something ugly this way comes

Nausea seeps through hole in space/time and turns my stomach.

 1.      Ithaca Voice / By Jeff Stein 

Notable Anti-Drone Activist and Grandmother Sentenced to Prison for Photographing Protest. Grady Flores was sentenced to jail for violating an order of protection after being part of a demonstration against drones.

http://www.alternet.org/activism/notable-anti-drone-activist-and-grandmother-sentenced-prison-photographing-protest 

Ithaca, N.Y. — An Ithaca woman crossed the street and stood for a few minutes where she wasn’t supposed to stand. Then she crossed back to where it was OK to stand. Now she’s going to jail for a year.
(For background on the case, see yesterday’s story, “Criminal or martyr? Inside the political formation of Ithaca’s jailed grandmother.“)
There are plenty of reasons to deplore the excessive jail sentence that DeWitt Town Justice David S. Gideon handed down last week to Mary Anne Grady Flores, a 58-year-old grandmother of three.
Here are seven of them: 

Editorial: Sentence against Ithaca drones protester is a farce and an outrageBy: THE ITHACA VOICE | July 16, 2014, http://ithacavoice.com/2014/07/editorial-sentence-ithaca-drones-protester-farce-outrage/

2.

A 400-pound asthmatic Staten Island dad died Thursday after a cop put him in a chokehold and other officers appeared to slam his head against the sidewalk, video of the incident shows.“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” Eric Garner, 43, repeatedly screamed after at least five NYPD officers took him down in front of a Tompkinsville beauty supply store when he balked at being handcuffed.Within moments Garner, a married father of six children with two grandchildren, stopped struggling and appeared to be unconscious as police called paramedics to the scene. An angry crowd gathered, some recording with smartphones.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/staten-island-man-dies-puts-choke-hold-article-1.1871486#ixzz37wSItkuM 

3.

The Palestinian death toll in Gaza during the war rose to 336, with more than 2,400 wounded, the Palestinian health ministry said. About 75 percent of the casualties have been civilians, according to the United Nations. 

The Israeli military dropped leaflets urging residents of additional areas, including two crowded refugee camps, Al-Bureij and Al-Maghazi, to evacuate, raising alarms from the United Nations, which said that shelters were already overwhelmed and in danger of running out of supplies. More than 63,000 people have flocked to official shelters, a number that has tripled in two days, and many more have taken refuge with friends and family.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/world/middleeast/gaza-israel.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=LargeMediaHeadlineSum&module=span-ab-lede-package-region&region=lede-package&WT.nav=lede-package&_r=0 

Someone sitting in the glow of Saturday night bonfire said life is not difficult once you learn how to live it in peace.

Then, through seamless black hole, the poison enters and I am stricken with unlearning nausea.

how would you describe us?

Israel pummels Palestinian Gaza with shelling and ground invasion. Gaza goes dark. Israel dwells darker still.

Russia looks at the civilian plane shot down and looks at the missile launcher that downed it.

I think about the man executed in Missouri whose last words were: “You’re killing an innocent man.”

We are so primitive. So hapless. So dull. 

So unattuned. 

Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going
Two simple happenings
That got entangled. 

(--Kozan Ichikyo, “Coming, Going”)

m,

Woman we know currently in Maryland for another surgical procedure re-fusing sections of her spine.

She says she’s asked her doctor if things do not go well to put her in a coma until some corrective action could be taken.

We are driving back from Auburn. Route 17 opens to Appleton Ridge and farmland before Union under blue sky and billowing white clouds. We tell her on the call that Maine awaits her return. She is cheered.

I tell her I hope her doctor knows how to spell.

“Spell? she asks.

“Yes,” I say. "What if he puts you in a ‘comma’ in the middle of a sentence?”

Her surgery is Friday afternoon.

She is laughing.

father, sons

Four children are blown up in Gaza.

Shame on those that hide behind military jargon and strategy rationalization.

As they played on and around a jetty in the late-afternoon sun, a blast hit a nearby shack. One boy was killed instantly. The others ran. There was a second blast, and three more bodies littered the sand. One was charred, missing a leg, and another lay motionless, his curly head intact, his legs splayed at unnatural angles. 

The Israeli military acknowledged later that it had launched the strike, which it said was aimed at Hamas militants, and called the civilian deaths “a tragic outcome.” 

The four dead boys came quickly to symbolize how the Israeli aerial assaults in Gaza are inevitably killing innocents in this crowded, impoverished sliver of land along the Mediterranean Sea. They stood out because they were inarguably blameless, children who simply wanted to play on their favorite beach, near the fishing port where their large extended family keeps its boats.  

://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/17/world/middleeast/gaza-strip-beach-explosion-kills-children.html?contentCollection=world&action=click&module=NextInCollection&region=Footer&pgtype=article

 The ugly enemy of life wanders through the eyes of those targeting the living with death.

There is no hope in the face of force, weaponry, and psychopathology.

In prison, CJ could be right: the God so many worship is quite possibly a psychopath.

These talmudic students continue their studies.

Seriously.

As I do.

Sorrowfully.

allure of non-news social sites

Like dogs to source of a good smell, there's a gathering to something ripe, rotting, or faintly dangerous. Each visitor leaves their mark.

"So, the highest form of love or devotion is simply to abide as awarenes, knowingly. Any other sort of devotion would be the devotion af an imagined entity towards an imagined object." 

(--Rupert Spira, p.127, Presence, The Intimacy of All Experience vol ll)

Goodbye momma, goodbye to you too pop

(A haiku)

Zen without Buddhism

Contemplation without Christianity

Poetry without words

Nothing but Tuesday

Birds fly through rain.

No umbrella, no yellow slicker --

Cooing dove -- dawn

What question do you hear?

Ordinary.

The Results of Practice | July 14, 2014

---

One becomes an ordinary person, but in an extraordinary way. Your words are still there, your hang-ups may still be there, you still have to deal with all your karmic baggage and so on, but you see it in a totally different light. You're at peace with yourself, at peace with the world. Not in a complacent sense, but in the sense that you can simply devote yourself to a life of compassion. 

(--L.F. Habito, Other Fingers Pointing to the Moon, Tricycle Daily Dharma)

A life.

Of compassion.

Simply devoted.

spirituality and hospice

Honor the journey.

Think of your religious tradition. Everyone has one. Ask yourself this question: If I had nothing to believe in, how would I live my life? Would “life” be enough? Or do we need something more, something else, something other, some place away, some other time -- in order to give our lives meaning?

Someone is dying. It’s all going away. Something is coming to its end.

What might be coming to an end is the religious traditions we all have in our histories.

Without them we are left with life that leads to (and through?) death.

Life, life itself, just might be the most significant spiritual journey, absent hope for something that might be after death. (Perhaps what is after death is life -- same as ever -- only seen clearly for the first time as what it really is.)

Make peace with life.

Live life with peace.

Honor the journey.

s t o p -- (a way to go)

seeing

this,

our

practice

appreciatory, a heart condition

It is the orientation of heart that entices the mechanism of mind to rationalize justification for action. It is not conditioning of mind that influences heart.

We often see this wrong. We want to train the mind, thinking heart will follow.

Perhaps "right heart" will become the 9th addition to the eightfold path.

Stoney heart creates hard thinking action. Open hear creates complementary thoughtful action.

Have a heart -- let it be clear and flowing with appreciatory love!

Ora et labora

Loon cry across silence where dawn opens eye and birds shower song into stillness.

Wu Wei -- effortless awakening.

Father Benedict, founder (they say) of monasticism, find here a suitable community of fellow creatures praying reality into god, god into reality, heart/mind into integrity of place!

Pane, not pain

A saint, the book said, is someone who, like a window, let's light show through.

Holiness allows translucence. It need not be its cause. It allows.

Here's to windows, light, and effect.

Madre Mia

Night grows quiet.

Only one thing 

made him happy 

and now that 

it was gone 

everything 

made him happy. 

(--Leonard Cohen, "Leonard Koan")

Room is quiet.

A yawn.

Blessings of birth anniversary to you!

Kinhin

Walking meditation at corner of Tire Warehouse parking lot right angle of shade from two trees in Bangor for thirty minutes.

No waiting. Rather, walking.

Nothing to wait for. Only, this step, this step, pivot, turn, this step, this step.

As the title of the book says: Practicing Mortality

It is courageous to spend time consciously with someone dying.

It might be with someone other than yourself.

It might be with yourself.

It is time well spent.

Entering

Present

Feeling

Aware

Truly,

Alive.

acquainted with night

Something odd has taken center stage. Personal interest in any professional sport, any personal news about any celebrity, or direct or oblique reference to body size, body part, or who’s doing what with whom -- is not the least bit interesting.

Center stage is empty.

Emptiness.

Bodhidharma, the reading tonight said, didn’t go to China to bring zen or the Buddha. He went to find one person not deluded by people.

Since 6th century C.E. looking around for the non-deluded!

Good luck!

Have mercy Lord and hear my prayer

We cut broken tree by road.

READING Deuteronomy 6:4-7 

Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength. Take to heart these words which I enjoin on you today. Drill them into your children. Speak of them at home and abroad, whether you are busy or at rest.  (--from Compline, Saturday night)

We pray for what and who needs praying for.

finding oneself within

How lovely the idea of shared responsibility for the world.

If this sounds like a lot of emotional tumult, it is. When we engage in a creativity recovery, we enter into a withdrawal process from life as we know it. Withdrawal is another way of saying detachment or nonattachment, which is emblematic of consistent work with any meditation practice.

We ourselves are the substance we withdraw to, not from, as we pull our overextended and misplaced creative energy back into our own core.

(--Julia Cameron, in The Artist's Way) 

How is it so few keep so many from it's realization? 

Friday the 4th

A woman we know writes from prison. She is not free today.

Mid afternoon prayer plays from ipad.

What we do is listen. To her. Our prayer.

HYMN 

Come and See, what I have done: I’ve given My only Son. He lived for you, and He died for you.Come and See. 

Lamb of God, Lamb of God, have mercy on us, forgive us, Lord. 

Come and See, what I have done: I’ve given My only Son.He lived for you, and He died for you.Come and See. 

Creator of Love, source of all life, have mercy on us, forgive us Lord.Come and See, what I have done: I’ve given My only Son.He lived for you, and He died for you.Come and See. 

“Pieta” by Melinda Kirigin-Voss; The Pietà (pl. same; Italian for pity) is a subject in Christian art depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus, most often found in sculpture.