say nothing
watch sun on leaves
breeze wavering
branches
these two children
killed in church
leaf and sunny rustling
Minneapolis to Maine
Sunday morning coffee
Irish cap, New York Times
companioning sorrow
tears
sit with me
dear children
we will watch
two cats walk though
one brown dog
aground in dooryard
they, too, know you
know they love you
Of course a country can go wrong.
Representatives of the people can get shut up in their own interests.
A bad man can ascend to power, surround himself with other bad people, and create havoc and bedlam.
And here we are.
God or nature will have to intervene.
The people are too afraid.
Tonight it rains in maine. That’s a good thing.
Tomorrow the bad people might fall under their own weight.
We can only wait and see.
We are fair people.
We’ll wait.
And see.
- Truth sits on the lips of dying men. (– Matthew Arnold)
- If you speak the truth, have one foot in the stirrup. (—Turkish proverb)
If you wonder
Why truth is so
Rarely spoken
You do not think
You are
Dying
Or, you have no
Horse tied
Outside door
But I’m sure
There is a
Proverb for you
Try this:
Most of us are
Already dead
But do not
Hear sound of
Mourning yet
Reading about Augustine, whose date of death (430AD) the church celebrates today.
I wanted clarification of the teaching of original sin he espoused .
Came across this:
Romans 5:12, translated properly (as in the NRSV and other translations), says: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned—“
The “one man” is, of course, Adam. And Paul seems to be saying, quite clearly in fact, that death spread because all have sinned. Now what that means exactly needs some clarification, but that isn’t the issue here. The issue is that Augustine, working from a poor Latin translation of Romans 5:12, has “in him” where the Greek has “because.”
You can see the problem. Augustine’s reading is that death spread to all because all sinned in him [in Adam]. In other words, death spread to humanity because all humanity was somehow “present” in Adam’s act of disobedience.
This bad reading of Romans 5:12, rooted in a bad Latin translation of the Greek, has led to the notion that all humans are culpable (guilty) with Adam for what Adam did—all humanity sinned in him.
Augustine’s reading is what many Christians believe Paul actually said, and which is why Augustine’s notion of “original sin” is defended with such uncompromising vehemence as the “biblical” teaching. But neither Romans nor Genesis or the Old Testament supports the idea.
(--by Peter Enns (Ph.D. fall-augustine-really-screw-everything )
A translation difference. But, then, most difficulties are brought about by errors in translation.
If “sin” is separation, then we’ll have to reconsider this difference in translation.
Matthew Fox likes “Original Blessing.” Maybe.
I’ll go with πρωτότυπη ολότητα. (protótypi olótita), (original wholeness)
And with the title of Jean Gebser’s book, “The Ever-Present Origin” we can always begin again that which is our original nature in deep mutation.
Without excuse.
Without apology.
Just humility, returning home.
Reading Frank O’Hara. Send a copy to a man I know from prison. O'Hara was just 40 when he died, in July 1966, after being hit by a jeep on Fire Island. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/04/11/books/frank-ohara-having-a-coke-poem.html
Some say it’s hard to always know where to end your poem.
At times a Jeep will end it.
it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it
(--from poem, Having a Coke With You, by Frank O’Hara)
*In literature, logos is a rhetorical appeal to an audience's sense of reason or logic, employing facts, statistics, data, historical precedents, and clear, rational arguments to persuade the reader. It focuses on presenting well-supported claims that make logical sense, ensuring a story or argument remains plausible and engaging by avoiding logical fallacies. [AI]
for now
this sorrow
is pulsing from
Minneapolis
children shot dead
elsewhere, wherever
elsewhere is,
they say
life goes on
but it doesn’t
you can utter words
say anything
but not every word
is λόγος
“This is my body”
shots, shots, shots
"Go, the mass is over”
america, america, america
they pray to Monica
children are shot dead
this is how america
functions day to day
always someone
shooting
always someone
saying crazy things
then he shot himself
the sacrifice at the altar
wasn’t enough for him
it wasn’t holy for him
president trump will fix this
he will tell us what he thinks
everything will get better --
except for that death thing
It is no timeline
Right now, just now
Nothing gone by.
Nothing ahead
Now, now, now
No pre-life, no afterlife
Just life-now
Free from before and after
Here here here, and
Gone gone gone
What joy
What grace
I have not forgotten who you are
Let me think for a moment
Nothing
I do not remember who I am
Let me think for a moment
Nothing
Would you like a glass of water
Yes, that’s it, a nice cold drink
That’s something
Not just our inner experience, but all inner experience.
“Matter is the external appearance of inner experience.” (--Bernardo Kastrup)
Perhaps, beyond being, the inner experience of what some call God.
The cosmos is experienced from within.
Mind, rife throughout the universe, is also well within human beings.
We apprehend things even without apparent direct contact with them. Hence, cosmic entanglement.
Hence, the vestiges of telepathic intercommunion.
Thereby, Trump is no stranger to me. Would that his strangeness would give way to a more interconnected sensitivity to his fellow beings rather than the obsession of control and cashing in on all of it in his purview.
A true spirituality would see things in a more benevolent way.
May the divine assistance visit and remain with all of us now and for all time and beyond!
J.B Pritzker according to Heather Cox Richardson:
Then Pritzker turned to a warning. “To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your national guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people,” he said, “cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.”
He went on: “The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever in our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.”
“Finally,” he said, “to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching, and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now. And eventually, the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually.
“If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, the arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Humbly, I would add, it doesn't bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-171959225
Good to hear.
May good return to what is here.
And, finally
If It Be Your Will
By Leonard Cohen
If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will
If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing
If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill
Let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well
And to draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night
If it be your will
If it be your will
We do not have a political problem, nor a moral problem. We have a spiritual problem.
Defining spirituality is tricky; the word is amorphous by definition, slipping through your fingers just as you think you’ve captured it. “” gets close, in the way it hints at or hopes for something beyond the material world.Many people explain spirituality through the : connection with God, connection with their innermost selves, connection with ancestors, connection with fellow humans.
https://www.templeton.org/news/speak-to-the-earth-and-it-will-teach-you
If we were to become a spiritual community, a careful, caring community -- we might have a chance.
I'm glad the Buddha taught for so long.
And so well.
Despite the obstacles,
I pursued the great monk
The misty mountains a million layers high
He pointed to the road back home
One round moon, lantern of the sky.
—Han Shan (c 730)
He touched the earth.
As the earth touched him.
In prison today we solve the problem of border control in the United States.
We were talking about schismogenesis.
Gregory Bateson developed the concept of schismogenesis in the 1930s in reference to certain forms of social behavior between groups of the Iatmul people of the Sepik River in New Guinea. Bateson first used the term in a publication in 1935,[1][2] but elaborated on the concept in his classic 1936 ethnography Naven: A Survey of the Problems suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe drawn from Three Points of View (reissued with a new epilogue in 1958).[3] The word "naven" refers to an honorific ceremony among the Iatmul whereby certain categories of kin celebrate first-time cultural achievements. In a schematic summary, Bateson focused on how groups of women and groups of men (especially the honorees' mothers' brothers) seemingly inverted their everyday, gendered-norms for dress, behavior, and emotional expression. For the most part, these groups of people belonged to different patrilineages who not only did not regularly renew their marriage alliances, but also interacted through the mode he called schismogenesis. Men and women, too, interacted in this mode. And thus the naven ritual served to correct schismogenesis, enabling the society to endure.[4] wikipedia
Then we decided to revamp the geographic and political landscape of North America to incorporate the nascent thinking of the current American president and flesh out a longer term resolution and composition.
Canada, the United States, and the countries of Central America will merge into one entity while honoring their individual expressions.
It would be called UCANA. That is "Union of Central America and North America."
Canada, US, Mexico, and the 7 countries of Central America would take on an identity in the same fashion of The European Union. It could also be called The North American Union.
We will leave the details of organization to more sophisticated minds than ours.
But we would like the planning of such an evolution of composition to begin forthwith.
Bonaventure said that creation itself is the first scripture.
All the scriptures of all the religions attempt to explain the first scripture.
The original always intrigues.
Let’s be intrigued.