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Unruly Teen Charges $23 Quadrillion At Drugstore
Looking Back: Dancing plagues and mass hysteria (The Psychologist.)
What stuntmen think are the best stunt films of all time. (Slate [via walker])
Top 10 Ironic Ads From History
and from
Second Pass
Fired from the Canon
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I'm taking a couple of days off to visit my sister, who is younger, smarter and more beautiful than I am .
Cheers.:)
Making Horses Gallop and Audiences CryLONDON — On the bare black stage of the New London Theater, a seven-foot-tall horse breaks into a gallop, round and round, until he pauses for a breath, his flanks heaving lightly. A human approaches; the horse, Topthorn, lifts his head, flexes his ears and shakes his tail. His right front hoof paws the floor, as if to charge.
Topthorn is not a real horse, of course, but an intricately constructed puppet in the hit West End play “War Horse.” He and the play’s other main horse puppet, named Joey, are central characters, and they are as much living, breathing and emotionally aware beings as any award-winning actor here today. (The horses’ creators won an Olivier Award for design.)
The play, adapted by Nick Stafford from a novel by Michael Morpurgo, is about a British boy of little means, Albert, who becomes Joey’s owner and best friend, only to lose him when Joey is sold to a British officer to ride into battle in World War I. The loss shatters Albert and leads him to enlist, under-age, so he can fight in Europe as well and maybe find his beloved Joey.
Washington
What is up with the banks and the rest of the financial industry? The people running this system remind me of gangsters who manage to walk out of the courthouse with a suspended sentence and can’t wait to get back to their nefarious activities.
These malefactors of great wealth (thank you, Teddy) developed hideously destructive credit policies and took insane risks that hurt millions of American families and nearly wrecked the economy. Then they were bailed out with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, money that came from the very people victimized by the industry’s outlandish practices.
Now the industry is fighting against creation of an agency that would protect taxpayers and ordinary consumers from a similarly devastating onslaught in the future. And at the same time they are scrambling to raise credit card interest rates and all manner of exploitive fees to build a brand new superstructure of questionable profits on the backs of the taxpayers who came to their rescue.
We’re reaching a whole new level of chutzpah here.
The Obama administration wants to create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would shield individuals and families from deceptive practices and outright fraud by banks and other businesses offering credit cards, mortgages, home loans and other forms of consumer finance.
Everything we’ve learned in this recession tells us we need such an agency. As Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner described it, “This agency will have only one mission: to protect consumers.”
Protecting the consumer is, of course, anathema to the industry. So it’s preparing for war. The Times’s Edmund Andrews neatly summed up the matter when he wrote that “banks and mortgage lenders are placing top priority on killing” the president’s proposal.
The proposed agency developed from an idea offered some time ago by Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor who currently chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel, which has been monitoring the financial industry bailouts. She is a strong contender to lead the proposed new agency.
Ms. Warren told a Congressional committee last month about the stark difference between the warm and fuzzy advertising approach used by lenders competing for consumer dollars and the treachery that is so often hidden in the fine print.
“Giant lenders compete for business by talking about nominal interest rates, free gifts and warm feelings,” she said, “but the fine print hides the things that really rake in the cash. Today’s business model is about making money through tricks and traps.”
It should be clear by now that it is often the goal of financial institutions to see that the consumer is not well informed. “In the early-1980s,” said Professor Warren, the average credit card contract was about a page long. “Today, it is more than 30 pages. ... I am a contract law professor, and I cannot make out some of the fine print.”
She added, “Study after study shows that credit products are designed in ways that obscure the meaning and trick customers.”
There is nothing free or fair about a market in which one side uses double talk and mumbo jumbo to obscure important information and deliberately dupe the other side into making decisions against its own interests.
When I think of the banking industry fighting to kill this proposed agency, it brings to mind the decades in which tobacco companies insisted that cigarettes were safe, and those days long ago when the auto companies fought against seat belts, and all the dopey arguments that were made against protecting the public from unsafe drugs and kitchen appliances that might burst into flames, and so on.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has concluded that Americans spend approximately $55 billion each year on closing costs that they don’t fully understand. As Ms. Warren noted, “Mortgage lenders furnish reams of unreadable documents shortly before closing, often leaving people with no practical option but to take whatever terms the lender has filled in.”
The family home is the largest purchase most Americans ever make. Paying it off can take much of a lifetime. Everything about that contract should be crystal clear to the buyer.
I had a breakfast interview with Ms. Warren on a variety of subjects last week. On the day of the meeting, USA Today had a front-page article that began: “Even as regulators crack down on abusive mortgage and credit card practices, another type of lending threatens to mire consumers in a credit trap.”
The article detailed the ways in which banks are wringing huge profits from overdraft fees that often are sky high and in many cases are handled in ways that are exploitive, if not predatory.
The malefactors of great wealth view an informed consumer as Public Enemy No. 1. The last thing in the world that they want is a fair marketplace, which is why the Consumer Financial Protection Agency can’t come fast enough.
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Facing a credit card rate hike? Here’s how to talk it down
Process poses slight risk to credit score, but some experts say it’s still worth a try
By Becky Yerak
If your credit card company has hiked your rate and you can’t pay it off immediately, one option is to call the issuer and ask for a lower rate, particularly if you’ve been a longtime customer.
“Say, ‘I’ve been a customer for X amount of time, and I’m looking at competitive offers,’ ” said Bill Hardekopf, chief executive of LowCards.com, a credit card Web site. ” ‘I’d like you to roll it back to X rate.’ ”
Credit card companies don’t want to lose customers because “the acquisition cost is too high,” he said.
In 2006 the Tribune published a script in a story by Gregory Karp aimed at helping consumers negotiate a lower credit card rate. This reporter successfully used it to bring down the rate on a credit card to 9.99 percent from 24.99 percent.
It goes like this:
You: “Hi. Can you tell me what my current interest rate is?”
Operator: “Your interest rate is X percent.”
You: “Hmmm. I’d like you to lower my interest rate now, please.”
(Don’t say another word until the operator makes a move.)
Operator: “OK, I can lower it to X percent.”
You: “That’s not enough, but I’ll take that for now. Thanks. I’d like to tell your supervisor how helpful you’ve been. Could you pass me over?”
If you’re able to get the supervisor on the line, mention that the operator did indeed help you, but then repeat the script.
In a few months call back and repeat the process.
There is a potential pitfall, according to Bankrate.com: Your FICO score could be dinged if your credit issuer considers that an application for credit and pulls your credit report and score.
“There is a slight risk, but the risk is worth taking if they’re increasing your interest rates so high,” Hardekopf said. “If they’re going from, say, 10 percent to 17 percent, go for it.”
Other tips >>>
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Wikipedia:Usury (pronounced /ˈjuːʒəri/, comes from the Medieval Latin usuria, "interest" or "excessive interest", from the Latin usura "interest") originally meant the charging of interest on loans. This would have included charging a fee for the use of money, such as at a bureau de change. After countries legislated to limit the rate of interest on loans, usury came to mean the interest above the lawful rate. In common usage today, the word means the charging of unreasonable or relatively high rates of interest. As such, the term is largely derived from Abrahamic religious principles; Riba is the corresponding Islamic term. The primary focus in this article is on the Christian tradition.
The pivotal change in the English-speaking world seems to have come with the permission to charge interest on lent money: particularly the Act 'In restraint of usury' of Henry VIII in England in 1545 (see book references).
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The First Council of Nicaea in 325, forbade clergy from engaging in usury[1](canon 17). At the time "usury" meant simply interest of any kind, and the canon merely forbade the clergy to lend money on interest above one per cent per month. Later ecumenical councils applied this regulation to the laity.[2][1]
Lateran III decreed that persons who accepted interest on loans could receive neither the sacraments nor Christian burial.[3] Pope Clement V made the belief in the right to usury a heresy in 1311, and abolished all secular legislation which allowed it.[4] Pope Sixtus V condemned the practice of charging interest as "detestable to God and man, damned by the sacred canons and contrary to Christian charity."[4]
*It is not enough when a man can say, “Oh, I labor, I have my craft,” or “I have my trade.” That is not enough. But we must see whether it is good and profitable for the common good, and whether his neighbors may fare the better of it.
–John Calvin, Sermons on the Epistle to the Ephesians (sermon on Eph. 4:26-28)(1558)
*
Mongolian Shamans Cure Modern Ills, for a PriceULAN BATOR, MONGOLIA — Waving her cigarette impatiently, the shaman declared that she had just the cure for the man’s misfortunes. Two divorces and a business in the dumps? Yes, yes, she had heard it all before. But first she needed another drink.
She watched the man pour out the rest of the bottle’s golden liquid into her bowl and then took a pensive sip. Only then could she administer her instructions, thanks to the fluid’s mystical qualities.
“I could drink vodka, but my spirit prefers beer,” she said. “He’s angry, and always drunk.”
Enkhtuya, 47, who like most Mongolians goes by her given name, proceeded to tell the man to wash with vodka to clear out the bad energy. Then he was to throw slices of horse meat, his wet shirt and vodka into a pot of water and dispose of the concoction far from his home. This, she said, would banish the demon plaguing him.
Additional rituals included keeping salt and sugar in his pockets and pouring out a cup of vodka on his right side every day for a month.
“Don’t spill any of it on your body or the evil spirit will come back and bring more trouble to you,” she warned.
The man thanked her, handing over 1,000 togrog, about 70 cents, and left her tiny shack. He was quickly replaced by an elderly lady, the next in a long line of customers waiting outside.
Enkhtuya is among a growing number of shamans turning an ancient spiritual tradition into a booming business in Mongolia’s rapidly swelling capital, home to about a third of the country’s nearly three million people. Banned for 70 years under Communist rule, shamans are now protected by the state and have become a fixture of city life.
They are in high demand. Thousands of bureaucrats, laid-off factory workers and nomads who lost their flocks in the country’s stumble toward a market economy now crowd faded Soviet-style apartment blocks and tent districts looking for work, love and healing.
“In the old days people asked for rain,” said Chinbat, 30, an electrical engineer who recently finished training to become a shaman. “Today they ask for money.”
This revival, however, is fueling a challenge to age-old notions of spiritual power, as self-styled shamans with their own rituals and lore vie with the more traditional shamanistic authorities for believers’ faith — and cash.
Mongolian shamanism arose from the vast grasslands thousands of years before Buddhism arrived from Tibet in the 16th century. At its heart is a worship of nature and the spirits that rule mountains, rivers and the sky.
Over time, various communities emerged with their own deities, rituals and tools. Some shamans beat drums or play jaw harps to induce trances, while others foam at the mouth and speak in tongues when communing with the spirit world.
Yet deep in their tradition lies the shared belief that shamanistic abilities can be passed down through families, with spirits forcing their chosen oracles onto this spiritual path, often through illness or other personal crises that cannot be explained by science or cured by conventional medicine.
Chinbat discovered his calling during a visit to a shaman who told him that his father’s liver disease was a sign of his mystical destiny. At first he rejected the idea, but after his father died, Chinbat paid 500,000 togrog, or $350, for a week of training along with 11 other students. The sacred drum and robes cost extra. Now he says he can see visions and channel spirits during his vodka-soaked trances. He practices his craft from home and says he keeps these new abilities secret from most people. He also plans to keep his day job.
“The main role of shamanism is to protect your family, not to make money,” he said.
But these days, hundreds of Mongolians claiming to wield shamanistic powers have set up shop in Ulan Bator, where a steady stream of clients suffering from unemployment, illness or heartbreak are just a phone call or taxi ride away.
Claiming to be a shaman can bring prestige, fame and a livelihood, said Matyas Balogh, an assistant professor of Mongolian studies at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest who has studied contemporary Mongolian shamanism. Some of these would-be spiritual healers and mediums invent their own rituals, he said, and are rejected as frauds by shamans who adhere to more traditional practices.
“Neo-shamans have nobody to learn from, so they just make it up,” he said.
Zorigtbaatar Banzar practices his own brand of magic in a round felt tent, or ger, that he calls the Center of Shaman and Eternal Heavenly Sophistication, which sits beside a karaoke bar at one of Ulan Bator’s busiest intersections. A potbellied, red-nosed man in his 50s, Zorigtbaatar says he first discovered his supernatural powers as a young soldier lost in the Gobi and then spent time in a mental hospital, he says, for telling others about his “gifts.”
Today he and his wife, who is also a shaman, have built a successful business based on the worship of Genghis Khan, the legendary Mongolian ruler who they say was the most powerful shaman of all. During their ceremonies, Zorigtbaatar channels Genghis Khan’s spirit for the benefit of the hundreds of believers they see each week.
The work, Zorigtbaatar says, is more important than that of the average shaman.
“We are close to the end of the world,” he said, pointing to a painting of the great Khan surrounded by a divine fire. “Mongolians today have lost their energy, their power, so they are lazy. I am sent by his spirit to help the people, not heal cancer or toothaches.”
Resplendent in a beaded crown and silk caftan draped with amulets, Zorigtbaatar beat his sheepskin drum and chanted incantations before an altar decorated with a stuffed bear head, Mongolian currency and a bottle of Gordon’s gin. Two dozen believers sat nearby clutching offerings of candy and cookies.
Then Zorigtbaatar led the faithful past a large eagle chained to a post and out into the parking lot toward a mound of horse skulls.
Straining to block out the blaring car horns as they focused on his drumming, they murmured prayers for prosperity and flicked drops of vodka into the air.
The ceremony ended with many of the attendees receiving a head massage from Zorigtbaatar before being sent home with a packet of sugar cubes for good luck.
Across town, Suhbat Shagdariin, president of the Golomt Center for Shamanism, an institute dedicated to preserving traditional shamanism, bristles when discussing the competing beliefs that have recently infiltrated Mongolian society, from the likes of Zorigtbaatar to Mormon and Catholic missionaries. Yet even his organization, which has trained more than 1,500 shamans since opening in 1996, has adapted to modernity. Many believers knock on the center’s door seeking financial advice, including two Mongolians who lost a fortune gambling in Las Vegas.
According to Suhbat, the pair returned to Las Vegas and quickly won $2 million applying the predictions of one of the center’s shamans — and a bit of technology.
“The shaman worked here,” Suhbat explained, holding up his cellphone, “but the spirits went there.”
All poets, if they are any good,” Charles Simic has said, “tend to stand apart from their literary age.” The key phrase here, of course, is “if they are any good”; average poets don’t just stand within their age, they compose it. But we sometimes talk as if poets are exceptions not simply when they write well, but because they write at all. According to this way of thinking, the art form demands such devotion to one’s individuality that every poet, no matter how lowly, is a kind of outsider — a Cheese Who Stands Alone. This perception frequently finds its way into depictions of poets in popular culture; it also emerges in the vehemence with which poets themselves regularly declare their opposition to labels, categories, schools, allegiances, booster clubs, car pools, intramural softball teams and so on. Yet when everyone is busy standing apart, how is it possible to stand out? What does real independence look like?
Possibly something like the work of Thom Gunn, whose new Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $14) is edited by August Kleinzahler. Gunn, who died in 2004, began his career as a hot young poet in England (he published his first book, “Fighting Terms,” when he was only 25) and was generally associated with the taut, plainspoken aesthetic favored by writers like Philip Larkin and Donald Davie. In 1954, he left England for San Francisco, where he eventually settled after studying with Yvor Winters at Stanford. Gunn embraced the city’s bohemian lifestyle — Edmund White called him “the last of the commune dwellers . . . serious and intellectual by day and druggy and sexual by night” — and he grew increasingly interested in syllabics and free verse even as he continued to hone the metrical forms that distinguished his early career. He’s possibly the only poet to have written a halfway decent quintain while on LSD, and he’s certainly one of the few to profess genuine admiration for both Winters (the archformalist) and Allen Ginsberg (the arch . . . well, Allen Ginsberg). This is, even for the poetry world, a pretty odd background.
It’s also the kind of background that leads to misleading career narratives. Like most people, poets rarely undergo multiple metamorphoses in their lives and art over a short period. In time, they might shift their style; they might take up different subject matter; they might buy a duplex in Miami. But generally speaking, their existence is reasonably consistent, and they stick fairly close to what they know. Gunn, however, not only moved from England to America, he exchanged the rarefied air of Cambridge for the hothouse of 1960s-era San Francisco, became openly gay, started dabbling in drugs, began writing about the urban underbelly and set about tinkering with the verse techniques that had made him (relatively) famous — all in the space of about 10 years. Critics often attribute changes in a poet’s style to changes in his life; this much change in both arenas threw some readers into what could be described as a tizzy of questionable causation. British reviewers who opposed Gunn’s technical shifts blamed California, just as American critics would, later on, connect his adventurous lifestyle with his more “relaxed” versification. (You can still see this dynamic at work today, whenever critics contrast Gunn’s libido with his tight metrics — as if no one had ever written quatrains about having sex before.) In any case, all of the talk about Gunn’s life and style, and style and life, almost makes one wish the poet had stayed in England; at least then no one could say he wrote seven-syllable lines because of Jefferson Airplane.
Kleinzahler believes that Gunn’s development was steadier and, in some ways, more conventional. He’s right. Gunn began to come into his own with the publication of “My Sad Captains” in 1961, when he was 32, and his work steadily strengthened for the next four decades. In his best, most characteristic writing, Gunn is what you might call a poet of friction: he’s interested in the ways in which surfaces push off, against or into each other. Consider his description of surfing in “From the Wave”:
The mindless heave of which they rode
A fluid shelf
Breaks as they leave it, falls and, slowed,
Loses itself.Clear, the sheathed bodies slick as seals
Loosen and tingle;
And by the board the bare foot feels
The suck of shingle.There are many ways to write about surfing — one could focus on the danger, the grace, the speed and so forth. But it’s typical of Gunn that while he gives us a sense of all these elements, he’s drawn to instances of contact: the point at which “the bare foot feels / The suck of shingle”; the moment in which “marbling bodies have become / Half wave, half men, / Grafted it seems by feet of foam.” Feel and touch and pressure are constants throughout this selection, whether it’s the longing of a hawk for “the feel . . . / Of catcher and of caught / Upon your wrist”; the swimmer who remembers “the pull and risk / Of the Pacific’s touch . . . Its cold live sinews tugging at each limb”; or simply the “secure firm dry embrace” of longtime domestic affection.
Even in the AIDS-related elegies that dominate his most famous book, “The Man With Night Sweats,” Gunn is drawn to comparisons involving substance brought to bear on substance. “Still Life,” a poem about a terminal patient, concludes with the image of “the tube his mouth enclosed / In an astonished O.” “The Missing” imagines the vast web of friendships, now vanishing, as a “supple entwinement through the living mass / Which for all that I knew might have no end, / Image of an unlimited embrace.” But the poem that gives “The Man With Night Sweats” its title is perhaps Gunn’s most arresting use of this sort of metaphor. The poem begins with a man waking at night (“I wake up cold, I who / Prospered through dreams of heat”) and recognizing the rising weakness in his once-powerful body. It concludes:
I have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead
Stopped upright where I am
Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,
As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.The delicate suggestion of alienation, or at least separation, between self and body (“Hugging my body to me”) presages the even greater disruption that occurs in the final couplet. We think of the earth as being our foundation: we’re “on solid ground.” The image of an avalanche is especially disturbing, then, because it suggests that what had supported our bodies is now bent on destroying them. The touch has become a blow; the heat of friction has become a conflagration. Here, Gunn is (consciously or not) rewriting the great American poem of unity between body and earth, Robert Frost’s “To Earthward.” That poem ends: “When stiff and sore and scarred / I take away my hand / From leaning on it hard / In grass and sand, / The hurt is not enough: / I long for weight and strength / To feel the earth as rough / To all my length.” Oh no, says Gunn, you don’t.
One can quibble with some of the choices in this volume. Kleinzahler’s version of Gunn is a little more austere than some might like, even when the poems themselves are bent on advertising their countercultural bona fides. It’s puzzling, for instance, that space was made for a druggy yet prim couplet about, yes, Jefferson Airplane (“The music comes and goes on the wind, / Comes and goes on the brain”), but not for any of Gunn’s epigrams; for instance, the superb “Barren Leaves,” which reads in its entirety: “Spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling: / Wet dreams, wet dreams, in libraries congealing.” Gunn was a very funny poet, and it would have been good to see more of that. But of course, his total output ran well over 500 pages, almost all of which are well worth reading, and any selection was bound to have holes critics would cry over. It’s to the credit of this remarkable writer that those absences seem unimportant beside what is so rousingly present.
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On real estate
For a moment I thought Augustine was referring to life in Sydney, when he wrote: “It grieves them more to own a bad house than a bad life, as if it were man’s greatest good to have everything good but himself” (City of God, 3.1).
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Photographic notes from a madhouse
photographs and text by
lauren e. simonutti
lauren e. simonuttiImploring AllahSequestered in the house that I had made, a madhouse in its own right, only leaving to see the doctor or for food, I am dosed with as much stardust* as a body can take without breaking, trying to balance the threat of organ failure against the redirection of the bio-chemical misfirings that conspire to convince me to destroy all.(*Lithium really is stardust. It is the 3rd to last element that an exploding star expels before it goes nova. Only hydrogen and helium come after).
[both via The Daily Dish]
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Jesus plus nothing:
And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.—Matthew 10:36
This is how they pray: a dozen clear-eyed, smooth-skinned “brothers” gathered together in a huddle, arms crossing arms over shoulders like the weave of a cable, leaning in on one another and swaying like the long grass up the hill from the house they share. The house is a handsome, gray, two-story colonial that smells of new carpet and Pine-Sol and aftershave; the men who live there call it Ivanwald. At the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac, quiet but for the buzz of lawn mowers and kids playing foxes-and-hounds in the park across the road, Ivanwald sits as one house among many, clustered together like mushrooms, all devoted, like these men, to the service of Jesus Christ. The men tend every tulip in the cul-de-sac, trim every magnolia, seal every driveway smooth and black as boot leather. And they pray, assembled at the dining table or on their lawn or in the hallway or in the bunk room or on the basketball court, each man's head bowed in humility and swollen with pride (secretly, he thinks) at being counted among such a fine corps for Christ, among men to whom he will open his heart and whom he will remember when he returns to the world not born-again but remade, no longer an individual but part of the Lord's revolution, his will transformed into a weapon for what the young men call “spiritual war.”
“Jeff, will you lead us in prayer?”
Surely, brother. It is April 2002, and I have lived with these men for weeks now, not as a Christian—a term they deride as too narrow for the world they are building in Christ's honor—but as a “believer.” I have shared the brothers' meals and their work and their games. I have been numbered among them and have been given a part in their ministry. I have wrestled with them and showered with them and listened to their stories: I know which man resents his father's fortune and which man succumbed to the flesh of a woman not once but twice and which man dances so well he is afraid of being taken for a fag. I know what it means to be a “brother,” which is to say that I know what it means to be a soldier in the army of God.
“Heavenly Father,” I begin. Then, “O Lord,” but I worry that this doesn't sound intimate enough. I settle on, “Dear Jesus.” “Dear Jesus, just, please, Jesus, let us fight for Your name.”
The C Street ClubBy Scott Horton
What links John Ensign, Mark Sanford, Jim DeMint, Tim Coburn, and a number of other senior Republican leaders on Capitol Hill? It’s a highly secretive religious organization that promotes a radically different view of Christianity, a sort of cult of power. Listen to Harper’s contributing editor Jeff Sharlet discuss The Family–the organization that runs the notorious C Street residence and the subject of his article from 2003 in Harper’s as well as his recent book–last night on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
It is not enough when a man can say, “Oh, I labor, I have my craft,” or “I have my trade.” That is not enough. But we must see whether it is good and profitable for the common good, and whether his neighbors may fare the better of it.
–John Calvin, Sermons on the Epistle to the Ephesians (sermon on Eph. 4:26-28)(1558)
Qigong group practice
Things to Think
Robert Bly
Think in ways you've never thought before...
When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
Source: Things to Think
inward/outward
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"For Your Birthday"
by John O'Donohue
Blessed be the mind that dreamed the day
The blueprint of your life
Would begin to glow on earth,
Illuminating all the faces and voices
That would arrive to invite
Your soul to growth.
Praised be your father and mother,
Who loved you before you were,
And trusted to call you here
With no idea who you would be.
Blessed be those who have loved you
Into becoming who you were meant to be,
Blessed be those who have crossed your life
With dark gifts of hurt and loss
That have helped to school your mind
In the art of disappointment.
When desolations surrounded you,
Blessed be those who looked for you
And found you, their kind hands
Urgent to open a blue window
In the gray wall formed around you.
Blessed be the gifts you never notice,
Your health, eyes to behold the world,
Thoughts to countenance the unknown,
Memory to harvest vanished days,
Your heart to feel the world's waves,
Your breath to breathe the nourishment
Of distance made intimate by earth.
On the echoing-day of your birth,
May you open the gift of solitude
In order to receive your soul;
Enter the generosity of silence
To hear your hidden heart;
Know the serenity of stillness
To be enfolded anew
By the miracle of your being.
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"Day and night gifts keep pelting down on us. If we were aware of this, gratefulness would overwhelm us. But we go through life in a daze. A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is; a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep. How much we are missing in life by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them."
- David Steindl-Rast
*"Attention is love, what we must give
to children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new."- Marge Piercy
*
The Art of Blessing the Day
James Estrin/The New York TimesSister Mary Lou Mitchell, president of the Sisters of St. Joseph congregation, visiting Sister Helen Goschke. “We approach our living and our dying in the same way, with discernment,” Sister Mary Lou said.
Months to Live
Sisters Face Death With Dignity and ReverenceA convent is a world apart, unduplicable. But the Sisters of St. Joseph, a congregation in this Rochester suburb, animate many factors that studies say contribute to successful aging and a gentle death — none of which require this special setting. These include a large social network, intellectual stimulation, continued engagement in life and spiritual beliefs, as well as health care guided by the less-is-more principles of palliative and hospice care — trends that are moving from the fringes to the mainstream.
For the elderly and infirm Roman Catholic sisters here, all of this takes place in a Mother House designed like a secular retirement community for a congregation that is literally dying off, like so many religious orders. On average, one sister dies each month, right here, not in the hospital, because few choose aggressive medical intervention at the end of life, although they are welcome to it if they want.
“We approach our living and our dying in the same way, with discernment,” said Sister Mary Lou Mitchell, the congregation president. “Maybe this is one of the messages we can send to society, by modeling it.”
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Life After Losing Part of Her Brain
By Tara Parker-PopeIn 1997, Ms. Van Deren had a lobectomy, surgery to remove a part of her temporal lobe that was implicated in a series of frightening grand mal seizures. The surgery cured her epilepsy, but with a cost: she has lost part of her memory and organizational skills. She also has lost sense of time and place, making her a formidable force in a lonely sport that requires participants to endure runs of 100 miles or more.
This is an amazing tale of science and the human spirit, and gives a glimpse into the challenges and difficult choices people with epilepsy must make to live normal lives. Read the full story, “Brain Surgery Frees a Runner, but Also Raises New Barriers.”Since brain surgery, she just runs, uninhibited by the drudgery of time and distance, undeterred by an inability to remember exactly where she is going or how to get back.
*
Again Dreaming
In a high up apartment at night
Peter and I look out the window and
Prepare to leave.
The city spreads out before us
Distant silent and winking in light.
We are high enough above the city
That we are embraced in
the still darkness of deep night
When sleep cloaks all activity.
Children are asleep behind
closed bedroom doors.
How many and who?
I cannot say.
“What about them ?” I ask.
“What about their fate ?
Should we wake them up at least?
We can’t leave them alone.”
But we can’t take the children
We have to leave them now
and let them sleep.
We have to go
now.
We look out over the city
We look at the lights burning holes in the
dark.
We breath in peacefulness.
Time to go.
We leave everything undisturbed
As it is.
B.S.
dreamed July 5, 2009
written down July 7, 2009
*
From "Follow Me Here"
‘Stoned wallabies make crop circles’
‘Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around “as high as a kite”, a government official has said.
…Rick Rockliff, a spokesman for poppy producer Tasmanian Alkaloids, said the wallaby incursions were not very common, but other animals had also been spotted in the poppy fields acting unusually.
“There have been many stories about sheep that have eaten some of the poppies after harvesting and they all walk around in circles,” he added.’ (BBC )
from my flickr photostream
BY Mark Jarman
from his collection "Epistles"
God said your name today. He said, "Tell me about X." And everybody had a lie you'd like. The solutions for X were all X + 1. X is charming as a firefly, and know a formula for cold fusion. X's good will is equal to the radius of earth; the fall of the meteorite, the passage of the gritty asteroid, the comet's lonely visit: X notes them all. The biological children of X adore their parent almost as much as the many adopted ones, and all of them are making money close to home. X will donate any duplicate organ for a loved one, and X loves everybody: ask for an eye, a kidney, a lung, a lobe of cerebellum.
And so God, boasting to the devil, said, "Consider my servant X."
*
The following from Nan Merrill's newsletter, "Friends of Silence" July/August 2009
Vol. XXII. No. 7
[snail mail only]
People can live only by dwelling in the living breath of God. Only in this way can they be at peace and realize their aspirations. From sunrise to sunset, they dwell in the living breath of God; every sight and thought is part of that breath. God provides a place for them filled with clarity and bliss and stillness. In the silence, we are moved by this wind, which blows everywhere in the world.
...from THE LOST SUTRAS OF JESUS, ed. by Ray Riegert & Thomas Moore
*
Something inside of me has reached to the place where the world is breathing.
...Kabir
*
Breathing is an act of prayer.
...Frank Waters
*
"From LUMEN CHRISTI, the wording "Nurture yourself with feasts of breath in silence and solitude' blew me away, to put it mildly. Although most mornings I do some breathing exercises, it occurred to me that I had not really paid attention to my breath otherwise in months. Going into meditation, I focused on inhaling Divine Love and exhaling peace and harmony. My mind became like a prism, drawing the energy of the pure white light of Love to a focal point and then refracting it into the colors of peace and harmony and breathing them out to the world... thirty-five minutes in the Silence without distracting thoughts intruding!"
.. in a letter from Anne Amerson, with thanks
*
There are two graces in breathing:
drawing in air and discharging it.
The former constrains, the latter refreshes:
so marvelously is life mixed.
... Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
*
Breathing properly and consciously assumes an attitude of openness and attentiveness. Our breath has a connection with the deeper emotional layers of consciousness. This is evident when we are emotional, angry, or anxious. At the same time, however, our breath remains open to those dimensions of our consciousness where we unfold and become receptive to God ... We need to discipline ourselves to attain an inner stillness and receptive attention toward God, who is our beginning.
...from THE EYE AWARE by Jerome Witkam
**
from Heron Dance interview with Nan Merrill:
Nan: Since 9/11 Friends of Silence has been getting about five new subscribers a week because people are hearing it – people are sharing it because it speaks to them. It softens what’s going on in a very harsh world. And, you know, I tell people about Heron Dance, and it grows that way but it hasn’t reached the 100th monkey stage where it just suddenly wells up.
I helped found The Guild of Spiritual Guidance. Douglas Steer, a prominent Quaker, was another founder. He had been at Vatican II and was very ecumenical. I had never really sat down with Douglas. When I went to the house where he was staying, he greeted me, we sat down and he closed his eyes. So I closed mine. We just sat in silence for about 25 minutes. This was an entirely new experience for me, being invited to see someone and sitting in silence. And then, after about 25 minutes, we spoke for 10 minutes. He gave me a hug afterwards and said, “What a wonderful Meeting.” It was just such a gift. And he said, “Oh, you learn so much about a person in the silence.”
Q: I lived for a while in my teens on a couple different Indian reserves. Old Indians will often walk in to one another’s house without knocking, sit at the table, drink tea or coffee, and leave with almost no words.
Nan: Beautiful.
Q: They’re friends. They’ve known each other since they were babies. I guess they just feel that at a certain point, there’s nothing really to say. You know, you just enjoy the other’s company.
Nan: A lot goes on in the silence. I mean, we speak soul to soul in the silence, and it’s so much deeper than when we verbalize unless we do it out of the silence. When we talk, it comes from the head. But when you can speak out of the silence it brings you into the heart of things, to appropriate action, appropriate talk, because it comes from a deep place.
I have an image that I’ve been playing with lately. The soul of each of us is like a garden and it starts out as fertile soil. We either keep it fertile or it gets filled with weeds or stones or sometimes rocks and brush. And so we’re called -- and it’s usually in the later part of life -- to start noticing that garden within us. All that soil has been planted with seeds by the Spirit. I call ‘em spirit seeds. To nourish them, we need to water it, which is to be nourished by the silence and by the Word, whatever our Word is, with a capital ‘W’. Whether it’s from scripture or from spiritual readings, but we need to keep nourishing that. And it also needs light….in the soil. And so our light is the Light within us, and we have to tend to that Light, to keep the fire of Spirit alive within us by being mindful and living in the Now Light. The warmth of companionship, the warmth of home, the warmth of good nutrition, all are important to that.
You have to nourish the soul within and weed it. It’s not going to happen without personal attention. That comes with being with yourself in solitude and silence. Then those seeds that are your true potential have the room and the nourishment to grow. Finally there is action in the world. You offer your gifts to the world, which you’re doing so beautifully in Heron Dance. You nourish yourself by going out into nature. That’s one our greatest nourishments. And what are we doing to it? We’re ruining it.
Q: Phrases like “letting it go” or “letting go” of whatever, ambition, ego, fear, and accepting – acceptance – those to me are like the big hurdles of my personal journey. On one level I understand all this stuff. On another, I struggle to live it, you know? I operate with the bias that Heron Dance is not going to fail because of a lack of hard work or imagination or creativity. It could well fail. I’m not going to let it fail because of something I should have done that I didn’t do. And that can take me into a frenetic way of living and working that is contrary to wisdom. But on the other hand, I can’t be too critical because I started Heron Dance completely broke with cancer. Things like that dedication to a work can be our greatest asset, and our greatest liability at the same time. We have to work really hard because we make so many mistakes. We’ve got to not only do things right, but also have to overcome all the mistakes.
Nan: That’s a challenge. Life’s challenge. My greatest fear growing up was of abandonment. My father was a traveling salesman. He was gone maybe 3 weeks out of the month. My mother was a very, very fearful person. Both of them had grown up with either various parents or no parents. And so I got this abandonment thing. A big part of my therapy was dealing with the fear of abandonment. And when I went to Detroit, I was introduced to the Prayer of Abandonment from Charles De Foucauld:
Beloved. I abandon myself into your hands.
Do with me what you will.
Whatever You may do, I thank you.
I am ready for all. I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me, and all your creatures.
I wish no more from this, my friend.
Into your hands I abandon my soul.
I offer it to you with all the love of my heart.
For I love you and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands
without reserve, not without boundless confidence.
For you are the heart of my heart.
It’s been the prayer of my heart for over 20 years. It delights me that I have changed from fearing abandonment to choosing to abandon myself. So that liability has been turned into one of the greatest gifts of my life.
from Faith and Theologyblogging as a reading-together
Here’s one more brief excerpt from my paper on blogging – this is from a section entitled “Blogging as a Technology of the Self.”
Blogging is not only a new technology of writing; it’s also a new way of reading. In Christian antiquity, reading was a social activity, not a wholly private one. The earliest recorded incident of silent reading is found in Augustine’s Confessions Augustine relates with astonishment Ambrose’s habit of reading in silence, a practice he had never seen before: “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.”Centuries later, reading as an oral and auditory social practice still remained the norm. Medieval writers “assumed that their readers would hear rather than simply see the text,” and their texts “repeatedly call upon the audience to ‘lend ears’ to a tale.” Only in the tenth century did reading practices start to become typically silent and solitary; by the modern period, the internalised nature of reading has become entirely self-evident. So that a literary critic like Harold Bloom can now simply define reading as the love of solitude; while George Steiner can argue that the busy sociality of modern life is destroying authentic reading, since “serious reading excludes even one’s intimates.”
In the world of Web 2.0, the ideal of the solitary reader is waning fast. Blogging is a kind of reading-together. It is the formation of a new kind of community of reading. No longer is reading an activity reserved for the private study, that carefully crafted space where thought is cultivated under conditions of silence, leisure, economic privilege. To read a blog is to participate in a collective reading process: on any given day, we all read the same post, the same thread of comments and responses. Such reading is far removed from solitude: the reading is understood primarily as a stimulus to conversation, criticism, discussion. Here, reading is not so much an end in itself as the means to a particular form of community. The very act of reading thus becomes a collective project.
Although I don’t share George Steiner’s cultural pessimism or his investment in the Victorian ideal of leisurely private reading, I think he showed remarkable insight when, as early as 1972, he noted the decline of solitary reading. Young people today, he observed, “read against a musical background or in company. Almost instinctively, they resent the solipsism … implicit in the classic act of reading. They wish to shut no one out from the empathic tide of their consciousness.” All this in 1972: one almost feels as though he was prophesying the existence of blogs!
*
Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore:
Sapere aude!
Have courage to use your own intelligence!
— Immanuel Kant, in “What Is Enlightenment?”, 1784
*
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.
John Ruskin
*
**
"We have to learn to read and write ourselves out of ourselves, and uncurl ourselves back into the world. Language is not a tool for communication that belongs to us. Language is not an exclusively human ability at all. It is a field of meanings and intentions that we inhabit. Human language grows out of the world itself. We speak because the world speaks. And because language and the symbols upon which it depends are the Breath of God, it has the power to penetrate to the very heart of things. Language in the broadest sense is creative because the world was spoken into being. Because of this, reading can be a means of transformation, of gnosis. The reading of the world that we need to learn has to be active and engaged. It must take the form of a dialogue that begins with a careful listening to the voices that speak to us from beyond the bounds of the known. We have to engage in a gentle kind of call and response, a reading that calls in turn for speech, and perhaps for writing, or other kinds of making, and that always turns back to listening."
- David Abram
**
"I am struck by how difficult it is to get back to something we knew to be true once we have been converted, forced by circumstances, or simply denied and turned away from it, to whatever lonely mess we have managed to make since. It is as though the experience of unhappiness is more valid than that of joy. We all know the experience of wanting something badly, only to have it disappear as we approach it. Rarely do we look at the wanting self. My shadowless shadow. We don't cope with much grace, neither the grace of civility, nor the grace of physical being, nor the grace of the spirit. There is at bottom no real distinction between them anyway. Perhaps I am too often absent from my own being."
- Terrance Keenan
St. Nadie in Winter
**
A poet went to see a doctor. He said to him, "I have all kinds of terrible symptoms. I am unhappy and uncomfortable, my hair and my arms and legs are as if tortured. "The doctor replied, "Is it not true that you have not yet given out your latest poetic composition?" "That is true," said the poet. "Very well," said the physician, "be good enough to recite. "He did so, and, at the doctor's orders, said his lines again and again.Then the doctor said, "Stand up, for you are now cured. What you had inside had affected your outside. Now that it is released, you are well again."
—A Sufi Fable
**
Mad TV Bob Newhart Skit with Mo Collins
Sorry, I found this very funny.
It's from Follow Me Here.
Bob Newhart's timing is impeccable. Watch all the way to the end.
image from my flickr photostream
This was a clipping in a scrapbook kept by my Grandfather.
It says:
July 4, 1948
"Prayer for the U.S"
by Peter Marshall [Chaplain of the Senate]
"O God our Father, we pray that the people of America, who have made such progress in material things, may now seek to grow in spiritual understanding.
For we have improved means, but not improved ends. We have better ways of getting there, but we have no better places to go. We can save more time, but are not making any better use of the time we save.
We need Thy help to do something about the world's true problems -- the problem of lying, which is called propaganda; the problem of selfishness, which is called self-interest; the problem of greed, which is often called profit; the problem of license; disguising itself as liberty; the problem of lust, masquerading as love; the problem of materialism, the hook which is baited with security.
Hear our prayers, O Lord, for the spiritual understanding which is better than political wisdom, that we may see our problems for what they are. This we ask in Jesus' name.
Amen
*
So, in barely a generation, we have gone from this view of Christian counsel to the recommendations and admonitions of the 'religious right.'
My grandfather was a passionate Republican as was my father and most of the people in my tiny hometown. [The town paper, for which my Aunt was a reporter was "The Kane Republican"].
I told my father a couple of years ago that if Ike could see today what had become of the Republican Party , he'd be a Democrat. Dad hung up on me.
Explain to me please the allure of Sarah Palin, the Right-to-Life movement, the current leadership of the Republican Party . The charm of Televangelists, the good sense of the "Prosperity Gospel" , the point of the 'Megachurch' [aside from the obvious one of making piles of money].
The only appeal that I can see is that we have gone as a country to the 'farce' setting and are just looking for a good laugh. Except those who seem caught up in the farce seem to have had their sense of humor extracted. This includes my father, a formerly hilarious human being who then became more and more angry.
It's raining today the day after the 4th of July. No fireworks for us last night, we just got drunk on the back porch and ate fish.
I'll pray the prayer of Peter Marshall for our country. Since time doesn't seem to run backwards, those days of sober, thoughtful men gracing the halls of the Capitol are probably gone for good, and life and especially Public Life will become more and more of a sporting event, filled with the kind of human beings who possess the kind of megalomania and narcissism necessary to survive the constant glare of an equally crazed media.
It struck me, in reading the NYTimes article about Provincetown and Mary Oliver, that all of her work and her poetry are about a tiny tiny place where she has spent her life. Is this how real change takes place, the quiet out of the way places and people, going about their lives and passions with integrity ? In spite of all that I see that would contradict it, my faith remains intact. I can only assume that this has something to do with all that I don't know and can't see. I forget sometimes the part of faith that is "the substance of things hoped for".
[ Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. [Hebrews 11:1]
And there is plenty of evidence of things not seen.
I saw this on "Talking 37th Dream With Rainbow"
"In Tibetan, the word for blessing means "transformation through majesty or power." In short, the meaning of blessing is to bring about, as a result of the experience, a transformation in one's mind for the better."
-- The Dalai Lama
I'm lifting it to share it here because , in this rambling post, I guess what Peter Marshall , my grandfather, my father, the Televangelist and myself share is the desire to bless and be blessed.
Here's to a transformation in one's mind for the better. My mind can always use a little transformation, the same goes for all of us down here on Planet earth as far as I can tell.
*
Blackwater Pond in the Province Lands, near Cape Cod’s tip.
The Land and Words of Mary Oliver, the Bard of Provincetown
BY half-past 5 on a morning in early May, the sun rising over Blackwater Pond had already brightened the pine woods. I stood in a wide natural path, carpeted with brown-red needles, that rises up the forested dune from the southwest side of the pond. In the high branches of the pines and beeches and honeysuckles, the birds were carrying on their racket — warblers, goldfinches, woodpeckers, doves and chickadees. But on the sandy ground among the trunks, nothing moved. Perfect stillness. Could this have been where Mary Oliver had seen the deer?
She had written about them in more than one poem, but most famously in “Five A.M. in the Pinewoods”:
I’d seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long nightunder the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so Igot up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting underthe blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes ...This is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be. ...If the deer hadn’t been at this particular spot, they must have been no farther than a mile or two away, because this small patch of earth, a two-mile-long smattering of a dozen or so freshwater ponds on the northwest tip of Cape Cod, is where Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who has a devoted audience, has set most of her poetry since she arrived in Provincetown in the 1960s.
She moved to Provincetown to be with the woman she loved, and to whom she has dedicated her books of poetry, Molly Malone Cook. As Ms. Oliver explained it in “Our World,” a collection of Ms. Cook’s photographs that she published two years after Ms. Cook’s death in 2005, the two of them had met at Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, when both of them were there in the late 1950s visiting Norma Millay, the late poet’s sister, and her husband. “I took one look and fell, hook and tumble,” Ms. Oliver said in “Our World.”
Ms. Cook was drawn to Provincetown, where she ran a gallery and later opened a bookstore, and once Ms. Oliver was there with her, “I too fell in love with the town,” she recalled, “that marvelous convergence of land and water; Mediterranean light; fishermen who made their living by hard and difficult work from frighteningly small boats; and, both residents and sometime visitors, the many artists and writers. ... M. and I decided to stay.”
Before long, she had discovered the Province Lands, 3,500 acres of national parkland tucked away on the other side of Route 6 from Provincetown itself. The tract was named the Province’s Lands in 1691 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony became a royal province as it absorbed Plymouth Colony and the land that had belonged to the Pilgrims (and absorbed Maine as well). This is not the Cape Cod of beaches and sailboats, shops and art galleries, but rather a small, shady and cool wilderness quietly teeming with life — a geological and biological wonder that stands in relative obscurity on the Cape.
“Most people think of Cape Cod as beaches and ocean, but quite a bit of it is forested, and there are all types of different freshwater ponds,” said Robert Cook, a wildlife ecologist for the Cape Cod National Seashore. This part of the Cape is relatively new land. It is made not of glacial moraine, as the rest of Cape Cod is, but of sand that eroded from cliffs farther south and was shaped into parabolic dunes by the Atlantic winds and currents. As this sand settled, ponds were formed in depressions in the dunes, and a rich deciduous forest mixed with stands of pine grew up from the sandy soil.
This is what the Pilgrims beheld in 1620, when they landed at the future site of Provincetown. The ponds and forests of the Province Lands are, Mr. Cook said, a small “undisturbed remnant” of Cape Cod’s ancient past. Ms. Oliver’s poems draw vivid pictures of all manner of life in this tightly contained ecosystem: blacksnakes swimming, foxes running, goldfinches singing, blue herons wading, and lilies that “break open over the dark water.”
At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?
**“People say to me: wouldn’t you like to see Yosemite? The Bay of Fundy? The Brooks Range?” she wrote in “Long Life,” a book of essays. “I smile and answer, ‘Oh yes — sometime,’ and go off to my woods, my ponds, my sun-filled harbor, no more than a blue comma on the map of the world but, to me, the emblem of everything.”
She does give some of her time to the sea, walking along the shore — especially, it seems along Herring Cove, just northwest of Provincetown below the curled top of Cape Cod. She has told in her poetry of picking up an ancient eardrum bone from a pilot whale and has written about the whelks: “always cracked and broken —/clearly they have been traveling/under the sky-blue waves/for a long time.”
*After a few days in the Province Lands, just before leaving, I stopped back at good old Blackwater Pond. Birdwatchers were quietly making their way along the Beech Forest Trail, stopping to aim their binoculars at orioles and black-throated blue warblers. I sat beside the water under a bunch of pines and opened Ms. Oliver’s “American Primitive” to reread “In Blackwater Woods” and imagine this landscape in other seasons, when “the trees/are turning/their own bodies/into pillars/of light” and “cattails/are bursting and floating away,” part of the cycle of life here that Ms. Oliver has watched so many times. Her appeal to her audience seems especially clear here — her sharp eye, her tugs of emotion as she relates the outer world to a deeper interior experience:
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
