on the other hand

 Two months 

Until Spring —

Can you imagine

using obviate in a long sentence

 I stay in my room

I do not go out

Am I afraid?

Will I be taken?

Back then

Immigrants from Ireland 

Into the streets of Brooklyn

The schools on corners

Perhaps my great grandfather

Filed wrong form, fudged a fact

Immigration control has found out

Are looking for me, drive passed

Want bonus for each capture, drag

Out of car, pull from living room

Tell me only the pure belong

Only genetic purity is wanted

Decommission human compassion

The Jews will not replace them

I am Somalian, I am Venezuelan, 

I am Cuban, Salvadoran, Colombian

I am an Arab, I am Danish, Greenlandian, 

I speak Spanish, speak Norwegian, French

I am now an enemy of the state

A traitor to their race, a piece of garbage

So I stay hidden, tucked away, unclean

While the new masters spew their rhetoric

Load their guns, kneel on necks

Drag us on the streets, punch faces

No one asks where is God, no prayers 

are heard, no churches, no gospel

No children playing in schoolyard or park

Only this, only this — some white men

Believe they own everything, count

Their money, are paid tribute, steal fortunes

And no one, no one can stop their absolute 

hubris, megalomania, superiority, excellence

So…we hide

Waiting fate

Wondering how 

One country’s suicide

Would obviate

Everything

Until

It becomes

Nothing

la peur est un fou dangereux

 It becomes frightening.

The chaotic threats

The frightened people

Frightened legislators

Frightened Supreme Court

Frightened criminals

Frightened pastors and priests

It is frightening

Now then —

Aside from fear

Can we talk about

(I’m sorry)

Can we talk about 

How decency has died

(I’m sorry)

How we now have to live

In his indecent world,

Again, there’s no antidote

No cute political banter

No facile name calling

A turning point

Dancing cacophony 

to my representatives and senators

 Forced myself to watch 45 minutes of trump at White House podium.

It is, in my estimation, a criminal dereliction of cabinet and congressional responsibility to allow this man to continue in office.

Unless, of course, the goal is the destruction of the US government as exemplified these 250 years.

And if such is the goal, I say — well done, and well played, you are overlooking and overseeing the end of the American experiment of democracy.

Now, then, tell me what’s next.

Shall I write my last will and testament? Leave the country?

Or should I buy a gun and cans of provisions for a long siege?

Thanks for your counsel.

sgìth

I used to think I was a pacifist. 

“True pacifism,” or “nonviolent resistance,” is “a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love.” (--Martin Luther King)

 I'll have to ponder this.

These days it seems that the courage required exceeds my ability to see through the fog of evil to the light of love.

This realization leaves me bereft. 

oración haiku

 Creating 

Wholeness

Gracious

One

We long to

Become

Your

Face

True

Here

αυτό που είναι, που έρχεται να γίνει

 Creating

One

Heaven

Itself

Your name

Is beyond us

May your 

Reality

Be our

Reality

(As it is)

As it must be

Today, move through

Us, be each beginning

(Even though we forget 

Causing others to forget)

Merciful compassion

Assisting us

To walk 

In peace, svāhā!

έτσι είναι, έτσι θα είναι

 Mothering 

Grace

That which is

Within wholeness

So that wholeness 

Comes through you

As true

Blessings do

You are the prayer

Of grace-filled

Wholeness for those

Of us not yet so

Let it be so — now

And at the hour

We give up our

Illusion of separateness 

Undergoing yes, your yes,

Our completing yes — svāhā!

anything else

 No reason

To love

Only reason

Is love

Anything else —

No, 

nothing 

else

ana-agoraphobia

(again — no easy 

way to escape) 

Ah, nightfall

Hiddenness

If you love me

Keep your

Commandments

I will follow

Your love

No compulsion

No competition 

Just what is true

From which 

There is

No easy way

To escape

worlds percieved -- that which is passing through, that which is passing by

Where have all the religious people gone?

•  “I just want to do God’s will.” (--Martin Luther King, 3april1968)
• 4april1968, Shot dead.
• 19jan2026, Wondering about the correlation of God’s will and the racist cruelty of pernicious personnel calling themselves 'leaders.'

Once christians were christians. 

Now the only christians whose voices and authoritarian pronouncements seem to be heard are white christian nationalists, and those whose designs collate with those voices.

And yet --

God is unknowable

The Trinity is incomprehensible.

Jesus is marvelously, badly, represented by his followers.

The Holy Spirit is beyond articulation or representation.

What we call ”The Christ” is the deepest longing of creation and the human heart for justice, compassion, service, peace and beneficent love. 

“Christ” is yet to appear for the vast majority of us.

Christianity, in its essential nature, thus, is mostly mute and moribund. What we hear are archive recordings of once vital proclamation. A nostalgia of oratory.

There is no creating a new religion. We've given things over to exegetes and historians to re-dredge our absurd arguments over who owns Jesus, who controls God, who is worthy to be saved, or, at least, have their name on the congregant registry.

We are sociologists scanning humankind's conceptualization in language of its religious sectarian and denomination variety, the parsing of subtile belief preferences, the registering and codifying of domicile congregations and fundraising letters.

We are left with fundraising appeals from our new political religions -- the republicans, the democrats, and the heretic independents.

What else is there?

Perhaps the return to the originating energy sourcing.

What is the originating energy of that which astounded us before we came to word trying to describe it?

Listen carefully

Fall into silence.

Look carefully.

See through everything.

Stop trying to nail your suspicions to the wall. 

That which you are seeing through, that passing breath, that sound gone by, that uncomprehended image faded away -- that is your very being, surrounding and surrounded by being-itself.

Umwelt. 

            Umwelt | ˈǒǒmvelt | 

noun (plural Umwelten) 

(in ethology) the world as it is experienced by a particular organism: the worlds they perceive, their Umwelten, are all different. 

origin 

German, literally ‘environment’.

The surround.

Seen through . . . seeing through.

This is what we are.

This is what is God.

What an experience to have faith in!

That is, if anyone remains willing to have faith in what-is-most-intimate. 

for martin and renee, prière du lundi matin

 Call me

Old-fashioned 

But I still hate

That a good man

And woman

Were assassinated

By stupidity and

Arrogance (the

Hidden rulers

Calling shots)

Rather,

(If you now dwell

Elsewhere),

Forgive our hatred

With

Your love

a pornography of perverse portraiture

Pernicious

Precedent 

President

Chooses

Himself

Over country

Persistently

We are poorer

A too-patient

Populace

Broken

By this perversion

Looking only

Up at his face

Lusting 

Paid-off

Pinning down

Decency

lullaby

 Snowplow

Passes

Again

Maine

January

Night

Empty

Once again

Quiet

huis clos

And then one day

He closed his door

Going silent

It was hard to know

What broke, but there

Were pieces on the floor

creator, creating, creation

 If you pray,

maybe this --

That which is

coming to be

our life our love

our hope

we are here

for you to be here

amid all who

are absent

refresh us with

presence, 

we are

here, we are

here

γνώρισε τον εαυτό σου, οι θεοί το κάνουν

 Socrates did not believe in the Athenian gods.

for that he was hounded and scorned by the Athenian gods’ believers.

Twenty five centuries later, those who believe in the American gods

Hound and scorn those who don’t believe in the American gods.

Socrates was condemned to death, he chose to drink hemlock,

My guess is he didn’t have a handgun to shoot himself in the head

 

The American gods are a jealous bunch of gods, but, oddly, generous —

They have guns and will happily shoot you, saving you the trouble

The chief god smiles, says you were stupid not to believe, gathers prizes

We're lucky to have such a god, not having to think anymore, we’re free

a special skill

 It looks easy

On television movies

Pulling the trigger

Killing someone

I don’t know what

I’d do in such life or

Death situation

Pulling the trigger

It is a big ask

Stopping someone from

Killing you by

Killing them

We ask people to do it

For us — soldiers, police

Ice goons —I might not be

Able to shoot a woman 

in the face

Because she told me

She wasn’t scared

Or didn’t blame me

a ban against it

 Light snow still falling Saturday afternoon.

Yesterday in prison we spoke of perspective, of seeing through, of seeing through space, of seeing through inner space and outer space. We are that which is seeing through.

We name this seeing through many things -- perception, awareness, consciousness.

"Consciousness," argues psychologist George A. Miller, "is a word worn smooth by a million tongues . . . Maybe we should ban the word for a decade or two until we can develop more precise terms for the several uses which 'consciousness' now obscures.1

He is of course right, but the solution he suggests is impractical. When one thinks about it there are few key words in our vocabulary that do not share the same polysemy. Should we also dispose of "life," "existence,” "time," "love," "humor," or "holiness"? They all invite idiosyncratic interpretations, even by professional users of these terms. Consequently they all are surrounded by a haze of ambivalence.

But ambivalence is not necessarily a drawback in human communication, because speech is only part of our total language system. And the inbuilt flexibility of words like "life," "love," and "existence" can even be advantageous. What is more, unless our emotional nature is stultified by an inflated rational pose, we can always empathize and reach out into the psyche of others and resonate with their feeling state or intended communication. Thus we may quibble about the definition of the word "love," but unless we are particularly callous or intransigent we know very well what it is to love. We also have a sense of what is means to be alive or to exist, notwithstanding the sophisticated word-splitting of philosophers.

I propose that the concept of "consciousness" falls in to the same category. We all intuit what it stands for, though our descriptions may not always match in every detail. Miller agrees: he writes: "Despite all its faults, however, the term would be sorely missed; it refers to something immediately obvious and familiar to anyone capable of understanding a ban against it."[2]

(--beginning of paper, On the Nature of Consciousness and Reality, An Overview of Jean Gebser's Thoughts on Consciousness, by Georg Feuerstein, Journal of Conscious Evolution, Volume 1 Issue 01/2005 , 

Perhaps we might do away with the word ‘perspective.' Settle on ’seeing through.’ 

We are that which is seeing through. No longer ask ‘who’ is seeing through. No association with a discrete person exercising perspective with perception.

We might find ourselves asking: What is that which is seeing through?

And here begins, again and incohately, the investigation of insight.

Perhaps we have become too enthralled with terms like consciousness, life, love, existence. We argue and dissect them, fancify and elaborate, complicate and obscure.

But when you ask me: What is that which is seeing through? -- you have my attention, and my ignorance.

Is that what Zen is asking?

Why we get all confused and pseudo clever in our responses?

Why we’re told to get back on our cushion, to look and breathe?

I don’t know.

The answer might be immediately obvious -- but I’ve always been blind, and now I am going blind.

Which might just be a blessing.

(With gratitude to the conversationalists on Friday morning in prison.)

window

 Light snow

Cat watches

Buddha sits

Empty cross

Dog snorts

Truck passes

All’s well

Within itself

the banality of great-full bullying

I read the two volumes of her “Life of the Mind” in my winter rental off the sands of old orchard beach in 1981.  

Here is Arendt on totalitarianism.             https://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/download/101/168

This morning I am reminded of Arendt’s take on politics vis a vis America’s slide into fascism:

Many readers were shocked by The Origins of Totalitarianism – not so much by its relentless account of insane cruelties, as by its occasional flashes of outlandish good cheer. At a time of deepening disillusionment about the public world, when many of Arendt’s contemporaries were turning towards the pleasures of cookery, religion, scholarship, children, art or psychoanalysis, Arendt insisted that however badly things were going, politics could always save us. She drew inspiration from the Nuremberg trials and the new-minted concept of ‘crimes against humanity’, and from the foundation of the United Nations, and looked forward with extraordinary confidence to some sort of global political renaissance.  

Arendt had a distinctly high-minded conception of politics, seeing it not as the bureaucratic administration of collective concerns, or a burdensome public duty, still less as a self-interested continuation of warfare by other means. Politics for her was a precious cultural achievement rather than a regrettable social necessity, and it involved the careful maintenance of institutions that enable people to converse freely and respectfully about the world as they see it and as they would like it to be. It was essentially concerned with problems of a kind that will never have perfect solutions, and which therefore require improvisation, invention, and endless critical discussion. Politics required us to set aside all sentiments of pride, indignation, shame or resentment, as well as any pretensions to superior expertise, in order to become responsive, intelligent citizens, willing to negotiate all our differences on a basis of complete equality.8 Politics, in short, was the opposite of totalitarianism, and it depended on an open-hearted love for ‘human plurality’9 – for people not in the mass or in the abstract, but in the distinctness and idiosyncrasy of their lives and the infinite variety of their perceptions. It was more like a serene philosophical seminar than a self-interested struggle for power, and it was not so much a means to human happiness as the pith and substance of it. 

https://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/download/101/168

Perhaps our cheerful slide into fascism will be a distinctively American variety of indomitable obliviousness.

reminder

 To the people of the United States

Do not allow

Racist and corrupt people to

Rob you of your beauty

Call them their true names

Ugly, and cruel, unkind, and hateful

They are not America

They are the perversion of our identity

Be nice

Dissolve ice

Remove maga

Return to your true saga

its only words, but words are all we have

 The lad in the novel

Where a woman went lost 

Hiking the AT ended up at

Dorethea Dix in Bangor

I’d visited there

There’s a mental illness

Thinking that the government

Is spying on you, is going to

Hurt you, hyper juiced and wary

I’ve looked at the brochure

The warden’s service, hiking clubs

Comb Maine woods

The thick growth hides and shelters

All visitors to the mind’s hospital —

Thank you for visiting

we read charles olson in prison friday morning

 LOVE

 

(down 

to my soul:

 

                         assume your nature as yourself 

                         for the love of God

 

                                                             not even good enough

    

 Stories 

                 only

                            the possibility

                                                             of discrete  

                                                                                   men 

 

There is no intelligence 

the equal of
the situation

 

There are only

                                  two ways:

                                  create the situation

 

                                                                     (and this is love)

 

                                  or avoid it.

                                                         This also can be

Love.

                                                                                                                    (Poem by Charles Olson)

in prison today, sometimes, the doubt

 Good people

Everywhere 

See what is

Not good

Furrow their

Brows

Ponder such

Ugliness

Cannot call out

God

Wonder why

They ever thought

They 

Could

en tom sardinboks er bare en tom sardinboks

 I have a tin

Norwegian sardines

Something fishy 

Is going on

today

 O yeah

Happy birthday

Martin; thanks

gourmet

 I wasn’t hungry

A few bites of tuna salad

Some ginger ale 

you're fin(e)

Where does silliness like this come from?

You cannot describe it or draw it,
You cannot praise it enough or perceive it.
No place can be found in which
To put the Original Face;
It will not disappear even
When the universe is destroyed.

Mumon (13th c.)

You’d think that sensible people would sniff at such words and turn quickly to their horoscope or stock market numbers.

Still, I wonder about the Original Face.

What are we talking about here?

The Creator?

My mug?

The photo of Wenby at foul line?

There’s fog covering roadside trees out on Barnestown.

Five vehicles in neighbors yard tell of some reconfiguration going on in the three year unoccupied house.

My unoccupied life is this room these days. With nothing to say I listen to books, tires, interviews, and voices from my past wondering what’s becoming of this version of personal pretense.

The recluse is in. 

LBJ died at 64 in 1973. MLK died at 39 in 1968. JFK died at 46 in 1963. RFK died at 42 in 1968.

I’ve outlived each of them. And have nothing to show for it, except some undiagnosed dementia and various actual diagnoses that shoot craps as to who will take me away. (Don’t blow on those dice, daddy has enough shoes and shirts for another forty years!)

Original Face! Really?

Give me a break.

These zen folks come here from China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea thinking we Americans are interested in silly riddles meant to liberate mind and body.

The only face I’m interested in is that of our dear leader, DJT. His “ …will not disappear even / When the universe is destroyed.”

It seems like he’s bringing us close. But, ah! Who cares?

Evil, cruelty, thoughtlessness, and absurd outcomes all live across the street from Zen.

Go ahead, wave. 

There's really nothing to worry about.

Don’t look back. Don’t look ahead. Face yourself.

You're fin(e)!

See it now?

yes, certainly

 It’s not difficult 

To be grateful —

Go ahead, 

Say yes

Thank you

You are gift

That’s it

Appreciate, and

The world glows

with no destination in mind

 Did not expect

To not want to belong

But, no, I do not

Preferring to walk by

Steps to door of

(You name it) church

Zendo, family living room,

Neighbor’s porch, your eyes.

It’s a rare disease, eremitic

Solitude, only statue of Buddha

Sample coffin cross at window

Winter trees in dooryard —

I listen to novel about woman

Lost in maine hiking on AT

And feel the community

The concern, the description 

Recognizing how being lost

Is little different than found

Daylight diminishing, headlights passing

towards Hope between ragged and bald

hello, dsm-5, i'd like a consult

 I no longer

think

I follow

trump

whose thinking

is 

pig-slop and

rotten cabbage

but it's

ok

those who

love him

tell us

he's sane and

we're not

so, there's that

but don’t open your mouth

 When nothing

Is being

Said

Listen carefully

What you hear

Is nothing

Worth repeating

in the beginning

 

At Tuesday Evening Conversation:

In the Beginning

An Intimate Origin Story 

Monday, 12jan2026

 

Brian McLaren reflects on the miraculous creation of the cosmos and everything in it:

The first and greatest surprise—a miracle, really—is this: that anything exists at all…. The first pages of the Bible and the best thinking of today’s scientists are in full agreement: it all began in the beginning, when space and time, energy and matter, gravity and light, burst or bloomed or banged into being. In light of the Genesis story, we would say that the possibility of this universe overflowed into actuality as God, the Creative Spirit, uttered the original joyful invitation: Let it be! And in response, what happened? Light. Time. Space. Matter. Motion. Sea. Stone. Fish. Sparrow. You. Me. Enjoying the unspeakable gift and privilege of being here, being alive….

Genesis means “beginnings.” It speaks through deep, multilayered poetry and wild, ancient stories. The poetry and stories of Genesis reveal deep truths that can help us be more fully alive today. They dare to proclaim that the universe is God’s self-expression, God’s speech act. That means that everything everywhere is always essentially holy, spiritual, valuable, meaningful. All matter matters.

Through the book of Genesis we encounter a story of goodness and interconnectedness. Genesis tells us that the universe is good—a truth so important it gets repeated like the theme of a song…. Every river or hill or valley or forest is good. Skin? Good. Bone? Good. Mating and eating and breathing and giving birth and growing old? Good, good, good. All are good. Life is good.

The best thing in Genesis is not simply human beings, but the whole creation considered and enjoyed together, as a beautiful, integrated whole, and us a part. The poetry of Genesis describes the “very goodness” that comes at the end of a long process of creation … when all the parts, including us, are working together as one whole. That harmonious whole is so good that the Creator takes a day off, as it were, just to enjoy it. That day of restful enjoyment tells us that the purpose of existence isn’t money or power or fame or security or anything less than this: to participate in the goodness and beauty and aliveness of creation….

According to the first creation story, you are part of creation. You are made from common soil … dust, Genesis says; stardust, astronomers tell us … soil that becomes watermelons and grain and apples and peanuts, and then, they become food, and then that food becomes you…. Together with all living things, you share the breath of life, participating in the same cycles of birth and death, reproduction and recycling and renewal. You, with them, are part of the story of creation—different branches on the tree of life. In that story, you are connected and related to everything everywhere. In fact, that is a good partial definition of God: God is the one through whom we are related and connected to everything.

https://cac.org/daily-meditations/an-intimate-origin-story/ 

no sh*t, really

 But he shot her

Dead

   That’s ok

Shouldn’t there be

An investigation?

     Don’t worry about it

But he shot her

Dead 

     That’s ok 

where is away, as in run away

 I suspect

A time is coming

Moral insanity

Will kill immoralists

There’s no need for further

Fret, something (fate?

God? Inner incongruity?)

Will destroy ugly immorality

We won’t believe our eyes

Bad administrators (et al)

Will melt like nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark

Proving art and life reconstitute what is good

lame, as bird calls me out

 I saw Jesus yesterday

Limping in Hannaford 

I prayed for this

Limping Jesus

“You're praying

For me?” Jesus said.

“Yeah, I am.” I said

Looking for soup

this one, this one, this one

 Dawn

Fingering beads

He prays:

Deus meus

Et omnia

Fiat mihi 

Voluntas tua

Secundum ΛΟΓΟΣ

(λόγος) 

Verbum tuum

Prosit!   

He prays

Fingering beads

Dawning

Divine Expression

as 2am rolls around

 I want to be awake when I die

want to see the darkness 

step up to my face

to hear senses say bye bye

brain switch off light

feet disappear beneath knees

I won’t have anything to say

no prayer, no bargaining --

what a shame to leave

undrunk

coffee milk

in refrigerator

huh, what trouble, indeed

 Maybe Hobbes was right 

and Locke wrong.

I hope not. And I don’t.

Hope is the stretching of luck.

Perhaps I’d rather not know.

Have some tuna fish and ginger ale

Contemplate Jeremiah Johnson

Chewing on rabbit from spit

As fellow mountain man rides off

we miserabilists

 Schopenhauer cheers me.

Sometimes to work out what something is, it is useful to contemplate its opposite. Arthur Schopenhauer is probably the best known miserabilist in the history of philosophy. Although he was once prosecuted for pushing his landlady down a flight of stairs, he was not on the whole an evil man. He thought ethics should be based upon compassion, and the compassion he felt both for animals and for his fellow humans can often be glimpsed in his writings. He was not bad, but he could be very grumpy and was a thorough pessimist. Even if he conceded occasionally that things could be worse, he probably would have added: “And they soon will be!” He even wrote a book called Studies in Pessimism. 

 https://philosophynow.org/issues/171/Happy_Thoughts

Although, I do hope his landlady recovered without much suffering.

Apart from her, I can think of several political landlords for whom a non-lethal tumble down to the well of a staircase would not be an undesirable occasion.

“Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.” G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

Please, ignore my thinking, I am a religious man.

bury them far away and deep

 The mean and ugly ones

Are already dead

May they go away 

Leave us in peace

Finding whatever distorted

Afterlife they’ve fashioned

time always tells

 No argument

No factual evidence

Will convince

Liars and corrupts

They are wrong

Only time, heart attacks

Cancer or a stroke

Will get their

Attention — how’re

You guys feeling?

five stanzas, thirteen words, seventeen syllables

To be

Free

Becoming

What is

Is

Itself

To be

Free

All

Alone

feels like unnaming suffices

 Faint blue gray

Morning eaves

Drip

We are all

Alone

No bird sings

Cracked shell

Scattered on 

Snow

nessuna chiamata

 Mostly quiet

This dark night

Nothing else

Only itself

solo, e tutto solo

 When I lost

My sanity

I looked

Around

To try to

Find it again

No luck

It was gone

So I closed door

To this enclave

And stayed crazy

As day goes

Night comes

Alone, and all alone

no country song, this hymn to jesus

This slow-moving invasion

of America by billionaire oligarchs

and a deranged chief executive

is getting 

worse 

and worse

they think their camouflage army

assault guns and surly bully attitude

will intimidate and suppress the people

which they do and are

they believe in ugliness

laugh at compassion

there will be war

we will be gunned down

they will win

ugliness is in the white house

arrogance and stupidity wear red hats

the living dead count bitcoin and stocks

I have no gun

no desire to kill

but they do, they will

so, I say goodbye

thanks for the chocolate donuts

there's no living with ugliness

Jesus ain't coming back

they put a sack over his head

he ain't nothing to us they said

ok, I'm deluded, the people will

never let fools and fascists take over — (right)

this land, these minds, true hearts -- (fight)

being prayed through, the vision of god

 To pray

Eyes open

Facing God

We wonder

Who sees

What how

Do we

See through

God

Or does

God see

Through us

It is said

No one sees

God and lives

But is to see

Through God

Our vocation

To be 

Seen through

What prayer is

Why so many

Do not pray, unwanting

To be seen through

Transparency is

The longing of God

Our being

Prayed through

Praying through

Clearing wisdom

what wisdom knows, what love shows

 Pray

Facing

God

our northern neighbor(s) see us differently

"America isn't the way it is because he's president, he's president because America is the way it is."  

-(--commentator on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 2026)

. . .

Then further north (so to speak):

   “Pretending what is true is not true, or that what is is not, is actual insanity. Take it from me, I am sanity, be more like me. “

   (—God)

by any other hand

This sad time

Night, White

House murders poet

Words are fingers

Gun is mind

Bullets in her face

thank you for asking

In response to the New York Times interview "We Pressed Trump on His Conclusion About the ICE Shooting. Here’s What He Said." with Donald Trump held 7jan26, my comment: 

What is equally nauseating to Ms. Good's horrible encounter with awful men imposing their deadly will on her -- is the callous and hypocritical narrative of the event by Homeland Secretary and President.  

 

Such intentional gaslighting, being told what we actually see is not what we are seeing, is the stuff of terrifying control and abuse.  

 

We are being trafficked into false narrative and dystopian future.

 One more thing -- Maybe its just me, but there's something darkly comical about the scenario where a reporter walks up to a man holding a bloody knife with a dead body at their feet, and asking the question of the perpetrator "How do you feel about your encounter?" 

ekpyrosis and onagrcracy

 I take swaths from Chris Hedges today on substack. Sometimes intellectual heft is the only solace. Where else do words like "ekpyrosis" and "onagrcracy" pop up and display themselves?

Ekpyrosis, the inevitable conflagration that destroys the world according to the ancient Stoics, is part of the cyclical nature of time. There is no escape. Fortuna. There is a time for individual death. There is a time for collective death. In the end, with weary citizens yearning for extinction, empires light their own funeral pyre.

... 

Our high priests of war, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, are no different from the fools and charlatans who snuffed out empires of the past — the haughty leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the militarists in imperial Germany and the hapless court of Tsarist Russia in World War I. They were followed by the fascists in Italy under Benito Mussolini, Germany under Adolf Hitler and the military rulers of imperial Japan in World War II.  

...

These stunted human beings are unable to read others. They threaten. They terrorize. They kill. The art of power politics between nations or individuals is far beyond their tiny imaginations. They lack the intelligence — emotional and intellectual — to cope with the complex, ever-shifting sands of old and new alliances. They cannot see themselves as the world sees them. 

 

Diplomacy is often a dark and deceptive art. It is by its nature manipulative. But it requires an understanding of other cultures and traditions. It requires getting inside the heads of adversaries and allies. For Trump and his minions, this is an impossibility.

...

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce quipped that fascism had created a fourth form of government, “onagrocracy,” a government by braying asses, to add to Aristotle’s traditional triumvirate of tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. 

 

Our ruling class, Democrats and Republicans, piece by piece, dismantled democracy. In Germany and Italy, the constitutional state, as well, collapsed long before the arrival of fascism. Trump, who is the symptom, not the disease, inherited the corpse. He is making good use of it. 

 

(THE CHRIS HEDGES REPORT, Grand Illusion, We are cursed by what the historian Barbara Tuchman calls the “bellicose frivolity of senile empires.”, CHRIS HEDGES, JAN 08, 2026, SUBSTACK) 

I'm happy to read those who still have their wits about them.

I seem to have severely misplaced mine these days. 

ohne zu wissen, warum oder warum nicht

 Tires hissing road

This cloudy morning

Eaves dripping

Ice agent

Blows out brains

Of poet mom

Breaks my spirit

The lies told

The ugly lying mouths 

I withdraw

Deeper within

Darkness

Giving hard

Cold truth chance

To thaw

nos yeux ne voient pas ce qu'ils voient, paraît-il

 Good is murdered

nausiating noem 

refuses truth

Good dies

trump lies

heartbroken cries

Good is gaslit

blatant dissembling

ugly, ugly, ugly

una collina spoglia

Back 2000 years ago there was a stated confidence that if you ask God, you will receive.

Over those 2000 years not a whole lot has come from such confidence. Yet the words are repeated like a mantra wishing to be true.

As though belief were all you needed. 

Whatever we ask God,

we shall receive,

because we keep his commandments

and live the kind of life that he wants.

His commandments are these:

that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ

and that we love one another

as he told us to.

Whoever keeps his commandments

lives in God and God lives in him.

We know that he lives in us

by the Spirit that he has given us.

(--from 1 John 3:22-4:6)

 We've been disappointed before. How many times over 2000 years? More than a few I suspect.

Maybe to get a favorable prayer response you'd have to pay to play. The way it works with President Trump. Pay him, and your requests are granted. Pay him a lot and big requests, big pardons, are granted.

I admit to liking the idea that one "lives in God and God in him." It's a good script. Fits in print. The idea.

These days prayer feels like someone quoting the Constitution and the Separation of Powers -- both regaled. Good copy. Fits in print. 

I admit to packing my valise and boarding a train to agnostic unbelief. It's not a far destination. A cup of coffee and a tuna fish sandwich help sustain the trip. Countryside passes with little beckoning. Fact is I could just get off anywhere and feel right at home in an aborted attempt to reach the last station.

The carefully crafted rails of scripted testament would go on with no rider. There would be broad fields rising to a bare hill from which to look back over the landscape. There's no one there. 

It's fine that so many ask and ask and ask. The sick ask. The dying ask. Those who want more for themselves or their families ask. Warmongers ask for a blessing. The well-fed ask for continued good luck in the stock market. The baseball player rounding third in home-run trot makes sign of cross in a public show of gratitude. The trudging farm laborer prays to make it to his casa and dinner.

I'll leave it there. In the field. It is dusk. Birds have sung and gone. So has the sun. 

The lonely expanse doesn't evoke anything but the dying of light and cooling of temperature.

The rails curve in silence.

Here is the only destination without travel plans.

Whether or not there's a cat snoozing on your lap, the moment, its bare offering, passes .