do something

I grieve for my brothers and sisters. I grieve for truth.
Not Donald Trump‘s abdication of truth. But earlier.
The 9/11 travesty. The improbable and the mendacious.
It is 17 years gone. We are not satisfied with explanations.
Hence, we are desolate. And we are forsaken. Enter
the people in our current government. Heirs of blatant
deception, arrogance, and surly inexplicable popularity.

I grieve.

Of a Tuesday in September.

School of Truth 

O fool, do something, so you won't just stand there looking dumb. 

If you are not traveling and on the road, how can you call yourself a guide? 

In the School of Truth, one sits at the feet of the Master of Love. 

So listen, son, so that one day you may be an old father, too!  

All this eating and sleeping has made you ignorant and fat; 

By denying yourself food and sleep, you may still have a chance. 

Know this: If God should shine His lovelight on your heart, 

I promise you'll shine brighter than a dozen suns.

And I say: wash the tarnished copper of your life from your hands; 

To be Love's alchemist, you should be working with gold. 

Don't sit there thinking; go out and immerse yourself in God's sea. 

Having only one hair wet with water will not put knowledge in that head. 

For those who see only God, their vision 

Is pure, and not a doubt remains.

Even if our world is turned upside down and blown over by the wind, 

If you are doubtless, you won't lose a thing. 

O Hafiz, if it is union with the Beloved that you seek, 

Be the dust at the Wise One's door, and speak! 

(—Hafiz, Sufi poet. From: 'Drunk On the Wind of the Beloved'  Translated by Thomas Rain Crowe)

it’s always something

Still, Zhuangzi points out what we mostly miss.

Perfect virtue produces nothing.     — Zhuangzi

The eternal nothing

The Little Book of Truth, “The Exemplar” by Henry Suso, ed. By Frank Tobin (About Henry Suso see note at bottom)
https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Suso

Edi

• Eternity is life that is beyond time but includes within itself all time but without a before or after. And whoever is taken into the Eternal Nothing possesses all in all and has no 'before or after'. Indeed a person taken within today would not have been there for a shorter period from the point of view of eternity than someone who had been taken 
  
  

  Whoever is taken into the Eternal Nothing possesses all in all and has no 'before or after'
  within a thousand years ago.

• Now these people who are taken within, 
  
  

  These people who are taken within, because of their boundless immanent oneness with God, see themselves as always and eternally existing
  because of their boundless immanent oneness with God, see themselves as always and eternally existing

• You and I do not meet on one branch or in one place. You make your way along one path and I along another. Your questions arise from human thinking, and I respond from a knowledge that is far beyond all human comprehension. 
  
  

  You must give up human understanding if you want to reach the goal, because the truth is known by not knowing
  You must give up human understanding if you want to reach the goal, because the truth is known by not knowing

• After this the disciple turned again in all seriousness to eternal Truth and asked for the power to discern by outward appearance a person who was truly detached. He asked thus. Eternal Truth, how do such people act in relation to various things?
  Answer: They withdraw from themselves, and all things withdraw along with this.
  Question: How do they conduct themselves with respect to time?
  Answer: They exist in an ever-present now, 
  
  

  They exist in an ever-present now, free of selfish intentions
  free of selfish intentions, and they seek to act perfectly in the smallest thing as in the greatest.

• Question: Paul says that no law is made for the just.
  Answer: Just persons, by becoming so, conduct themselves more submissively than other people because they understand from within, in the source, what is proper outwardly for everyone, and they view all things accordingly. The reason that they are unfettered is that they do (freely) out of an attitude of detachment what ordinary people do under compulsion.

• Question: Is not the person who has been transported to interior detachment freed from external exercises?
  Answer: One sees few people reach the condition you describe without their strength being wasted. The efforts of those who really achieve it affect them to the marrow. And so, when they realise what is to be done and left undone, they continue to practise the usual exercises, performing them more or less frequently as their strength and the occasion permit.
  Question: Where do the pangs of conscience and other anxieties of seemingly good people come from, as well as the unrestrained latitude (of conscience) in other people?
  Answer: Both types are focusing their attention on their own image but in different ways; the one group spiritually, the other bodily.

• Question: Does a detached person remain unoccupied all the time, or what does he or she do?
  Answer: The activity of really detached people lies in their becoming detached, and their achievement is to remain unoccupied because they remain calm in action and unconcerned about their achievements.
  Question: What is their conduct toward their fellow human beings?
  Answer: They enjoy the companionship of people, but without being compromised by them. They love them without attachment, and they show them sympathy without anxious concern - all in true freedom.
  Question: Is such a person required to go to confession?
  Answer: The confession that is motivated by love is nobler than one motivated by necessity
• Question: What is such people’s prayer like? Are they supposed to pray, too?
  Answer: Their prayer is effective because they forestall the influence of the senses. God is spirit and knows whether this person has put an obstacle in the way or whether he or she has acted from selfish impulses. And then a light is enkindled in their highest power, which makes clear that God is the being, life and activity within them and that they are merely instruments.
• Question: What are such a person's eating, drinking and sleeping like?
  Answer: Externally, and in keeping with their sensuous nature, the outward person eats. Internally, however, they are as if not eating; otherwise, 
  
  

  One does not arrive at the goal by asking questions. It is rather through detachment that one comes to this hidden truth
  they would be enjoying food and rest like an animal. This is also the case in other things pertaining to human existence.

• Question: What is their external behaviour like?
  Answer: They have few mannerisms, and they do not talk a lot; their words are simple and direct. They live modestly so that things pass through them without their involvement. They are composed in their use of the senses.
  Question: Are all detached people like this?
  Answer: More so or less so, depending on accidental circumstances. Essentially, however, they are the same.
  Question: Do such people come to a full knowledge of the truth, or do they remain in the realm of opinion and imagining?
  Answer: Since they remain basically human, they continue to have opinions and imaginings. But because they have withdrawn from themselves into that which is, they have a knowledge of all truth; for this is truth itself and they ignore themselves. But let this be enough for you. 
  
  

  It is important to realize that everyone has five kinds of self
  One does not arrive at the goal by asking questions. It is rather through detachment that one comes to this hidden truth. Amen

• Disciple: Lord, what is true detachment?
• Truth: Take note with careful discrimination of these two words: oneself and leave. If you know how to weigh these two words properly, testing their meaning thoroughly to their core and viewing them with true discernment, then you can quickly grasp the truth.
  Take, first of all, the first word -- oneself or myself -- and see what it is. It is important to realize that everyone has five kinds of self. The first self we have in common with a stone, and this is being. The second we share with plants, and this is growing. The third self we share with animals, and this is sensation. The fourth we share with all other human beings: we possess a common human nature in which all are one. The fifth - which belongs to a person exclusively as his or her own - is one's individual human self…
  Now what is it that leads people astray and robs them of happiness? It is exclusively this last self. Because of it a person turns outward, away from God and toward this self, when he or she should be returning inward. Thus they fashion their own selves according to what is accidental. In their blindness they appropriate to themselves what is God's. This is the direction they take, and they eventually sink into sinfulness.

• Disciple: The truth be praised! Dear Lord, tell me, does anything (of this self) still remain in the happy, detached person?
• 
  
• Truth: Without a doubt it happens that, when the good and loyal servant is led into the joy of his Lord, he becomes drunk from the limitless overabundance of God's house. What happens to a drunken man happens to him, though it cannot really be described, that he so forgets his self that he is not at all his self and consequently has got rid of his self completely and lost himself entirely in God, becoming one spirit in all ways with him, just as a small drop of water does which has been dropped into a large amount of wine. Just as the drop of water loses itself, drawing the taste and colour of the wine to and into itself, so it happens that those who are in full possession of blessedness lose all human desires in an inexpressible manner, and they ebb away from themselves and are immersed completely in the divine will. Otherwise, if something of the individual were to remain of which he or she were not completely emptied, scripture could not be true in stating that God shall 
  
  

  When the good and loyal servant is led into the joy of his Lord, he becomes drunk from the limitless overabundance of God's house. What happens to a drunken man happens to him, though it cannot really be described, that he so forgets his self that he is not at all his self
  become all things in all things. Certainly one's being remains, but in a different form, in a different resplendence, and in a different power. This is all the result of total detachment from self.

...   ...   ...

Suffering is the ancient law of love; there is no quest without pain; there is no lover who is not also a martyr.

Note:

The Blessed Henry Suso (21 March c. 1300 – 25 January 1366), also known as Amandus or Heinrich Seuse, was a German-Swiss mystic of the Catholic Church, born at Überlingen on Lake Constance, he died in Ulm and was declared Blessed in 1831 by Pope Gregory XVI, who assigned his feast in the Dominican Order to 2 March. He was, along with his friend and contemporary Johannes Tauler, one of a triumvirate of thinkers belonging to the Rhineland school, also called The Rheno-Flemish school, of Catholic mysticism of which Meister Eckhart was the founder and supreme proponent. Blessed Jan Van Ruusbroec is also sometimes held to be a mystical teacher of this school.

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Suso

reading richard kearney

 Anthony Storr observes:

Many people resort to the so-called paranoid–schizoid stage of development, in which they will follow a guru-like leader whom they invest with magical powers for good, and at the same time find scapegoats whom they blame for the disaster and regard as wholly evil. 2(Loc.166)

Then:

My wager is that if the enigma of the Other has been largely ignored by the mainstream metaphysical tradition –going back to Parmenides and Plato who defined the Other in relation to the Same –it resurfaces again and again throughout our western cultural history in the guise of strangers, gods and monsters who will not go away and continue to command our attention. Preoccupied with the Rule of Reason, most western philosophers since Parmenides have banished the puzzlements provoked by ‘strangeness’ to the realm of Unreason, namely the cultural unconscious of myth, art and religion. And in the process of this estrangement, the Other passed from the horizon of reflective understanding into the invisible, unspeakable, unthinkable dark.  

It is my conviction that the Other may be brought back onto the horizon of philosophical understanding again in light of a number of recent explorations of the Self–Other relation in psychoanalytic theory, deconstruction, anthropology and phenomenological hermeneutics. It is also my conviction that the project of enlightenment will remain unenlightened until it comes to terms with the strangers, gods and monsters that it has all too often ostracized or ignored. And it is here that I will also be proposing a second movement from philosophy back to its others (art, religion, psychoanalysis). Understanding and pre-understanding need to get back into dialogue with each other. That is one of the guiding hypotheses of this work. 

*
One example of how this might be achieved is, I suggest, a new hermeneutic 

understanding of ‘melancholy’. If melancholic dread and anxiety is indeed one of the characteristic maladies of humanity, it is incumbent on philosophers to take this seriously. One of the best ways in which this may be done is by looking at the formative myths which epitomize this fundamental experience of alienation. Foremost here is the myth of Saturn, the monster who castrates his father and seeks to devour his own children. Though ignored by mainstream philosophy and metaphysics for centuries, certain thinkers in our own time –from Klibansky and Heidegger to Kristeva and Ricoeur –have sought to revisit the hidden meanings of this mythic monster and remind us how dread before death and loss can veer manically between abjection and elation unless we come to terms with it. Such reckoning implies both an acknowledgement and a working-through of this estranging mood, so that we may tame the monster and be less ‘driven’ by it. Once again, art, religion and psychoanalysis offer indispensable means of achieving this task. But so, I submit, does philosophy. To go on evading the monster of angst within us is a recipe for obsessional neurosis and existential inauthenticity. To face the Saturnine monster and acknowledge that it is an intregral part of us is to accept the truth that we are strangers-to-ourselves and that we need not fear such strangeness or ‘act it out’ by projecting such fear onto Others.
.
The story of Hamlet, which we explore below in both its Shakespearean and Joycean retellings, dramatizes the options faced by the melancholic soul. Confronting the terrors of death –triggered by the untimely loss of his father –the tortured Dane finds himself vacillating between mania and despair. One moment he apotheosizes his dead father as a demi-god (Hyperion), the next he recoils in horror from his ghostly apparition. The anguished Prince is a well-seasoned traveller on the peaks and troughs of strangeness. But what every melancholic –from heroic Danes to existential Daseins –must ultimately accept is this: the lost thing is really lost and the only cure lies in true mourning, that is, in the readiness to let go of the other we hold captive within or scapegoat without. The key is to let the other be other so that the self may be itself again. I will be suggesting that one of the best aids in this task is narrative understanding: a working-through of loss and fear by means of cathartic imagination and mindful acknowledgement.
.
*
Letting the other be other in the right way is, of course, no easy task. Our contemporary culture in particular exploits our deep ambiguity towards the death instinct, displacing our fearful fascination onto spectacular stories of horror, monstrosity and violence.
.
Julia Kristeva captures this point well in a dialogue we conducted on the subject in Paris in 1991:

.The media propagate the death instinct. Look at the films people like to watch after a long tiring day: a thriller or a horror film, anything less is considered boring. We are attracted to this violence. So the great moral work which grapples with the problem of identity also grapples with this contemporary experience of death, violence and hate.  

And Kristeva goes on to suggest, quite correctly in my view, that this expresses itself in extremist forms of identity politics:

Nationalisms, like fundamentalisms, are screens in front of this violence, fragile screens, see-through screens, because they only displace that hatred, sending it to the other, to the neighbour, to the rival ethnic group. The big work of our civilization is to try to fight this hatred. 3

(—from, STRANGERS, GODS AND MONSTERS, Interpreting otherness, by Richard Kearney, 2003, Routledge, kindle, Loc. 214-251)

a joy within no without

 Yes

“God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that he is so.” Plotinus

Sitting with R last night in room where so many have died before, I think about death as retrieving source of life, the going to the profound within, where God is beyond center.

This morning, reading Underhill:

The solar system is an almost perfect symbol of this concept of Reality; which finds at once its most rigid and most beautiful expression in Dante’s “Paradiso.”  182 The Absolute Godhead is conceived as removed by a vast distance from the material world of sense; the last or lowest of that system of dependent worlds or states which, generated by or emanating from the Unity or Central Sun, become less in spirituality and splendour, greater in multiplicity, the further they recede from their source. That Source—the Great Countenance of the Godhead—can never, say the Kabalists, be discerned by man. It is the Absolute of the Neoplatonists, the Unplumbed Abyss of later mysticism: the Cloud of Unknowing wraps it from our sight. Only by its “emanations” or manifested attributes can we attain knowledge of it. By the outflow of these same manifested attributes and powers the created universe exists, depending in the last resort on the latens Deitas: Who is therefore conceived as external to the world which He illuminates and vivifies. 

St. Thomas Aquinas virtually accepts the doctrine of Emanations when he writes:  183 “As all the perfections of Creatures descend in order from God, who is the height of perfection, man should begin from the lower creatures and ascend by degrees, and so advance to the knowledge of God. . . . And because in that roof and crown of all things, God, we find the most perfect unity, and everything is stronger and more excellent the more thoroughly it is one; it follows that diversity and variety increase in things, the further they are removed from Him who is the first principle of all.” Suso, whose mystical system, like that of most Dominicans, is entirely consistent with Thomist philosophy, is really glossing Aquinas when he writes: “The supreme and superessential Spirit has ennobled man by illuminating him with a ray from the Eternal Godhead. . . . Hence from out the great ring which represents the p. 98 Eternal Godhead there flow forth . . . little rings, which may be taken to signify the high nobility of natural creatures.”  184

(—from Chapter V, Mysticism and Theology, in Mysticism, by Evelyn Underhill, [1911], at sacred-texts.com )http://www.sacred-texts.com/myst/myst/myst08.htm

The beyond center is the within of within.

We spend our lives navigating the outer.

Returning to the source — the center of all that is — is our final pilgrimage. And this pilgrimage requires no effort. None but consistently letting go.

R is going within.

During the late afternoon early evening down the corridor two women (as we say) died.

Drops of water falling into vast oceanic emptiness — the first light dawning disappearance into what is unseen in its permeable presence that, for no better word, we call absence.

“It feels so empty,” we say.

Yes.

It does.

A discoverable mystery, a joy within no without.

semiotic temporicity*

middle night

center everywhere

circumference nowhere —

once God, now this

...   ...   ...

* https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Gebser’s_19_Criteria_to_Appraise_Aperspectival_Movements_and_Tendencies

living well environment

I love how zên in Greek means “living.” And in Japanese Zen, following Chinese “Chan” and Sanskrit “dhyana” means “meditation.”

The principal idea with which Aristotle begins is that there are differences of opinion about what is best for human beings, and that to profit from ethical inquiry we must resolve this disagreement. He insists that ethics is not a theoretical discipline: we are asking what the good for human beings is not simply because we want to have knowledge, but because we will be better able to achieve our good if we develop a fuller understanding of what it is to flourish. In raising this question—what is the good?—Aristotle is not looking for a list of items that are good. He assumes that such a list can be compiled rather easily; most would agree, for example, that it is good to have friends, to experience pleasure, to be healthy, to be honored, and to have such virtues as courage at least to some degree. The difficult and controversial question arises when we ask whether certain of these goods are more desirable than others. Aristotle's search for the good is a search for the highest good, and he assumes that the highest good, whatever it turns out to be, has three characteristics: it is desirable for itself, it is not desirable for the sake of some other good, and all other goods are desirable for its sake. 

Aristotle thinks everyone will agree that the terms “eudaimonia” (“happiness”) and “eu zên” (“living well”) designate such an end. The Greek term “eudaimon” is composed of two parts: “eu” means “well” and “daimon” means “divinity” or “spirit”. To be eudaimon is therefore to be living in a way that is well-favored by a god. But Aristotle never calls attention to this etymology in his ethical writings, and it seems to have little influence on his thinking. He regards “eudaimon” as a mere substitute for eu zên (“living well”). These terms play an evaluative role, and are not simply descriptions of someone's state of mind.  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/#toc

Meditation is seeing well into living well.

It is this gift, the gift of coming to realize that which appears within-without and without-within as a singular manifestation of who we are and what we are becoming — beings of dignity, infinite boundlessness, and caring interconnectedness.

All this, and the ability to speak through this with one another as we travel and pass through this existence with attention, presence, and a compassionate heart.

Union, unity, umwelt.*

...   ...   ...

* Umwelt 

In the semiotic theories of Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, umwelt (plural: umwelten; from the German Umwelt meaning "environment" or "surroundings") is the "biological foundations that lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal".^[1] The term is usually translated as "self-centered world".^[2] Uexküll theorised that organisms can have different umwelten, even though they share the same environment. The subject of umwelt and Uexküll's work is described by Dorion Sagan in an introduction to a collection of translations.^[3] The term umwelt, together with companion terms Umgebung (an Umwelt as seen by another observer) and Innenwelt (the mapping of the self to the world of objects)^[4], have special relevance for cognitive philosophers, roboticists and cyberneticians, since they offer a solution to the conundrum of the infinite regress of the Cartesian Theater. 

—Wikipedia   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt

breaking out

Inmates practice yoga.

That is good.

Prison is so limiting.

Soul is boundless.

what is real

Why is it difficult to be ethical?

Because we are not in our right mind.

Right mind is everything revealing itself as it is.

That mind is beyond concepts, beyond normative rules.

That mind is this.

And this is 100% correct relationship with what is real.

9/11

Horror has no happy outcome.

But time, it seems, moves on.

As we look over our shoulder.

meaningful adjacency

In the video the man is telling
others how names are grouped
around footprint
of empty space

Running with water
where Tower Two stood
seventeen years ago

As in last moment
of their lives, so in
length of carved
nominalism for

Eyes to glance

Next to one
another

nothing else seen

Rain falls like

buildings on 9/11

People fall like

nothing else seen

If you want 

to understand, try

this: there is 

No understanding

carriers

It is 2018. Eve of anniversary of 9/11/2001.

And we are still fearful.

Of just what — we’re not sure.

‘Monsters’ also signal borderline experiences of uncontainable excess, reminding the ego that it is never wholly sovereign. Many great myths and tales bear witness to this. Oedipus and the Sphinx. Theseus and the Minotaur. Job and Leviathan. Saint George and the Dragon. Beowulf and Grendel. Ahab and the Whale. Lucy and the Vampire. Ripley and the Alien. Each monster narrative recalls that the self is never secure in itself. ‘There are monsters on the prowl’, as Michel Foucault writes, ‘whose form changes with the history of knowledge’. 1 For as our ideas of self-identity alter so do our ideas of what menaces this identity. Liminal creatures of the unknown shift and slide, change masks. We are of the earth, they whisper, autochthonous. We are carriers of the mark of Cain, hobbled by the Achilles heel of a primal unconscious. Monsters show us that if our aims are celestial, our origins are terrestrial. They ghost the margins of what can be legitimately thought and said. By definition unrecognizable, they defy our accredited norms of identification. Unnatural, transgressive, obscene, contradictory, heterogeneous, mad. Monsters are what keep us awake at night and make us nervous during the day. And even when they claim as in Monsters Inc. that ‘they only scare because they care’, they still scare.

 (—from, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness by Richard Kearney)

So, we look around to locate what, for now, we will desperately be afraid of, hate, and cruelly diminish.

with you I am here

Lex Hixon reading Saturday morning practice suggests right hand assists left hand, not based on compassion, but just to assist.

Adyashanti talk Sunday Evening Practice suggests you can’t think your way out of koan (or out of inevitable death), nor love your way out of it, but only let go, surrender.

David Whyte poem on Friday’s Poetry, Tea, and Thee went:

THE WELL OF GRIEF  

Those who will not slip beneath           

        the still surface on the well of grief,  

turning down through its black water            

       to the place we cannot breathe,   

will never know the source from which we drink,           

        the secret water, cold and clear,  

nor find in the darkness glimmering,  

     the small round coins,                   

           thrown by those who wished for something else.

We practice together so as to face the perennial question “Why am I doing this?” 

One response is “I am doing this because I am here.”

With you.

I am here.

where (we’re) everywhere

If its 3am, it must be consciously.

“Reification” is the term for becoming fixated, or getting stuck or trapped in one mode of perception, or the singular “point-of-view”, and this is what we refer to as “narcissism”, which I’ve referred to as being “trapped in the mirror” or the phantom called “self-image”. Reification means that consciousness and perception lose their fluency and fluidity and becomes rigid like stone or fossil, which is the condition I’ve referred to as “the arrogance of ignorance”. That rigidity of perception and perspective is usually what we mean when speaking of “Selfhood” or of ego-nature and identity. 

That is certainly one of the things I take from the meaning of “post-historic man”, who is no longer able to enter into these various legacy structures of consciousness without losing his marbles and why the “culture of narcissism” is synonymous with the “empathy deficit”.
(—from Gebser’s Empathetic Epistemics, blog, The Chrysalis) https://longsworde.wordpress.com/2017/07/10/gebsers-empathetic-epistemics/

This chilly morning with no marbles.

Where, what once we called ‘prayer,’ becomes now being present, everywhere.

don’t ask

We are not

Two

Nor are we

One

clear and cold moving through grief

Eight of us in prison this morning around a circle talking with one another about Rumi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddha, and Ezekiel.

Ten of us at poetry midafternoon in Nursing Home reading Poe, Collins, a Sung poet, a Tang poet, David Whyte, and Robert Frost.

Eight of us on evening hermitage porch spoke about safety, the meaning of the word "individual," critical thinking, how to argue without creating "other," and one person saying that there is no outside for her -- we are what is within everyone and everything.

A Friday.

A joy!

friday

Cool morning on mountain

Scat inside barn door —

Visitor scouting lodging

the gamble

This is news today:

On Wednesday, we learned from Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, under questioning from Democratic senators: 

• He cannot say whether a president can promise a pardon in exchange for a witness’s silence. • He won’t say whether the president is subject to a subpoena to give live testimony in an ongoing criminal matter. • He cannot say whether firing a prosecutor looking into the president’s wrongdoing (akin to the Saturday Night Massacre) is acceptable, even though he opined on the subject in 1998. • He refuse to say whether a president can  self-pardon. • He will not recuse himself from matters pertaining to the president’s status as, in effect, an alleged co-conspirator to defraud voters. • He would not answer a question from Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) as to whether a president could, as President Trump did in deploring prosecution of Republican House members, use federal agencies to help friends and punish enemies.

(—from,  Kavanaugh is daring the Senate to gamble with the Constitution, By Jennifer Rubin, September 6 at 09:15 ET, The Washington Post)

country

Darkness descends. Restless night. Uncertain path

is this so

The way we think of the world is how we treat one another.

Look at mind.

Learn your ethical character.

betwixed and between

I like “structural invisibility.”

In “Liminality and Communitas,” Turner begins by defining liminal individuals or entities as “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony” (1969: 95). He then goes on to name the non-structure or anti-structure that he continuously refers to in “Betwixt and Between” through such concepts as the “realm of pure possibility” and structural invisibility. He chooses the Latin term “communitas” to express this idea of anti-structure, and refers to social structure and communitas as “two major ‘models’ for human interrelatedness.” These models are defined as follows:

The first is of society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of “more” or “less.” The second, which emerges recognizably in the liminal period, is of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders. (1969: 96) http://www.liminality.org/about/whatisliminality/

 Is integral consciousness without structure?

ephemeral

Mono no aware

it begins now

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."
(Isaac Asimov)

I sat with him last Saturday night four hours as he breathed from a deeply restless but subdued place.

I sat with him tonight an hour and a half as his breath, gone, left his body quiet and still.

“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth."

(Buddha)

Family gathers. It begins now. The way we navigate new transition.

for me it is new year’s eve

31 aug.

Comes September

A new year

Give a man a mask and he will show his true face. (Oscar Wilde)

It is time to face our true face.

Happy birthday, laddie!

watching the play

When the time comes, do we expect anyone to do the right thing?

Becoming an ethical and moral individual requires self-awareness as well as a real connection with fellow beings.

An actor, whether true or charlatan, will ultimately exit the stage. 

Words, however trippingly, end

losing faith

Walking mountain

hot morning

Step by

step slowly

rooster call

Night holds on, barely

It’s only words, sounds of waking

Neutrinos billons of miles

And years from home

mourn the loss

Perhaps part of the outpouring for John McCain following his death is the stark awareness and contrast with that which is not John McCain in our midst. Not only do we mourn the loss of this funny, irascible, dedicated man — we also mourn the loss of the kind of man he presented to us to look up to, argue with, and respect. To respect a respectable man is ennobling. 

It is good practice to disagree with an agreeable man. Preferable to disagreeable men whose habits involve denigration and detraction, theft of honor for sport and personal profit.

We mourn the loss of McCain. 

He takes with him a good part of us.

from huh, to care for, through in/as, to with

Jane Hirshfield says it well.

She does so by saying what poets have said about relationship with nature.

https://youtu.be/4MZl5mdCzuY

the physics of cyberspace

The power and extent of cyberattack possibility is under-emphasized and under-appreciated.

There is more here than the skin of a wounded executive in a compromised office of a vulnerable country.

Almost everyone who has studied NotPetya, however, agrees on one point: that it could happen again or even reoccur on a larger scale. Global corporations are simply too interconnected, information security too complex, attack surfaces too broad to protect against state-trained hackers bent on releasing the next world-shaking worm. Russia, meanwhile, hardly seems to have been chastened by the US government’s sanctions for NotPetya, which arrived a full eight months after the worm hit and whose punishments were muddled with other messages chastising Russia for everything from 2016 election disinformation to hacker probes of the US power grid. “The lack of a proper response has been almost an invitation to escalate more,” says Thomas Rid, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies. 

But the most enduring object lesson of NotPetya may simply be the strange, extra­dimensional landscape of cyberwar’s battlefield. This is the confounding geography of cyberwarfare: In ways that still defy human intuition, phantoms inside M.E.Doc’s server room in a gritty corner of Kiev spread chaos into the gilded conference rooms of the capital’s federal agencies, into ports dotting the globe, into the stately headquarters of Maersk on the Copenhagen harbor, and across the global economy. “Somehow the vulnerability of this Ukrainian accounting software affects the US national security supply of vaccines and global shipping?” asks Joshua Corman, a cybersecurity fellow at the Atlantic Council, as if still puzzling out the shape of the wormhole that made that cause-and-effect possible. “The physics of cyberspace are wholly different from every other war domain.” 

In those physics, NotPetya reminds us, distance is no defense. Every barbarian is already at every gate. And the network of entanglements in that ether, which have unified and elevated the world for the past 25 years, can, over a few hours on a summer day, bring it to a crashing halt. 

(—from, THE UNTOLD STORY OF NOTPETYA, THE MOST DEVASTATING CYBERATTACK IN HISTORY, Crippled ports. Paralyzed corporations. Frozen government agencies. How a single piece of code crashed the world. 

by Andy Greenberg (@a_greenberg) is a WIRED senior writer. This story is excerpted from his book Sandworm, forthcoming from Doubleday.)https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world/

A day will come, I’m sure, when I will look at these computational devices reliant on a fragile network of signals and switches as quaint relics of a time when information and artistic entertainment  flowed easily to them in homes and public places. They will gather dust.

I will be reading a book.

Underlining and making notations in margins.

The war will be history.