acknowledging other times, the caved

 If I were a philosopher I would question the ontological foundation of truth and the epistemology of knowledge as revelatory of accurate discernment.

If I were a poet I’d investigate the existential thereness of inner reality where word resides speaking itself up from inception through reception into expression with lamenting joy.

If I were a theologian I would follow the journey of God inside/out from centerless center to edgeless circumference while listening to soundless silence turning its head to discern the lovely motionless movement of incohence through everything emerging into manifestation coming to something without knowing why.

But I’m not.

I am a mind and mouth agape at the idiocy of my beloved brothers and sisters attaching themselves to the idiocy and sucker-show snake-oil ruse of a deficient man running numbers on a gullible audience.

All day today, reporters fact checked Trump’s statements, proving them lies. But lies have never damaged him; they reinforce his dominance by forcing subordinates to agree that the person in charge gets to determine what reality is. Victims must surrender either their integrity or their ownership of their own perceptions; in either case, once they have agreed to a deliberate lie, it becomes harder to challenge later ones since that means acknowledging the other times they caved.

(—Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American, 11Sept.24)

Such reality is fallacious.

Mendacious.

And yet, for many, their morning, noon, and evening hemlock.

a madman

speaks drivel

promising a mouse

for every pocket

calling himself 

retribution and

fomenting

vinegary dissociation

an I-scream pop

of poison  

 It’s still the same old story.

We are suckers being born every minute as minúte mimesis.

community

 We look at those who’ve died on 9/11

They are in our yards and on front steps

I bow to them to you to us as we watch and remember

Right here, in front of us, they step and turn and circle our lives

desolation and degradation

 Watched Philly debate 

One person was clear and sane

The other, (a shame)

gone away, there it is

Reading  Richard Kearney’s Anatheism: [Returning to God After God], (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture) 2011.

Looking up a reference, I come across this:

The game of “fort-da” was invented by Freud’s grandson, who was then one and a half years old (1955: 14–17). In the simplest form of this play, the child had a piece of string attached to a wooden spool which he threw from him, murmuring “o-o-o-o,” then pulled back, saying “da.” Freud (and the child’s mother) interpreted the first sound as the child’s version of “fort” (“gone away”), the second as the German for “there” (as in English “there it is!”). Freud associated this game with the child’s attempt to assert mastery in play to compensate for an emotionally fraught situation where he had no control, his mother’s occasional excursions from the household without him (1955: 15). Freud also linked the empowerment of this early game with the child’s apparent lack of reaction to his mother’s death several years later (1955, 16, n. 1).

—Derrida/Fort-Da: Deconstructing Play, by Alan Aycock

God after the death of God, whether in one’s personal life or in the cultural milieu wherein no easy recognition of the God once known (or thought to be known) is made.

Where has God gone? And what the possibility of return — in what conceivable or experienceable shape or form? Or, stranger still, what kenotic self-beyonding manifestation would be discernible?

To speak of God is to word energy that conceivably might morph into a temporary encounter-able moment.

In the depths of silence, that coming-to-word is our attentive consciousness readying itself for a potentially felt passing mystery. 

There and gone.

To return, once, (more)?

watch

 It is time

You ask, What time is it?

You meet yourself

the first casualty

Twin Towers up in smoke

bodies falling to ground

I wish I could trust that

truth is being told

battery notion of soul

memory is not the thing itself

meaning is itself

and remains here

nothing travels with the soul

wordless watching

 jump into oblivion

or be crushed by millions of tons

choice on 9/11

time moves through space

God is time — hear it

We are contemporaries 

We, with time, are — here

o-range-ing causes and conditions

Like the wind that blows hard

he goes nowhere in a hurry

threatening everybody

sixty one years, gone, bye

 Watch film Parkland about the hospital in Texas. Listen to Mark Lane. Recollect the early sixties.

Still interested in the Warren Commission Report following JFK killing.

The kill shot. The evidence. The things misrepresented. The odd conclusions.

The curious thing about truth is how it hides in plain sight yet requires clear-eyed and clear-minded encounter.

That's all. 

A sad event. 

An incomplete and unsatisfying experience of deferred integrity.

if not here, where

 Cosmos and cross — way

Emerging from itself to

Itself within/out

a word wakened by lips that perish

 In prison this morning, Milosz: 

          Meaning

When I die, I will see the lining of the world.  
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add Up, 
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
- And if there is no lining to the world? 
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, 
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other? 
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth? 
- Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish, 
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, 
And calls out, protests, screams.

—Poem by Cheslaw Milosz, 1911-2004

The men gave great insight concerning null and zero and word and meaning.

As though a graduate seminar on mathematics and philosophy.

We, grateful students. 

fools such as i

Such as it is. 

 A mendicant (from Latin: mendicans, "begging") is one who practices mendicancy, relying chiefly or exclusively on alms to survive. In principle, mendicant religious orders own little property, either individually or collectively, and in many instances members have taken a vow of poverty, in order that all their time and energy could be expended on practicing their respective faith, preaching and serving society.

Mendicancy is a form of asceticism, especially in Western Christianity. In Eastern Christianity, some ascetics are referred to as Fools for Christ, whereby they spurn the convention of society in pursuit of living a more wholly Christian life. —wikipedia

So it is. 

the runner finished 44th in Paris

                            (for Rebecca)

Back home, she was doused

in petrol, her body burnt,

died four days later --

there is something in the mind

that heart cannot ease or cool

the limits of ai

 I suppose young men

get tired of gaming screen deaths --

go for live targets

let's not pretend

 The sorrow of school

shooting -- we know what to do,

what has to be done

are you asking me

dogen said we're already enlightened

francis showed christ dwelling within

god 

how do we continually evade who 

and what we are

hyphen words not wholeness

 Dogen said we’re al-

ready enlightened; Jesus 

said God is within —

What is it we don’t get a-

bout our inner life

332

There are choices to be made. And we want to trust our leaders to make a good choice. 

There are serious and severe doubts that the leader of Israel made the honorable choice in hostage release negotiations.

Nor do we have any sympathy for executioners who kill innocent hostages.

At the funeral on Monday, Goldberg-Polin’s parents led a procession of thousands of mourners. Their shirts were torn––a symbol of mourning in the Jewish tradition––and they wore stickers reading “332,” the number of days that their son spent as a captive in Gaza before he was found dead. 

(—the New Yorker, Grief and Fury in Israel! By Ruth Margalit, September 3, 2024)

It is unseemly to merely contend that war is terrible. It is.

It is dishonest to say blithely there’s no way to avoid conflict. There is.

Our contentiousness and dishonesty are lamentable — but they aren’t our defining fundamental nature. That nature is fluid and formative and yearning for the wholeness it is being urged to accommodate.

Let there be no rest for the unfinished!

insist

I like the clarification.

The Insistence of God presents the provocative idea that God does not exist, God insists, while God's existence is a human responsibility, which may or may not happen. For John D. Caputo, God's existence is haunted by "perhaps," which does not signify indecisiveness but an openness to risk, to the unforeseeable. Perhaps constitutes a theology of what is to come and what we cannot see coming. Responding to current critics of continental philosophy, Caputo explores the materiality of perhaps and the promise of the world. He shows how perhaps can become a new theology of the gaps God opens. 

(From description of The Insistence of God, A Theology of Perhaps by John D. Caputo, Indiana University Press)

It is a good distinction.

Really.

I insist. 

As must God.

prompt

Write something on God

I write — ‘s o m e t h i n g’ — on paper

Paper being God

chicanery

Looked at Threads. At X.

Can't tell any more what's real --

Won't look, not again

many are disturbed by being disturbed

I’ve been thinking of trying the intent of this prayer: 

“Let nothing disturb you”

Let nothing disturb you,

Let nothing frighten you,

All things are passing away:

God never changes.

Patience obtains all things

Whoever has God lacks nothing;

God alone suffices.          

 (St. Teresa of Avila)

There’s something more than important here to be considered. 

we are held in place by what links us.

 Smart aleck Foyan in 11th century probably was right. That doesn't make him less annoying.

If people with a potential for enlightenment are willing to see in this way, they must investigate most deeply and examine most closely; all of a sudden they will gain mastery of it and have no further doubt.

The reason you do not understand is just because you are taken away by random thoughts twenty-four hours a day. Since you want to learn business, you fall in love with things you see and fondly pursue things you read; over time, you get continuously involved. How can you manage to work on enlightenment then?

Foyan (1067–1120)

And he, presumably, did not know about, nor have,  a smartphone, laptop, or tablet.

Still, distractions and random thoughts crowd our consciousness, turning our attention away from that which might better nourish and comfort our well-being.

Dead hostages are found in tunnel in Gaza. (I let that sink in.)

I suspect not much has changed in the telling of atrocities from ancient Babylonia to contemporary Middle East. Nor from Atlanta Georgia to Dallas Texas. The violence, antipathy, and (if I might say it), ignorance prevails and is pernicious.

It makes me wonder what Foyan was pointing to -- that we are veering off from enlightenment.? What is this 'enlightenment'?

No easy answer here. Not from me.

But perhaps...

Is enlightenment the foundational reservoir of dynamic wholeness that undergirds all of existence? 

As I write this, Doris sends this:

                             

                                             Photo : Eli Campbell

 

 

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII

 

Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move alongside our real life
with steps that are ever the same.

 

 

Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.

 

Pure attention, the essence of the powers !
Distracted by each day's doing,
how can we hear the signals?

 

 

Even as the farmer labors
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work.  It is Earth who gives. 

 

 

 Rainer Maria Rilke ~In Praise of Mortality, translated and edited by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

This, yes!

Prosit! 

a life, lived among birds and forests and fields

I'm busy folding and packing away my summer whites.

It is nominally ('in name only; officially though perhaps not in reality') innominate ('anonymous') autumn. My tennis racquets and golf shoes, straw fedora and briar pipe, boating shorts and tom collins glasses -- all put away, spit-spot, de rigeur, done. 

We read from Dead Man's Float by Jim Harrison at Friday Evening Conversation. Our friend in the Philippines thought he'd want to read more by Harrison.

HARRISON

It’s the origin of the thinking behind The Theory and Practice of Rivers. In a life properly lived, you’re a river. You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it; you can’t figure out a banal game plan applicable to all situations; you just have to go with the “beingness” of life, as Rilke would have it. In Sundog, Strang says a dam doesn’t stop a river, it just controls the flow. Technically speaking, you can’t stop one at all. 

(--The Paris Review, Jim Harrison, The Art of Fiction No. 104, Interviewed by Jim Fergus ISSUE 107, SUMMER 1988)

Saw the film adaptation Legends of the Fall (1994) of Harrison's 1979 novella of the same name. I think I'll prefer to read the novella. 

One of his poems:

Old Man

An old man is a spindly junk pile.

He is so brittle he can fall

through himself top to bottom.

No mirror is needed to see the layers

of detritus, some years clogged with it.

The red bloody layer of auto deaths

of dad and sister. Deaths piled like cordwood

at the cabin, the body 190 pounds of ravaged

nerve ends from disease. The junk pile is without

sympathy for itself. A life is a life,

lived among birds and forests and fields.

It knew many dogs, a few bears and wolves.

Some women said they wanted to murder him

but what is there worth murdering?

The body, of course, the criminal body

doing this and that. Some will look

for miraculous gold nuggets in the junk

and find a piece of fool’s gold in the empty

cans of menudo, a Mexican tripe stew. 

(--poem by Jim Harrison) 

Cool air blows through wohnküche sliding door. I don't go into prison this morning. I give them a break 

Cats and dog fed. Day-old coffee heated and sipped. House quiet. 

Mariners breakfast behind Lasell Island out on Penobscot Bay before crossing water back to Rockport Harbor with pictures and stories, then scuttling to load car disembarking with hundreds of thousands down turnpike out of Maine to darker environs south through Massachusetts.

The rest of us Maine residents wave and bid adieu, happy to have served as temporary hosts to their temporary sojourn in this lovely state.

Harrison died in 2016. That's it. We all do.

no sir

 I will

Not comment

boo

 Have it gone

Ghost sentence

Haunting page

truth be told

 Words creep

Through this space

I have no control 

it might not seem a big deal

I prefer the words

Eventual Truth -- Taoist

Way -- to God or Lord

yes, you are, am i

Water and mountains, says Dōgen, are places formed by the wise Water and mountains, says Dōgen, are places formed by the wise

ndrei)

perhaps could be said

'no other as other is'

both still redounding 

one and many, you and me

travelling through many selves 

tonight is new year’s eve

 The boy's mother gave

Birth today to a fine son --

She a fine mother 

game with no goal, death, an opponent that chips away

Haiku

             (after the Gaudreau brothers, R.I.P.)

 one more drink, he slurr'd

where's my keys, he grinn'd -- then killed

two ice-men on bikes

a followup, such as it is...

Only because you felt badly, and I had no intent to cause such, yet feel badly about such, this, for you:

Tanka (1)

         (for C.B.)

If I was too harsh

Consider it august (2), not 

Me -- mere śūnyatā --

I have grown old loving truth

Wherever it shows Itself (3)

….  ….  ...

(1)

tanka¹ | ˈtäNGkə | 

noun (plural tanka or plural tankas | ˈtäNGkəz |) 

a Japanese poem consisting of five lines, the first and third of which have five syllables and the other seven, making 31 syllables in all and giving a complete picture of an event or mood.

(2). 

adjective 

respected and impressive: he/she was in august company.

:late 16th century: from French auguste or Latin augustus ‘worthy of respect, venerable, majestic’.

(3)

じたい

jitai

    noun, used as a suffix, noun (common) (futsuumeishi)
Meaning:
    itself

exeunt

 I’d rather not tell you what I think

It would upset you

I know you like your faith

Believe it is the best there is,

It becomes duty to inform us

Where we’ve gone wrong

Quoting chapter, verse, and worse

Telling the uncontrite their fate.

I lose patience I’d never had

Only, that day, it was gone

Our differences laid on table

Wondering where that board

Across forehead swung from

his long shadow

 Chill air through window

First cool night in late summer —

Augustine was wrong

like breezes in space

You could do worse than thinking about these things. 

Body impermanent like spring mist; 

Mind insubstantial like empty sky;  

 

Thoughts unestablished like breezes in space. 

 

Think about these three points over and over.

Godrakpa (1170-1249)

The worse is seldom as bad as that which isn't good. 

I'd rather drift through these sentences than stand solid in some firm belief.

Wave if you're passing by. 

freedom is what is truly terrifying

Of course, I'd want that choice.

When to live, when to die. 

Many aver, "Leave it to God!"  I'd assert, "It is being left up to God. Where do we think God is? And what?"

As a filmmaker, I had complicated feelings about Carmen’s choice and my role in her journey. As I first got to know her, I had the hope that the process of filming could influence her to at least postpone her departure. But she had made this decision years ago. 

A former Catholic nun who had spent over a decade in a convent, she said of organized religion: “They instill fear so you can’t be free. Freedom is what is truly terrifying!” She lived the rest of her life rebelling against that fear. I eventually came to the realization that I was making this film because I’m afraid of death, and she was not. 

Carmen’s case raises a question: Should the elderly have the choice to die if they feel ready, even though they could stay with us longer? Making this film did not make answering that any easier, and I do not want Carmen to serve as an example. Ultimately, making this film taught me more about how she chose to live than how she chose to die.

( from, Should the Elderly Get to Choose When They Die?  An 86-year-old woman’s decision to end her life raises complex questions about life and death for a filmmaker., By Guillermo F. Flórez, NYT,  Opinion, 28aug24)

Whose authority does it belong to?

The mugger with a gun? The military with exploding shells and hurtling bombs? The drunk driver going wrong way on the turnpike? The troubled spouse for whom the idea of murder/suicide seems the only option? The prison warden, state prosecutor, citizen jury, or the revenge assassin deciding to take matters into their own hands?

Why would the individual who's life is depleting and health descending not have the wherewithal to determine when their end should be?

Yes, life is sacred.

As is death.

Both, as it should be, deserve reverence and a modicum (or more) of joy.

In addition, perhaps we might make that traditional pledge to pray for all those who, legitimately or illegitimately, take the prospect of death, theirs or others, into their own deliberation. 

I'd prefer that all guns and weapons be lowered.

In that low place of humility, perhaps there, things might become clear.

And we might meditate on that curious Buddhist notion that there is no birth nor death. Just life, living itself, for the time/being.

Ah, Carmen! Thank you and Guillermo for the glimpse.

We look at the sea and we see the sea.

the system we live in

So many changes to act three. 

 "You said it yourself, Big Daddy, mendacity is the system we live in." (--Brick to Big Daddy, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,  by Tennessee Williams, play 1955, film 1958)

 From original play to different productions to film of it. The script becomes an object lesson of the ways mendacity crawls across the page and screen.

It exemplifies the very system wherein we dwell.

Our current Big Daddy takes to social media, cable media, and print media several times a day to underline the motif of mendacity coursing through his veins and brain.

So many of us are unwilling to call it what it is.

Maggie the cat, herself a study in anguish and frustration, looks out at us and dares us to be different.

before it can become clear again

Because the history of something has torn spots, rough abrasions and soiled splotches — nothing escapes the ravages of time and human perversion.

That includes matters of faith, religion, and those attending to them.

“Faith often needs to become more complex before it can become clear again.” (—in Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence” by Diane Butler Bass, 2021)

It sometimes takes a steely eye and hardened sensibilities to sift through the debris so as to find any survivors capable of standing up again.

Faith is not for the faint of heart. 

bring joy to all

Joy stands around like a huge cedar tree on a late August morning with sunshine backfilling the clear air of a quiet day.

Verse of the day Deceit is in the mind of those who plan evil, but those who counsel peace have joy. - Proverbs 12:20 Voice of the day May leaders hear the truth the prophets teach us — / that gifts of peace are well worth struggling for. - Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, “A Hymn for Peace” Prayer of the day

God of peace, may those in power hear our cries for peace. Show them that true peace brings joy to all. 

(--Sojourners) 

Sitting in this still life of a sketched kitchen, grateful I am able to hiking-stick walk the 1.5 miles snow bowl greeting dog walkers and seeing two young loons in windless unrippled pond. I listen to A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith, by Brian D. McLaren, (2011)

It is morning prayer as well as intellectual pilgrimage to think about new ways of perceiving ancient narratives. Even the narrative of my curiosity spanning intercultural religions and theologies, comparative philosophical speculation, and deeply intimate considerations of expressions of anatta, anicca, and karma.

Joy is not a stranger. It stands close and seeks fraternity/sorority. It is easy to withstand, easy to be silent with as time goes by.

There's no special club to belong to in order to experience joy.

Turn your head, see the sleeping cat. Turn the other way, the dirt-dug dog.

There's a quietness, an unimposing joy, in thinking about those you currently know, those you could easily know, and prayerfully, silently, wishing them well.

As I do now, thinking of you. 

it's not there

 I'm ready to look into this.

Please point me in the right direction.

Hmmm, let me see --

Whatever you are doing, twenty-four hours a day, in all your various activities, there is something that transcends the Buddhas and Zen Masters; but as soon as you want to understand it, it’s not there.

As soon as you try to gather your attention on it, you have already turned away from it. That is why I say you see but cannot do anything about it.

Foyan (1067–1120)

Ok. I'd like to say something. 

I'd like to say something true.

Let me see.

[Pause]

Huh!

I'll be leaving now.

Pay no attention to me.

so that’s how to disappear

What if I had none 

No expressing opinion—

I would not be seen

contresens

All translation is

Misinterpretation — take

For example, God —

Surely a word everyone

Thinks they know well — laughingly

in his own clothes

 The bicycle will roll with its seven gears but the motor is cranky and shudders when asked to cut in. And I am tired after only a mile and a half.

One more thing to let go. Nor does it matter. I have my books and well-water. So many thoughts stepping down Ragged mountain. It is a kindly set of trails. They do not ask age or health or express concern when one goes high and one low.

The “spy” his outfit caught, one bamboo-slender

Child ringed round by twenty weary men —

Expressionless even when Leo —even when—

Sleep overtakes him clasping what he loathes

And loves, the dead self dressed in his own clothes.

   (P.49, The Book of Ephraim, in James Merrill’s The Changing Light At Sandover, A Poem, 1992)

Who or what it is Merrill contacts with poetic imagination I don’t know.

The Buddhist in me sees nothing else to be object to my disappearing subject.

The Christian in me asks nothing else from the cosmos other than what time it is and what’s the temperature.

These are the clothes I wear.

A wristwatch and a hat.

A chair to tilt back so as to close eyes and drift off a while.

morning for unchurched

 spider strand stretches

overhang to yew bush -- light

breeze through open door

nightly routine

Thump, thump, thump with stick

'Pish, pish' to St. Bernard mix

And he does — back in

and the integrative tendencies of organisms

It sounds like an academic distinction -- duality vs polarity. 

It might turn out to be the crux of our current political struggle. 

Duality is characteristic of the mental structure to the same extent that polarity is a hallmark of the mythical structure. But duality differs in one essential respect from polarity: in polarity correspondences are valid. Every correspondence is a complement, a completion of the whole. 

 

Duality is the mental splitting and tearing apart of polarity, and, from the correspondences of polarity, duality abstracts and quantifies the oppositions or antitheses.… from duality only a deficient, because unstable, form of unity can be realized as the unification of opposites in a third aspect. 

(--Jean Gebser, [EPO 85, 86])

Duality intends a rupturing, a severing of what is connected, and a subsequent analysis as to which end of the split is better, richer, more worthy, and which end should be diminished, denigrated, or eliminated.

This mechanism of perception has long been with us. It represents a cutting off of one from another, a hierarchy of worth, and a categorization of those who belong from those who do not belong.

If I have any glimmer of understanding about holarchy and grace, I would want to further explore a world view that embraces and appreciates one as another, one within another, one an-other.

A holon is something that is simultaneously a whole in and of itself, as well as a part of a larger whole. In this way, a holon can be considered a subsystem within a larger hierarchical system.^[1]

The holon represents a way to overcome the dichotomy between parts and wholes, as well as a way to account for both the self-assertive and the integrative tendencies of organisms.^[2] Holons are sometimes discussed in the context of self-organizing holarchic open (SOHO) systems.^[2][1]

The word holon (Greek: ὅλον) is a combination of the Greek holos (ὅλος) meaning 'whole', with the suffix -on which denotes a particle or part (as in proton and neutron). Holons are self-reliant units that possess a degree of independence and can handle contingencies without asking higher authorities for instructions (i.e., they have a degree of autonomy). These holons are also simultaneously subject to control from one or more of these higher authorities. The first property ensures that holons are stable forms that are able to withstand disturbances, while the latter property signifies that they are intermediate forms, providing a context for the proper functionality for the larger whole.  (wikipedia)

The whole belongs to no-one, thus, to every-one. This sense of belonging is not the sense of possession, as in real estate, or furniture, a financial portfolio, or a closet full of shirts.

The whole, it might be said, is where God is. Perhaps, better said, the whole is what God is.

So many have difficulty, in the traditional parlance, believing in God. This might be because so many of us dwell in the "parts." We dwell in the fragmentary conception of reality as bits and pieces that are best owned and traded, bolstering the concept of the economy variously navigated by different "classes" of society whose social class is predicated on wealth and possessions.

The very notion that there is a "whole" is a dubious consideration most think is better left to abstract thinkers, philosophers, and theologians. It is not meant for practical people, movers and shakers, or the common folk whose very livelihood is predicated on the bits and pieces of hourly wage or yearly salary minus the cost of housing, food, clothing, and distracting amusements.

No, they might say, the whole is a luxury most cannot afford to think about, unless it is packaged as some heavenly destination attained after a life of ethical and moral rectitude and strong faith in a God who will reward or punish based on your beliefs and actions.

Polarity suggests an interconnection. A spectrum of continuity. A realization that no one is out of the loop.

The notion of wholeness, where, it might be said, each being is everywhere and nowhere, can be unsettling to our dualistic thinking.

"Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation" -- is how John Fowles began his novel Daniel Martin. 

We live, perhaps, in a desolate time. We are so busy trying to serve the ego and be better than some perceived enemy. 

"I am better than you" it seems, is easier to say than "I see the best in you."

Our political theater, nightly, performs the same play with the same lines and the same intent -- to better the other.

To better the other rather than to become the other.

Wherein there is no other.

Just us. No one, no being, no thing left out.

The whole of it.