Saturday, December 06, 2014

rain and snow, come and go


Feel what you feel.

Think what you think.

Only, don't become attached to what you feel or think.

Everything changes up.  Two candles. One light.

Friday, December 05, 2014

still

In Staten Island
breath is
held cheap --
Eric Garner
still
can't
breathe

Wednesday, December 03, 2014

the war on black men by officials and police just became a little scarier

Policeman, (nor the assembled hold-him-down, kneel-on-his neck-and-head officers) who killed Eric Garner with banned chokehold for selling individual cigarettes, is not indicted for the homicide.

He pleaded for breath.

Nobody, then or now, helped Mr Garner. 


Bramhall’s World, Justice system and Eric Garner

Alice Walker on who actually killed Eric Garner.

 ©2014 by Alice Walker for Carl Dix and Cornel West

It is still hard to believe
that millions of us saw Eric Garner die.
He died with what looked like a half dozen
heavily clad
policemen
standing on his body, twisting and crushing
him
especially his head
and neck.
He was a big man, too.  They must have felt
like clumsy midgets
as they dragged him down.

Watching the video,
I was reminded of the first lynching
I, quite unintentionally, learned about:
it happened in my tiny lumber mill 
town before the cows were brought in
and young white girls
on ornate floats
became dairy queens.
A big man too,
whom my parents knew,
he was attacked also by a mob
of white men (in white robes and hoods)
and battered to death
by their two by fours.

I must have been a toddler
overhearing my parents talk
and mystified by pieces of something
called “two by fours.”
Later, building a house, 
i would encounter the weight,
the heaviness, of this varying length
of wood, and begin to understand.
What is the hatred
of the big black man
or the small black man
or the medium sized
black man
the brown man
or the red man
in all his sizes
that drives the white lynch mob
mentality?

I always thought it was envy:
of the sheer courage to survive
and ceaselessly resist conformity
enough to sing and dance
or orate, or say in so many outlandish
ways:
You’re not the boss
of me!
Think how many black men
said that: “Cracker,* you’re not the boss
of me;” 
even enslaved.  Think of how
the legal lynch mob 
so long ago
tore Nat Turner’s body
in quarters
skinned him 
and made “money purses”
from his “hide.”
Who are these beings?

Now we are beginning to ask
the crucial question.
If it is natural to be black
and red or brown
and if it is beautiful to resist
oppression
and if it is gorgeous to be of color
and walking around free,
then where does the problem
lie?

Who are these people
that kill our children in the night?
Murder our brothers in broad daylight?
Refuse to see themselves in us
as we have strained, over centuries, 
to see ourselves in them?
Perhaps we are more different
than we thought.
And does this scare us?
And what of, for instance,
those among us
who collude?
Gather.
Come see what stillness
lies now
in the people’s broken
hearts.

It is the quiet force of comprehension,
of realization
of the meaning
of our ancient
and perfect
contrariness;
of what must now be understood
and done to honor
and cherish
ourselves:
no matter who
today’s “bosses”
may be.

Our passion
and love for ourselves
that must at last
unite
and free us.  As we lay our sacrificed
beloveds to rest
in our profound
and ample caring:
broad, ever moving,
and holy,
as the sea. 
*Cracker:  from the crack of the whip wielded by slave drivers. http://aliasbruce.typepad.com/alias_bruce/2014/09/alice-walker-on-who-actually-killed-eric-garner.html

Tuesday, December 02, 2014

"Advent, when ladder climbing stops we are ready to gather around the manger"


Something this way arrives from louie, louie this morning.
"Alexandra Bircken’s site-specific installation Deflated Bodies in the Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield, forms part of her Eskalation 2014 exhibition."


"In the face of such injustice and harm the Bible prophetically kicks away the ladders and gives the lie to seductions of ladder climbing and ladder making. Seen through a biblical lens Alexandra Bircken’s Deflated Bodies portrays the horrific cost and the appalling waste of the thinking which blighted our world then and which continues to do so now. It makes plain all that God desires us to subvert and overthrow.”             
(--from art exhibition,  http://visualtheology.blogspot.com/2014/11/advent-when-ladder-climbing-stops-we.html
This morning watched night become dawn breathing light arriving shapes of mountain, tree. road. 

Monday, December 01, 2014

After Wallander & The Troubled Man


To remain safe & sane it is wise to ignore lies & secrets of government, corporation & institution. 

So...wise is humbling & foolish, eh? 

Yep!

I think: to know? what? don’t



I don’t know
what
to think.
The realm of non-thinking 
Can hardly be fathomed by cognition;  
In the sphere of genuine suchness 
There is neither “I" nor "other."               
                 - Yunmen (864-949)
To think,
know
what I don’t.

What to
think?
“I"?
Don’t know

missing; nothing


Cat spat at 3am. 

In the dream I sit on floor with one of Del Mastro brothers I knew in the 1960s. He is in brown habit. He died at thirty. He is telling me there will be a talk by a theologian, something about the abc's of Ten Commandments. While in the past an encounter with woman from early seventies. Can one be happy finding the particulars of past circulating in dream state?

Everything emerges from silence. Sounds itself. Returns to silence.

Are we, each of us, an articulation drawing us into form of something seen something heard, a moment's manifestation, then a Doppler diminishing, a fading image on screen going to disappearance?

We live, it is said, as dream within a dream. We feel this mirage real, we look at it, we are seen as it.

And so, take naps. Dream within the dream that resides as dream of Dream.

There's no need to wake up.

It's dream all the way down.

Cat, kneading her way with inner motor purring with momentary rest, decides to go to window again to see what she is missing.

I suspect it is nothing.

Sunday, November 30, 2014

first candle; coming toward


New liturgical year. 

Repeat: arriving, always arriving.

One whole through billions of particulars.

Becoming apparent.

landing, intuition


Something gives way in peapod. At tie-up along harbor dock she fills with water. There's a time for each of us to come ashore.