Love Is Foundational

God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

- Timaeus of Locris

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You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of one who gives and kindles joy in the heart of one who receives.

- St. Seraphim of Sarov

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(The following is transcripted from my imperfect notes taken this past weekend. The talk was by Roberta Bondi, taken from her books on the desert Abbas and Ammas; "To Pray and to Love" "To Love As God Loves" and "Memories of God".)

Roberta Bondi Talk
Retreat July 26, 2008
Cherry Log, Ga.

It's interesting to ask: What the desert fathers (and mothers) thought they were doing?

They were fulfilling Jesus' command to Love God with their whole heart and their neighbors as themselves. Everything was measured by love -- love of God and love of neighbor.
This is the 4th or 5th century.

In the 6th century, we find Dortheus. The favorite activity of the monks was fighting with one another. There are accounts of Monks peeing on the heads of other monks -- you name it. He has many "Why you shouldn't fight with your brothers" sermons. The normal response would be something like: " I could just love God if I didn't have to put up with these horrible people."

Think of a circle you draw with a compass. God is at the center . People and the world and all in it are all around. Draw a line from God to world, world to God , and the closer you get to the center (to God) the closer you get to other people. You can't love God and not love other people. Moving towards God doesn't move you apart from other people. It's a piece of information about reality --- about the direction you're going. How can I tell when I'm making up God? Or when it's really God and not something else? ["Oh, I can't know about all the horrible things in the world....."] This drawing, this metaphor aids discernment.

FEARFUL BELIEFS IN OUR VERY BODIES

The starting point of the Christian life is love of God and love of neighbor. They had no illusion -- that you suddenly woke up one morning and loved God and your neighbor. We have to learn to do it. We have to move on that path of love in our lifetime.
"How can I learn to love _____?"
Be considerate of him. Have sympathy. Have mercy. Help him out. Regard the well being of the person as your own.
Break it down into tiny little steps. It wasn't laid out in advance. It's not paint-by-numbers. It wasn't predetermined. Break down the job.
Learning to love is a long process. The hypocrisy of Christians can be the pretense of it being a done deal. Pretended knowingness and pretended insight..... It comes from needing to act as though we are already there, which again, creates a lie and a false self that leads us away from love of God and love of neighbor. It's much deeper and harder than that. The humility demanded knows that this task takes our entire life. So it is futile to pretend to be at the end of a path that has only just begun. You can't love the person you don't know. Which includes yourself.

We have inside of us, fearsome abusive images of God. How does God (that God) love us? If the interest that God has in us is primarily critical, how do we internalize that relationship? The images of hell, criticism, lack of love, lack of acceptance, guilt and failure stand between us and the love of God.

The emphasis on 'belief in ______" (virgin births , aspects of creedal and dogmatic life) without curiosity was not the way of the desert fathers. We cannot exclude our own curiosity. "If I had loved that God -- that would have destroyed me." It's not just a 'head' image, but what is true in every pore of your body.

HEROIC MEASURE TO 'FIX' WHAT IS 'WRONG'

What about God do we have wrong? It is that aspect that we have wrong that ruins us. Our life's work is investigating that which is "the good news." We think we have it right, but it's always under investigation. The warning is against our own tendency to want to take heroic measures to fix that which is 'wrong'. We have to understand that seeing it changes it. In the 21st century, we say "work harder work harder aim higher aim higher". The desert culture says, "back off."

So, if you're trying to set up a prayer discipline, set up 1/2 as much as you think you can do. Cut that in half. Make it so that you can actually DO it so you don't get discouraged and quit. See the long view, the change over time. It's not just the prayer.

Anthony, one of the first of the monks , dating from the 5th century:
[from "Sayings of the Desert Fathers" trans. Benedicta Ward]

"When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert he was beset by accidie, and attacked by many sinful thoughts. He said to God, "Lord, I want to be saved but these thoughts do not leave me alone; what shall I do in my affliction? How can I be saved? A short while afterwards, when he got up to go out, Anthony saw a man like himself sitting at his work, getting up from his work to pray, then sitting down and plaiting a rope, then getting up again to pray. It was the angel of the Lord sent to correct and reassure him. He heard the angel saying to him, "Do this and you will be saved." At these words, Anthony was filled with joy and courage. He did this, and he was saved."

Our desire in the spiritual life is to be heroic -- get get where we're going. To have arrived. All the people to love -- how hard that is! It's somehow easier to live within the fantasy of the great deed, being somehow a superbeing, being valiant. We ask ourselves, "What am I going to do?" and look around for some great purpose or great deed to hurl ourselves towards. The desert teachers point our gaze back to the ordinary things of one's life. Making rope and standing up and praying. Nothing is heroic about this world. The "big stuff" is what tends to get us in trouble.

ABOUT BEING UNABLE TO KEEP UP WITH MY PRAYERS

Prayer

About prayer itself they had little to say; the life geared towards God was the prayer; and about contemplation, who could speak? Arsenius prayed on Saturday evening with his hands stretched out to the setting sun, and he stayed there until the sun shone on his face on Sunday. The usual pattern was to say the Psalms, one after another, during the week, and to intersperse this with weaving ropes, sometimes saying, 'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me.' The aim was hesychia, quiet, the calm through the whole man that is like a still pool of water, capable of reflecting the sun. To be in true relationship with God, standing before him in every situation -- that was the angelic life, the spiritual life, the monastic life, the aim and the way of the monk. It was life orientated towards God. 'Unless a man can say, "I alone and God are here", he will not find the prayer of quiet.' It is the other side of the saying of St. Anthony, "My life is with my brother.'

[The Sayings of the Desert Fathers trans. by Benedicta Ward, SLG]

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"It is helpful to understand that regularity is more sustaining in prayer than intensity or length. You are spending time with God, learning who God is and who you are, learning to love God and God's world, and this happens over a matter of years. If you miss some days, start again, and think small. A brother told an Abba that he had gotten away from his monastic disciplines, presumably including his prayer, and he felt too discouraged to begin again. The Abba replied by telling him this story:

" A man had a plot of land. And through his carelessness brambles sprang up and it became a wilderness of thistles and thorns. Then he decided to cultivate it. So he said to his son: 'Go and clear that ground.' So the son went to clear it, and saw that the thistles and thorns had multiplied...... He said: 'How much time shall I need to clear and weed all this?' And he lay down on the ground and went to sleep. He did this day after day. Later his father cam to see what he had done, and found him doing nothing."

When his father asked him about it, the son replied that the job looked so bad that he could never make himself begin. His father replied,

"'Son, if you had cleared each day the area on which you lay down, your work would have advanced slowly and you would not have lost heart.' So the lad did what his father said, and in a short time the plot was cultivated."

So the Abba told the discouraged brother,

"Do a little work and do not faint, and God will give you grace."

The disheartened brother took up his prayer again with patience without trying to do everything. You can, too. Prayer is for you. Prayer is not a test of your character, and endurance contest, or a heroic task set before you.

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Heroic doesn't work.

That thinking tells us lies. It makes up false Gods, like the God who hates us. The belief in a hateful God is different from not believing in God. It's hard to let go of these ideas and feelings. The world is made is a way that makes us long for God, for the love of God. It is the love of God that holds us all in existence. No matter what bad or destructive notions we have, we're made to want/desire "the real thing." We seek what is genuine. We love and don't love at the same time. But that which is of God, which is the truth , will help us to seek our way. We are learning to recognize and to know what we are. We are gaining the insight to know what is in us intrinsically.

The thought or the inner belief that God hates us is a terrible wound, a hurt. It is as though we are a child watching our parents drive off saying "we're never coming back." In the book of Genesis, God saw it (creation) was "very very good." The goodness of reality confirms for us that God was good in that particular way. That the world was lovable. We can see in the world 'the beauty of God,' this God of Creation.
In the midst of this sorting out, we can begin to want the scary heroic part for ourselves.

The center part of the world's pie is for God. If something else gets put there, it'll make you miserable. That's not the place for that. No person, thing, concern or object will fit in the place , for that is God's place. If we persist in placing something or someone inappropriate in that place, it will not work and we will grow more and more let down. They simply cannot fill that place. If we persist in forcing the issue , it is to the detriment of all concerned. Our attachments are a sort of idol. They are not wicked. They just make us miserable.

Even if "I don't trust God" , I trust these teachers, these desert people. They won't lie to me and they love me, even it they're wrong. (Abbas and Ammas) It's our ancestors, our grandparents. We trust the integrity of their vision, of how they lived and died. Their lessons and teachings are still valid for us. They are trustworthy. We can keep reading them, stay in the relationship and learn from it.

Dogma and belief, i.e., that 'Jesus Christ is the Son of God' etc. was not terribly important to the desert teachers. Their view was that we are made in a way that we're drawn to God. That 'Christian' was not the only way to do it. That relationship, that search was senior in importance to dogma or what one believed. The search involved the longing of one's entire being, not just our head. It's not our convictions that save us (so to speak)....

Even the words 'Save Us' referred to what will continue to bring us to God. It involved a way of being and thriving in spite of what else is going on in life and the world not just 'fire insurance.' Scripture and how it looks brings the recognition that kindness and love are what brings us to the Throne of God. Kindness and love reveal the love of God and allow us to pass on this 'saving' this salvation, this grace.

The idea that one "can't believe the wrong things" can also be a dangerous fallacy. The view that God's righteousness is primary, that there is a knife edge about right and wrong can bring about in a person or a community a position of exclusion and legalism. The primary characteristic of God is ______, --- if it is the wrong thing here, that idea will lead you to hurt and exclude people from the love of God.

If you are Christian and trinitarian, the reading of that dogma can become destructive religion if God is on top, Jesus is subordinate and the Holy Spirit is flying around somewhere...... The religious arc that portrays Jesus as effeminate and weak is headed towards the religion that enforces "females obey males." Church doctrine includes the idea that the three of the trinity are equal. This makes a fundamental difference.

We give ourselves reason to believe ourselves to be inferior. It doesn't matter what we believe. We can be terrorized by what we believe. We can hurt people with those beliefs.

In the early church, they were still figuring it out. We're still figuring it out. As Origen says, God comes to each of us according to our need.

Any Christian doctrine that breaks our spirit and demoralizes us is false. God isn't about crushing us.

"Our mother -- our father" : God comes to us according to our need. God is that presence there for you. We thrive as a result of that prayer. God is that presence that nourishes and nurtures us.

Love is foundational. It is the basic principal . That which destroys love is for us to avoid.

There is a need for gentleness with ourselves, rather than bullying and 'controlling' ourselves. We drive ourselves away from God. We speak harshly to ourselves. We alienate ourselves from God in this habitual degradation of our godliness. When our interaction with either someone else or ourself is dominated by control and trying to make guilty, when we bully ourselves with these tactics, we just want to get away.

We commit to the discipline, not to use language to ourselves that cuts us down. It is the picture of mercy and kindness of the Ammas and Abbas that counters the picture idea or image of God /Self/ other as adversary.

It's so easy to fall into the trap. Few people have too high an opinion of themselves. God isn't interested in either our perfection or our sin. Then we can lose the need to be heroic.

We will be saved. We will be preserved in our seeking of God. We will find what it is to fulfill our own nature. We will find that which keeps us in life and lets us die in trust. We don't need to know beyond that point.

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Cross-posted to Dreaming in the Deep South

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Man On Wire

Walking on Air Between the Towers

This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.

Jean-Louis Blondeau/Polaris

Philippe Petit in "Man on Wire."

July 25, 2008

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: July 25, 2008

On the morning of Aug. 7, 1974, after months of preparation and years of dreaming, a French daredevil named Philippe Petit stepped into the sky above Lower Manhattan. For almost 45 minutes he ambled back and forth on a metal cable strung between the towers of the World Trade Center, a feat of illegal tightrope walking that, according to a New York Police Department sergeant who recounted Mr. Petit’s act of physical poetry in dry press-conference prose, would more aptly be described as dancing.

For many years after, Mr. Petit’s stunt was a cherished footnote in the annals of New York history, one of the touchstones of a crazy, awful, glittering era in the life of the city. The destruction of the twin towers in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, revived the memory of that earlier aesthetic assault on the buildings, which is now the subject of “Man on Wire,” James Marsh’s thorough, understated and altogether enthralling documentary. Wisely, Mr. Marsh, who based his film on a book Mr. Petit published in 2002, never alludes to Sept. 11. That would have been both distracting and redundant, since it’s impossible, while watching a movie so intimate in its attention to the towers, not to be haunted by thoughts of their fate.

But it is also worth recalling that the trade center inspired more love posthumously than while it stood. Mr. Petit was an exception. A zealous, daring wire walker — the French word funambule is a more lyrical, as well as a somewhat more ridiculous-sounding term — he conceived a passion for the structures even before they were built.

As he recalls it (and as Mr. Marsh imagines the scene in one of many witty, unobtrusive re-enactments), the young Mr. Petit was flipping through a magazine at a doctor’s office when he saw an article about plans to construct the two tallest skyscrapers in the world side by side at the bottom of Manhattan. In his mind, and then in a series of sketches and diagrams, he drew a simple line connecting the buildings and imagined himself perched atop it.

What kind of person would think of such a thing? How would he go about accomplishing it? Why? Those are the questions that preoccupy Mr. Marsh, whose earlier films include the semidocumentary “Wisconsin Death Trip” and the fictional feature “The King.”

The first question is answered largely by Mr. Petit’s own testimony. In his 50s, he is elfin and energetic, a beguiling combination of showboat, idealist and con man. And in his early, outlaw years, before the twin towers walk brought him fame and a measure of legitimacy, he combined an exalted sense of artistic mission with a street criminal’s sense of serious mischief.

Accordingly, “Man on Wire” is constructed like a heist movie, in the manner of “Rififi” or the revived “Ocean’s Eleven” franchise. Though Mr. Petit was alone on the cable that August morning, his walk in the sky was the result of a conspiracy of true believers and casual adventurers. In his two previous acts of guerrilla funambulism — at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris and on the Harbor Bridge in Sydney — he relied on the logistical and moral support of several friends, including his lover, Annie Allix, and his faithful sidekick, Jean-Louis Blondeau.

In interviews, they and some of Mr. Petit’s other confederates — including two American goofballs and Barry Greenhouse, a flamboyant insurance executive who served as the all-important inside man — reconstruct their project, which they referred to at the time as “the coup,” in fascinating detail. There were engineering problems and also challenges that seem to belong to the world of espionage, as well as the inevitable tensions that arise when a group of people pursue a dangerous goal.

Why did they do it? Rather than risking banality by addressing this question head-on, Mr. Marsh allows the answer to be at once self-evident and profoundly mysterious. A work of art is its own explanation, and “Man on Wire” leaves no doubt that Mr. Petit’s coup deserves to be called art. Mr. Blondeau, a sensitive and cerebral foil to the impish Mr. Petit, chokes up when he recalls watching his friend step out over the abyss. “The important thing is that we did it,” he says.

And without making any grandiose claims, this lovely, touching film demonstrates that the World Trade Center sky walk was an important event. The proof is in the emotions — amusement, amazement, awe — evoked by those images of a tiny human figure balancing above a void. Also gratitude. It is easy to imagine that, in contemplating the scale and solidity of those brand-new towers, Mr. Petit saw them at least partly as the vehicle of his own immortality (whether or not he survived the crossing). No one looking up at the New York sky on a hazy morning 34 years ago and seeing a man on a wire could have suspected that the reverse would turn out to be true.

“Man on Wire” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It includes nudity, sexuality and drug references.

No Tea Cozies Without Irony

The New Knitting: This Is Not Your Grandma's Arts & Crafts

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet
Posted on July 28, 2008

You don't have to handcraft your next checkbook cover out of an old plastic tennis racket sheath that you plucked from a neighbor's garbage bin, cut up and sewed. You don't have to adorn your bathroom curtain with repetitive designs (sea horses, say, or tugboats) using a chiseled half-potato and colorfast fabric paint. You could use the free checkbook cover the bank gave you and buy ready-made curtains. Nor must you snip the sleeves off that knitted top and replace them -- get out the matching thread --with floaty scarves. But hey.

The DIY movement wants you to make stuff. The DIY movement is huge, and sometimes it's charming and sometimes it's annoying and it is an anti-mass-production insurrection, a cuddly-soft revolt whose arsenal is crochet hooks, needles and glue guns. It is active in an all-too-passive age. It is a revolution against dehumanization in a programmed, processed world, and Doing It Yourself declares the self. It is an anti-retail uprising whose strategy is Make, don't buy -- at least not new, never full-price. It is one more way to recycle, restore, rescue and renew -- and every stenciled paper bag transformed into gift wrap, every lipstick tube transformed into a tampon case, cleans up the Earth while telling major industries: Fuck you.

A flood of books, many of them spawned by blogs, takes up that chorus. In Anticraft: Knitting, Beading and Stitching for the Slightly Sinister (North Light, 2007), Rene Rigdon and Zabet Stewart declare themselves "sick of homogenized culture, and these realizations have left holes in our hearts. We create to fill those holes, to be able to sleep at night knowing we've done something, even a small something, to confront the manufactured culture that is currently being churned out." In Lotta Prints: How to Print with Anything, from Potatoes to Linoleum (Chronicle, 2008), Lotta Jansdotter suggests chiseled turnips and carrots as well. In Creepy Cute Crochet (Quirk, 2008), Christen Haden promises: "You can teach yourself to crochet, often in as little as one day (it's true!)." In Alternation (North Light, 2007), Shannon Okey and Alexandra Underhill hail "enviro-chic." In Subversive Seamster (Taunton, 2007), Melissa Rannels and Hope Meng declare: "We derive the most fashionable satisfaction from knowing that we are reusing and recycling what already exists in this material world -- and looking damn good doing it!"

You already know this, or you will: Crafting is back.

Not as it was when pioneers made dolls from clothespins -- when your average person even knew what clothespins were. But that's the point. This is not crafting by necessity. This is not crafting to kill time. This is crafting to claim identity, to save the world from soulless junk. To casual observers it looks like adults making toys and keeping them. But this is a resurgence with a vengeance.

By the start of this decade, the counterculture had reached a near-endgame. Just about every aesthetic and activity that could have been informed by punk already was. We might not have been aware of this as such, and still we might not credit it, but punk spawned so much of the angryuglybeautiful, the violent getpisseddestroy that we take for granted now. And DIY: Punk was DIY music, after all. Played in DIY costumes at DIY venues, with DIY announcements taped to poles. But by this decade, punk was one-plus generation back. What hadn't yet been long-since punkified? What had stayed so uncool so long as to still be untouched?

Did someone say "embroidery hoop"?

I craft too. Check out these bottle-cap-framed miniature colored-pencil portraits, this coquillage matchbox.

These new crafting books -- and dozens more, such as Khris Cochran's The DIY Bride and Kristen Rask's Plush You -- turn the toothpick-whittling our ancestors did beside the bonfire into something now performed in dorm rooms under Che posters. And just as postmodern crafters refashion polyester golf trousers into floofy plaid faux-feather boas, they are also deeply invested in refashioning the public image of crafting itself. It is imperative that they distance themselves from past crafters, who were not cool: from the toothpick-whittlers and the summer-camp lanyard-plaiters to the late-20th-century toilet-roll-cover knitters and tie-dyers. This is not your grandmother's crafting, they say -- literally. The Anticraft authors proclaim craft "de-grannified."

Plush You! scorns a "stinky, grumpy old grandfather." Subversive Seamster's authors urge readers to raid "grandma's wardrobe" and make sexy corsets out of "old man pants." It's as if they feel compelled to keep reminding us that they're young.

Well, every youth revolution must present itself as radical and new -- even if, as in this case, the tools and fruits of that revolt are age-old and one of its driving forces is nostalgia: for remembered "Star Wars"-era childhoods and for eras that ended long before these crafters were born, lost tiki-torch-lit cocktail party years adrift in sock-monkeys and napkin rings. They call it kitsch. They make what their ancestors made, but now it's funny, angry, sexual, political. Among its rabbits and robots and puppies, Plush You! spotlights stuffed felt donuts: frosted, with bugle-bead sprinkles. AlterNation shows you how to transform pillowcases and button-down blouses into saucy corsets. Anticraft has corsets and a crocheted cat-o'-nine-tails. Subversive Seamster, too, has corsets and the "Peek-a-Bootylicious Skirt."

Subversive. Sinister. "Scream yourself hoarse," the Anticraft authors propose. "We're all outcasts and refugees from the mainstream here. We want you to help us carry this along, which makes it political -- a stand against the current trends in society to sanitize grief, drug sadness, hide obscenities, stigmatize sex." Thenceforth come instructions on making scarves, stockings, purses, earrings, stuffed felt Easter eggs, a soft woolen hat. The hat is "an antidote to the bright colors this season forces upon (us)." The eggs are appliqued with decapitated rabbits: "Sew on bloody hole at the top left of the bunny body using red floss. Sew on the bone so it appears to be sticking out of the bloody hole. Embroider blood drips and arterial spray using red floss."

One of the revolving mottoes at the seminal site Craftster.org is "No tea cozies without irony."

At its most basic, we're talking popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue. At the far end of the spectrum, it's soldering irons and pearls. In between lies this vast realm of clever, creative, not bone-simple but still basically doable-without-a-design-degree projects, your rubber-stamped note cards and drawstring tote bag. That's what insiders, aka craftsters, like to call them: projects, lending all this snipping of felt and sewing-on of sequins a semiacademic, art-grant, observerish tone.

That tone is crucial, because the craftster scene is one to watch. Like earlier eras' garage-band and punk and 'zine scenes, this is one of those rare, actually of-the-people crusades that start from the bottom up: a few plebeian pals horsing around in a basement and somehow, somehow, whatever they come up with catches on. That this can still happen in a processed world should give us hope. In 2003, Boston-area computer programmer Leah Kramer started Craftster.org based on a lifelong hobby that she hadn't realized many others shared until she started posting project ideas and pictures online. Almost entirely by word of mouth, the site quickly expanded to more than 100,000 members. Thousands more join every month. Other sites pepper the Internet, long-tailing the crafting subculture into subsubcultures: the neo-knitters, the book-cover refigurers, the sewing-machinists. And yes, this anti-industry intifada is now itself an industry, with its own superstores, TV shows, ad-laden Web sites, celebrities and books, because after all this is America. Still craftsterism is, at heart, all heart. It has to be. Originality is non-negotiable when anything is made by hand. In a consumer culture where even the so-called customized is mass-produced -- think ring tones, think M&Ms printed with your favorite photograph -- this is the revolutionary part. Human one-of-a-kindness.

Even the same "project," completed by different crafters, yields different results. Because each finished product is so intrinsically personal, each stitch and each silver spray-painted pea a wee receptacle of memory (I did this part while listening to Tisto, right before the rainstorm, talking on the phone to Dad), and because the movement's ethos is so intrinsically populist, craftsterism (as punk and 'zines once were) is a social barometer. At craftsteramas like Boston's Bizarre Bazaar and San Francisco's new Renegade Craft Fair, whose premiere event drew bustling crowds this summer, the "projects" on show and on sale expose the hopes and dreams of an ever-increasing faction of the young and hip: their obsessions and their preoccupations. Their themes become memes. Making crafts takes precious time. What icons, which motifs, which messages are, to their makers, worth it?

Well.

Visions of childhood. Again and again, the kittens and the monkeys. And the big round staring eyes -- made of felt, buttons, French knots, beads, polymer clay, classic cheap plastic shake-'ems, set wide apart for maximum wistfulness and affixed even to renditions of non-living things: to stuffed popsicles and rocks and fruit, staring, usually smiling. Why? These are eminently fearsome, fearful times. Most modern craftsters belong to post-Roe v. Wade generations often criticized (and envied) as the most wanted, most spoiled, most infantile and most narcissistic in history. It's no surprise that so many solace themselves by spending days and nights with cuddly toys. The past, your own or some putative past that came before, is a known territory. How tempting to retreat into a time before anyone ever heard of global warming, a time without war (or with wars which, being so long ago, seem sanitized and not quite real).

"This is stuff to remind you of childhood, to comfort you in your darkened apartment," we read in Plush You! Its repertoire of staring-smiling felt fried eggs and staring-smiling stuffed fleece ice cream sandwiches and staring-smiling candy corn and staring-smiling trees and staring-smiling cookies and a staring-smiling Brussels sprout, all made by different craftsters, "represents real-world things but in a surreal, softly perfect way."

Visions of hell. Creepy Cute Crochet's title says it all. Instructions that your grandmother might actually recognize -- "Row 4: Ch 1, sc 1 in same, sc 2 [inc, sc1] 5 times, sl st to close round (23)" -- lead to utterly adorable, round-bottomed Satans, Grim Reapers, and the like, to be stuffed with polyfill or poly-pellets. Amid its irresistible owlets and donuts, Plush You! includes zombie sock monkeys with loosely stitched gaping wounds, eyes dangling out on blood-red yarn, amputated legs ending in bloody stumps. Another stuffed toy in this book is a "poor little bunny whose throat has been cut." After drawing the slash with thick red craft paint, we read, add realistic droplets. One section on a nearby page shows how to craft vomit. Apply thick paint to make it "look as if gravity is at work and the fluids are pooling."

It's a 21st century merging of comfort and fear, childhood and death, escapism and protest. "We're all about the cute and pretty," announces Plush You! -- and yes. We have reached a point in history at which a certain sector of the populace finds puke pretty and cute.

Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, including "Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto."

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Methinks they doth protest a little too much. The just want to crochet and knit....
No need to be so self-conscious about it.

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Monday Poems

I was at a retreat all weekend. Just getting s-l-o-w-l-y back in motion and back to work.
I am drawing together some material about the Desert Fathers , along with some Gerald May, when I get, like, several hours in a row to pull it together.

I went up to Brasstown Ga. to see a friend after the retreat. I got horribly lost, and ended up in Tennessee. Then North Carolina. Around the wrong end of the wrong mountain. Why not just stay on 515 you say? All of those hours, you could have just bipped up the four-lane and been then. I just couldn't stand to see one more 'Hardees' , that's all. The story of my life, lost in Tennessee. But my friend gave me a piece of her artwork which is lovely and melds gorgeously into my office colors.

I was also reminded of how much I like to drive. Going nowhere in particular.

My son [That's him in the front row with the bow tie "in character" here] sent me some of his current photos on flickr. The "Elsewhere" series is interesting, although I've told him that they really need the "Elsewhere" story along with the photos. He needs to write about Elsewhere.

Here's some poems.

**

Forgetfulness
BY BILLY COLLINS

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall

on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

**

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early,I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle
flowers.

There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not
embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and

sails.

Czeslaw Milosz

**

Look at the happy moron
He doesn't give a damn
I wish I were a moron,
My god, perhaps I am

- anonymous

**

God bless the roots! — Body and soul are one!
The small become the great, the great the small;
The right thing happens to the happy man.......

Theodore Roethke

*

Dorothy Parker:

In youth it was a way I had to do my best to please.
I'd change with every passing lad to suit his theories.
But now I know the things I know,
And do the things I do —
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you.

**

The Spider’s Web

The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unfolds a plan of her devising
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising.
And all that journey down through space
In cool descent and loyal-hearted
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started.
Thus I, gone forth as spiders do,
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you,
For my returning.

--E.B. White

*

Robert Hass's "Privilege of Being":

"Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond and the texture of cold rivers."

**
My favorite snippet of a poem is

"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry."

-Mark Strand

*

Complaining acts as a placebo for getting satisfied

***

The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)


Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.


~ from "Thirst":
Poems by Mary Oliver

*******
"There is, in all visible things . . . a hidden wholeness" (Thomas Merton)

***
All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions. ...

We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon A Time lasts forever.

-- Philip Pullman

******


Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

-- Salman Rushdie

******

Behold, my beloved, I have shown you the power of silence, how thoroughly it heals and how fully pleasing it is to God. Wherefore I have written to you to show yourselves strong in this work you have undertaken, so that you may know that it is by silence that the saints grew, that it was because of silence that the power of God dwelt in them, because of silence that the mysteries of God were known to them.

-Desert Father Ammonas, disciple of St. Anthony

***

There is a difference between change and transformation. Change happens when something old dies and something new begins. I am told that planned change is as troublesome to the psyche as unplanned change, often more so. But change might or might not be accompanied by transformation of soul. If change does not invite personal transformation, we lose our souls.

At times of change, the agents of transformation must work overtime, even though few will hear them. The ego would sooner play victim or too-quick victor than take the ambiguous road of transformation. We change-agents need a simple virtue: faith. It still is the rarest of commodities because it feels like nothing, at least nothing that satisfies our need to know, to fix, to manage, to understand. Faith goes against the grain.

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace, "A Transitional Generation"

***

In the March 2008 newsletter, Nan Merrill wrote, as a prelude to the variety of quotations she collected for this issue:

"May our prayers include pauses of simple be-ing. . . of gratitude in the Silence for the present moment of live, nature's gifts, and Love-ever-with-us. Throughout each day may we be mindful of our thoughts, for strong thought--positive or negative--are, in a real sense our prayers. As has been wisely observed, 'as we thinketh, so we become.' Thoughts, like prayer, radiate energy that matters, depending on our focus, intensity, intention, and accompanying source of reception. May our prayers be from the heart, breathed into the Silence. . . May our thoughts be loving, gentle, and kind. . . May both our prayers and thoughts lead us to fulfillment; service and sharing wherever we meet a need. . . May our gifts and creativity grow in the Silence."

~~Nan Merrill

****

No matter what the ruin of any life may be there is always a place to start. There is a place where you must begin. You need to apologize to someone. You need to go to somebody and straighten something out. You need to stop some practice that is wrong. You need to open yourself up to counsel. You need to seek advice. You need to get some guidance. There is always a first step. That is where you must begin.

And whatever you pray, pray that God will give you the grace, the strength and the determination to take that step. Then, the process of recovery has begun.

- Ray C. Stedman

***
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

- Reinhold Niebuhr

**
Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all ... As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength.
- G. K. Chesterton

**
MYSTICISM
- by Evelyn Underhill -

(On the psychology of mystical experiences)

This awakening, from the psychological point of view, appears to be an intense form of the phenomenon of “conversion”; and closely akin to those deep and permanent conversions of the adult type which some religious psychologists call “sanctification.” It is a disturbance of the equilibrium of the self, which results in the shifting of the field of consciousness from lower to higher levels, with a consequent removal of the centre of interest from the subject to an object now brought into view: the necessary beginning of any process of transcendence. It must not, however, be confused or identified with religious conversion as ordinarily understood: the sudden and emotional acceptance of theological beliefs which the self had previously either rejected or treated as conventions dwelling upon the margin of consciousness and having no meaning for her actual life. The mechanical process may be much the same; but the material involved, the results attained, belong to a higher order of reality.
- Part 2, Chapter 2

**
"Happiness is reality divided by expectations."

--Dr. John Bach
Respiratory expert University Hospital
Newark, NJ

**
From heaven even the most miserable life will look like one bad night at an inconvenient hotel.
- St. Teresa of Avila

***

y'osen, bihiill hishash aaii diji jooni
(god, may i walk today in beauty)

doc's right, breathe. pray. but above all, don't forget to breathe.

another thing my grandfather used to say when people would talk about somebody in trouble
indii daho dhatzhaa, daho wah ga'an

(man no dead, no name him ghost)

(from comments at the news blog)

***

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.

Jessica Wapner , Scientific American

**

(cross-posted at The Healing Path)

Stayin' Alive

Give Birth to Yourself

Janusz Korczak

You yourself are the child you must learn to know, rear, and above all enlighten. To demand that others should provide you with textbook answers is like asking a strange woman to give birth to your baby. There are insights that can be born only of your own pain, and they are the most precious. Seek in your child the undiscovered part of yourself.

**

ACID

In Jakarta,
among the venders
of flowers and soft drinks,
I saw a child
with a hideous mouth,
begging,
and I knew the wound was made
for a way to stay alive.
What I gave him
wouldn't keep a dog alive.
What he gave me
from the brown coin
of his sweating face
was a look of cunning.
I carry it
like a bead of acid
to remember how,
once in a while,
you can creep out of your own life
and become someone else --
an explosion
in that nest of wires
we call the imagination.
I will never see him
again, I suppose.
But what of this rag,
this shadow
flung like a boy's body
into the walls
of my mind, bleeding
their sour taste --
insult and anger,
the great movers.

--Mary Oliver

**

"The revelation of Sufism, and especially the revelation of Rumi, brings to the world a crucial understanding at this moment: the understanding of heartbreak. The understanding of the importance of letting the heart break again and again and again, the necessity of never covering the heart, never shielding it, and never disguising the heart's sensitivity...

...a Jesus cannot be born without opening the whole being to the pain of the world. The sensitivity of the heart and its ability to suffer purely for love is the clue to the mystical understanding of reality, and so, now, the clue to human survival."

--Andrew Harvey
The Return of the Mother

Dark Buds of Dreams

Dreams

All night
the dark buds of dreams
open
richly.

In the center
of every petal
is a letter,
and you imagine

if you could only remember
and string them all together
they would spell the answer.
It is a long night,

and not an easy one --
you have so many branches,
and there are diversions --
birds that come and go,

the black fox that lies down
to sleep beneath you,
the moon staring
with her bone-white eye.

Finally you have spent
all the energy you can
and you drag from the ground
the muddy skirt of your roots

and leap awake
with two or three syllables
like water in your mouth
and a sense

of loss -- a memory
not yet of a word,
certainly not yet the answer --
only how it feels

when deep in the tree
all the locks click open,
and the fire surges through the wood,
and the blossoms blossom.

-- Mary Oliver

Wandering About Looking For something

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21):

In his book *The Medusa and the Snail,* science writer Lewis Thomas said that the
English word "error" developed  from a root meaning "to wander about, looking for
something." That's  why he liked Darwin's idea that error is the driving force in evolution.
I  think this wandering-about-looking-for-something approach should be the
driving force in your personal evolution, Sagittarius. The coming weeks will be a
great time to meander and get distracted and stumble upon unexpected opportunities.
May all your mutations have a positive spin!

(P.S. Lewis also wrote this: "The capacity to blunder slightly is the real
marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic
bacteria and there would be no music.")

**
"The way you must go is the way you already know.

He has set it in your heart.  The solitude will speak to you."

--Derek Webster

**

A GLIMPSE AT AN ANCIENT  PSYCHOLOGY

The early Christians ... did not think all this up by themselves, nor did they get it by a
revelation of God.  Basically,  they were working with a popular psychology that went back
to Plato.  One of the most frequent metaphor they used to illustrate the human makeup
was that of a charioteer driving a chariot pulled by two horses.  The two horses are
two basic impulses or life forces within us which make us interact with our world by
drawing things into ourselves and pushing ourselves against other things.  These are called
the "appetitive and the spirited,"   or desire and anger.  (Gr. Life II, 96)

The appetitive and the spirited,  desire and anger,  are far more fundamental
than surface emotions, "I want the dress,"  "I am angry at that boy."  They
are two sources of energy,  one bringing in the outside world to the self,  the
other pushing against it.  What we ordinarily think of as desire and anger, 
sexual attraction and repulsion,  compassion and contempt are fueled by these
basic impulses.  Anger and desire,  as basic drives,  are themselves blind.  Though
our participation in the life of God depends on them, they are not ours as human
beings alone.  We share these two basic internal sources of energy with all the other
animals who have physical bodies.  Without them we could not life.
When these drives function as they are meant to they are good;  they
are part of our nature,  given to us by God in  our creation.  They are
the horses for our chariot.

Driving the chariot is reason.  It is reason that enables human beings to see the
world and respond to it not simply on a level of physical needs and desires,  but
consciously and morally.  For the Christian monastics,  this meant to see and know
God,  to see as God sees,  and to love God and other people.  Acts of compassion and
forgiveness,  worship,  insight into others all stem from reason which is fueled by desire
and anger.  The horses provide the energy and power;  it is the charioteer who sets the
direction of the travel and puts the energy of the chariot in motion.

If reason is somehow overthrown by the horses,  however,  chaos  results;  the energy
of the horses becomes the source of power for various destructive passions,  and the
human personality is turned over to these passions which victimize it and destroy it as
they repeatedly try unsuccessfully to satisfy themselves.  But they can never permanently
fill themselves up:  Gregory of Nyssa uses the metaphor of thebrickmold that the Israelites
in Egypt used to make brick to illustrate the passions'  insatiability.  Just as the mold was
continually filled with mud for the brick and just as continually emptied out to be refilled, 
so are our desires when not governed by reason.

-To Love as God Loves
 Roberta C. Bondi

***
Be thou by nought perturbed
  Of nought afraid,
Fro all things pass
  Save God,
Who does not change.
Be patient,  and at last
  Thou shalt of all
Fulfillment find.
  Hold God,
And nought shall fail thee,
For He alone is All.

-- St Teresa of Avila

**

You're Not A Slave

On not having plans...

"More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence. Still, it is not as simple as it seems. My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress. But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn't be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simply like them, but truly love them."

Henri Nouwen

**
I have come into the desert to pray, to learn to pray.

- Carlo Carretto
Letters from the Desert

**

"...it is possible to live a contemplative life in the midst of the world--the desert, after all, is really everywhere. The heart of the Gospel...is to make of ourselves an oasis of love in whatever desert we might find ourselves."

~Robert Ellsberg in the introduction to Letters from the Desert by Carlo Carretto

**
“The words Flee, be silent, and pray summarize the spirituality of the desert. They indicate the three ways of preventing the world from shaping us in its image and thus the three ways to life in the spirit.”

The Way of the Heart
Henri Nouwen

***

“Society ... was regarded (by the Desert Fathers) as the shipwreck from which each single individual man had to swim for his life ... These were men who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster.”

The Way of the Heart
Henri Nouwen

**

(From IOZ)

"It occurs to me that much of the political evil in the world is enabled by the persistent belief that doing something is necessarily better than doing nothing, and, paradoxically, that doing nothing is not doing something. That's a first principle. Abstention is sometimes honorable. Sometimes, on the forced march, the most radical act possible is to sit down in the snow until the rifle cracks the side of your skull, until they drag you to your feet and force you onward. Have you changed anything? Good god, man, who cares? You don't have to be Spartacus to remind yourself that you're not a slave.

All the dramatic metaphorizing aside, the constant demands for Action, for a Plan, for a collective Purpose--these are invariably made by people whose heads are still cobwebbed with cant. Useless though they are, the self-satisfied perseverations of the soi-disant progressive community appeal to this type simply because they carry the illusion of change: new names, new polls, new H.R. Such-and-Such to pray for passage, new FISA bills to filibuster, la, dee, da.

When I wanted to learn yoga, my guru told me that I had to learn how to breath first, and goddamn if he wouldn't let me climb into a downward-facing dog or even stretch to touch my toes until I did."

***

Those who don't want to change, let them sleep"

Herbert Spencer tells us that the perfect man's conduct will appear perfect only when the environment is perfect: to no inferior environment is it suitably adapted. We may paraphrase this by cordially admitting that saintly conduct would be the most perfect conduct conceivable in an environment where all were saints already; but by adding that in an environment where few are saints, and many the exact reverse of saints, it must be ill adapted. We must frankly confess, then using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. The powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage of them. The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence of the failure of simply giving alms. The whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on the excellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, of smiting back and not turning the other cheek also.

You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.

And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these hard-headed , hard-hearted , and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for the wronger's person; no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live always on suspicion; no one glad to treat individuals passionately and impulsively rather than by general rules of prudence; the world would be an infinitely worse place than it is now to live in. The tender grace, not of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the golden rule grown natural, would be cut out from the perspective of our imaginations.

The saints, existing in this way, may, with their extravagances of human tenderness, be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times they have proved themselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met, in spite of the past, in spite of all appearance, as worthy, they have stimulated them to be worthy, miraculously transformed them by their radiant example and by the challenge of their expectation.

From this point of view we may admit the human charity which we find in all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, to be a genuinely creative social force, tending to make real a degree of virtue which it alone is ready to assume as possible. the saints are authors, auctores, increasers, of goodness. The potentialities of development in human souls are unfathomable. So many who seemed irretrievably hardened have in point of fact been softened, converted, regenerated, in ways that amazed the subjects even more than they surprised the spectators, that we never can be sure in advance of any man that his salvation by the way of love is hopeless. We have no right to speak of human crocodiles and boa-constrictors as of fixedly incurable beings. We know not the complexities of personality, the smouldering emotional fires, the other facets of the character-polyhedron, the resources of the subliminal region. Saint Paul long ago made our ancestors familiar with the idea that every soul is virtually sacred. Since Christ died for us all without exception, Saint Paul said, we must despair of no one. This belief in the essential sacredness of every one expresses itself today in all sorts of humane customs and reformatory institutions, and in a growing aversion to the death penalty and to brutality in punishment. The saints, with their extravagance of human tenderness, are the great torch-bearers of this belief, the tip of the wedge, the clearers of the darkness. Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a wave-crest or of a flood, they show the way and are forerunners. The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world's affairs to be preposterous.

--The Varieties of Religious Experience
William James
**
Devotion, scholarship, and meditation can all be empty rituals, and whether these devotional acts or any other practices are in fact Dharma depends solely upon one's motivation. . . . Our initial attempts at spiritual practice tend to be very self-conscious. We want to overcome the distortions of our minds and cultivate such wholesome qualities as kindness, insight, mindfulness, and concentration; but as we engage in practices designed to cultivate these, at first they appear to be only mental exercises. Dharma seems separate, something adopted from outside. But as we go deeper into the practice, this sense of separation begins to disappear; our minds become the very Dharma we seek to cultivate.

~ B. Alan Wallace, Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground Up

***

"All day I have been reading
about the invisible world, the one
that's always trying to reach us. What if we could hear
the small round o's of dirt,
the chant of stars and plants,
carbon and sulphur, calling to each other, innumerable
to innumerable, a throat at every blade of grass."

-- from "Night: Volcano, California"
by Ellery Akers

**
Ode 314
Rumi

Those who don't feel this Love
pulling them like a river,
those who don't drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take in sunset like supper,
those who don't want to change,

let them sleep.

This Love is beyond the study of theology,
that old trickery and hypocrisy.
I you want to improve your mind that way,

sleep on.

I've given up on my brain.
I've torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.

If you're not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful robe of words
around you,

and sleep.


"Like This" Coleman Barks,
Maypop, 1990

**

'I am your tongue and eyes.
I am all your senses.
I am your happiness and anger.
You are my property,
but I belong to you.
Sometimes I say, "you are you."
Other times I say, "you are me."
Whichever way-
I am the Sun which illuminates it.'

--Rumi

Put A Saddle On Your Back

Trickling Down?

from the Sideshow

William Greider talked to Bill Moyers: "Usury, to be clear about it, is rich people taking advantage of poor people by lending them money on terms that are sure to make them fail. All three of the great religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, had a moral prohibition against usury because they recognized that society can't function like that. People of great wealth and their institutions like banks naturally have the power to overwhelm people of lesser means. And you can't allow that in a decent society. It won't survive."

**
Money and the Meaning of Life

“Usually our concerns about money reduce themselves to getting or managing it, and there are countless books about that aspect of the money question. But it is almost impossible to find serious and useful thought about the relationship between the quest for money and the quest for meaning. What is the role of money in the search for consciousness, in the pursuit of that transformation of the self spoken of by the great teachers and philosophers of all epochs and cultures? “

“...It is necessary to break out of our conventional concepts of God as a merely external being. The point is that within ourselves there exists the possibility and even the necessity of experiencing and serving something unimaginably great and inconceivably real. The structure of human nature is without sense or meaning unless the idea of this inner possibility is understood....”

“Somewhere within every human being there exists an intimation of this possibility and often even a wordless, obscure longing for contact with this something. It is a longing, a wish, a call, that throws into question every other aim and purpose of our lives. We do not hear that call very often or very distinctly, but when we do hear it, we see that it comes from a part of ourselves that is disturbingly unrelated to the rest of us.”

Paraphrasing the words of Goethe’s Faust, “two selves dwell within our breast.” One part of us is meant to live and function in the world we see around us -- to eat, sleep, and produce our children, to answer the challenges of the natural and social world: in the words of Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes, to be born and die, to kill and to heal, to build and destroy, to weep and to laugh, get and lose, keep and cast away. This is human life “under the sun,” the world that we see and know and call real. But God, the “something,” is above the sun, above all that our eyes can see and our mind can name, and there is a higher part of ourselves that senses that and calls to us. We are two-natured beings. Such is the ancient teaching.”

...”Time disappears into outer action or inner impulses. Into doings, cravings, or dreamings. But human time is conscious time. And this has been lost, destroyed. In its place there is now animal time (doing, moving about, preying on others, eating, building, killing, etc. ); plant time (dreaming, languishing, imagining); or “mineral” -- that is, mechanical -- time: the time of devices such as clocks and computers. What we call logical thinking is often just an internal version of these lifeless machines. Implicitly, we even take pride in the mechanicity of our thinking when, forgetting the metaphorical origin of the usage, we refer to a computer’s “intelligence.” This is mental time, “mineral” in its rigidity and sterility. We lay this logical cement over organic life out there and in ourselves. Carried to its extreme, this becomes the mindset that measures the whole of human life solely by the “bottom line.”

“In the Old Testament the lower world is called Sheol. Here there are no images of raging fire. No cacophonous sounds. No sulfurous fumes. Sheol is simply and solely the place of shadows, dark, weak existence, continually fading, ever-paler life. Sheol is the realm of diminishing being.

Sheol is the condition of human life proceeding with ever-diminishing human presence. It is the movement toward absence, the movement away from God--for let us carefully note that one of the central definitions of God that is given in the Old Testament is conscious presence. Moses asks God, “What shall I say to the people of Israel? Whom shall I say has sent me with these commandments?”
The answer he receives, as mysteriously today as it has ever been: “Say unto the children of Israel, I AM has sent me unto you.” (Exodus 3:14)

Sheol -- the lower world or hell of the ancient Hebrews -- is the condition of ever-increasing distance from I am, from one’s own conscious presence in the midst of life. It is this state of the human psyche that is -- for us -- the most relevant definition of hell.....”

[from Money and the Meaning of Life by Jacob Needleman]

**
Jesus and Alinski

Indebtedness was the most serious social problem in first-century Palestine. Jesus' parables are full of debtors struggling to salvage their lives. It is in this context that Jesus speaks. His hearers are the poor ("if anyone would sue you"). They share a rankling hatred for a system that subjects them to humiliation by stripping them of their lands, their goods, finally even their outer garments.

Why then does Jesus counsel them to give over their inner garment as well? This would mean stripping off all their clothing and marching out of court stark naked! Put yourself in the debtor's place; imagine the chuckles this saying must have evoked. There stands the creditor, beet-red with embarrassment, your outer garment in one hand, your underwear in the other. You have suddenly turned the tables on him. You had no hope of winning the trial; the law was entirely in his favor. But you have refused to be humiliated. At the same time you have registered a stunning protest against a system that spawns such debt. You have said, in effect, "You want my robe? Here, take everything! Now you've got all I have except my body. Is that what you'll take next?"

Nakedness was taboo in Judaism. Shame fell not on the naked party but the person viewing or causing one's nakedness (Genesis 9:20-27). By stripping you have brought the creditor under the same prohibition that led to the curse of Canaan. As you parade into the street, your friends and neighbors, startled, aghast, inquire what happened. You explain. They join your growing procession, which now resembles a victory parade. The entire system by which debtors are oppressed has been publicly unmasked. The creditor is revealed to be not a "respectable" moneylender but a party in the reduction of an entire social class to landlessness and destitution. This unmasking is not simply punitive, however; it offers the creditor a chance to see, perhaps for the first time in his life, what his practices cause-and to repent.

Jesus in effect is sponsoring clowning. In so doing he shows himself to be thoroughly Jewish. A later saying of the Talmud runs, "If your neighbor calls you an ass, put a saddle on your back."

The Powers That Be literally stand on their dignity. Nothing takes away their potency faster than deft lampooning. By refusing to be awed by their power, the powerless are emboldened to seize the initiative, even where structural change is not possible. This message, far from being a counsel of perfection unattainable in this life, is a practical, strategic measure for empowering the oppressed. It provides a hint of how to take on the entire system in a way that unmasks its essential cruelty and to burlesque its pretensions to justice, law, and order.

Walter Wink's essay "Jesus & Alinsky" is excerpted from the book The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear
(Paperback) by Paul Loeb

Fall

What's Love Got To Do With It?

Ten propositions on marriage

by Kim Fabricius

1. Marriage, Edward Schillebeeckx writes, is “a reality secular by origin”; yet, as he continues, it “has acquired a deeper meaning in the order of salvation in which we live.” Because creation is in and for Christ, and because the apocalyptic shockwaves of the resurrection of Christ radiate both backwards and forwards, marriage must finally be understood Christologically. Although Jesus relativised marriage (e.g. Luke 18:29, Matthew 19:12), and although in the consummation there will be no marriage (Matthew 22:30), in his patience and grace God gives us marriage between-the-times as an intimate space for two people to be good and let be, and, for Christians, to bear witness to the new creation. At the marriage in Cana, Jesus turned water to wine – lots of wine! – his first and programmatic sign of the dawning new age (John 2:1-11). In the imagery of Ephesians 5:31-33, Christian marriage reflects the eschatological marriage of Christ and his church (cf. Revelation 19:7). With Bonhoeffer, the ultimate frames but does not negate the penultimate. It is therefore appropriate to speak of marriage as a covenant. To call it a sacrament, however, begs too many questions.

2. A marriage is not to be confused with a wedding. “A wedding is only the regulative confirmation and legitimation of a marriage before and by society. It does not constitute a marriage” (Karl Barth). A ceremony does not make a marriage, consent makes a marriage. And even in the ceremony, and even in the Roman Catholic Church, the ministers of the marriage are the bride and bridegroom, not the minister. Indeed it was only with the Council of Trent in 1563 that the Roman Catholic Church insisted on an ecclesial occasion, and mainly to ensure, through the presence of witnesses, that the marriage was, in fact, consensual. In short, a church wedding does not create a marriage, it recognises and blesses a marriage that already exists. Nor should consent itself be taken as a punctiliar act but as part of an ongoing project of mutual discovery and affirmation. It is always sad to hear a couple say that their wedding day was the happiest day of their lives.

3. If the heart of faith is friendship with God through Christ, active in the love of neighbour, the heart of marriage is maxima amicitia humana, the most intimate form of neighbour-love. This pre-eminent human friendship is normally both expressed and confirmed as a sexual relationship. While eros and agape are certainly to be distinguished (as Beethoven to Mozart, according to Barth – though, as Eberhard Jüngel winks, “We won’t ask what Mozart would say about that”), they must not be opposed (as Anders Nygren argued); nor is sex to be ruefully indulged (as Augustine held) but enthusiastically enjoyed (as Solomon sang). By the way, we should exercise word-care when we speak of “pre-marital sex”: what we usually mean is pre-ceremonial sex.

4. Yet corruptio optimi pessima: sex as the sphere of supreme tenderness and joy is also the sphere of desire at its most distorted (concupiscentia), indeed an arena of violence, as eros morphs into thanatos. In fact the libido dominandi is the regnant Pauline “principality and power” in contemporary western culture. Sex and the City is the iconic text of an age in which sex is everything – there are even parodic Virgilian tours of its virtual Manhattan Inferno – as we amuse ourselves to death-by-serial-fucking. Yet while we must speak of the body’s abuse, we may, in Christ, speak of “the body’s grace”. “The moral question,” writes Rowan Williams, “ought to be how much we want our sexual activity to communicate, how much we want it to display a breadth of human possibility and a sense of the body’s capacity to heal and enlarge the life of other subjects.” If there is the civitas diaboli of Carrie and company, there is also the civitas Dei of Jesus and his friends.

5. Although marriage is complete without procreation (Genesis 2:24) and remains complete after the kids have left home, marriage is the God-given unit for the birth and nurture of children (Genesis 1:28). There is, however, a teleology to raising children, namely that they may grow up to experience the joy and freedom of faith. “This means,” as Bonhoeffer says, “that marriage is not only a matter of producing children, but also of educating them to be obedient to Jesus Christ,” so that they too might become friends of God. The obedience course begins by telling your children that Jesus loves them – even when they are disobedient. As for the learning curve (or slider!), I recommend a Hauerwasian pedagogy: “Start with baseball and also teach them to read. Don’t teach kids a bunch of rules. Help them submit their lives to something that they find to be a wonderful activity that transforms them.”

6. What about divorce? And remarriage? Reviewing the New Testament texts, Richard B. Hays concludes that “the fundamental concern in all of them is to affirm marriage as a permanently binding commitment in which man and woman become one…. At the same time, there are complex differences…. Mark and Luke categorically prohibit divorce, but Matthew and Paul both entertain the necessity of exceptions to the rule, situations in which pastoral discernment is required.” To be sure, mired as they are in the cult of feelings, the myth of sexual fulfilment, and the language of rights, the modern motives for divorce are usually hopelessly un-Christian. However the notion of “indissolubility” smuggles in a metaphysic quite alien to the Bible; divorce is not an ontological impossibility. Nor can or should remarriage be rejected tout court. “Indeed, ”with Hays, “if one purpose of marriage is to serve as a sign of God’s love in the world …, how can we reject the possibility that a second marriage after a divorce could serve as a sign of grace and redemption from the sin and brokenness of the past?”

7. Tina Turner puts the problem – and the question I always put to dumfounded couples whom I prepare for marriage: “What’s love got to do with it?” Stanley Hauerwas: “Christians have far too readily underwritten the romantic assumption that people ‘fall’ in love and then get married. We would be much better advised to suggest that love does not create marriage; rather, marriage provides a good training ground to teach us what love involves.” Thus, most provocatively, to disabuse us of conventional notions of Mr or Miss Right, Hauerwas’s Law: “You always marry the wrong person.” (As Henny Youngman jested: I married Miss Right. I just didn’t know her first name was Always.) Thus does marriage become Luther’s “school of character”, or, better, a “class of character” in the school of the church. Of course a relationship begins with the chemistry of attraction, but unless it does graduate work in the art of loving, it shouldn’t be surprising if it ends in an explosion.

8. Colin Gunton observed that marriage “is at once the most private and the most public of our institutions,” and we may expect marriage to contribute to the enrichment of society and the strengthening of community. The church, after all, exists for the world. Yet in much Protestant thought that takes marriage to belong to an “order of nature”, the conclusion has been drawn that marriage is a purely civil affair, a matter of state for which the church provides the altar. This Constantinian understanding of marriage is a disaster, the collateral damage of which includes the apotheosis of “family values” and the raising of children to be loyal citizens, not faithful Christians. Divorce itself becomes, not a personal tragedy or a failure of witness, but a threat to the “fabric of society”, i.e. the status quo. The church must certainly cease to be Caesar’s chaplain, but not by abandoning its ceremonies, rather by reclaiming them for Christ. Follow the trajectory to a status confessionis and the state would not sanction and regulate church weddings but declare them to be illegal.

9. Am I suggesting that the church restrict weddings only to committed Christians, or to “nominal” Christians only after thorough catechesis? That would seem to be the drift of the argument – except for one thing. John Wesley spoke of the eucharist as a “converting ordinance”, as a means of grace that may bring the baptised (back) to Christ. In my own experience as a minister, church weddings, on a not insignificant number of occasions, have performed a similar function – and not only for the couple but for members of the congregation. In fact, they have been, indirectly, evangelistic events through which some people have been drawn into the body of Christ. They may even be prophetic events. Of course marriage preparation is essential, and that will include catechesis as well as counsel, but I have always seen it fundamentally as an act of hospitality and care. Some may chastise me with Matthew 7:6. I take consolation in Matthew 5:45.

10. Finally, if the heart of marriage is friendship, if marriage is for procreation in a gratuitous rather than an instrumental sense, as overflow rather than essence, then do we not open the way for the blessing of same-sex relationships? I think we do, though I think the term “marriage” is unhelpful. (And by the way, whatever the social and legal conventions, homosexual Christians, like heterosexual Christians, may have a vocation as parents in the church.) This view presupposes that natural law arguments against same-sex relationships are otiose – but then I think that the concept of natural law is otiose in a theology of marriage too! The point is this: if Luke Timothy Johnson is right to suggest that “If sexual virtue and vice are defined covenantally rather than biologically, then it is possible to place homosexual and heterosexual activity in the same context,” it is also possible to see same-sex relationships, blessed by the church, as an analogue of the relationship between God and his people, and a model of the church’s own proper economy of grace. In short, nihil obstat.

Postscript: two clean jokes and a dirty one

• Why did Adam and Eve have the perfect marriage? He didn’t have to listen to her talk about all the other men she could have married, and she didn’t have to put up with his mother.
• A minister sent a tele-message to his goddaughter for her wedding day: “I John 4:18. Love, Uncle Jack”. Unfortunately, the telephonist omitted the “I”, so that the reference was to John’s Gospel. Check it out!
• Finally, as an illustration that (pace von Clausewitz) marriage is the continuation of war by other means, an “order of militarisation”: Reviewing their marriage vows on the eve of their thirtieth anniversary, a couple had a furious row when they came to “as long as we both shall live”. He was so angry that in the morning he went out and bought her a tombstone bearing the inscription: “Here lies my wife – cold as ever.” In retaliation she went out and bought him a tombstone too. The inscription? “Here lies my husband – stiff at last.”

• 
  

We Are Made Of Time--It's Feet and It's Voice

From Friends of Silence

see also....

“The eternal moment is outside of time, is not a part of our past or our future, and yet it is lived amidst all our everyday activities. It is in the eternal moment that love is born. Love does not belong to time, and its timeless quality is well known to all lovers. The lover has to learn to still the mind in order to catch the moment and stay true to love’s unfolding. Wayfarers tread a path that lead from illusions of time to the eternal moment that belongs to the soul.

Frrom “Signs of God” by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

**
We are made of time
We are its feet and its voice.
The feet of time walk in our shoes.
Sooner or later, we all know,
the winds of time will close the tracks.
Passage of nothing, steps of no one.
The voice of time tells of the boyage.

--Eduardo Galeano

**

Eternity is one time, its only dimension: always.

...ACIM

**
Memory is the repository of the past, which is where most of our living takes place. we have divided life into past, present, and future, and this division, like all of our divisions, removes us from the fullness of living, from the mysterious unknown and unknowable movement of life that isw the source of all beauty. The past exists only in memory, and thefuture is merely a projection of past memories. Now, this moment, is all there is.

-- From The Secret of the Yamas by John McAfee

***
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light.
She went out one day
in a relative way,
And returned the previous night.

---Anonymous

**

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of life, the clearer we should see through it.

-- Jean Paul

** We were breaking an unspoken social rule. we were talking about God and religion at a time when the stakes were high, when turmoil and confusion were the order of the day. We were harried, busy mothers, but at our meetings we found ourselves released from Time, suspended from the reality of the outside world ... Our relationship was turning into something sacred, something we began to call our Faith Club.

-- From The Faith Club : A Muslin, A Christian, A Jew
by R. Idliby, S. Oliver, and P. Warner

***
In the timelessness we discover god. If we have ever become aware of the moment when we understood something, we must have realized the extratemporal nature of the event. Extemporaneous means outside of time. Indeed, the git of making extemporaneous comments hinges on our receptivity to inspired wisdom, reaching our consciousness from the realm of the timeless.

-- From Beyond the Dream by Thomas Hora

**
When time is a friend, you relish how it works. You know that your purpose is within you and that eventually time will unfold a dream, an integrating vision for your life purpose ..... My future is behind me. I can’t see it, while I can see my past which runs out in front of me.

-- Sharon Franquemont

**
He was still and gazed deeply into the infinite pool that bears stars into being. Above him was a tiny smudge of light that was the closest galaxy. It was spinning, spinning, but so far away that one could look for a whole lifetime and not see it alter. The galaxies out there whirled into each other like discs, blinding into space without colliding -- passing through each other at thousands of miles per second, yet they did not appear to move.

Suddenly he understood: Time is an illusion of the mind. Only love remains.

--From Eclipse of the Sun by Michael O’Brien

Lucky Enough To Live Inside Of A Story

Kafka Story

“All right. The story. The story of the doll... It’s the last year of Kafka’s life, and he’s fallen in love with Dora Diamant, a young girl of nineteen or twenty who ran away from her Hasidic family in Poland and now lives in Berlin. She’s half his age, but she’s the one who gives him the courage to leave Prague --- something he’s been wanting to do for years -- and she becomes the first and only woman he lives with. He gets to Berlin in the fall of 1923 and dies the following spring, but those last months are probably the happiest months of his life. In spite of his deteriorating health. In spite of the social conditions in Berlin: food shortages, political riots, the worst inflation in German history. In spite of the certain knowledge that he is not long for this world.

“Every afternoon, Kafka goes out for a walk in the park. More often than not, Dora goes with him . One day, they run into a little girl in tears, sobbing her heart out. Kafka asks her what’s wrong, and she tells him that she’s lost her doll. He immediately starts inventing a story to explain what happened. “Your doll has gone off on a trip,” he says. “How do you know that?” the girl asks. “Because she’s written me a letter,” Kafka says. The girl seems suspicious. “Do you have it on you?" she asks. “No, I’m sorry,” he says, “I left it at home by mistake, but I’ll bring it with me tomorrow.” He’s so convincing, the girl doesn’t know what to think anymore. Can it be possible that this mysterious man is telling the truth?

“Kafka goes straight home to write the letter. He sits down at his desk, and as Dora watches him write, she notices the same seriousness and tension he displays when composing his own work. He isn’t about to cheat the little girl. This is a real literary labor, and he’s determined to get it right. If he can come up with a beautiful and persuasive lie, it will supplant the girl’s loss with a different reality -- a false one, maybe, but something true and believable according to the laws of fiction.

“The next day, Kafka rushes back to the park with the letter. The little girl is waiting for him, and since she hasn’t learned how to read yet, he reads the letter out loud to her. The doll is very sorry, but she’s grown tired of living with the same people all the time. She needs to get out and see the world, to make new friends. It’s not that she doesn’t love the little girl, but she longs for a change of scenery, and therefore they must separate for a while. The doll then promises to write the girl every day and keep her abreast of her activities.

“That’s where the story begins to break my heart. It’s astonishing enough that Kafka took the trouble to write the first letter , but now he commits himself to the project of writing a new letter every day -- for no other reason than to console the little girl, who happens to be a complete stranger to him, a child he ran into by accident one afternoon in a park. What kind of man does a thing like that? He keep it up for three weeks, Nathan. Three weeks. One of the most brilliant writers who ever lived sacrificing his time -- his ever more precious and dwindling time -- to composing imaginary letters from a lost doll. Dora says that he wrote every sentence with excruciating attention to detail, that the prose was precise, funny, and absorbing. In other words, it was Kafka’s prose, and everyday for three weeks he went to the park and read another letter to the girl. The doll grows up, goes to school, gets to know other people. She continues to assure the girl of her love, but she hints at certain complications in her life that make it impossible for her to return home. Little by little, Kafka is preparing the girl for the moment when the doll will vanish from her life forever. He struggles to come up with a satisfactory ending, worried that if he doesn’t succeed, the magic spell will be broken. After testing out several possibilities, he finally decides to marry off the doll. He describes the young man she falls in love with, the engagement party, the wedding in the country, even the house where the doll and her husband now live and then, in the last line, the doll bids farewell to her old and beloved friend.

“By that point, of course, the girl no longer misses the doll. Kafka has given her something else instead, and by the time those three weeks are up, the letters have cured her of her unhappiness. She has the story, and when a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For a long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.”


Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

Blog Friend Down

"I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith."

Bible, 2 Timothy iv. 7.

**
Melanie Mattson was a blogger friend of mine. I was saddened to hear of her death.

{Sideshow}

"I learned a couple of weeks back that Melanie Mattson (who some of you may remember from her blog Just A Bump In The Beltway as well as the other sites she contributed to) had died, but we were asked to hold off saying anything until the family had gotten itself together. Melanie has been a part of our little network of lefty bloggers for years, and I regard this as a considerable loss. Melanie, a DC-area blogger, had been ill for a while, and would have been only 54 next week had she lived. Others have written in more detail about why she meant so much to them, but here's what she said about herself when she filled out the self-interview for What She Said. Peace, Melanie."

***
I valued her writing and thinking about everything from spiritual direction to cooking. I have almost an entire book of recipes I printed from "Just a bump in the beltway" and had some e-mail correspondence with her about Spiritual Direction and Shalem Institute.

I knew that she had been ill with things both chronic and acute -- that she hadn't posted in awhile, which was worrisome. Things must have been tough. I can only suppose.
These artistic talented and ill bloggers without health insurance. It is heartbreaking.

All week at the beach I've been urging my firstborn to go to Grad school to get more marketable credentialing. I have plenty of bright talented artistic friends who are living at the bottom of the chow line. Being an artist is as much a 'call' as the priesthood.
There are simply so few institutional supports to offer them work with which to support themselves.

Melanie's fierce voice will be missed, as will be her wisdom and advocacy. I wish she had lived a life that better rewarded her gifts. I 've been thinking about what Wendell Berry wrote :

**
"Our national faith so far has been: "There's always more." Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People of intelligence and ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a big machine. Thus an X marked on a paper ballot no longer fulfills our idea of voting. One problem with this state of affairs is that the work now most needing to be done -- that of neighborliness and caretaking -- cannot be done by remote control and the greatest power on the largest scale. A second problem is that the economic fantasy of limitlessness in a limited world calls fearfully into question the value of our monetary wealth, which does not reliably stand for the real wealth of land, resources, and workmanship but instead wastes and depletes it.

**

"In the arts, by contrast, no limitless sequence of works is ever implied or looked for. No work of art is necessarily followed by a second work that is necessarily better. Given the methodologies of science, the law of gravity and the genome were bound to be discovered by somebody; the identity of the discoverer is incidental to the fact. But it appears that in the arts there are no second chances. We must assume that we had one chance each for The Divine Comedy and King Lear. If Dante and Shakespeare had died before they wrote those poems, nobody ever would have written them."

***
"The same is true of our arts of land use, our economic arts, which are our arts of living. With these it is once-for-all. We will have no chance to redo our experiments with bad agriculture leading to soil loss. The Appalachian mountains and forests we have destroyed for coal are gone forever. It is now and forevermore too late to use thriftily the first half of the world's supply of petroleum. In the art of living we can only start again with what remains."

***

While I was on vacation , I read The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster on the recommendation of my son. A charming book.

In the spirit of it's funeral scene, I toast Melanie. May light perpetually shine on her.

Shalom.

***
"It wasn’t Rufus Sprague who had joined us -- it was Tina Hott, and the transformation was so radical, so mesmerizing, that I actually heard someone behind me gasp.

He was one of the most beautiful women i had ever seen. Decked out in full widow’s regalia, with a tight black dress, three-inch heels, and a black pillbox hat with a delicate black veil, he had turned himself into an incarnation of absolute femininity, an idea of the feminine that surpassed anything that existed in the realm of natural womanhood. The auburn wig looked like real hair; the breasts looked like real breasts; the makeup had been applied with skill and precision; and Tina’s legs were so long and lovely to look at, it was impossible to believe that they were attached to a man.

But there was more to the effect she created than mere surface trapping, more than just clothes or wigs or makeup. The inner light of the feminine was there as well, and Tina’s dignified, sorrowful bearing was a perfect representation of grieving widowhood, a performance by an actress of immense talent. All through the ceremony, she didn’t say a word, standing among us in total silence as people delivered short speeches about Harry and Tom then opened the box and spread the ashes out on the ground. It seemed as if our business had been concluded, but before we turned to go, a chubby black boy of about twelve emerged from the fringes of the small forest and approached the group. there was a portable CD player in his outstretched arms, and he carried it as if he were bearing a crown on a velvet pillow. the boy, who was later identified as Rufus’s cousin, placed the boom box at Tina’s feet and pushed a button. Suddenly, Tina opened her mouth, and as the first bars of orchestral music came pouring through the speakers, she began lip-synching the words of the song that followed. After a moment or two, I recognized the voice of Lena Horne, singing the old song from Show Boat, “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.” This was how Tina Hott performed in her Saturday night cabaret appearances: not as a singer, but as a faux-singer, mouthing the words of show tunes and jazz standards as sung by legendary female vocalists. It was magnificent and absurd. It was funny and heartbreaking. I was moving and comical. It was everything it was and everything it wasn’t. And there was Tina, gesturing with her arms as she pretended to belt out the words of the song. Her face was all tenderness and love. Her eyes were wet with tears, and we all stood there transfixed, not knowing whether to cry with her or to laugh. As far as I’m concerned, it was one of the strangest, most transcendent moments of my life.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly
I gotta love one man ‘til I die.....

That evening, Rufus boarded a plane and flew home to Jamaica. To the best of my knowledge, he has not been back since."

-- The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster

He Is Not Diminished As They Become More

From
Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell



“Why do we travel, really? If we are of a thoughtful nature, we may wish to improve our minds , to examine the manners and customs of others and compare them to our own. For these reasons, we study guidebooks and make lists of the churches, palaces, galleries, and museums we’ll visit. We take photographs and write our impressions in diaries. We might even justify the expense of the trip by planning to share our knowledge with others upon our return.

But is it really an education that we yearn to acquire when we travel? Or -- be honest, now -- do we more sincerely desire souvenirs? What tourist returns with lighter bags than those he packed at home? We want something to display, a memento, a “conversation piece” that will silently inform a guest: I have traveled. I have awakened under a fierce foreign sun. We look for a painting, a sculpture, a vase that will whisper: I have shopped in souks and bargained in bazaars, and I have this to show for it.

In all practicality, of course, one could buy such objects at home. After all, there are importers, antique shops, and art galleries -- even in Ohio. Why, then, do we undertake the expense and risk of travel? Why leave the comforts of home for flies and disease, heat and dust, crowds and the risk of theft? Because souvenirs remind even the traveler of his journey: I was not always who and what I seem, sitting in this Ohio Parlor. Here is a talisman of a magical time when nothing -- not even I -- was ordinary.

If we are timid or rebellious or both, then travel -- by itself and by ourselves -- forces us to leave our old lives behind. Travel can overcome habitual resistance and set the soul in motion along magnetic lines of attraction. On foreign soil, desires -- denied, policed, constrained at home -- can be unbound."

***
"To leave the apple unpicked -- that was sin. To choose loneliness if love -- even illicit love -- were offered, that seemed worse than sin.

That would make of my life a tragedy.”

***
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but apart from the steadfast faith I see in Francis, there is no sign here of the deity my sister, Lillian, worshipped. Far more in evidence are the gods of war, whom I once assumed were merely mythical: Mars, Ares, Thor. Indra, Guan Yu, Wotan. Ogun. Ahur, the Morrigan. Huitzilophochtili, Bishamon, Sekhmut .... All of them are real, and in their numberless hordes, they watch human history with gleeful satisfaction.

Here, along the Nile, Mentu the Falcon-Headed seems to be in charge. “The children of men may prate of peace and mewl of love, but anyone can see the truth,” he roars, lifting his great feathered arm toward his legions. “They worship us!”

I wish I could argue, but the twentieth century certainly didn’t provide much evidence to deploy. I’ve come to believe that Mr. William James was right.
**
Most people welcome war. Rare and precious as it is, peace seems boring and banal by comparison. People believe easily that battle is a sacrament with young men the necessary sacrifice. They believe darkly that without war’s mystical blood payment, society goes soft and rots from within. And most of them can be swayed by lofty rhetoric and crafty slogans. As war approaches, Mr. James wrote, nations experience a vague, religious exultation. That’s when the blood-red gods begin to dance. “I am Empire,” Mentu howls as the others whirl in ecstasy. “I am the King of Thieves!”

The irony is that each new war begins in hope: hope of restoring lost honor, hope of redressing injustices and reclaiming tarnished glory, hope of a grand new world. Each war ends with the black seeds of the next war sown: honor newly lost, injustice freshly inflicted, a world more broken than before. Always, someone steps forward, ready to water and weed and harvest those black seeds, dreaming of the day when they will bring forth their bounty of vindictive vindication. Into that dreamer’s ear, a bloodred god whispers, “offer flattery in one hand, fear in the other. rule or be ruled! Dominate or disappear!”

The rationales warp and twist and shift. The closer war comes, the simpler and stupider the choices. Are you a warrior or a coward? Are you with us or against us?

“All men dream,” Colonel Lawrence wrote, “ but not equally. Those who dream by night wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”

***
“Maybe that’s the way to tell the dangerous men from the good ones. A dreamer of the day is dangerous when he believes that others are less: less than their own best selves and certainly less than he is. They exist to follow and flatter him, and to serve his purposes.

A true prophet, I suppose, is like a good parent. A true prophet sees others, not himself. He helps them define their own half-formed dreams, and puts himself at their service. He is not diminished as they become more. He offers courage in one hand and generosity in the other.”

**
“Read to children.
Vote.
And never buy anything from a man who’s selling fear.”

The Problem Is...

Merlin on the beach


**
"The problem is, God does not take up residence on this or any other spectrum. Love finds no steady home in psychological health. I am sure God wants us to be whole and healthy in every way possible, but love neither depends upon these things nor ends with them. In fact, blessings sometimes come through brokenness that could never come in any other way. In reflecting on my own life, I have to conclude that grace has come through me more powerfully sometimes when I have been very dysfunctional and maladjusted. Love transcends all possible adjustments and continually invites us through and beyond them. God invites us to a communion of divine and human desire that cannot be located in any concept or model. We must go beyond the spectrum entirely."

Gerald G. May M.D.
The Awakened Heart
Opening Yourself To The Love You Need

**

Dreamers of the Day

Intracoastal waterway

**


I've been reading Mary Doria Russell's "Dreamers of the Day" -- a story of between wars Middle East.

Her character, the German spy says "Here is the trouble for a colonialist in the Middle East: he shall always be the natural victim of ketman."

"Ketman?"

"The art of fakery," Karl said dryly, "whereby underlings preserve their dignity by fooling authority. In Persia, the practice is combined with a Shi'a concept: takkiya -- religious permission to lie when dealing with infidels."

****
Mary Doria Russell wrote "The Sparrow" and "Children of God" two truly visionary Science Fiction theologies.

This book is more like her last novel "A Thread of Grace" which is an account of the end of WWII in Italy, mixing the author's knowledge of history and culture with her Catholic roots. It also mirrors her own conversion from Catholic to Jewish. Interesting.

Sometimes her writing reminds me of Annie Dillard, although Dillard's novels are more God-like and right brained.

But both of them sort of explore the back yard for bugs, and then look up at the sun and then the stars.

Both of them read like meditation would be (assuming I can meditate).

Both of them are a sort of love psalm to human beings. There is no desire to reform or change the very oddness of humanity.

It's actually an older view of human beings. That work, time, the simple movements of lives in communities and in settings are adequate for fulfillment, for enlightenment. Slowness. But not an -ism or an -ess. Simple, slow, courtly, respectful. Reverent. Old fashioned.

The sense that the world makes is not 'this' or 'that' but the paradoxical, the wild, reason and unreason each in its season. The rhythm of nature and cosmos, but not in general but in specific.

Her use of words is puzzling and upsetting sometimes. There are a lot of narrative gaps and spaces in her stories. She doesn't have a gossipy curiosity injected into the narrative. The narrator is allowed to communicate as little or as much as she wishes.

That the solution for human mood and depression, involution and self pity is movement, motion, putting on your coat and trudging through the snow, even with a broken foot. It is 'looking up'. It's the process of learning to watch and to listen.
To face outward -- to be aware of where and when you are.

This is the crux....

**

Big storm last night at the beach. A sky full of lightening and this morning a beach full of debris and rank seaweed.

I took a plastic bag and picked up loose junk to throw away.

An elderly couple who passed me thanked me and asked me if I had an extra bag.

**

Black and White Photographs

From Jincy Willett's
Jenny and the Jaws of Life
"My Father At the Wheel"

"The long slippery backseat was for children and dogs. We all liked to stick our heads out the window, and on the open highway, away from the whipping branches of trees, we were allowed to do this, with my mother watching, and our hair and fir skinned straight back, our eyes hooded against the wind. We stuck our arms out, too for the magic or air hard as a board. We threw our sneakers out the window on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. My father stopped the car and spanked me, because it had been my idea. And sometimes, when May Jane and I were fighting, my father would reach around and knuckle one of us in the back of the head, d or grab one of us by the arm and shake, leaving little marks.

Once, before Mary Jane was born and I didn't want to leave my cousin's birthday party, my father picked me up and threw me into the car, so that I cracked my head against the door handle and stopped screaming. And there were side window vents in the back, which we could open at will, with sharp edges pointing toward our eyes. And there were no seatbelts, harnesses, or regulation infant carseats. When the car stopped short we would slam into the front seat upholstery, we learned not to sit or kneel directly in front of the ashtray, which could cut your lip. Or if I rode in front, and the brakes locked, or we ran into something my father's arm , or my mother's, would shoot out rigid and straight in front of my face, giving me an object softer than steel to hit with my nose, to grab hold of as my body slid beneath the dash.

How tough we all were! How rubbery and intrepid! Millions of little fat kids in black and white photographs, the last of the black and white children. Twinkles in the eye of World War II. We ate white bread and spam, creamed salt cod, mashed potatoes, chipped beef on toast. Cream of wheat! And when we weren't eating white things, we shard smoky air with our shameless parents, and cavernous steel boxes, traveling at lethal speeds, shook our square sturdy bodies like dice. Some of us must have died. We didn't!

**

From Jincy Willett's
Jenny and the Jaws of Life
"My Father At the Wheel"

Off To Paradise

St. George Island, Fla panhandle

"Sea-Fever"

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

By John Masefield (1878-1967).
(English Poet Laureate, 1930-1967.)

**
More sea poems (sort of)

*

Horizon
Billy Collins

You can use the brush of a Japanese monk
or a pencil stub from a race track.

As long as you draw the line a third
the way up from the bottom of the page,

the effect is the same; the world suddenly
divided into its elemental realms.

A moment ago there was only a piece of paper.
Now there is earth and sky, and sky and sea.

You were sitting alone in a small room.
Now your are walking into the heart of a vast desert

or standing on the ledge of a winter beach
watching the light on the water, light in the air.

**
Ground Swell

By Mark Jarman

Is nothing real but when I was fifteen,
Going on sixteen, like a corny song?
I see myself so clearly then, and painfully--
Knees bleeding through my usher's uniform
Behind the candy counter in the theater
After a morning's surfing; ; paddling frantically
To top the brisk outsiders coming to wreck me,
Trundle me clumsily along the beach floor's
Gravel and sand; my knees aching with salt.
Is that all I have to write about?
You write about the life that's vividest.
And if that is your own, that is your subject.
And if the years before and after sixteen
Are colorless as salt and taste like sand--
Return to those remembered chilly mornings,
The light spreading like a great skin on the water,
And the blue water scalloped with wind-ridges,
And--what was it exactly?--that slow waiting
When, to invigorate yourself, you peed
Inside your bathing suit and felt the warmth
Crawl all around your hips and thighs,
And the first set rolled in and the water level
Rose in expectancy, and the sun struck
The water surface like a brassy palm,
Flat and gonglike, and the wave face formed.
Yes. But that was a summer so removed
In time, so specially peculiar to my life,
Why would I want to write about it again?
There was a day or two when, paddling out,
An older boy who had just graduated
And grown a great blonde moustache, like a walrus,
Skimmed past me like a smooth machine on the water,
And said my name. I was so much younger,
To be identified by one like him--
The easy deference of a kind of god
Who also went to church where I did--made me
Reconsider my worth. I had been noticed.
He soon was a small figure crossing waves,
The shawling crest surrounding him with spray,
Whiter than gull feathers. He had said my name
Without scorn, just with a bit of surprise
To notice me among those trying the big waves
Of the morning break. His name is carved now
On the black wall in Washington, the frozen wave
That grievers cross to find a name or names.
I knew him as I say I knew him, then,
Which wasn't very well. My father preached
His funeral. He came home in a bag
That may have mixed in pieces of his squad.
Yes, I can write about a lot of things
Besides the summer that I turned sixteen.
But that's my ground swell. I must start.
Where things began to happen and I knew it.

**
The Case for Solace
by Ellery Akers

—Port Townsend, Washington

I go down to the beach with its lengths of kelp,
one with a holdfast * clutching a pebble.
It doesn't matter how small it is, the harbormaster says,
it does the job.

I don't miss you so much. I'm surprised.
Maybe it's because the sky is always changing,
cumulus to stratus, stratus to altostratus,
altostratus to rain.

At the Grebe Dive Shop, the black rubber suits
and flippers smell pungent, and the divers advise
against the tide. Shark stories, and cases of beer.

At night I sleep calm,
hearing the cutters and scows,
the moan of the buoys and the put-put
of the huge, rusted Ginza Star as it switches engines
and enters the strait.

Maybe it's the rain, it doesn't matter how small it is,
or the swallows, flying around my ankles in the cut grass,
picking up bugs my feet release.

On the cliffs, ailanthus and clover fall straight down to the
water.

It's summer. I forget what else should matter.

**

[ *A holdfast is the root of a kelp,
and anchors the seaweed to the
bottom of the ocean by wrapping
itself around a stone.]

***

The Person Who is Also a Storm

Metaphor.
Something is enough like
something else that
it becomes that.

The storms of life
That are also the people in life.

The approach
the warning
Breaking forming
slow dispersal
memory --

Storms are not exactly a beach picnic.
Not what I asked for
I swear it.

But I too am a storm to someone.

The great winds,
The gales, the great shaking
That seems to be so dire

Anxiety that never ends.

From another point of view
It might be a simple beach
drama -
The forces of nature
encountered serendipitously
At the shore
Then back to the comforts of home

Life companionable and calm
A little dog
Hungry for a treat and a little companionship.

Never write off the future
Because of what has happened in the past.

Let the future call you
In your dreams.

Let it whisper and call you
Even as the storm is upon you

You'll know when to batten down the hatches
and go below.


Don't forget to open up as many doors as you can
in this life.
And don't close too many , either.



(revised July 5, 2008)

**
***
"To Lou's raised light Maytree had once set his face. "Time was," said a Wessex rustic, "long and merry ago now!"

***

"Lou hoped scandalously to live her own life. A subnormal calling, since civilization means cities and cities mean social norms. She wanted only to hear herself think. She admired Diogenes who shaved half his head to he would stay home to think. How else might she hear any original note, any stray subject-and-verb in the head, however faint, should one come?

She pushed the tiller hard over, came about, and set a slashing course upwind. The one-room ever-sparer dune shack was her chief dwelling from which only hurricane or frost exiled her. Over decades, she had reclaimed what she had forfeited of her own mind, if any. She took pains to keep outside the world's acceleration. An Athens marketplace amazed Diogenes with "How many things there are in the world of which Diogenes hath no need!" Lou had long since cut out fashion and all radio but the RedSox . In the past few years she had let go her ties to people she did not like, to ironing, to dining out in town, and to buying things not necessary and that themselves needed care. She ignored whatever did not interest her. With those blows she opened her days like a pinata. A hundred freedoms fell on her. She hitched free years to her lifespan like a kite tail. Everyone envied her the time she had, not noticing that they had equal time."

--from Annie Dillard's
The Maytrees

**

Very Nervous

David Rokeby in Very Nervous System in the street in Potsdam

Very Nervous System is the third generation of interactive sound installations which I have created. In these systems, I use video cameras, image processors, computers, synthesizers and a sound system to create a space in which the movements of one's body create sound and/or music. It has been primarily presented as an installation in galleries but has also been installed in public outdoor spaces, and has been used in a number of performances.

I created the work for many reasons, but perhaps the most pervasive reason was a simple impulse towards contrariness. The computer as a medium is strongly biased. And so my impulse while using the computer was to work solidly against these biases. Because the computer is purely logical, the language of interaction should strive to be intuitive. Because the computer removes you from your body, the body should be strongly engaged. Because the computer's activity takes place on the tiny playing fields of integrated circuits, the encounter with the computer should take place in human-scaled physical space. Because the computer is objective and disinterested, the experience should be intimate.

***

The following is from

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (James H. Silberman Books) by Norman Doidge

THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF
by Norman Doidge, M. D.

**
"Normally, when we make a mistake, three things happen. First, we get a "mistake feeling," that nagging sense that something is wrong. Second, we become anxious, and that anxiety drives us to correct the mistake. Third, when we have corrected the mistake, an automatic gearshift in our brain allows us to move on to the next thought or activity. Then both the "mistake feeling" and the anxiety disappear.

But the brain of the obsessive-compulsive does not move on or "turn the page." Even though he has corrected his spelling mistake, washed the germs off his hands, or apologized for forgetting his friend's birthday, he continues to obsess. His automatic gearshift does not work, and the mistake feeling and its pursuant anxiety build in intensity.

We now know, from brain scans, that three parts of the brain are involve in obsessions.

We detect mistakes with our orbital frontal cortex, part of the frontal lobe, on the underside of the brain, just behind our eyes. Scans show that the more obsessive a person is, the more activated the orbital frontal cortex is.

Once the orbital frontal cortex has fired the "mistake feeling," it sends a signal to the cingulate gyrus, located in the deepest part of the cortex. The cingulate triggers the dreadful anxiety that something bad is going to happen unless we correct the mistake and sends signals to both the gut and the heart, causing the physical sensations we associate with dread.

The "automatic gearshift," the caudate nucleus, sits deep in the center of the brain and allows our thoughts to flow from one to the next unless, as happens in OCD, the caudate becomes extremely "sticky."

Brain scans of OCD patients show that all three brain areas are hyperactive. The orbital frontal cortex and the cingulate turn on and stay on as though locked in the "on position" together -- one reason that Schwartz calls OCD "brain lock." because the caudate doesn't "shift the gear" automatically, the orbital frontal cortex and the cingulate continue to fire off their signals, increasing the mistake feeling and the anxiety. Because the person has already corrected the mistake, these are, of course, false alarms. The malfunctioning caudate is probably overactive because it is stuck and is still being inundated with signals from the orbital frontal cortex.

--p.170

**
"Pain and body image are closely related. We always experience pain as projected into the body. When you throw your back out, you say, "My back is killing me!" and not, "My pain system is killing me." But as phantoms show, we don't need a body part or even pain receptors to feel pain. We need only a body image, produced by our brain maps. People with actual limbs don't usually realize this, because the body images of our limbs are perfectly projected onto our actual limbs, making it impossible to distinguish our body image from our body. "You own body is a phantom," say Ramachandran, "one that your brain has constructed purely for convenience."

p. 188

**
"According to Ramachandran, pain, like the body image, is created by the brain and projected onto the body. This assertion is contrary to common sense and the traditional neurological view of pain that says that when we are hurt, our pain receptors send a one-way signal to the brain's pain center and that the intensity of pain perceived is proportional to th seriousness of the injury. We assume that pain always files an accurate damage report. This traditional view dates back to the philosopher Descartes, who saw the brain as a passive recipient of pain. But that view was overturned in 1965, when neuroscientists Ronald Melzack (a Canadian who studied phantom limbs and pin) and Patrick Wall (an Englishman who studied pain and plasticity) wrote the most important article in the history of pain. Wall and Melzack's theory asserted that the pain system is spread throughout the brain and spinal cord, and far from being a passive recipient of pain, the brain always controls the pain signals we feel.

Their "gate control theory of pain" proposed a series of controls, or "gates," between the site of injury and the brain. When pain messages are sent from damaged tissue through the nervous system, they pass through several "gates," starting in the spinal cord, before they get to the brain. But these messages travel only if the brain gives them "permission," after determining they are important enough to be let through. If permission is granted, a gate will open and increase the feeling of pain by allowing certain neurons to turn on and transmit their signals. The brain can also close a gate and block the pain signal by releasing endorphins, the narcotics made by the body to quell pain.

***
Wall and Melzack showed that the neurons in our pain system are far more plastic than we ever imagined, that important pain maps in the spinal cord can change following injury, and that a chronic injury can make the cells in the pain system fire more easily -- a plastic alteration -- making a person hypersensitive to pain. Maps can also enlarge their receptive field, coming to represent more of the body's surface, increasing pain sensitivity. As the maps change, pain signals in one map can"spill" into adjacent pain maps, and we may develop "referred pain," when we are hurt in one body part but feel the pain in another. Sometimes a single pain signal reverberates throughout the brain, so that pain persists even after its original stimulus has stopped.

**
Extending the gate theory, Ramachandran developed his next idea: that pain is a complex system under the plastic brain's control. He summed this up as follows: "pain is an opinion on the organism's state of health rather than a mere reflexive response to injury." The brain gather evidence from many sources before triggering pain. He has also said that "pain is an illusion" and that "our mind is a virtual reality machine," which experiences the world indirectly and processes it at one remove, constructing a model in our head. So pain, like the body image, is a construct of our brain."

Picnic Things

The Minimalist

101 20-Minute Dishes for Inspired Picnics

By MARK BITTMAN

July 2, 2008

THERE is something both innocent and exciting about a picnic, even if you are only packing a few things at the last minute and heading down the street to the park. It may be nothing fancier than bologna or tuna salad on white bread, but you’re still likely to have a good time, which is probably why many of us remain devoted to the same picnic foods we’ve eaten all our lives.

But at some point, you may get the urge to vary the menu a bit. With that in mind, I’d like to make a few — or, actually, 101 — suggestions, ranging from snacks to dessert. With a little shopping, a little effort, and 20 minutes or less for assembly, you can create the kind of carry-out food that will put the local prepared food shops to shame while saving you a small fortune. No matter how faithful you are to your old favorites, I’ll bet you will find something intriguing here.

1 BEET SALAD Peel beets and grate them (a food processor will keep the juice contained). Add pistachios or hazelnuts; dress with orange zest and juice, and olive oil. Add bits of goat cheese and chopped parsley.

2 PESTO CHICKEN ROLLS Season and grill chicken cutlets. Brush lavash or any other wrap-type bread with pesto; layer with the chicken, sun-dried tomatoes and arugula; roll up and cut on the bias.

3 CURRIED EGG SALAD Make egg salad with hard-cooked eggs, mayo, curry powder, Dijon mustard, fresh lime juice, salt, pepper, cilantro, red onion and, if you like, diced apple.

4 TOMATOES AND PEACHES Toss together sliced seeded tomatoes and peaches, along with thinly sliced red onion and chopped cilantro or rosemary. Dress at the last minute with olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

5 ROAST BEEF AND BLUE Start with whole-grain rolls. Smear blue cheese on one side and prepared horseradish on the other. Add red onion and thin-sliced roast beef, pork or lamb. Pack! lettuce and tomato on the side. Potato chips are mandatory.

6 CORNFLAKE CHICKEN BITES Cut boneless chicken breasts into small pieces. Dip in milk or buttermilk, then dredge in seasoned crushed corn flake crumbs, cornmeal or panko. Pan-fry in oil, drain, cool and eat cold with celery sticks, with ranch or blue cheese dressing for dipping.

7 GRAPES AND CHEESE Mix feta cubes and green grapes (or grape tomatoes or pieces of watermelon). Add mint, salt, pepper and olive oil. A tiny bit of chopped fresh chili is good, too.

8 COLD PEANUT NOODLES Cook Chinese egg noodles or regular spaghetti. Drain and rinse. Toss with sesame oil, peanut butter (or tahini), sugar, soy sauce, ginger, vinegar, black pepper (lots) and chili oil (optional). Pack shredded seeded cucumber, cooked shrimp and chopped scallions separately.

RAW VEGETABLES

COOKED VEGETABLES

BEAN, RICE AND GRAIN SALADS

POTATO SALADS AND EGG SALADS

SEAFOOD

MEAT AND POULTRY

SANDWICHES

COLD NOODLES

DESSERTS

All Over the Earth People Are Saying It With You

The Word That Is A Prayer


by Ellery Akers

One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you;
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a streetlight, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he's saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don't go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.



**

"In youth a person may identify with many intimate imaginings of what he or she is going to grow into, what position, what palace, they will possess, and how many servants and what chorus of praise and sympathy will surround them. These and similar imaginings can form very strong impressions .... The result will be that in growing up a sense of discontent or of disappointment, or a sadness, pervades the outlook, the cause being unknown to the person although it is still evident in the imagination. The tendency will be to look backwards because life as it is experienced will seem in some way unreal, the reason being that in view of the forms of expectancy laid down by the early imaginings the life is not what was expected ...."

--Maurice Nicoll
Psychological Commentaries
Vol. 3

**
"We expect too much of the world. Our expectations are extravagant in the precise dictionary sense of the word -- "going beyond the limits of reason or moderation." They are excessive.

When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect -- we even demand -- that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio and expect "news" to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house not only to shelter us, to keep us warm in winter and cool in summer, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night. We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, yet we expect everybody to be loyal, not to rock the boat. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion, yet not to think less of others for not believing. We expect our nation to be strong and great and vast and varied and prepared for every challenge; yet we expect our "national purpose" to be clear and simple, something that gives direction to the live of nearly two hundred million people and yet can be bought in a paperback at the drugstore for a dollar.

We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for "excellence," to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to a "church of our choice." and yet feel its guiding power over us. To revere God and to be God.

Never have a people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer."

--Daniel J. Boorstein
"The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream"

***
"Our own struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase our own consciousness makes us discover in the endeavours and movements and revolutions of all things a struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase consciousness, to which everything tends. Beneath the actions of those most akin to myself, of my fellow-men, I feel -- or rather, I co-feel -- a state of consciousness similar to that which lies beneath my own actions. On hearing my brother give a cry of pain, my own pain awakes and cries in the depth of my consciousness. And in the same way I feel the pain of animals, and the pain of a tree when one of its branches is being cut off, and I feel it most when my imagination is alive, for the imagination is the faculty of intuition, of inward vision.

-- Miguel de Unamuno
Tragic Sense of Life

**
"Most potent are the ghosts of the unlived past -- ghosts of the things one did not do, commitments one did not make, choosing instead the provisional life that did not demand decisive choice. These ghosts haunt the crossroads, reiterating that it is too late, or too soon, or not possible now; but when "God takes you and cleans away all your ghosts," you accept the here and now and try to see what you can make of your life in spite of limitations and past mistakes. Then you can "step out on the waves" and "come back to life all over again."

You come back to the same old life; but the old is now the new because a new concept reanimates and transforms it. Now when you journey on the waves, you understand that these waters are waters of life: you see beneath the surface the deeper forces moving. The fantasies, the dreams, the visions, the intuitions of truth that arise within you are no longer ghost whispers blowing through you as wailing or singing wind blows through a windharp ; they are real living experiences that speak their meaning in both inner and outer life. The voice we now hear is that of the Living Word that moves upon the waters of life. Good and evil are realities, and we accept the burden of choice.

--Frances G. Wickes,
The Inner World of Choice

**
All quotes from Elizabeth O'Connor
"Our Many Selves -- A Handbook for Self-Discovery"
1971

Breath

Nadis
from Wikipedia

Only Breath

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

— Rumi

[Rumi was born Jalaluddin Balkhi, September 30, 1207, in Balkh, Afghanistan which was part of the Persian empire back then. One of the most beloved and read mystical poets in America and all over the world.]

**
"We live by the sheer generosity of a moment-by-moment miracle, and it is called the breath. Actually, we could say we live and die by this miracle. Every breath out is a practice of yielding the self to the universe; every breath in is a reincarnation event, the self reborn, fresh. Zen is the practice of agreeing to live with a mind and self as alive and fluid as breathing itself: accepting the offer of each moment, yielding to the passing of each moment.

**
A practice is an undertaking with the self: I vow to sit once a day and do nothing, just sit and let things be completely. When we have a practice, we show up faithfully and do sincerely whatever we can to get ourselves out of the way. Hard as it often is at first, we just keep giving way to simply seeing and being what we are.

**
Samuel Beckett's potent advice to someone who asked how to become a more accomplished writer was stark: "Try again. Fail better." We grow by being defeated decisively by ever-greater opponents. Resistance announces, "Here I am, your greatest opponent, always on duty: yourself!"

**

--Upside - Down Zen
Susan Murphy