Spirit Surfers

earthbound
Stephanie Valentin
Stills Gallery

via gmtPlus9 (-15)

via Andrew Sullivan

"We must take time, take pains, have a plan, form spiritual habits, if we are to keep our souls alive; and now is the time to begin. A man to whom religion is a reality, and who knows what is meant by "the practice of salvation," keeps his balance, because the living center of his life is spiritual. He cannot be upset, not shaken. The same hard knocks come to him as to others, but he reacts to them by the central law of his life. He suffers deeply, but he does not sour. He knows frustration, but he goes right on in his kindness and faith. He sees his own shortcomings but he does not give up, because a power rises up from his spiritual center and urges him to the best, - Joseph Fort Newton.

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Brain Curls

A newish study:

"According to researchers at UCLA, meditation is ... a way to build a bigger brain. Using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of people who meditate and people who don’t, researchers found that certain brain areas - specifically “the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cortex, the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus” - were significantly larger in people who meditate. And, those bigger brain parts might actually play a role in long-term meditators’ abilities to grab on to and maintain control of their mindfulness and emotions."

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POEM

Have You Prayed

by Li-Young Lee

When the wind

turns and asks, in my father’s voice,

Have you prayed?

I know three things. One:

I’m never finished answering to the dead.

Two: A man is four winds and three fires.

And the four winds are his father’s voice,

his mother’s voice . . .

Or maybe he’s seven winds and ten fires.

And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching,

dreaming, thinking . . .

Or is he the breath of God?

When the wind turns traveler

and asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed?

I remember three things.

One: A father’s love

is milk and sugar,

two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and what’s left over

is trimmed and leavened to make the bread

the dead and the living share.

And patience? That’s to endure

the terrible leavening and kneading.

And wisdom? That’s my father’s face in sleep.

When the wind

asks, Have you prayed?

I know it’s only me

reminding myself

a flower is one station between

earth’s wish and earth’s rapture, and blood

was fire, salt, and breath long before

it quickened any wand or branch, any limb

that woke speaking. It’s just me

in the gowns of the wind,

or my father through me, asking,

Have you found your refuge yet?

asking, Are you happy?

Strange. A troubled father. A happy son.

The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one.

“Have you Prayed,” from Behind My Eyes by Li-Young Lee.

**


2009 MOUNTAINEERING SEASON

Musical Minds

An M.R.I. scan of Oliver Sacks’s brain, from “Musical Minds,” which considers the impact that music can have on the brain.

June 30, 2009

Television Review | 'Nova: Musical Minds'

Our Brains on Music: The Science

By MIKE HALE

“Musical Minds,” the season premiere of “Nova” on PBS, is based on the neurologist Oliver Sacks’s most recent book, “Musicophilia,” a collection of case studies of people whose brains have unusual relationships to music, cases in which, as Dr. Sacks puts it, “music gets them going to an extraordinary degree.” A one-hour program can’t approach the depth and texture of Dr. Sacks’s book, but it does get at one question that nags the reader: What do these musical savants sound like? Or put another way: Are they really as amazing as they’re cracked up to be?

Music isn’t my area, so I’m not going to hazard an answer other than to say that Derek Paravicini, an autistic and blind 29-year-old who is described as an “astonishingly, almost bafflingly brilliant pianist,” and Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon who began playing classical piano and composing after being struck by lightning, would be awfully impressive at your next party.

“Musical Minds,” which with the season premiere of the newsmagazine “Nova ScienceNow” is inaugurating a Tuesday-night science block for PBS, looks at four cases. In addition to Mr. Paravicini and Mr. Cicoria, a third exceptional performer, Matt Giordano, uses drumming to help control his Tourette’s syndrome.

Anne Barker, however, sits at the opposite extreme: she suffers from amusia, an inability to hear or respond to music. The narrator, the BBC reporter Alan Yentob, mentions that Ms. Barker has the condition despite the fact that her parents own a store specializing in traditional Irish instruments. Viewers are free to draw their own conclusions about cause and effect.

(Those who follow Dr. Sacks’s dispatches in The New Yorker will be disappointed to hear that no mention is made of Clive Wearing, the British musician whose profound amnesia was the subject of a heartbreaking excerpt from “Musicophilia” in that magazine in 2007.)

Dr. Sacks’s trademarks as a writer are evocative storytelling and, just as important, a deep compassion for subjects coping with both the practical difficulties and the alienation caused by brain disorders. When those subjects are packed into 10-minute television profiles, an air of the carnival sideshow can set in, and “Musical Minds” is not immune to this, particularly in its depiction of Mr. Paravicini. His autism has caused speech patterns like those of a particularly loud talk-show host (an impression reinforced by his physical resemblance to the ubiquitous British presenter Graham Norton), and his hands, while striking the keys with impressive speed and precision, have a suspended look, as if attached to a marionette. Unfortunately, those are the impressions a viewer is likely to be left with.

The best moments in “Musical Minds” tend to involve the program’s fifth subject: Dr. Sacks, who not only is interviewed by Mr. Yentob but also enthusiastically submits to having his own brain tested. These scenes are diverting, if not revealing.

In one Dr. Sacks is scanned while listening to his professed favorite, Bach, and then to Beethoven. A Columbia University researcher shows him the scans: many more areas of his brain light up during the Bach, which proves that he indeed prefers the Baroque master to the Classical firebrand. But does it? As the program acknowledges, science still has little idea what those red and green flashes on the M.R.I. screen really mean.

Which, in the meantime, makes Dr. Sacks’s work documenting the strange adaptations of our brains all the more valuable and mysterious. “Musical Minds” may barely scratch the surface, but it’s still full of fascinating information. Like this: Mr. Paravicini and Mr. Giordano each first demonstrated his unusual musical abilities at 2 — one by playing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” on the piano, and one by playing “I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band)” on the drums. There’s a dissertation right there.

NOVA

Musical Minds

On most PBS stations on Tuesday night (check local listings).

Produced for PBS by the WGBH Science Unit. Paula S. Apsell, director of the WGBH Science Unit and senior executive producer of Nova; Janet Lee and Alan Yentob, executive producers for the BBC; Louise Lockwood, producer; Ryan Murdock, producer for Nova; narrated and presented by Mr. Yentob.

It Was Here, One Summer Day, I Sat Down

A Partial List of Great Poems Since 1900

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Super Adventure Club News

A new marketing campaign.

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from comments:

the best advice i've ever received in my 74 yrs was years ago from joseph campbell on pbs. at the end of his long series with bill moyers, two things have stuck with me ever since: all religions(and/or cultures) use metaphor in their myths and later they all make the mistake of turning their metaphors into facts. secondly, he concluded that what humans were doing through it all that has benefited us the most was NOT searching for the meaning of life but exploring and learning from THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING ALIVE. the former can (all my words, not campbell's) drives you crazy and causes you, maybe, to join other neurotics in a cult, the latter(the capitalized) has freed me to accept the randomness of the joy and pain of the world while trying to maximize the joy and minimize the pain. forget all that crap about "what's out there". leave it to the astronomers and physicists. i guess, like meyer baba, "don't worry, be happy" (it works!). and of course, like google," don't do evil"... NOBODY(but you) has the answer.

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Well, I'll second that..

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A great poem from my newest favorite poet, Li-Young Lee:

Visions And Interpretations

Because this graveyard is a hill,
I must climb up to see my dead,
stopping once midway to rest
beside this tree.

It was here, between the anticipation
of exhaustion, and exhaustion,
between vale and peak,
my father came down to me

and we climbed arm in arm to the top.
He cradled the bouquet I'd brought,
and 1, a good son, never mentioned his grave,
erect like a door behind him.

And it was here, one summer day, I sat down
to read an old book. When I looked up
from the noon-lit page, I saw a vision
of a world about to come, and a world about to go.

Truth is, I've not seen my father
since he died, and, no, the dead
do not walk arm in arm with me.

If I carry flowers to them, I do so without their help,
the blossoms not always bright, torch-like,
but often heavy as sodden newspaper.

Truth is, I came here with my son one day,
and we rested against this tree,
and I fell asleep, and dreamed

a dream which, upon my boy waking me, I told.
Neither of us understood.
Then we went up.

Even this is not accurate.
Let me begin again:

Between two griefs, a tree.
Between my hands, white chrysanthemums, yellow
chrysanthemums.

The old book I finished reading
I've since read again and again.

And what was far grows near,
and what is near grows more dear,

and all of my visions and interpretations
depend on what I see,

and between my eyes is always
the rain, the migrant rain.

Li-Young Lee

**

Made of Time and Water

Ars Poetica

To look at the river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river,
To know that we are lost like the river
And that faces dissolve like water.

To be aware that waking dreams it is not asleep
While it is another dream, and that the death
That our flesh goes in fear of is that death
Which comes every night and is called sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of the days of man and of his years,
To transmute the outrage of the years
Into a music, a murmur of voices, and a symbol,

To see in death sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold—such is poetry,
Which is immortal and poor. Poetry
returns like the dawn and the sunset.

At times in the evenings a face
Looks at us out of the depths of a mirror;
Art should be like that mirror
Which reveals to us our own face.

They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels,
Wept tears of love at the sight of his Ithaca,
Green and humble. Art is that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of marvels.

It is also like the river with no end
That flows and remains and is the mirror of one same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And is another, like the river with no end.

Translation by William S. Merwin

For The Money

Michael Jackson
Michael Remembered: A Bloggy Round-Up

A Musical Genius and An Abused Child

Witness It

I just glanced at the clock and realized it's 5pm and I've done almost nothing related to my job today -- I've been clicking through link after link, reading and watching all I can from the reports trickling out of Iran. I am so overwhelmed with emotion I can't find the words to properly describe it. My heart reels for these people -- at the same time, I am almost dumbfounded by their courage and bravery and ideals. It's an incredible thing to watch history unfold in real time. I feel confident that one day my children will see these photos and read these accounts in their history books, and I take some solace in the fact that history is on the side of these protesters.

But as the day winds down, I find that the emotion I feel most vividly is frustration.

I can't stop thinking about my visit to a concentration camp in Germany a few summers ago and the raw emotion I felt walking slowly down the hall in to the gas chambers. I have some German-Jewish heritage so the moment was especially poignant for me, but you didn't have to be a Jew to appreciate the significance of the surroundings. I remember asking myself over and over again how the world let something like this happen - how good people could stand by and watch as people were slaughtered. I know the comparison isn't fair -- and I know that it's oversimplifying the situation to say that good people are standing by doing nothing. Still, besides turning my twitter avatar green and donating money to tehranbureau.com (god, those sound even sillier writing them out) I don't know what I can do. I know the answer is nothing. It just doesn't seem like enough.

I understand the feeling. My own sense of helplessness is abated by blogging manically. It's all I know to do. But watching a boot come down on a human face in real time is ... well more than frustrating. But this is the fallen world we inhabit in which power always trumps freedom if it is ruthless enough in the short term. What we look for is the long term, the arc of history, and the rightness of the cause. Our job cannot be to end tyranny or evil, for that is impossible and the attempt can be counter-productive. But we can expose it, explain it, witness it and through the march of time chip way at it. I believe the Iranian people revealed who they are these past few weeks. And who they are is a source of great hope. I think of those cries to God through the night, to the heavens, through the darkness

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draw near
another one
do what you can

(Photo: A demonstrator holds a photo of dead icon Neda Agha Soltan during a protest of the Iranian election results in Union Square June 24, 2009 in New York City. By Mario Tama/Getty)

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[From Andrew Sullivan' "Daily Dish"]

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From Clearances 3

By Seamus Heaney

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives--
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

*

A teacher I once had said: We are not here to change the world, but to serve it with love.

This Dream You Are Having Matches Everyone's Dream, and the Result Is the World

from my flickr photostream

I’ve just been reading Bede Griffiths. He writes, commenting on the Bhagavad Gita:

“Each chapter of the Bhagavad Gita concerns a particular yoga. This first chapter is called “the yoga of Arjuna’s despair” and it is significant that the experience of despair is a yoga; despair is often the first step on the path of spiritual life.. It s very important to go through the experience of emptiness, of disillusion and despair. Many people do not awaken to the reality of God, and to the experience of transformation in their lives, until they reach the point of despair.”

This speaks to the our search less as accomplishment, and more as letting go of a certain kind of effort. My brother after a life-altering accident said that he’s grown closer and closer to God “Because it is completely impossible to make it through a day without His help.”

I can’t claim to really understand this, but I have witnessed it, and experienced it in fits and starts. God is not who and what we believe God to be. It’s always something else……

Again, from "River of Compassion"

So on the battlefield Arjuna sees that his enemies are his friends and relatives. there is Bhisma his grandfather's brother and Drona, who is his guru, his teacher, and Arjuna realizes that he is divided against himself. That is the human predicament. In the battle of life, we are divided against ourselves and the point is that there is really no solution to the problems of life on the human level. As long as Arjuna is simply confronting the battle by himself, there is no answer. It is only when Krishna, the Spirit, the Lord, begins to counsel him that an answer can be found. What is demanded of Arjuna, and what is so difficult, is that he has got to fight. He says, "I shall have to kill all these, my relatives and friends." This is the problem. When we are asked to give up the world and to fight against our instincts, passions, and desires, it looks as though there is nothing left and it seems as if one is in a desert.

This highlights one of the perennial problems of spiritual life. we give up Egypt, we give up the world and the pleasures of the senses, we give up appearances and go out into the desert. Our state then is that we have lost the world abut we do not seem to have gained anything. That is why Arjuna is in despair. He throws down his arms and refuses to fight because there does not seem to be anything to fight for. Even if he wins he will only have killed all his enemies who are also his friends.

What we all have to learn is that there is no answer on the human level to the problems of human life. As long as it is a question of the human soul, the human body, the human situation, there is no answer to be found and all we can do is throw down our arms and say, "I will not fight!" Only when the Spirit within begins to speak does the answer begin to be found.

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"Being a Person" by William Stafford

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.

A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.

Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone's dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn't be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.

How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.

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Descended from Dreamers

-

Li-Young Lee

-

And what did I learn, a child, on the Sabbath?

A father is bound to kill his favorite son,

and to his father's cherishing,

the beloved answers Yes.

-

The rest of the week, I hid from my father,

grateful I was not prized. But how deserted

he looked, with no son who pleased him.

-

And what else did I learn?

That light is born of dark to usurp its ancient rank.

And when a pharaoh dreams of ears of wheat

or grazing cows, it means

he's seen the shapes of the oncoming years.

-

The rest of my life I wondered: Are there dreams

that help us to understand the past? Or

-

is any looking back a waste of time,

the whole of it a too finely woven

net of innumerable conditions,

causes, effects, countereffects, impossible

to read? Like rain on the surface of a pond.

-

Where's Joseph when you need him?

Did Jacob, his father, understand

the dream of the ladder? Or did his enduring

its mystery make him richer?

-

. . .

-

Why are you crying? my father asked

in my dream, in which we faced each other,

knees touching, seated in a moving train.

-

He had recently died,

and I was wondering if my life would ever begin.

-

Looking out the window,

one of us witnessed what kept vanishing,

while the other watched what continually emerged.

-

from Behind My Eyes

-
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She Walks In Beauty

Image from my flicker photostream

She Walks in Beauty
by George Gordon Byron

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

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My aunt died on Tuesday p.m. A truly noble human being, the last of the "Elders" of my mother's generation.

The night she died, I had a dream of being in a procession of people moving towards a wooden-log-cabin-like 'lodge'. I knew some of the people and didn't know others. Some were on walkers and in wheelchairs, and I was trying to figure out what the assembly was for.

When I heard that my aunt had died, I knew that these were truly the 'elders' , come to honor her and to welcome her.

May light eternally shine on her.

*

Dust Settles Upon My Head and Upon My Metaphors

June 23, 2009

In a Death Seen Around the World, a Symbol of Iranian Protests

By NAZILA FATHI

TEHRAN — It was hot in the car, so the young woman and her singing instructor got out for a breath of fresh air on a quiet side street not far from the antigovernment protests they had ventured out to attend. A gunshot rang out, and the woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, fell to the ground. “It burned me,” she said before she died.

The bloody video of her death on Saturday, circulated in Iran and around the world, has made Ms. Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old who relatives said was not political, an instant symbol of the antigovernment movement.

Her death is stirring wide outrage in a society that is infused with the culture of martyrdom — although the word itself has become discredited because the government has pointed to the martyrs’ deaths of Iranian soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war to justify repressive measures.

Ms. Agha-Soltan’s fate resonates particularly with women, who have been at the vanguard of many of the protests throughout Iran.

“I am so worried that all the sacrifices that we made in the past week, the blood that was spilled, would be wasted,” said one woman who came to mourn Ms. Agha-Soltan on Monday outside Niloofar mosque here. “I cry every time I see Neda’s face on TV.”

Opposition Web sites and television channels, which Iranians view with satellite dishes, have repeatedly shown the video, in which blood can be seen gushing from Ms. Agha-Soltan’s body as she dies. By Monday evening, there already were 6,860 entries for her on the Persian-language Google Web site. Some Web sites suggest changing the name of Kargar Street, where she was killed, to Neda Street.

Mehdi Karroubi, an opposition candidate for president in this month’s election, called her a martyr on his Web site. “A young girl, who did not have a weapon in her soft hands, or a grenade in her pocket, became a victim of thugs who are supported by a horrifying intelligence apparatus.”

Only scraps of information are known about Ms. Agha-Soltan. Her friends and relatives were mostly afraid to speak, and the government broke up public attempts to mourn her. She studied philosophy and took underground singing lessons — women are barred from singing publicly in Iran. Her name means voice in Persian, and many are now calling her the voice of Iran.

Her fiancé, Caspian Makan, contributed to a Persian Wikipedia entry. He said she never supported any particular presidential candidate. “She wanted freedom, freedom for everybody,” the entry read.

Her singing instructor, Hamid Panahi, offered a glimpse of her last moments.

He said the two of them decided to head home after being caught in a clash with club-wielding forces in central Tehran. They stepped out of the car. “We heard one gunshot, and the bullet came and hit Neda right in the chest,” he said. The shot was fired from the rooftop of a private house across the street, perhaps by a sniper, he said. On a Facebook posting along with the video, an anonymous doctor said he tried to save her but failed because the bullet hit her heart.

“She was so full of life,” said a relative who spoke on condition of anonymity. “She sang pop music.”

The relative said the government had ordered the family to bury Ms. Agha-Soltan immediately and barred family members from holding a memorial service.

The paramilitary forces were quick to stop memorial services elsewhere, too. More than a dozen bearded men on motorcycles dispersed nearly 70 people gathered outside Niloofar mosque on Monday. Authorities ordered the mosques not to hold services for any victims of the demonstrations over the past few days.

“Go, get lost,” they shouted, as the regular police stood by.

But one police officer, watching the militia, said a prayer aloud with the crowd in her honor: “Peace be upon the prophet and her family.”

As Ms. Agha-Soltan’s family held a private ceremony on Monday, they turned reporters away and refused to speak. “They were not allowed to hang even a black banner,” the relative said.

Funerals have long served as a political rallying point in Iran, since it is customary to have a week of mourning and a large memorial service 40 days after a death. In the 1979 revolution, that cycle generated a constant supply of new protests and deaths.

But the narrative of death has also been important in the lore surrounding the existence of the Islamic republic.

The government portrayed itself in the role of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad killed by a far larger army during the seventh-century struggle within Islam, which gave birth to the Shiite sect that predominates in Iran.

Days for prophets and saints believed killed in the service of the faith dot the holiday calendar, taking up 22 days of the year.

So the very public adulation of Ms. Agha-Soltan could create a religious symbol for the opposition and sap support for the government among the faithful who believe Islam abhors killing innocent civilians.

One poem circulating on the Internet explicitly linked her death to other symbols of the protest movement:

Stay, Neda —

Look at this city

At the shaken foundations of palaces,

The height of Tehran’s maple trees,

They call us “dust,” and if so

Let us sully the air for the oppressor

Don’t go, Neda

She has become the public face of an unknown number of Iranians who have died in the protests. While state television has reported 10 deaths and state radio 19, it is widely believed the total is much higher.

A witness said the body of a 19-year-old man who was killed in Tehran on Sunday was given to the family only after it paid $5,000.

For many Iranians, though, the death of a young woman has special meaning.

“We know a lot of people have died, but it is so hard to see a woman, so young and innocent, die like this,” a 41-year-old who gave his name as Alireza said Monday.

Women were particular targets after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began to strictly enforce previously loosened restrictions. Thousands of women were arrested or intimidated because they did not adhere precisely to Islamic dress code on the streets.

Mir Hussein Moussavi, the leading opposition candidate, campaigned along with his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, and other prominent Iranian women rallied to his side as he promised to improve the status of women.

A woman called Hana posted a comment on Mr. Karroubi’s Web site: “I am alive but my sister was killed. She wanted the wind to blow into her hair; she wanted to be free; she wanted to hold her head high up and say: I am Iranian. My sister died because there is no life left; my sister died because there is no end to tyranny.”

Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from New York.

*
"If, by God's grace, I can learn one thing let that thing be love"

-- Abdur Rahman

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‘A man said to al-Junayd: ‘Brothers are scarce in these times. Where am I to find a brother in God?’ Al-Junayd made him repeat this thrice before saying: ‘If you want a brother to provide for you and to bear your burden, such – by my life – are few and far between. But if you want a brother in God whose burden you will carry and whose pain you will bear, then I have a whole troop I can introduce you to’. The man was silent’
(taken from Imam al-Ghazali’s Ihya Ulum al-Din)

**

‘O my God, our intoxicated eyes have blurred our vision.
Our burdens have been made heavy, forgive us.
You are hidden, and yet from East to West You have filled the world with Your radiance.
Your Light is more magnificent than sunrise or sunset,
and You are the inmost ground of consciousness,
revealing the secrets we hold.
You are an explosive force causing our damned up rivers to burst forth.
You whose essence is hidden while Your gifts are manifest,
You are like water and we are like millstones.
You are like wind and we are like dust.
The wind is hidden while the dust is plainly seen.
You are the invisible spring and we are Your lush garden.

You are the Spirit of life and we are like hand and foot.
Spirit causes the hand to close and open.
You are intelligence; we are Your voice.
Your intelligence causes this tongue to speak.
You are joy and we are laughter,
for we are the result of the blessing of Your joy.
All our movement is really a continual profession of faith,
bearing witness to Your eternal power,
just as the powerful turning of the millstone professes faith in the river’s existence.
Dust settles upon my head and upon my metaphors,
for You are beyond anything we can ever think or say.
And yet, this servant cannot stop trying to express Your beauty,
in every moment, let my soul be Your carpet’

(Masnavi V.3307-3319, trans. Shaykh Kabir Helminski)

from :Abdur Rahman's Corner

I Give You My Discontent

from my flickr photostream

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Help Me Now to Unclutter My Life

Celtic Daily Prayer

Lord, help me now to unclutter my life,
to organize myself in the direction of simplicity.
Lord, teach me to listen to my heart;
teach me to welcome change, instead of fearing it.
Lord, I give You these stirrings inside me,
I give you my discontent,
I give you my restlessness,
I give you my doubt,
I give you my despair,
I give you all the longings I hold inside.
Help me to listen to these signs of change, of growth;
to listen seriously and follow where they lead
through the breathtaking empty space of an open door.

author unknown

Add your thoughts at inward/outward

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Gitanjali # 37

I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power–that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity.

But I find that thy will knows no end in me. And when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.

-Tagore

*

What good is meditating on patience
If you will not tolerate insult?
What use are sacrifices
If you do not overcome attachment and revulsion?
What good is giving alms
If you do not root out selfishness?


~ The Life of Milarepa, trans. by Lobsang P. Lhalunga

*
When we start out on a spiritual path we often have ideals we think we're supposed to live up to. We feel we're supposed to be better than we are in some way. But with this practice you take yourself completely as you are. Then ironically, taking in pain - breathing it in for yourself and all others in the same boat as you are - heightens your awareness of exactly where you're stuck.

~ Pema Chodron

*

link

"Do not feel overwhelmed by the length of this journey. All you ever need do is focus on one thing, what you are doing. Stay on the path and put one foot in front of the other - that is all. There is joy in the struggle."

- Philip Toshio Sudo
Zen Guitar
zen dot studio

When We Emerge, With All Our Choosing Done .....

New Mexico from my flickr photostream

***

Consider this from Thomas Merton:

"There must be a time of day when the man who
makes plans forgets his plans,
and acts as if he had no plans at all.

There must be a time of day when the man who has
to speak falls very silent.
And his mind forms no more propositions,
and he asks himself:
Did they have a meaning?

There must be a time
When the man of prayer goes to pray
as if it were the first time in his life
he had ever prayed,
when the man of resolutions puts his
resolutions aside
as if they had all been broken,
and he learns a different wisdom:

distinguishing the sun from the moon,
the stars from the darkness,
the sea from the dry land,
and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.

*
"Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. Childlikeness has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring breeze. Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage. When a man reaches this stage of spiritual development, he is a Zen artist of life."

- D. T. Suzuki

*****
"There is tremendous power in unearthing, in recognizing distracted, scattered mind, the mind which would rather be anywhere but here, and spending some time there, with that mind. Rather than being an anonymous voice from the dark bossing you around, scattered mind is someone you can sit down and hang out with."

- Jusan Ed Brown

*
Wheresoever you turn, there is the face of God."

~ Quran, II.115

*
"In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice. We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we're faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we'll do, but who we'll be. Perhaps the sound of all those doors swinging
shut behind us each time we select this one or that one should trouble us, but it doesn't. Nor does the fact that the doors often are identical and even lead in some cases to the exact same place. Occasionally a door is locked, but no matter, since so many others remain available. The distinct possibility that choice itself may be an illusion is something we disregard, because we're curious to know what's behind that next door, the one we hope will lead us to the very heart of the mystery. Even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary we remain confident that when we emerge, with all our choosing done, we'll have found not just our true destination but also its meaning."

from Bridge of Sighs
by Richard Russo

*
"When Moses conversed with God, he asked, "Lord where shall I seek you?"

God answered, "Among the brokenhearted."

Moses continued, "But, Lord, no heart could be more despairing than mine."

And God replied, "Then I am where you are."

-Abu'l Fayd Al-Misri

*
The 'guinea-pigging' of vast swathes of the population has, up till now, solved two problems: the 'time' problem (namely, how to avoid addressing the underlying reasons for mental health problems), and how to create new markets amidst the flourishing of generic drug production, particularly outside of the US and Europe. Clearly the interiorisation of unhappiness is far more profitable than the outward realisation that perhaps misery has nothing to do with you personally and everything to do with the world in which you live.

- infinite thØught

Raised To Fear The Yes In Ourselves

from my flickr photostream

The news and images from Iran have been gripping and frightening. This is the world of the web. Revolution and protest going around the roadblocks erected by the official media representatives via citizen cell phones, computers and cameras. Women in blue jeans, head scarves and portable media. The brutal murders and assaults, the old women , marching in black, smiling. In one account, someone was describing being caught with a group of other students and riot police wading into the group with truncheons, and he said, "then the fear stopped, and we began to yell to each other that we were all in it together."

This movement has taken on a life of its' own. It's no longer about politics, or this or that candidate. It's people as a country saying "no confidence" to it's government, true democracy in action. What is it for? They may not even know. It becomes important to stand and be counted in order to go on living one's life.

As a mother of two 20-ish students, I can only say that many mothers will have their hearts broken from this. Prayers and bearing witness to the voices lives and courage of these kids [and adults] seems so little. We can only hope that there is the hand of the Divine somewhere in here. The You Tube videos of citizens chanting the name of God on the rooftops is pretty humbling, I must say.

From the flickr page of fhashemi:

"Human beings are members of a whole
In creation of one essence and soul

If one member is afflicted with pain
Other members uneasy will remain.

If you have no sympathy for human pain
The name of human you cannot retain."

--Saadi

**
September 1, 1939
W. H. Auden

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

**

"There are thresholds which thought alone, left to itself, can never permit us to cross. An experience is
required - an experience of poverty, of sickness."
- Gabriel Marcel
Les Pauvres de Yahvk

*
"We have been raised to fear the yes in ourselves."
- Audre Lorde

**
"Each chapter of the Bhagavad Gita concerns a particular yoga.  This first chapter is called "The yoga of
Arjuna's despair" and it is significant that the experience of despair is a yoga;  despair is often the first
step on the path of spiritual life.  It is very important to go through the experience of emptiness,
of disillusion and despair  Many people do not awaken to the reality of God,  and to the experience of
transformation in their lives,  until they reach the point of despair.

---Bede Griffiths
River of Compassion

*

The Lightening of This Cosmic Storm

Coverage and commentary of the Iran 'revolution'
Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic

The President's Statement

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said - "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

Permalink

Tick Tock, Motherfuckers
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Quote For The Day
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It's On Now

The Jpost also got an e-mail from Iran:

Girls are extremely active in all these rallies (a little less in night riots where patches of young men are more visible). They courageously charge anti-riot police, chant slogans in front of them, lead the crowd, etc., but they are equally beaten too. The police seem to have no limit in the use of force. They are disproportionately violent. They don't use fire weapons, but they don't go easy on you with their clubs. They literally beat up protesters to death if they don't get rescued by fellow protesters or somehow break away and run. The level of brutality is exceptional, but it is amazing to see how people stand up to them. I heard from many witnesses that thugs were brought by bus from smaller cities to assist police in the crackdown...

Permalink

**

Mousavi's Latest Statement: "I Followed Them"

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**

Poem For The Day

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**

This photographic slideshow, with many pictures I haven't yet seen, is well worth your time.

Permalink

*
Confirming The Basij Murder Of Neda
Permalink

*

Poem For The Day II

A day of ominous decision has now dawned on this free nation. Save us
then from our obsessions! Open our eyes, dissipate our confusions,
teach us to understand ourselves and our adversary.
Let us never forget that sins against the law of love
are punishable by loss of faith, and those without faith
stop at no crime to achieve their ends!

Help us to be masters of the weapons that threaten to master us.
Help us to use our science for peace and plenty, not for war and destruction.
Save us from the compulsion to follow our adversaries in all that we most hate,
confirming them in their hatred and suspicion of us.

Resolve our inner contradictions,
which now grow beyond belief and beyond bearing.
They are at once a torment and a blessing:
for if you had not left us the light of conscience,
we would not have to endure them.

Teach us to wait and trust.

Grant light, grant strength and patience to all who work for peace.
But grant us above all to see that our ways are not necessarily your ways,
that we cannot fully penetrate the mystery of your designs
and that the very storm of power now raging on this earth
reveals your hidden will and your inscrutable decision.

Grant us to see your face in the lightning of this cosmic storm

- Thomas Merton, Prayer For Peace.

Permalink

*
The Women
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*
The Most Staggering Footage Yet
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Suppressing Ideas Never Succeeds In Making them go Away

The President's Statement

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said - "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

Permalink

**

I am amazed at how many women -- mothers, daughters, students -- are out in these crowds. Sullivan at The Atlantic had video showing a young woman shot and killed. The courage of the
Iranian people is astonishing.

So, is the twittering, you-tubing and blogging of civil disobedience a game changer ? Will the pressure on the perpetrators of this violence be influenced or will they continue to slaughter children in front of cameras?

*
Prayerful , the only perspective I can cling to is similar to that voiced by David Ignatow:

I wish I understood the beauty
in leaves falling.

To whom
are we beautiful
as we go ?

"Please Pray For Us"

from Andrew Sullivan's "Daily Dish"

Live-Blogging Day 8

11.27 am. Shiraz erupting?

REPORT FROM SHIRAZ: Intense conflict in Alam Square.

Report from source: Mohammad Ghouchani, the editor-in-chief of National Trust newspaper, has been arrested.

5:30 In Khosh Street police is attacking people with batons and pepper spray trying to disperse ppl, shots heard

5:20 A lot of conflict happenning at Kosh St. now 5:26 shooting in Azadi ave. near Gharib!

11.24 am. Chemical warfare? It is not boiling water but something else:

Helicopters spraying water with agent in it onto crowds. Skin irritant, will make it feel as though water is scalding.

11.17 am. I have to say I found the boiling water from helicopters hard to believe. And yet more tweets repeat it:

**

Two reports coming from Tehran about helicopters pouring boiling water on protesters.

reports of some Iranians protesting with Qurans in their hand.

even at metro station at azadi ppl r beaten up!!!

I should reiterate that all tweets need to be taken provisionally. They are raw, unconfirmed mini-telegrams from the streets of Iran and elsewhere. But the use of the Koran in resisting oppression of this kind, now ocnfirmed all over the place, strikes me as a vital gesture. It puts the lie to the idea that Islam is not, at its core, a religion of peace, however hijacked by the fundamentalists and fascists. It is of a part with the color green and the cries into the night of Allah O Akbar. In this pitched battle, there is also a struggle for the soul of Islam. It is so so heartening to see decent people fighting back to reclaim their faith. Without these Muslims, the world will know no peace.

11.13 am. ppl r not allowed to look out the window if they do their windows r broken

11.11 am From Robert Mackie:

From Shiraz, My mom said the protesters were just walking in silence from Daneshjoo Square to Eram Square then the plain clothes men on motorcylces started going in the crowd and in the side walks and told the crowd to disperse.

When the people didn’t disperse they started shooting in the air. My mom said that then people dispersed and she doesn’t know if anyone was hit or not.

**

11.02 am. The Guardian:

An eyewitness in Enghelab square reports around 20,000 riot police, made up of Basiji militiamen and soldiers, and armed with rifles, tear gas and water cannons. The eyewitness saw dozens of people beaten by riot police in an attempt to frighten them into evacuating the square, with one young man being beaten to the ground by four policemen. The protesters were not wearing the green insignia that signifies support for Mousavi, and were not making victory signs or chanting.The eyewitness reports riot police attacking people on passing motorbikes and, on occasion, innocent passersby who have no way of escaping the heavy police presence. Nonetheless, there are thousands of Mousavi supporters, marching peacefully near the square, where rthey have been subjected to these brutal reprisals from the police. Across Tehran, there is widespread fear and panic, with many desperate to know what is going on in Enghelab square, but unable to find out due to reporting restrictions. Now the question seems to be: what will Mousavi do next?

*

10.53 am. Al Giordano:

What seems to be the government strategy is to have set a wide perimeter of various blocks in each direction around Enghalab Square where demonstrators were to begin their march to Freedom Square. There are also multiple Twitter reports of university students being intercepted and beaten if they leave the campus toward the demonstration route.

If this is what is happening, it is intended to prevent a critical mass of demonstrators from forming all in one place. Together with the house arrest of reporters and ban on images, the police strategy is a media strategy: to avoid the photograph or video that shows the magnitude of the protest: footage of scattershot crowds trying to get through - or running from the shots of - the police blockades simply do not have the emotional weight of images of a unified march.

10.50 am. things are horrible, please pray for us

my young sister has taken to the streets as well she hasn't returned

another friend's arm has broken

one of my friends got smacked so hard she has lost hearing in one ear

basij is even attacking young girls and women

trucks blasting water at the people

some forces are refusing to attack the people, but basij and special forces are attacking people

Permalink

**
from 3 Quarks Daily:

The bird may die
Forough Farokhzad

I feel sad,

I feel blue.

I go outside and rub my fingers

on the sleek shell of the night.

“I see that lights of contact are blocked,

All lights of contact are blocked.”

“Nobody will introduce me to the sun,

Nobody will take me to the gathering of doves.”

Keep the flight in mind,

The bird may die.

Translation: Maryam Dilmaghani

Posted by Jim Culleny | Permalink

*
Ya Hussain! Iran stands on the brink of a bloodbath

He Would Make A Man To Walk the Earth

Mike Sinclair

via Heading East

**

Art Review | 'Pen and Parchment'

Those Medieval Monks Could Draw
By ROBERTA SMITH

*
Well: Is Your Ab Workout Hurting Your Back?

*

 
"Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession," by Anne Rice. 
Knopf.  2008.

 
Rice gave faithful fans fits when she concluded her lengthy vampire
saga with series hero Lestat searching for sainthood and followed
up with carefully orthodox biographical novels about Jesus. Now she
eloquently explains the life change that shaped those books: her
return to Catholicism. First, however, she limns the early-life
faith she hoped to resume and the long exile from it that began, so
typically, in college and continued until late middle age. She
expansively recalls the cohesion and beauty that regular mass
attendance, Catholic schooling, and community observance of the
panoply of Christian festivals bestowed on her New Orleans
childhood and adolescence. Much more tersely but no less
consequentially, she asserts the satisfaction of her thoroughly
faithful 41-year marriage to the poet Stan Rice (1942-2002). About
her long period of unbelief, she is even briefer, though she
retrospectively interprets her vampires and witches as sad
unbelievers still desperately striving for transcendence and grace,
as she was. Coming home to New Orleans in 1989 preceded coming home
to the church in 1996, and full realization of revived faith came
with the decision to write for God. As plainly written as a Quaker
spiritual journal, Rice's confession of faith will impress many who
wouldn't think of reading vampire romances--and possibly many who
read little else. 
--Ray Olson, Amazon. com review

*

exegesis
The False Science

by Gordon Haber

Testing the limits of tolerance on a psychic’s new book.

*

They Ask: Is God, Too, Lonely?
Carl Sandburg

When God scooped up a handful of dust,
And spit on it, and molded the shape of man,
And blew breath into it and told it to walk—
That was a great day.

And did God do this because he was lonely?
Did God say to Himself he must have company
And therefore he would make a man to walk the earth
And set apart churches for speech and song with God?

These are questions.
They are scrawled in old caves.
They are painted in tall cathedrals.
There are men and women so lonely they believe
God, too, is lonely.


from Harvest Poems 1910-1960; Harvest Books 1960

*

  
What Makes a Great Bartender?
by Derek Brown


*

I Heard the Voice of the World Speak Out

The Opening of Eyes

That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew then, as I had before,
life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far-off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.

It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

-David Whyte
from "Crossing the Unknown Sea"

*
" What is meant by Rilke's "You must change your life" is evidently something more subtle. I don't understand it at all myself, so I can only speculate. Conrad evidently made use of the information the shadow gave him by ceasing to be a ship's captain on the Congo, and so a low-level exploiter of Africa. Rilke, when he realized what his work was telling him, interrupted his writing of poetry, and spent months watching animals in the zoo, and blind men on the streets, and years alone. He began to ask less from the world, not more. The Taoists would probably say that changing your way of life means giving up having an effect upon the world. It involves "wu-wei," not playing any role. Wu-wei is also translated as doing nothing. Wang Wei said once:

In the old days the serious man was not an important person.
He thought making decisions was too complicated for him.
He took whatever small job came along.
Essentially, he did nothing, like these walnut trees.

His friend P'ei Ti answered this way:

I soon found doing nothing was a great joy to me.
You see, here I am, keeping my ancient promise !
Let's spend today just strolling around theses walnut trees.
The two of us will nourish the ecstasies Chuang Tzu loved.

A man has an effect on "the world" mainly through institutions. So we could say that in the second half of life a man should sever his link with institutions. I think the problem is more complicated for women, but I don't understand it. Conceivably for women the change might involved accepting more responsibility for affecting the world.

**
If the shadow's gifts are not acted upon, it evidently retreats and returns to the earth. It gives the writer or person ten or fifteen years to change his life, in response to the amazing visions the shadow has brought him -- that change may involve only deepening of the interior marriage of male and femanle within the man or woman -- but if that does not happen, the shadow goes back down, abandoning him, and the last state of that man is evidently worse than the first. Rilke talks of the shadow retreating in this poem:

Already the ripening barberries are red,
and the asters hardly breathe in their beds.
The man who is not rich now as summer goes
will wait and wait and never be himself.

The man who cannot quietly close his eyes
certain that there is vision after vision
inside, simply waiting until nighttime
to rise all around him in the darkness --
he is an old man, it's all over for him.

Nothing else will come; no more days will open;
and everything that does happen will cheat him --
even you, my God. And you are like a stone
that draws him daily deeper into the depths. "

-- Robert Bly
from "A Little Book on the Human Shadow"

*

Escape

photo from my flickr files [photo by my grandfather]

“To know the wretchedness of who we are,” he says. “Yet the fact that we know it, is itself a noble thing, because that kind of knowledge means we can know a whole lot of other things.”

I think of a passage in West’s 2004 Democracy Matters. In a chapter that ranges from the Stoic philosopher Zeno to Emmett Till’s mother standing over her murdered son’s coffin, West quotes Ralph Ellison writing on the blues. I’d copied it into my notebook on the train to Princeton. “‘The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness,’” I read aloud, “’to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.’”

*

West is a conservative, in the truest, oldest sense. He’s inspired by Giambattista Vico, an 18th century Italian philosopher who in his New Science—his attempt to construct a theory of almost everything—pointed to the common roots of “human” and the Latin humando, which means “burying.” To be a scholar of the humanities—to be human—is to begin with the dead, to see that our futures are linked to our pasts, to acknowledge, deep in our bones, the truth of our own dying selves, “from womb to tomb,” West says.

from Cornell West

The Supreme Love and Revolutionary Funk of Dr. Cornel West, Philosopher of the Blues

by Jeff Sharlet

*

To the Editor:

A modest proposal to all our representatives in Congress: (1) Withdraw from your present “socialized” medical coverage and apply for a private insurance plan of your choice, or (2) Allow the rest of us Americans to have the same benefits you enjoy — taxpayer-financed public health care.

Vic Ulmer
Saratoga, Calif., June 15, 2009

*

Harvest Day

Lord: it is time. The summer has been huge.
Lay your shadows across the sun dials,
in the fields let the winds run loose.

Command the last fruit to ripen;
give it two more Southern days,
force it to completion and chase
its last sweetness into the heavy wine

He who still has no house shall never build.
He who is alone shall be given short shrift,
shall read and write long letters, shift
and restlessly pace the lanes that skirt the field
watching as the leaves drift.

~~~~~~

Rilke's Herbsttag
from A Rare Rare Find

*
Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world pierced by a ray of sunlight, and suddenly it is evening.
Salvatore Quasimodo

To Listen and To Care

Duehrer : Knight

Great coverage of the Twittering of the Iran election protests at the Daily Dish.

*

Leading for the Common Good Elizabeth O'Connor The difficulty confronting the churches in the organization of a small group movement is the lack of leadership for such groups. Most of us lack the confidence required to assume this kind of responsibility. We have discovered over the years that even the people who know how to administer churches, banks, corporations and hospitals have no idea how to nurture a small group so that its members deepen their lives in Christ---learn self-knowledge, how to listen and to care---the deep nurture of the spiritual life so essential for the recovery of vision and passion. The lack of servant leaders is being experienced in the whole of society. One looks in vain today for those who are using their strengths and gifts and riches on behalf of the common good. In all of our institutions is a yearning for the presence of the fearless ones in whose company we will be able to put aside our own fears and begin to hope and exercise imagination. Source: Servant Leaders, Servant Structures Add your thoughts at inward/outward *

Not yet up on the web...
July HARPERS
"Barack Hoover Obama" by Kevin Baker

"Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be brought about. the trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disaster. The question is not what can be done but what must be done."

*
"The story of the real Herbert Hoover reads like something out of an Indiana Jones script, with touches of Dickens and the memoirs of Albert Schweitzer. Orphaned and penniless by the age of nine, Hoover was raised by an exploitative uncle who considered him more chattel than son. He had no illusions about the America he grew up in, writing years later, "As gentle as are the memories of the times, I am not recommending a return to the good old days. Sadness was greater, and death came sooner.

Removed from public school at fourteen to work as his uncle's office boy, Hoover nonetheless learned enough at night school to make the very first class at the newly opened Stanford University, where he studied geology and engineering. He paid his own way by working as a waiter, a typist, and a handyman, and eventually running a laundry service, a baggage service, and a newspaper route. (Unsurprisingly, his favorite book was David Copperfield.) After graduation, he ran mining camps and scouted new strikes around the globe. It was an adventurous life; on one occasion he made a small fortune by following an ancient Chinese map and tiger tracks into a moribund silver mine in Burma. By the time he was forty, Hoover was worth $84 million in today's dollars, and he retired from business to take up public life. "The ideal of service,' he would later write, was no burden on the striving entrepreneur but a "great spiritual force poured out by our people as never before in the history of the world."

*
Why was Herbert Hoover so reluctant to make the radical changes that were so clearly needed? I could not have been a question of competence or compassion for this lifelong Quaker, who had rushed sustenance to starving people around the world regardless of their nationalities or beliefs. Ultimately, Hoover could not break with the prevailing beliefs of his day. The essence of the Progressive Era in which he had come of age -- the very essence of his own public image -- was that government was a science. .....

*
Progressivism aspired to be something of a political science itself, untrammeled by ideological or partisan influence: there was a right way and a wrong way to do things, and all unselfish and uncorrupted individuals could be counted on to do the right thing, once they were shown what that was.

*
Farsighted as he was compared with almost everyone else in public life, believing as much as he did in activist government, he still could not convince himself to take the next step and accept that the basic economic tenents he had believed in all his life were discredited; that something wholly new was required.

Such a transformation would have required a mental suppleness that was simply not in the makeup of this fabulously successful scientist and self-made businessman. And it was this inability to radically alter his thinking that, ultimately, distinguished Hoover from Franklin Roosevelt. FDR was by no means the rigorous thinker that Hoover was, and many observers then and since have accused him of having no fixed principles whatsoever. And yet it was Roosevelt, the Great Improviser, who was able to patch and borrow and fudge his way to solutions not only to the Depression but also to sustained prosperity and democracy.

**
Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attemptivng to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past -- without accepting the inevitable conflict. Like Hoover, he is bound to fail.

President Obama, to be fair, seems to be even more alone than Hoover was in facing the emergency at hand. The most appalling aspect of the present crisis has been the utter fecklessness of the American elite in failing to confront it. From both the private and public sectors, across the entire political spectrum, the lack of both will and new ideas has been stunning.

*
More frustrating has been the torpor among Obama's fellow Democrats...

*
We have seen a parade of aged satraps from vast, windy places stepping forward to tell us what is off the table.

*
These are men with tiny constituencies who sat for decades in the Senate without doing or saying anything of note, who acquiesced shamelessly to the worst abuses of the Bush Administration and who come forward now to chide the president for not concentrating enough on reducing the budget deficit, or for "trying to do too much," as if he were as old and as indolent as they are. "

*******

Buy the magazine , read the entire article. Quite thought provoking, if not a big cheerer-upper......
The observations made about the need to change one's thinking and improvise is an interesting way to think about servant leadership. What does the situation or the institution or the individual require right now ? "How to listen and to care" indeed ! It's so hard to get out from the under the weight of the 'conventional wisdom' about what is going on. Those with the self-knowledge and humility are not usually the ones with the ambition and drive to rise in politics.

Be Prepared To Live With The Fear Of Failure All Your Life

Jacques-Jean Tiziou

Rainpan 43’s production of “Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines,” at Here.

Arts Groups Seek Safety in Numbers

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

“PEOPLE visit New York to come to Broadway, but people are inspired to move to New York and live here because of organizations like ours,” said Kristin Marting, the artistic director of the Here Arts Center in the South Village, which has produced innovative new theatrical work since it was founded in 1993.

Ms. Marting is not just blowing her own horn. She’s actually speaking of 11 diverse downtown arts organizations that have come together to forge a collective and active response to the grim economic climate. Calling themselves the Lower Manhattan Arts Leaders, they meet once a week to plan strategy and exchange ideas about helping government policy makers and grant-making foundations become aware of the vital ways in which small arts groups feed the life of a neighborhood.

Support for the arts, in their view, is not simply a matter of cultural philanthropy, it’s also a smart and necessary way to sustain a vibrant urban environment, to keep any city from becoming a patchwork of chain stores, steroidal gyms and name-brand coffee shops. It’s forward-thinking city planning.

“I think we need to pay more attention to the artistic and cultural work that goes on in every neighborhood in this city,” Ms. Marting said. “We are part of what makes New York unique. It’s amazing the mixture of experiences you can have in a night. We are in danger of losing a lot of the fabric of our neighborhoods as they become more expensive, and arts organizations are on the front line.”

It’s a dangerous place to be right now because as everyone involved in the arts has become painfully aware, the steep economic slide of the past months has radically altered the climate. Grant-giving foundations have watched their endowments plummet in tandem with the stock market and have tightened the purse strings accordingly. Corporate giving has become scarcer still, with some companies even shying away from taking the usual generous credit for money already given rather than be seen spending on philanthropy as they slash costs and set employees adrift.

You might expect that the sudden scarcity of arts dollars would bring out a ruthless streak in the administrators charged with keeping their organizations afloat in rough economic waters. It would be only natural for companies to fight hard and fend for themselves as the never exactly enormous pie of arts money shrinks to the size of a two-bite tart. And yet the members of the Lower Manhattan Arts Leaders reacted in just the opposite way, banding together to create a collective front to fight the tough times.

Nello McDaniel, who runs the consulting group Arts Action Research, said: “It makes a tremendous amount of sense and also says a lot about the strength of these organizations.” Mr. McDaniel, who has attended some of the new group’s meetings, added, “Not so long ago the mind-set was a sort of castle-island. If you were a theater or dance organization, you built a moat to protect your turf, and the thought of sharing or reaching out was antithetical.”

Kevin Cunningham, the executive artistic director of 3-Legged Dog/3LD Art & Technology Center, which presents theatrical and multimedia works, was among the first to sense the seriousness of the impact as the economy began to sour last summer. Mr. Cunningham had weathered catastrophe before; 3-Legged Dog was the only arts producing organization to have its headquarters destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

“We began to see the same patterns that we saw in 2001 to 2003 in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks,” he said. “There was a similar sharp cessation of foundation giving, along with deep cuts in giving by individuals and government funding.”

But Mr. Cunningham also foresaw a lack of unified effort to fight the impact of the impending downturn. In contrast to the post-9/11 response, “there didn’t seem to be any kind of plan or interest in a community intervention to help these arts groups survive,” he said. “There was not the kind of pulling together of the community on behalf of itself, and no concerted recovery effort coming from the funding community.”

Instead of getting sharp elbowed, however, Mr. Cunningham recruited neighborhood allies to present a united front as they began the hard work of digging up new resources and securing gifts already promised. In addition to 3LD and Here, Lower Manhattan Arts Leaders includes the theater companies Soho Rep, the Flea Theater, Dixon Place, Access Theater and Blue Coyote Theater Group; the dance companies Dance New Amsterdam and Battery Dance Company; the independent media arts center DCTV; and the Children’s Museum of the Arts.

Many had already worked together, but the sense of embattlement inspired a new sense of solidarity. Like most not-for-profit arts organizations, these generally earn from ticket sales less than half the money they need to function. A sudden, steep decline in corporate, government and individual giving could be crippling, and many were already feeling the pinch.

The idea of safety in numbers has more than one dimension as it applies here. One of the first orders of business was translating into actual statistics the powerful influence these companies collectively have on the economic health of the neighborhood. Although individually they are mostly small fry when it comes to the arts in the city — with annual budgets from just $32,000 to $3 million — the companies together create some 1,500 full- or part-time jobs. They serve an audience of 275,000 annually and have an aggregate budget of $15 million.

“We wanted to make clear,” Ms. Marting said, “the size of our collective cultural and economic impact on the neighborhood, so that when people think about cutting funding for the arts they think about what they’re losing on a deeper level.”

A theater company, dance company or museum draws visitors from throughout the city. The rap on Lincoln Center has been that it closes itself off from the urban landscape around it. The smaller outfits represented by Lower Manhattan Arts Leaders, peppered all over downtown, sit cheek by jowl with residential and retail neighbors.

Despite the importance of the arts as an economic engine — nationwide they represent 4.3 percent of American business and employ 5.7 million people — the big-ticket stimulus package didn’t give much support to the arts. Initially an amendment in the Senate version specifically prohibited the use of the funds for a “casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center and highway beautification project.” That language, fortunately, was changed. (Swimming pools are still out of luck, I’m afraid.) But the $50 million added to the budget for the National Endowment the Arts is still a paltry sum given the size of the stimulus. Arts support continues to be an almost impossible sell in Washington.

Paul Nagle, an arts advocacy expert who is director of communications and cultural policy for Councilman member Alan J. Gerson of Manhattan, has been advising the new organization and sitting in on policy meetings. He has been impressed with their innovative approach to making a case for culture as a vital organ in the health of a city.

“It’s a really different way of presenting the argument for the arts,” he said. “Because you have such a small geographic area you get a much better microeconomic picture of the impact that arts organizations have on their neighborhoods.

“Policy makers have been happy to hear this,” he added. “They don’t really know how integral the arts are to urban economies, all the different ways they contribute.”

Initial reactions to the organization’s efforts has been positive, although with foundations often working from multiyear plans on different schedules, there are no major victories to declare yet. Meetings with staff from Senator Charles E. Schumer’s office have been positive, with the attendees responding well to “the concept that culture should be eligible to access noncultural funding streams when it can help to achieve the objectives of those streams,” as Mr. Nagle put it.

But the objectives of the new organization, which hopes to become a model for similar collectives in other parts of the city, do not end with prying open access to available grant money. Ms. Marting said the meetings also involve discussions of new fund-raising and marketing models, potential exchanges of resources and other initiatives. This fall the groups will inaugurate Fall Downtown, a festival that will include events at most if not all of the member organizations. A smaller number of the organizations is also looking at the possibility of creating a debt-restructuring subgroup, creating one big debt pool out of their obligations to secure a lower interest rate and save everyone money.

Mr. Cunningham admitted that he was prepared for some rough sailing when the group first got together. “But I was pleasantly surprised,” he said. “My experience is that these ad hoc organizations can be real cat-herding exercises. This has turned out to be one of the most satisfying and easy collaborations that we’ve been involved in. These are tested nonprofit managers who are also artists. They have had to be efficient to survive, so we don’t get into a lot of long-winded discussions.”

And he hopes that the encouraging sense of their collective prowess as an economic engine in the neighborhood will be communicated to the policy makers and foundations, he said. “If this is just 11 small groups, imagine how significant the impact of all the similar companies in the city and the country is,” he added. “We are having a more direct effect on job creation than most studies show.”

The urgent importance of getting that message across cannot be overstated, Mr. Cunningham said. Reflecting on the nightmare events that inspired him to circle the artistic wagons, he recalls thinking that “if something didn’t change quick,” half the city’s 1,400 nonprofits “could be dead within 18 to 24 months.” He added: “Many are already operating at minimum capacity. They’ve already cut all they could.”

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"The most political decision you make is where you direct people's eyes. In other words, what you show people, day in and day out, is political. . . . And the most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being is to show her, every day, that there can be no change."

- Wim Wenders

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Work cures everything.

-Matisse

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It is not skill, knowledge, intellect,
good luck or bad, but choosing
to feel the strange notes
of our wildness,
for there is not nothingness
despite the easy magic
of despair.

- Terrance Keenan
St. Nadie in Winter

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From the book, Poetry as Insurgent Art:

“Poetry deconstructs power. Absolute poetry deconstructs absolutely.”

“The poet is the master ontologist, constantly questioning existence and reinventing it.”

“A poem is a shadow of a plane fleeing over the ground like a cross escaping a church.”

“Don’t slip on the banana peel of nihilism, even while listening to the roar of Nothingness.”

“Secretly liberate any being you see in a cage.”

“And if you have two loaves of bread, do as the Greeks did – sell one and with the coin of the realm buy sunflowers.”

“A sunflower maddened with light sheds the seeds of poems.”

***

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"Do not quit. You see, the most constant state of an artist is uncertainty. You must face confusion, self-questioning, dilemma. Only amateurs are confident . . . be prepared to live with the fear of failure all your life."

- William Ormond Mitchell

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Bones In the Corner of the Cage

"Then I asked: Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? He replied: All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything."

-William Blake
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

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"Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred."
- C.S. Lewis
(Mere Christianity)

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“Also, I’ve always been fascinated by families. In families you see how sloppy, in terms of boundaries, and intimate they are in the most beautiful and troubling ways.”

Tony Kuchner

Cosmos of Kushner, Spinning Forward

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"If you call one thing vile and another precious, if you praise success and blame failure, you will fill the world with thieves, soldiers, and businessmen. I have praised the saints and I have told at what cost they strove to surpass lesser men. What madness have I not preached in sermons !"

--Thomas Merton
Confessions of a Guilty Bystander

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"One morning sitting zazen and waiting my turn for sanzen, I saw Mind, not as obscure or deep and hidden, but as superficial and immediately available. I sat there breathing and before long I was thinking about how to get our new video camera working. then I moved on to the day's schedule. I caught myself and wondered how much of a hinrance these thoughts were. The pulling power of my thinking was low and an image arose with the phrase "bones in the corner of the cage." Yep, just old meatless bones I'm gnawing on. And then I thought, well what am I then, the cage? I experienced myself as that room with the cement walls and metal bars, the floor with the bones on it, and some water ina trough by the edge. Hm. The cage? Is that it? I sat and watched and then from within I heard breathing and sensed movement and saw a lion's tail sweep around before me in a circular path."

"Thank you and Ok! An American Zen Failure In Japan"
--David Chadwick

"The Catch-22 of Zen." - Taigen Dan Leighton

Your Parents, Grandparents ....

"Your parents,

Grandparents ....

All constituted in Yourself.

Love Yourself,

Revere Yourself.


-- a Zen Harvest

Photo from Flickr ancestors

Thinking It Through

Radio Tower Berlin
László Moholy-Nagy
1928

László Moholy-Nagy
ca.1895-1946

The Moholy-Nagy Foundation

"The man who bumped up against the invisible."

saint max brod
Limited Inc

(Dearest Max, my last request: everything that can be found in my posthumous papers (thus in boxes, cupboards, desks, at home and in the offie, or wherever else they may be that you come upon them) of diaries, manuscripts, letters, my own and those written to me, sketches and so on, should be burned unread and without remnant, even all the written or drawn things that you or others have, that you might have asked for in my name. If there are letters that people will not turn over to you, at least they should promise to burn them themselves.”)
- Kafka, letter

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"I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after-image of the inner eye."
- Theodore Roethke, "The Dying Man, Part 4, The Exalting"

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The Consolations of Pessimism
Alain de Botton

It's time to recognize how odd and counterproductive is the optimism on which we have grown up.

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- wood s lot

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"True listening, total concentration on the other, is always a manifestation of love. An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one's own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as afar as possible the speaker's world from the inside, stepping inside his or her shoes. This unification of speaker and listener is actually an extension and enlargement of ourself, and new knowledge is always gained from this. Moreover, since true listening involves bracketing, a setting aside of the self, it also temporarily involves a total acceptance of the other. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will feel less and less vulnerable and more and more inclined to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. As this happens, speaker and listener begin to appreciate ach other more and more, and the duet dance of love is again begun. The energy required for the discipline of bracketing and the focusing of total attention is so great that it can be accomplished only by love, by the will to extend oneself for mututal growth.

--M. Scott Peck

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Daily Dish:

How A Bad Dancer Becomes Many Bad Dancers

This video is great, though the cameraman could use a tripod. It reminds Jonah Lehrer of a study:

In this study, Milgram had "confederates" stop on a busy city street and look upwards at the sky. He demonstrated that when one person was looking up, 40 percent of passerby also looked up, just in case something interesting was happening. (There was nothing to look at, just sky and buildings.) When two people were looking up, 60 of passerby looked up. When there were three people, the percentage jumped to 65 percent, and when there were four people nearly 80 of strangers stopped and stared upwards.

Seth Godin remarks:

My favorite part happens just before the first minute mark. That's when guy #3 joins the group. Before him, it was just a crazy dancing guy and then maybe one other crazy guy. But it's guy #3 who made it a movement.

Permalink

Preferring Freedom to Security

The Joy of Less

By Pico Iyer

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.

In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.

I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).

When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.

Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.

[Editor's note: an earlier version of this post included an inaccurate reference to the constitution of Japan. It has since been removed.]

Pico Iyer’s most recent book, “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” is just out in paperback.

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Use It Or Lose It

Eric Clapton Finds God

by Mystic Wizard

I'm just finishing Eric Clapton's autobiography. It was rather unusual for me to get caught up in it since I haven't really followed pop music for quite some time (although I do enjoy youtube videos of certain performers from my youth). But he was a childhood hero of mine and I was curious....

The stories of "Clapton is God" being written as graffiti all over London, even before he was in the band "Cream", are well-known. But the more (literally) sobering story of his finding the other God, is really quite compelling.

The amount of drug and alcohol abuse in his life was truly unbelievable. He writes about being drunk 24 hours a day, in addition to doing copious amounts of coke, heroin, etc (often at the same time) nonstop, for about 3 decades. He once played an entire concert in a stadium lying on the floor next to the microphone (and no one complained. He said the audience was probably as drunk as he).

Clapton even attempted suicide at least once. The only reason he gives for not trying on a number of other occasions was simply because he wouldn't be able to drink if he were dead! Now THAT's addiction...

Anyway, the book (not surprisingly) turns out to be quite "spiritual", because towards the end of his 2nd rehab stay, when he is about to leave knowing he is still fully addicted, and that his life is a complete mess, the miraculous occurs:

"I was absolutely terrified, in complete despair. At that moment, almost of their own accord, my legs gave way, and I fell to my knees. In the privacy of my room I begged for help. I had no notion of who I was taking to, I just knew I had come to the end of my tether, I had nothing left to fight with. Then I remembered what I had heard about surrender, something I thought I could never do, my pride just wouldn't allow it, but I knew that on my own I just wasn't going to make it, so I asked for help, getting down on my knees, I surrendered...

Within a few days I realized something had happened to me. An atheist would probably say that it was just a change in attitude, and to a certain extent that's true, but there was much more to it than that. I had found a place to turn to, a place that I always knew was there, but that I never wanted, or needed, to believe in.

From that day until this (over 20 years), I have never failed to pray in the morning, on my knees, asking for help, and at night, to express my gratitude for my life, and, most of all, for my sobriety...

In all this time since I've been sober, I have never once seriously thought of taking a drink or a drug."

It really is an extraordinary book. Eric is amazingly candid and very hard on himself, while being extremely self-aware (due at least in part to decades of therapy), and with an astounding memory for almost everything that's ever happened to him.

He's one smart, talented, survivor. And I'm sure now is an inspiration to millions of others who have struggled with their own various demons...

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If I wanted to pull your shit out of you I would have gone to dental school or studied proctology
Freud as elevator conversation..........

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whiskey river

link

"The states of mind or feelings that art can excite have been helpfully distinguished in Sanskrit aesthetics, where they are called rasas, from a word meaning 'juice' or 'essence'. A fully achieved work of art should flow with all nine of them: their names might be transposed into English as wonder, joy, sexual pleasure, pity, anguish, anger, terror, disgust and laughter."
- Marina Warner
Monsters of Our Own Making

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Poems from Lust ('Desire', Söderströms, 2008)
Claes Andersson
translated by David McDuff and David Hackston

Use it or lose it
Take the muscles in your arms and legs
Take the laughter muscles and the crying muscles
Take the stomach muscles
One day they are gone
Or take thoughts
If you stop thinking you will soon have none left
Or teeth if you stop chewing
The same is true of the emotions
If you stop feeling they will waste away and wither
Until one day they are gone
First you are unfeeling then cold
then insensible
One day you stand there shouting: Heil who?
Friendship too wastes away if you do not
use it
Not to speak of hatred bitterness
jealousy and envy
You will end up being very lonely
What will you do then without your old
favourites?
With desire and sex it is the same
Unused they will shrink and wither away
If you don’t use your love
it will die
It becomes real in action which is its ex libris in our hearts
Unemployed it disappears forever
What we don’t use uses us up, we early used-up ones


...(more)

To The Prisoner Inside Me

Alive in the World

I want to live in the world, not inside my head
I want to live in the world, I want to stand and be counted
With the hopeful and the willing
With the open and the strong
With the voices in the darkness
Fashioning daylight out of song
And the millions of lovers
Alive in the world

I want to live in the world, not behind some wall
I want to live in the world, where I will hear if another voice should call
To the prisoner inside me
To the captive of my doubt
Who among his fantasies harbors the dream of breaking out
And taking his chances
Alive in the world

To open my eyes and wake up alive in the world
To open my eyes and fully arrive in the world

With its beauty and its cruelty
With its heartbreak and its joy
With it constantly giving birth to life and to forces that destroy
And the infinite power of change
Alive in the world

To open my eyes and wake up alive in the world
To open my eyes and fully arrive in the world
To open my eyes and wake up alive in the world
To open my eyes and fully arrive in the world

Jackson Browne

"Hey Dad! What's up?" "Rivers of blood!"

What Did You Do in the War, Dad?

By DOUGLAS WOLK

“YOU’LL NEVER KNOW”

Book 1: “A Good and Decent Man.”

Written and illustrated by C. Tyler

Unpaged. Fantagraphics Books. $24.99

What happened to Carol Tyler’s father as a staff sergeant in the Army during World War II wasn’t unusual. As she puts it in this remarkable memoir, “ ‘You’ll Never Know,’ ” he’s “a member of a huge, exclusive community”: 16 million American soldiers went off to war, and the ones who came back got on with their lives, or tried to. For nearly 60 years, he didn’t talk about the war, even with his family. A proud, resourceful blue-collar craftsman, he could be taciturn and irritable; the relics of his military service in his garage fell into “the category of ‘leave it the hell alone’ or ‘it’s none of your goddamn business.’ ” As Tyler spells out on one page, rebus-style, “not all scars are visible.”

Then, one day in 2002, he called his daughter and opened up. (Tyler’s rendition of the phone call that set this book in motion: “Hey, Dad! What’s up?” “Rivers of blood!”) She captured a few hours of his recollections on videotape, although he clammed up again when he got to the subject of Italy, where something awful apparently happened. As this volume (the first of three) ends, we still don’t know what it was, although her art and his fading memory are circling warily around it. The tent poles of this book, subtitled “ ‘A Good and Decent Man,’ ” are two brief sequences of an “Army scrapbook” Tyler made for him — not the photos he’s held on to for decades, but sepia-toned cartoons, annotated with entertaining bits of his narration. He slept on a gun turret to avoid snakes; he set up a shower in the North African desert and was delighted that a sheik’s “harum” used it.

Still, the book is less about his experiences in the Army than everything that radiated out from them: the way they shaped the rest of his life, as well as his wife’s and daughter’s and granddaughter’s lives. One resonance of the title is the World War II-era song of the same name; in part, this is a portrait of his 60-year romance with Tyler’s mother. Another is that, as the author puts it, “you would never know” what had happened to him from the postwar life he constructed — the war may be the central fact of his psychological makeup, but he tried, with some success, to bury it “under tons of mental concrete.”

When her father told her his story, Tyler’s own life was in flux: as we see in the book, her husband, the underground cartoonist Justin Green, had recently left her for a former baby sitter — although he was thinking about coming back — and she had moved from California to Ohio with their teenage daughter, Julia. (The book’s acknowledgments include thanks to “Justin and Julia Green for support and for keeping it interesting.”) It’s easy to see echoes of her father’s dedication and grudging optimism, as well as his capacity for sublimating painful feelings in endless craft and construction projects, in what Tyler shows us of her open-hearted relationships with all of them and her stoic perseverance in dealing with her own downturns.

“ ‘You’ll Never Know’ ” unfolds like a rambling reminiscence, except without the boring parts. It skitters around in time, every observation setting off another memory or meditation or visual flourish. Tyler’s artwork flutters between representation, fantasy and symbolism, sometimes even in the same panel, but her stylistic virtuosity is a steadfast guide through her chronology’s loops and pivots. On one page, she shows us an imagined scene in her family’s backyard in the early ’50s — kids playing in buckets of water, her mother hanging up a towel reading “Always Do Your Best,” a TV set and a pair of pedal pushers floating in midair — then carefully annotates the anachronisms. She draws her father as a sturdy young man in an Army helmet and as a grouchy retiree in a trucker’s cap, but also as a little boy in church with a halo floating over his horns, as a fox seeking out a peach labeled “Mom,” and as a tree trying to teach fortitude to its fragile sapling of a daughter.

Tyler has been drawing comics on and off since the 1980s; her 2005 collection of short pieces is aptly titled “Late Bloomer.” She was a painter before she was a cartoonist, though, and she’s adapted some painterly techniques to comics, even beyond her magisterial sense of color (she drew this project with 53 custom-mixed inks). Every panel is lush with visual and psychological detail. Her swooping ink lines have the fluidity and force of paint, and she treats the borders of her pages and images as frames, sometimes solid and unassuming but more often decorative or permeable or even broken. In one sequence, a despondent Tyler falls through the base of a panel and onto the bottom of the page, only to be scolded by her father in his easy chair (“Whaddya think you’re layin’ on!! Get up!!!”) and an imaginary elf that we’ve earlier seen telling him to “keep your feelings secret!”

He does, for the most part. But it’s only in the final few pages of this volume that we fully understand what that has cost him and his family. As autumn turns to winter, a gust of wind that steals his hat becomes Hitler in his aging mind. Meanwhile, Tyler imagines herself stumbling into the “rivers of blood” that her father saw in “It’ly”; as she researches what might have happened to him, he explodes with fury over his delusion that she’s stolen the Army pictures he loaned her.

It’s impossible not to compare “ ‘You’ll Never Know’ ” with Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” the first great graphic novel about what happened to a cartoonist’s father during World War II. They’re very different sorts of books, though, in both their means and their ends. “Maus” is largely Vladek Spiegelman’s own testimony amplified by the book’s abject, minimal style and the allegory of its cat-and-mouse imagery, and is only secondarily about its creator’s relationship with his father and his struggle with the enormity of his topic. Tyler’s book is a vivid, affecting, eccentrically stylish frame built around a terrible silence.

Douglas Wolk is the author of “Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean.” He writes frequently about comics for The Times.

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I have only come to understand - dimly - in recent years how profound an effect my father's service in WWII has had on our family. His was the first company into Hiroshima after the bomb dropped. His unit in the Pacific suffered over 50% casualties.

He told me [shortly before his death last fall] about one of his good friends, who was island hopping with him. This kid had been Dad's lab partner in High School Chemistry. "Smartest guy I ever met," said Dad. "He became convinced that he was unkillable, that no Jap would ever kill him." Dad tried to talk to him as a friend. But the delusion persisted. Then, one night on patrol, this kid was killed. I asked dad how old he was then and he said, "19."

I think of all his restless habits -- humming to himself under his breath, tapping his hands constantly, pacing, so many habits that betrayed his inner anxiety and unease.

Most of his life he just outran the ghosts, but the ghosts [and the alcohol] ultimately changed him. During his last years, he spoke at length about the war -- after a lifetime of never mentioning it. It occurred to me during several of those conversations that "Rivers of blood!" had always been present to him, but not named or acknowledged.

Our last conversation before his death was unpleasant, and I wrote him an angry letter which a wise friend counseled me not to send. He died within the week. So there was the incompleteness that had always been between us. There was no neat tidying up our loose ends as father and daughter.

But I remind myself when I get morose , when I let myself brood over our fucked up relationship, that I really can't know what his inner world was like. What it would be like to live with PTSD or it's equivalent.

Not all questions have answers. Or, as some might say:

Your difficulties are not obstacles on the spiritual path, they are the path. --Ezra Bayda

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SEE ALSO:

THE WALL WITHIN:

"Delivered at the commencement of the National Salute II in Washington, D.C. on November 10, 1984, as part of the official activities prior to the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial ("The Wall) as a national monument. It honors the personal list of love and loss that each American has marked in his/her heart. Poem entered into the Congressional, January 30, 1985." Johnny's Song: Poetry of a Vietnam Veteran. Steve Mason. (May 1986). Bantam Books.



Most real men

hanging tough
in their early forties
would like the rest of us to think
they could really handle one more war
and two more women.
But I know better.
You have no more lies to tell.
I have no more dreams to believe.

I have seen it in your face
I am sure you have noticed it
in mine;
at the unutterable,
unalterable truth of our war.


The eye sees
what the mind believes.
And all that I know of war,
all that I have heard of peace,
has me looking over my shoulder
for that one bullet
which still has my name on it--
circling
round and round the globe
waiting and circling
circling and waiting
until I break from cover
and it takes its best, last shot.
In the absence of Time,
the accuracy of guilt is assured.
It is a cosmic marksman.

[MORE]

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Every One Of These Ghosts Has A Story

From Faith & Theology

Is there life before death? On aged care and anxiety

A guest-post by Scott Stephens (an abridged version of this post was published in Eureka Street)

Sigmund Freud once wrote that the only feeling that doesn’t lie is anxiety. This is a hard thing for us to hear, because few feelings terrify us more than anxiety. Anxiety disrupts our carefully constructed and managed zones of comfort, and acts as a stubborn reminder of the world without. Anxiety, in other words, is the way are affected by the reality of the things we can’t change, the things that just won’t go away. Perhaps that’s why we try so hard to suppress it. We convince ourselves that, if we ignore it, if we sedate it, if we pretend it isn’t there, if we close our eyes, it will just go away. To be sure, one of the great luxuries of modern life is that we have so many ways of avoiding the things that make us feel anxious.

If we don’t like the traumatic images we are seeing on SBS World News, we change the channel and watch The Biggest Loser instead. If we don’t like what we are hearing on Radio National, there’s plenty of vulgar banality waiting on Triple M. If you don’t like all that talk you hear in church about sin, repentance and following Jesus, you can always stay home and watch Hillsong and feel much better about yourself. And that’s not even to mention our contemporary panoply of narcotics – from alcohol and prozac to retail therapy and comfort food.

But deep down, the anxiety never goes away. It’s always there, lurking just beneath the surface. As Freud explained, anxiety is immutable because, ultimately, it is the chill of death’s own inevitability. So what happens when we try to do to death what we do to our other, more contingent sources of anxiety, and just ‘change the channel’? How, in other words, do we try to forget our own mortality? The answer is devastatingly simple: nursing homes.

While there are, no doubt, some wonderful examples of aged care facilities that provide both community and dignity for those who have entered their twilight years and are in need of additional care, this is certainly not the experience of the majority of our elderly. For, increasingly, the elderly have become the ritual sacrifices that we as a society offer to the most implacable of our modern gods: what Hervé Juvin has described (in his mordant masterpiece, L’avènement du corps) as a kind of provisional immortality, a deathless existence realized in unlimited consumption.

Precisely because they are painful reminders of our mortality and fragility, and thus disrupt our sacrosanct comfort, so many of our elderly are consigned to sub-standard, and often degrading, care as a way of classifying them as not really alive, but ‘not yet dead’. The cold reality of aged care is that institutionalization has become a mechanism of our desire to forget death and our wish to go on living unperturbed in our capitalist nirvana.

But it is now imperative that we recognize that our collective failure to care for – and indeed to honour – the lives of our elderly degrades us all. Further, the systemic forgetting of the elderly is one of the great causes of the weakness and moral impoverishment in our culture. Lives tempered by age and shaped by hard-earned virtue are gifts of God, and it is to our detriment that we ignore them.

Perhaps it is time to revive the long Christian tradition that regarded old age as a theatre of virtue and courage. Aging was imagined as a kind of final transaction, whereby the elderly show what the good life looks like, having finally reached the point where they can drop all pretense and start telling the story of their lives honestly – or, to put it in a more Augustinian fashion, to tell the story of their lives as an unbroken confession of sin enabled by God’s grace.

But the elderly, in this perspective, also bear witness to what the good death looks like, how to face the completion of one’s life with courage and faith. Aquinas, for instance, regarded the martyr as the archetype for Christian courage in the face of death. All the while, those gathered round in loving community express their humble gratitude for these lives well lived, and urge them not to waver in their faith as they sprint toward their final prize.

There is a rather surprising fictional counterpart to this Christian tradition in the final volume of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The children, Lyra and Will, have made their perilous journey to the world of the dead on the pretense that Lyra must apologise to a friend she inadvertently betrayed, and for whose death she was responsible. Once there, it becomes clear that their destiny is much grander than that: their destiny is to defeat death itself by, quite literally, cutting a hole in the other side of this cavernous Sheol and thereby allowing the atoms of the ghosts of the dead to disperse into the benign indifference of the universe.

When one of the harpies – whose role is to torment the dead by hissing and spitting their venomous reminders of the dead’s failed lives – objects that releasing the dead would negate their very reason for being, one of the children’s traveling companions makes a remarkable suggestion:

‘Then’, said Tialys, ‘let’s make a bargain with you. Instead of seeing only the wickedness and cruelty and greed of the ghosts that come down here, from now on you will have the right to ask every ghost to tell you the story of their lives, and they will have to tell the truth about what they’ve seen and touched and heard and loved and known in the world. Every one of these ghosts has a story; every single one that comes down in the future will have true things to tell you about the world. And you’ll have the right to hear them, and they will have to tell you.’

Could not this rather purgatorial vocation be a model of the community’s care of the elderly? To listen with humble gratitude to lives that have finally learned to tell the truth about themselves, that have stripped themselves of every last shred of pretense, and that now simply need a loving community to hear.

However much our death-defined culture may wish to deny it, there is life before death. It may be weak and frail, but so are the other gifts that God has given us in order to demonstrate his grace, and confound our supposed strength. As the apostle Paul put it, ‘the weakness of God is stronger than human strength’.

**

I Love Improv

The Surprise Wedding Reception

There Is A Reality In Blessing

Islamorada Sunset from my sister on flickr
[she visits these places]

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead

Prompted by recommendations from both Kim Fabricius and Stanley Hauerwas, I finally got around to reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (New York: Farrar, 2004), an exquisite portrayal of three (or four) generations of preachers in a decrepit little town in Iowa. (In a lecture, Hauerwas describes this as “the first Barthian novel” – a fine description, except that John Updike has been writing “Barthian novels” for decades!)

The novel is extraordinary in every way. It’s a narrative of fragile beauties, luminous insights, mysterious silences – all related in a prose as spare and understated as the dustbowl town itself. And there is plenty here for theologians to think about as well. You wouldn’t be far wrong if you said that the whole novel is an account of the power and beauty of blessing.

Our narrator, John Ames, tells us that he became a minister not for any of the usual reasons, but because it gave him the opportunity to confer blessing. When he baptised a family of kittens as a young boy, he discovered that “there is a reality in blessing”: “Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing…. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.” Ames describes this as one of the “advantages” of being a minister: “Not that you have to be a minister to confer blessing. You are simply much more likely to find yourself in that position. It’s a thing people expect of you” (p. 23).

To confer blessing – that is the purpose of existence, that is how we honour all those “precious things [that] have been put into our hands” (p. 246). More than that: to confer blessing is required of us; it’s an obligation placed on us as soon as we really encounter another person. Ames remarks: “there is nothing more astonishing than a human face…. It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it” (p. 66).

It’s fitting, then, that John Ames’ own life should culminate in a simple moment of blessing. Sitting at a dusty old bus stop, he places his hand on Jack Boughton’s brow and blesses him. And he tells us: “I’d have gone through seminary and ordination and all the years intervening for that one moment” (p. 242).

Gilead is itself just such a moment – the novel is a gentle intrusion of grace, a warm hand on your brow, a moment when the world stands still and blessing is conferred.

**
from comments

kim fabricius said...

Lovely review, Ben. Even your prose style pays fitting homage to this fine, fine novel. We've just spent two sessions on it in my church's "Exploration Group"; appreciation of it increased exponentially as we talked it through.

Many describe it as a novel of ideas, but at heart it is a beautiful love story, not only about John Ames and his young wife, but about God and the world, creation and grace (which "has a grand laughter in it," "an ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials"). (It is not surprising that Robinson writes under the spell of Donne and Herbert, who are both mentioned in the novel.) It is also about fathers and (prodigal) sons (a perennial theme in American literature), and "the way," as one reviewer put it, "that children inexorably disappear into their own futures." The way Robinson so acutely observes men is astonishing, and the novel is a perfect counterpoint to her first novel Housekeeping (1980), which is about women

There is indeed a balm in Gilead (cf. Jeremiah 8:22).

I would add that the book is also extremely timely - it was written during the ascendancy of the Religious Right - in its recovery of America's "liberal" theological traditions. And I would highly recommend Robinson's collection of essays The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998).

Finally, you mention the episode in Gilead of Ames' baptism of a litter of cats. My Thelma sits before my PC even as I type. Nor is it merely incidental that, for Ames: "And there was baseball."

*

A great book, which did much for my theology of the body. Your winsome review rang bells with a new collection of poems I’ve been reading called “The Resurrection of the Body” by Michael Schmidt, a professor of literature at Glasgow University. His title piece imagines the Gospel episode in which Christ raises Jairus’ daughter:

[…] He holds her
And out of his chest where she is pressed against him
Flows that unusual grace which is rooted in muscle,
Which comes from the marrow and lymph, which is divine,
The grace of a man whom love has turned into God,
The love of incarnate God whose flesh knows the name of his creature.

In John Ames is a minister of the incarnation, in that he gives place to “that unusual grace which is rooted in muscle…marrow, and lymph.” His view of the body as a vessel - if not a locus - of grace recalls the physicality of Christ’s ministry and something of what Marilynne Robinson herself claims of the religious impulse of American literature:

“The insistent valuing of the living world in the face of its mortality is an assertion of the imagination to know more than can be known” (Poetry, May 2007).

A wonderful blog. my first post ☺

- Nicole Meline

*

From "Reckonings"

Robert Bly's "In the Month of May"

Robert Bly's poem came to me today, over the transom, through the ether, at the right moment, and as I read and reread, resonance grew. It is a love poem, a layered weaving of season, spirit, the vivid life of an aging, unfinished, still changing soul waiting for - celebrating - the miraculous.

I find such tenderness in his last lines:

Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.

In the Month of May

In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well all things
lean on each other, how the bees work,
the fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high; then I understand
I love you with what in me is unfinished.

I love you with what in me is still
changing, what has no head or arms
or legs, what has not found its body.
And why shouldn't the miraculous,
caught on this earth, visit
the old man alone in his hut?

And why shouldn't Gabriel, who loves honey,
be fed with our own radishes and walnuts?
And lovers, tough ones, how many there are
whose holy bodies are not yet born.
Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.

- Robert Bly

**
Another word on idols and exclusivity


"Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without overcoming this double exclusion--without transposing the enemy from the sphere of monstrous inhumanity into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness. When one knows that the torturer will not eternally triumph over the victim, one is free to rediscover that person's humanity and imitate God's love for him. And when one knows that God's love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself in the light of God's justice and so rediscover one's own sinfulness."


Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (p. 124)
[from the now erased blog "subversive Christianity"]
*
Saturday's prayer

O God of many names,
lover of all people;
we pray for peace
in our hearts and homes,
in our nations and our world;
the peace of your will,
the peace of our need.


For the hungry and the overfed
May we have enough.
For the mourners and the mockers
May we laugh together.
For the victims and the oppressors
May we share power wisely.
For the peacemakers and the warmongers
May clear truth and stern love lead us to harmony.
For the silenced and the propagandists
May we speak our own words in truth.
For the unemployed and the overworked
May our impress on the earth be kindly and creative.
For the troubled and the sleek
May we live together as wounded healers.
For the homeless and the cosseted
May our homes be simple, warm and welcoming.
For the vibrant and the dying
May we all die to live.
Amen.

Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand & Polynesia

*
I've been thinking about blessing, both as an act and a reality. Thinking of blessing as the starting point helps me to straighten out my own thinking. Our very lives are blessing the existence of life evidence of a power to bless that the universe possesses as an elemental part of itself. We all have the power to bless others consciously and intentionally. But most of the blessing we do is by virtue of being. It's who and what we are.
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Timelessness, The Old Eternal Now

The C.C. Bens on the porch [flickr]

link

"Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
lassie & timmy

*
**
Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now.

*

Emily Dickinson:

Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God's residence is next to mine,
His furniture is love.

*

Joanna Russ:

Faith is not contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out to be right or wrong, like a gambler's bet: it's an act, an intention, a project, something that makes you, in leaping into the future, go so far, far, far ahead that you shoot clean out of time and right into Eternity, which is not the end of time or a whole lot of time or unending time, but timelessness, the old Eternal Now.

*

Pema Chodron:

Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future. In other words, if we're going to be more cheerful in the future, it's because of our aspiration and exertion to be cheerful in the present. What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.

*

Robert Louis Stevenson:

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.

*
Soren Kierkegaard:

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Eyes Too Blind To See All The Hazards of the Struggle

Andrew Sullivan:

His Niebuhrian Moment

A reader writes:

I have to say Obama's speech in Cairo was, for me, his most Niebuhrian moment. Religion in this speech became the ally of humility and reconciliation, not a barrier to them. He retained moral resolve without believing God's purposes were his own. He even refused to turn his back on genuine progress and modernity -- what Niebuhr would call the "growth" we see in history -- while not being simply or naively progressive.

His invocation of the Torah, the Koran, and the New Testament at the end of the speech pointed towards the enduring necessity, beauty, and relevance of prophetic religion. We all are under the judgment of the One beyond the many, and as such only partially grasp his will -- all our earthly projects and ambitions are tinged with sin, marred by our pride and partiality. Recognizing this is the precondition for working together.

A decent conservative movement would embrace the speech. I don't think we'll see that happen, but that shouldn't detract from what was going on in this speech. It was genuinely important, I think. He understands what Niebuhr wrote on the last page of The Irony of American History:

"For if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history, but by hatred and vainglory."

Permalink

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War Is Sin

"Those who return to speak this truth, such as members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, are our contemporary prophets. But like all prophets they are condemned and ignored for their courage. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. They know that what we are taught in school, in worship, by the press, through the entertainment industry and at home, that the melding of the state’s rhetoric with the rhetoric of religion, is empty and false."

*
wood s lot

A Place Weeping
John Berger
threepennyreview

A few days after our return from what was thought of, until recently, as the future state of Palestine, and which is now the world's largest prison (Gaza) and the world's largest waiting room (Cis-Jordan), I had a dream.

I was alone, standing, stripped to the waist, in a sandstone desert. Eventually somebody else's hand scooped up some dusty soil from the ground and threw it at my chest. It was a considerate rather than an aggressive act. The soil or gravel changed, before it touched me, into torn pieces of cloth, probably cotton, which wrapped themselves around my torso. Then these tattered rags changed again and became words, phrases. Written not by me but by the place.

Remembering this dream, the invented word landswept came to my mind. Repeatedly. Landswept describes a place or places where everything, both material and immaterial, has been brushed aside, purloined, swept away, blown down, irrigated off, everything except the touchable earth....(more)

**
whiskey river

link

"If you remember nothing else, always remember this one great secret of spiritual practice: we don't have to feel any particular way. We don't have to have special experiences, nor do we have to be any particular way. With whatever arises, whether it's pleasing or not, try to remember that all we can do is experience and work with whatever our life is right now. No matter what life is and no matter how we feel about it, all that matters in practice is whether we can honestly acknowledge what is going on, and then stay present with the physical experience of that moment."
- Ezra Bayda
Zen Heart
*

Above The Passing Squalls and Doldrums

photo from the set "Sun" on flickr


Reprieve

By Tim Kreider

Fourteen years ago I was stabbed in the throat. This is kind of a long story and it’s not the point of this essay. The point is that after my unsuccessful murder I wasn’t unhappy for an entire year.

Winston Churchill’s quote about the exhilaration of being shot at without result is verifiably true. I was reminded of an old Ray Bradbury story, “The Lost City of Mars,” in which a man finds a miraculous machine that enables him to experience his own violent death over and over again, as many times as he likes — in locomotive collisions, race car crashes, exploding rockets — until he emerges flayed of all his free-floating guilt and unconscious longing for death, forgiven and free, finally alive.

I started brewing my own dandelion wine in a big Amish crock. I listened to old pop songs too stupid to name in print.

I’m not claiming I was continuously euphoric the whole time; it’s just that, during that grace period, nothing much could bother me or get me down. The sort of horrible thing that I’d always dreaded was going to happen to me had finally happened. I figured I was off the hook for a while. In a parallel universe only two millimeters away from this one (the distance between the stiletto and my carotid), I had been flown home in the cargo hold instead of in coach. Everything in this one, as far as I was concerned, was gravy.

My friends immediately mocked me out of my self-consciousness about the nerve damage that had left me with a lopsided smile. I started brewing my own dandelion wine in a big Amish crock. I listened to old pop songs too stupid to name in print. And I developed a strange new laugh that’s stayed with me to this day — a loud, raucous, barking thing that comes from deep in the diaphragm and makes people in bars or restaurants look over at me for a second to make sure I’m not about to open up on the crowd with a weapon.

I wish I could recommend this experience to everyone. It’s a cliché that this is why people enjoy thrill-seeking pastimes ranging from harmless adrenaline fixes like roller coasters to suicide attempts with safety nets, like bungee jumping. The catch is that to get the full effect you have to be genuinely uncertain that you’re going to survive. The best approximation would be to hire an incompetent hit man to assassinate you.

It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die, sort of the same way some of us only appreciate our girlfriends after they’re exes. I saw the same thing happen, in a more profound and lasting way, to my father when he was terminally ill, and then to my mother after he died; an almost literal lightening, a flippant indifference to the silly, quotidian nonsense that preoccupies most of us and ruins so much of our lives. A neighbor was suing my father for some reason or other during his illness, but if you tried to talk to him about such “serious” matters he’d just sing you old songs like “A Bird In a Gilded Cage” in a high, quavering old-man falsetto. When my mother, who’s now a leader in her church, sees people squabbling over minutiae or personal politics, she reminds them, diplomatically I’m sure, to focus on the larger context.

It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than a sort of hysterical high. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace.

It didn’t last, of course. You can’t feel grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever — or grieve forever, for that matter. Time forces us all to betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living in the world. Before a year had gone by the same dumb everyday anxieties and frustrations began creeping back. I’d be disgusted to catch myself yelling in traffic, pounding on my computer, lying awake at night wondering what was going to become of me.

Once a year on my stabbiversary I remind myself that this is still my bonus life, a free round. But now that I’m back down in the messy, tedious slog of everyday emotional life, I have to struggle to keep things in what I still insist is their true perspective. I know intellectually that all the urgent, pressing items on our mental lists — taxes, car repairs, our careers, the headlines — are so much idiot noise, and that what matters is spending time with people you love. It’s just hard to bear in mind when the hard drive crashes.

I was not cheered, a few years ago, to read about psychological studies suggesting that most people inevitably return to a certain emotional baseline after circumstantial highs and lows. You’d like to think that nearly getting killed would be a major, permanently life-altering experience, but in truth it was less painful, and occasioned less serious reflection, than certain breakups I’ve gone through. If anything, it only reinforced the illusion that in the story of my life only supporting characters would die, while I, its protagonist and first-person narrator, would survive. I’ve demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience.

I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best ones, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d experience after being clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace. It’s like the revelation I had when I was a kid the first time I ever flew in an airplane: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold onto and take back with you when you descend once more beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.

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Tim Kreider’s articles have appeared in Film Quarterly and The New York Times and his cartoon “The Pain — When Will It End?” has appeared in the Baltimore City Paper since 1997. His Web site is thepaincomics.com.

And There Are Sunflowers

sunflowers from flickr

If Time Is An Engine

There are sunflowers on the path where I go
and lacewings rising from the fields
With each step I take, I know more surely
that this is the way

If time is an engine, then it was created in a dream
If love is an engine, then the dreamer weeps
If memory is an engine, then it will carry the dream away

But there are sunflowers on the path where I go
and the dog is at my heel. There is a gate
and a meadow beyond. There is a stream

The sky is blue by day, blue in the evening
But I know the way of the hidden stars
and I'm still alive, I still know secrets
There is nothing I have left undone.

So my keys are on the table. You can sell my
clothes. Rust, rust is affecting the machinery
But I am not needed. The machines can be repaired

For if time is a cathedral, then I have lived in the cathedral
If love is a cathedral, then I have lived in splendor
If memory is a cathedral, then I remember everything

but now pass by. And there are sunflowers
on the path where I go. The dog is at my heel
There is a gate and a meadow beyond
There is a stream

--Eleanor Lerman

The Mystery of Meteors - Eleanor Lerman

Flickering

Sun One : From flickr set "Sun"

I invite you to view my 'sets' of pictures on flickr -- click at the top right side of the flickr page to make a slideshow. I've been working on these sets for awhile. A little compulsive, but I've been trying to organize my photographs for years and it feels good to do that.

Sun
Desert
Shapes and Shadows
Ancestral Images
Vintage Portraits
Vintage Kids
Vintage Picks
Just Like Heaven
Icon
Random Beach
The Afterlife
Clippings
Sky
Spiritual
Forest
Sea
Storms
Nature
*

Don't Ask Me !

Andrew Sullivan continues to publish abortion experiences and reactions to the murder of Dr. Tiller:

The Daily Wrap

As the Tiller tragedy wound down today, O'Reilly stood his ground, Malkin revealed her hypocrisy, Hilzoy and Megan locked horns, and Ann Friedman urged the protection of clinics. We also published more abortion testimonials here, here, and here.

Permalink

These stories are powerful and personal.

For me, the question of abortion has always been a theological/medical issue, not a political/legal one. It has been made political/legal and will never make sense in that arena. As an old-school 'feminist' (like liberal, now a 'dirty word.' As my brother says: "Oh you wimmins-libbers" -- *sigh*) I see only men telling women that they (the men) will decide what's 'best' for us -- you know how those fuzzy headed women have to have their men-folk make their decisions for them. Hmmm. No thanks.

Sullivan's readers take him to task a couple of times for saying that he could not 'in good conscience' countenance those abortions (even for ectopic pregnancy ? Really ?) Well Andrew then, DON'T HAVE ONE.

**

I also invite you to read again "The Inarticulate Terror" -- which is, I think , a key [brief] article which sums up, for a person of faith the deepest dissent from every single argument 'for' torture - and disputes any articulated defense of torture. Read it. Think about it in terms of your own inner relationship with theology.

"Let us be clear: 'offense' is not death itself--Jesus proved that--it is the betrayal of the imago dei, the betrayal of ourselves, the betrayal of God, the betrayal of our fellow men and women, no matter how lost they may appear to be. Offense is, simply, the failure of love; the failure of courage; the failure of the heart."

**

CESAR VALLEJO

"This man is so far out that he is only an inch away from his own face. Some poets may say that they don't feel well. Vallejo tells you that he is afraid that he is really an animal made of white snow. He creates in his poems paintings in words that suggest frightful things, and we do feel frightened, and wonder why the rest of the painters are painting flowers.

*

Vallejo's art is not in recapturing ideas but in actually thinking. We feel the flow of thought, its power like an underground river finding its way for the first time through some shifted ground -- even he doesn't know where it will come out.

*

In Poemas Humanas especially, Vallejo suggests so well the incredible weight of daily life, how it pulls men and women down; carrying a day is like carrying a mountain. And what the weight of daily life wants to pull us down to is mediocrity.

*

The Black Riders

There are blows in life so violent -- don't ask me !

Blows as if from the hatred of God; as if before them,

the deep waters of everything lived through

were backed up in the soul.... Don't ask me !

[from 'The Winged Energy of Delight' by Robert Bly]