing more will happen to him, no day will arrive
And everything that does happen will cheat him.
Even you, my God. And you are like a stone
which draws him daily deeper into the depths.

-Rilke
Looking For Dragon Smoke
Robert Bly

*
"We are finally all, wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become."

-Louis L'Amour

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"I want it all." "Go for it" is the current cliche` expressing some horrible greediness, naivete`, and love of the unlimited. Some naive men and women do not want to choose, but want events to choose...

...Suffering ... means the difficult tasks accepted for the sake of your desire, but also the painful awareness of other roads not taken. The passion in our nature urges a human being to choose "the one precious thing" and urges him to pay for it through poverty, conflict, deprivation, labor, and the endurance of anger from rejected divinities ...

... if we choose "the one precious thing" -- the object of our desire -- then, according to the alchemists, the inner King in us that has been asleep for so many years wakes up.

We could say that New Age people in general are addicted to harmony. The alchemical woodcut says that a child will not become an adult until it breaks the addiction to harmony, chooses the one precious thing, and enters into a joyful participation in the tensions of the world."

--Robert Bly

*
from KTBlog

Priests in Space

by Mary Valle

Souls are souls, even
extraterrestrial
But please, dear Vatican
astronomers, take a moment
and read The Sparrow

*

blessing the boats
by Lucille Clifton

(at St. Mary's)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that


*

The History of His Breaths

I started reading Cormack McCarthy's "The Road"

My God !

We allow ourselves to love someone/something and that makes the world.

*
“A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love indifference and dislike, also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forbears, the stones and sands of his familiar places, long-silenced battles and struggles of conscience, of the smiles of girls and the slow utterance of old women, of accidents and the gradual action of inexorable law, of all this and something else, too, a single flame which in every way obeys the laws that pertain to Fire itself, and yet is lit and put out from one moment to the next, and can never be relumed in the whole waste of time to come. ~A.S. Byatt”

[via Crashingly Beautiful]

Everyone Else Is Already Taken

Bernard Faucon

Everything You Know

People who don't read poetry
Who consider it wasted time
Have poetry in them
like they have bones and flesh
The man standing still on the dock
holding his grandson
can feel his moment's poem
Even if words and rhymes
would never come

Trusting the truth of things in the world
Will make the poem live
Will make the world true
Like we know about the river
and the sea
We can feel the dawn before it comes
The place of laughter in us is still alive
Even as we sleep and cry
God is God, belief or none at all.

The great turning of the earth
causes a shiver of joy
Even though the world
appears to be absolutely still.

B.S. 23 Jan. 2010

*

psalm

Sermon Fire

by Adam Moorad

A cut-up/erasure of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon.

*

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." — Oscar Wilde

*

I Would Use My Last Ounce of Strength to Freak Out

by Mary Valle

There’s been an attack or an earthquake
and you’re waiting for help
lying on the ground, possibly bleeding
and who shows up?
Some dick with an e-meter

(source)

*

INSTANT POETRY

Short 'n Sassy!

This hair makes me feel like

I'm teaching Adult Christian Living

and wearing a slacks girdle, I said.

My friend said, I have no idea

what you're talking about.

Consider the front of a Toni

home perm box, I said. Circa 1982.

Oh.