It must come upon many. The weariness. The body moving away from itself.
The tiredness of awfulness.
The way the rich and powerful in their dreariness and slovenly discounting of moral behavior model ugliness and disreputable ways.
This is a hard age.
We look to the honorable and the kind for encouragement.
To the dignified and the saintly for example.
Awful.
Hard to hear.
Haunted by ‘Dark Thoughts,’ Louisiana Father Kills 8 Children
Seven of the eight children killed were the shooter’s own. Two other people were gravely wounded. The gunman, who was struggling with mental health problems, died in a confrontation with police. (19apr2016, NYTimes)
Before thought, prayer.
Under the dream, the real.
(*Gaelic: walking without a destination)
If I had my druthers
I’d live in Canada
Nova Scotia, Cape Breton
A side street
In Baddeck
Up from Bras d’Or
Sausage and eggs
Coffee at café
Jetty leading nowhere
As James Joyce wrote
About a pier being
A disappointed bridge
Contemplation is
Omnidirectional attention
The heart longs
For itself
The mind is still
Within itself
An expanse of
Intimacy
Like birdcall
Through drizzle fog
Try not to be annoyed, frustrated, or worried.
In the Ch’an perspective
Wisdom is a state
That is free from attachments,
Free from measurement,
Free from self-reference
And empty of vexation.
--Sheng Yen (1931-2009)
Everything that happens out here is chimera.
All is an impossible, wild, or unattainable dream, fantasy, or illusion.
I know this is so because it is the way things are and the way I am.
There’s no one to blame.
No one to hate.
No one to say “He did it.”
Were we wise we would see this as it is.
Then we’d be able to decide how we’d want to be in the midst of how things are.
What she wanted. What he got.
“When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.” (Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell)
He didn’t get to write it. After he died in 1977, she wrote this elegy for him:
In Memoriam: Robert Lowell
I can make out the rigging of a schoonera mile off; I can countthe new cones on the spruce. It is so stillthe pale bay wears a milky skin; the skyno clouds except for one long, carded horse¹s tail.The islands haven't shifted since last summer,even if I like to pretend they have—drifting, in a dreamy sort of way,a little north, a little south, or sidewise—and that they¹re free within the blue frontiers of bay.This month our favorite one is full of flowers:buttercups, red clover, purple vetch,hackweed still burning, daisies pied, eyebright,the fragrant bedstraw's incandescent stars,and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.The goldfinches are back, or others like them,and the white-throated sparrow's five-note song,pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.Nature repeats herself, or almost does:repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.Years ago, you told me it was here(in 1932?) you first "discovered girls"and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.You had "such fun," you said, that classic summer.("Fun"—it always seemed to leave you at a loss…)You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,afloat in mystic blue…And now—you've leftfor good. You can't derange, or rearrange,your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)The words won't change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.(--Poem, North Haven, by Elizabeth Bishop)
Friendships, like words, find their own particular expression.
I don’t know what you mean
I’m saying it feels like
deflation, everything going away
What does that mean
It means I’m losing it
What do you want me to do
Nothing, I’m just saying
Ok, you said it; now what
There’s another cup of coffee
in the pot. It’s yours
Lord help us
Nah, don’t go there
some cars cut it close
not concerned the road walker
might step out into their right
fender, to them we are not suicidal
they don’t want to be bothered
to ease over toward center lines
only the suicidal consider stepping
into speeding fender, that’s not me
the thought never occurs, not at all,
not even once, not less than once, never
For me, it is inactivity.
Too much knowledge leads to overactivity;
Better to calm the mind.
The more you consider, the greater the loss;
Better to unify the mind.
Water dripping ceaselessly
Will fill the four seas.
Specks of dust not wiped away
Will become the five mountains.
—Wang Ming (6th c.)
Drips and dust cover the earth.
Cover me.
These days
At Tuesday evening conversation, a 4th century hymn:
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https://youtu.be/6uY_WV__JP0?si=cLg8ZYFxVFsLTz5u |
Heather Cox Richardson
From Lincoln to Trump
History as revelatory clarification of what we are dealing with.
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/april-15-2026-wednesday?r=26uu5u&utm_medium=ios
The madness and the sorrow of history.
Thought, reasoning, and derived conclusions are dangerous skills in a world dominated by symbolic preference, myth-poetic literalism, fanciful beliefs, and (let’s face it) dull wits.
Anaxagoras, a Greek Philosopher, (501BC) - introduced philosophy to the Athenians during the age of Pericles, and he was prosecuted for teaching that the sun was not a god but a red-hot stone.
(--Andreas Nothiger in Synchronoptical World History Chart, 2004)
The current Pope doesn’t have a chance against Trump, Vance, and Johnson. These three men know a god when they look around and, slack-jawed, affirm the prejudices of their libidos and their stock-holdings.
Of course djt thinks he is the christ.
He knows how to hollow a city block in order to pour a foundation. He knows how to manipulate a dug-out psyche of its intelligence and replacing any wit with a red baseball cap to hold the empty space together.
Anaxagoras was charged with heresy, sentenced to death by the Athenian court, left Athens, and spent his remaining years in exile.
Many might be pissed-off by the empty-headed ignorance of unfeeling, unthinking, and uncaring leaders, but there’s something to be said for having a current passport.
Came across:
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin[a] (9 December [O.S. 27 November] 1842 – 8 February 1921) was a Russian anarchist political philosopher and geographer known as a proponent of anarchist communism.
. . .
Although in the past he harshly criticized religious morality,[76] Kropotkin recognized the Christian anarchism of Leo Tolstoy as one of the four schools of thought in anarchism.[77] Kropotkin and Tolstoy maintained, despite never meeting in person, a relationship of mutual respect.[78] Kropotkin saw the origins of anarchism in Europe as found in various Christian movements, such as the Anabaptists and Hussites, mentioning figures such as the Italian Catholic bishop Marco Girolamo Vida and the German Anabaptist theologian Hans Denck.[79]
Kropotkin admired Christianity and Buddhism, along with the figures of Jesus Christ and Buddha and their ethical teachings.[80] Kropotkin did not see that Christianity introduced anything new in its defense of brotherhood and mutual aid, but considered Christian (and Buddhist) teaching on forgiveness to have been an innovation. In contrast with the ethics of vengeful pre-Christian cultures, the doctrine of Christ repudiates persecution and revenge. In the view of Kropotkin, "the true greatness of Christianity" lies in the words "do not take revenge on your enemies."[81] Kropotkin also saw the Christian God as an improvement over the pagan gods, whom he considered vengeful and requiring submission on the part of the believer.[82] Kropotkin's Ethics stated:
In the case of Christianity the love of the divine teacher for men, – for all men without distinction of nation or condition, and especially for the lowest, – led to the highest heroic sacrifice – to death on the cross for the salvation of humanity from the power of evil.[83]. (wikipedia)
On a personal note, I think fondly of my craggy-haired grey-bearded leather-working alternative-educator philosopher, self-proclaimed anarchist, former-drunk, sometime-poet, turkey-vulture loving good fellow, erstwhile-friend, Bob D. who died 29aug2022.
He knew every service station on the coast of maine and what day of the week they gave away a free cup of coffee.
Wonder if he knew of Kropotkin?
He doesn’t go to church
He thinks he is always in church
He is, of course, deluded
There is no church, and he attends
Morning baptism, communion
Penance, and extreme unction
From his chair by front window
His monastery, his solitude
The way things fall away, unseeing
The unseen, unhearing the soundless
You won’t find me there, you won’t
Find me here, no latitude, no longitude
A vacant point, an empty erasure
One tired gesture waving itself away
The way a song, maybe “rainy night
in soho” lingers in air near no one’s ear —
“I'm not singing for the future
I'm not dreaming of the past“
Nothing pronounced, nothing
Renounced, drizzle everywhere
At
Once
Subway car rolling to stop
Doors open, a window seat
Something about owning up, self-sacrifice, choosing a redemptive course, realizing who is important, encouraging others, resolving lingering burdens, accepting help from unlikely quarters, unmasking hidden feelings, accepting what is there --
Touches, and softens, a crusty and unforgiving environment.
So it was finally getting around to Season 8, Episode 16, Suits -- after years of letting it go.
Watched it twice, for the wide assortment, thought, emotion.
Where do we think true reality resides?
Is it ‘something’ that is ‘out there’ somewhere that our so-called instruments of senses and intellect extend themselves as a fisherman might cast his line into a body of water?
Here’s Plotinus as presented by The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Plotinus (204--270 C.E.)
Plotinus is considered to be the founder of Neoplatonism. Taking his lead from his reading of Plato, Plotinus developed a complex spiritual cosmology involving three foundational elements: the One, the Intelligence, and the Soul. It is from the productive unity of these three Beings that all existence emanates, according to Plotinus. The principal of emanation is not simply causal, but also contemplative. In his system, Plotinus raises intellectual contemplation to the status of a productive principle; and it is by virtue of contemplation that all existents are said to be united as a single, all-pervasive reality. In this sense, Plotinus is not a strict pantheist, yet his system does not permit the notion of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothingness). In addition to his cosmology, Plotinus also developed a unique theory of sense-perception and knowledge, based on the idea that the mind plays an active role in shaping or ordering the objects of its perception, rather than passively receiving the data of sense experience (in this sense, Plotinus may be said to have anticipated the phenomenological theories of Husserl). Plotinus’ doctrine that the soul is composed of a higher and a lower part — the higher part being unchangeable and divine (and aloof from the lower part, yet providing the lower part with life), while the lower part is the seat of the personality (and hence the passions and vices) — led him to neglect an ethics of the individual human being in favor of a mystical or soteric doctrine of the soul’s ascent to union with its higher part. The philosophy of Plotinus is represented in the complete collection of his treatises, collected and edited by his student Porphyry into six books of nine treatises each. For this reason they have come down to us under the title of the Enneads.
https://iep.utm.edu/plotinus/#:~:text=Taking%20his%20lead%20from%20his,existence%20emanates%2C%20according%20to%20Plotinus.
Alexander Earl, writes in Plotinus, Augustine, and the One God:
I. Intellect
But what exactly does this claim entail? What does it mean to say intellect is thought-thinking-itself? Unsurprisingly, Plotinus says it best:
Since, then, there is soul that reasons about just and beautiful things, and reasoning that inquires whether this is just or that is beautiful, there must also be some stable justice, from which there comes to be reasoning at [the level of] soul. Or how else could it reason? And if soul sometimes reasons about these things and sometimes does not, there must be in us intellect, which does not reason discursively but always possesses justice.4
Stephen R. L. Clark, commenting on this passage, explains that “this identifies the need, in any reasoning, for premises. If our premises are wrong, so will all our reasonings be.”5 Clark continues by asking an intuitive follow-up: “where do we get right premises?”6 If prior to any right reasoning we need an apprehension of right premises, and those right premises were right before we recognized them, then, Clark concludes, there must be “some further permanent rightness” that acts as a standard for all our judgments.7 To avoid an infinite regress, that permanent rightness will have to be a rightness self-possessed, so to speak; that is, it cannot be a rightness discovered, which involves moving from potentially to actuality qua coming-to-know the standard—again, invoking the principle of causality—which will entail that the case in question is just another instance of something under the standard, instead of the standard itself. Plotinus, in countering other 3rd century Platonists about the status of the forms relative to intellect, argues that
If one grants that the objects of thought are as completely as possible outside Intellect, and that Intellect contemplates them as absolutely outside it, then it cannot possess the truth of them and must be deceived in everything it contemplates. For they would be the true realities; and on this supposition it will contemplate them without possessing them, but will only get images of them in a knowledge of this sort. If then it does not possess the true reality, but only receives in itself images of the truth, it will have falsities and nothing true.8
(--Plotinus, Augustine, and the One God, 30 July 2018 by Alexander Earl, Eclectic Orthodoxy) https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2018/07/30/plotinus-augustine-and-the-one-god/
What the disciples witness behind locked doors is not merely the return of a dead man. It is the beginning of God’s creation all over again.
God loves nothing more than creating stuff. He never gets tired of making the sun rise every morning. G. K. Chesterton once suggested that God is strong enough to exult in monotony. He looks at the daisies and the snowflakes, and he exults, “Do it again!”
Creation ex nihilo is the great biblical confession. Out of nothing, God calls into being sun and moon, sea and sky, beasts and birds, and at last the human from the dust. Above all, God delights in life. New beginnings are his signature.
(--from, Resurrection Isn’t Resuscitation—It’s Creation ex morte victa, 12 April 2026 by John Stamps). https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2026/04/12/resurrection-isnt-resuscitation-its-creation-ex-nihilo/#comment-46609
Song by Foreigner:
I've gotta take a little timeI Want to Know What Love Is
A little time to think things over
I better read between the lines
In case I need it when I'm older
Now this mountain I must climb
Feels like the world upon my shoulders
Through the clouds, I see love shine
It keeps me warm as life grows colder
In my life, there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
Can't stop now, I've traveled so far
To change this lonely lifeI wanna know what love isI want you to show meI wanna feel what love isI know you can show meOh
I'm gonna take a little time
A little time to look around me
I've got nowhere left to hide
It looks like love has finally found meIn my life, there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
Can't stop now, I've traveled so far
To change this lonely lifeI wanna know what love isI want you to show meI wanna feel what love isI know you can show meI wanna know what love isI want you to show me
(And I wanna feel) I wanna feel what love is
(And I know) I know you can show me
Let's talk about love
(I wanna know what love is) The love that you feel inside
(I want you to show me) And I'm feelin' so much love
(I wanna feel what love is) No, you just cannot hide
(I know you can show me) Yeah
I wanna know what love is (Let's talk about love)
I want you to show me, I wanna feel
(I wanna feel what love is) And I know, and I know
I know you can show me (Yeah)
(I wanna know what love is) (I wanna know)
(I want you to show me) I wanna know, I wanna know, wanna know
(I wanna feel what love is) (I wanna feel)
(I know you can show me)
As good a longing, as good a prayer, as one might find
