evacuation orders

Ιt’s good that he’s dead.

War loves its dead.

Will his love transform death and dissolve war?

Their aim was good, waiting for rescuers to attend to the dead and wounded. Then firing at their asses. [The next few lines are my anger.] 

Our Israeli cohort doing what they love to do in the Middle East. Kill, destroy, maim. They are God’s chosen, They are Trump’s chosen. “But we survive,” they say, that mischievous grin on Netanyahu’s face inviting Jared and Ivanka to Jerusalem. “First we kill, then we break bread,” he purrs. The American Press knows how to report on Israel’s tactics. Can you spell -- ‘a n t i s e m i t i s m’ -- whenever anyone criticizes our Jewish friends?

Here’s what the LATimes reports:

• • Father Pierre al-Rahi, a priest in southern Lebanon’s Christian-majority village of Qlayaa, was killed by an Israeli tank shell while helping wounded civilians.
  • His death underscores the widening toll of renewed Israel-Hezbollah fighting, which was triggered by the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran.
  • Pope Leo XIV paid tribute to Al-Rahi, saying, ‘May the blood he shed be a seed of peace for beloved Lebanon.’ [cf. https://youtu.be/uTpkJxGRuxE?si=IFE0Gmm05EKU8_LF]

• QLAYAA, Lebanon — The bells rang, their peals obscuring the buzz of the Israeli drone overhead as the casket of Father Pierre al-Rahi arrived at the parish he had served.  

  
  Only days before, Al-Rahi had stood in the very churchyard where the crowd assembled Wednesday for his funeral. He had announced that the people of Qlayaa would ignore Israel’s evacuation orders for southern Lebanon and remain. 

  
  “He gave us strength to stay rooted here. He kept repeating, ‘We’re staying,’” said Eveline Farah, a 67-year-old resident. 

  
  And he had lived up to his word, Farah added. So when an Israeli tank shell struck a house in the village on Monday, Al-Rahi and others rushed to help the elderly couple living there.That was when the second shell struck, wounding Al-Rahi and five others. He bled to death later that day, bringing home to Qlayaa, one of the few Christian-majority areas in Lebanon’s south, the latest conflict between Israel and the Islamic militants of Hezbollah. It’s a war no one here wants. 
  https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2026-03-11/priests-death-in-lebanon-brings-war-to-community-that-wanted-peace 

  And The National Catholic Reporter: https://www.ncronline.org/news/lebanese-maronite-catholic-priest-killed-israeli-tank-fire-southern-lebanon 

  [The next few lines are what a desolate philosopher who sees war as insanity might write.]

  The crime is not ignorance. The crime is failure to discern the core of care longing to ascend to the surface of human interaction. We know it is there. It wishes to ascend of itself to the material manifestation of social, ethical, and political recognition. 

  Human greed obfuscates. The craving for power and recognition obviates care crawling up from obscurity to the light of human practice. Core care like spring seed pushes itself toward manifestation. But the heel and boot of personal aggrandizement and pretense stomps it back down into dark soil. The ugliness of human power ambition cannot abide the longing of the human spirit for peace, justice, and the humanitarian way.

  We seem to be stuck in a desolate and deficient psyche and psychology of egoistic accrual of self-determined ideopathy decidedly recondite and obtuse. Not only don’t we know who and what we are, we don’t care to consider the deeper constitution and implication of our raison-d’être.

  
  

  [I end here. “I” ends “here."]

  Perhaps better said; me ends here.

  “Here" is all there is. 

  “Me” absents. Me abstracts. Me takes an erasure to reality-as-it-really-is, rather fabricating a reality that mendacity tries to weave with swollen tongue and cancerous ambition..

  “I” doesn’t know anything.

  Intentionally pretending to know what is best, to know anything true, and absenting what is here, is the death-knell we hear transposing healing loving silence into the cynical noise of war, deceit, and perversion.

  I am ashamed of myself.

genug fűr jetzt

 I give up

To sleep

I give up

To God

It’s enough

For now

qui es-tu?

 nobody’s here

            who are you?

nobody

            you’re nobody?

yeah

            and you’re here?

yes

            good to know

generative origin, ever-present

 It feels I've lived far too long. 

Not worn out by fields, nor slain by stones or arrows, bullet or shrapnel. No one in my neighborhood slit my throat. No Circus Maximus chariots impaling my body or wild animals tearing my flesh, no gladiators whipped my back with barbed metal,  

OUR ANCESTORS' SHORT LIVES 

 --by Wislawa Szymborska

(Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

Few of them made it to thirty

Old age was the privilege of rocks and trees.

Childhood ended as fast as wolf cubs grow.

One had to hurry, to get on with life

before the sun went down,

before the first snow.

Thirteen-year-olds bearing children,

four-year-olds stalking birds’ nests in the rushes,

leading the hunt at twenty—

they aren’t yet, then they are gone.

Infinity’s ends fused quickly.

Witches chewed charms

with all the teeth of youth intact.

A son grew to manhood beneath his father’s eye.

Beneath the grandfather’s blank sockets the grandson

was born.

And anyway they didn’t count the years.

They counted nets, pods, sheds, and axes.

Time, so generous toward any petty star in the sky,

offered them a nearly empty hand

and quickly took it back, as if the effort were too much.

One step more, two steps more

along the glittering river

that sprang from darkness and vanished into darkness.

There wasn’t a moment to lose,

no deferred questions, no belated revelations,

just those experienced in time.

Wisdom couldn’t wait for gray hair.

It had to see clearly before it saw the light

and to hear every voice before it sounded.

Good and evil—

they knew little of them, but knew all:

when evil triumphs, good goes into hiding;

when good is manifest, then evil lies low.

Neither can be conquered

or cast off beyond return.

Hence, if joy, then with a touch of fear;

if despair, then not without some quiet hope.

Life, however long, will always be short.

Too short for anything to be added.

Maybe good and evil are unknowable.

Still we think or utter prayers to the Great Unknown hovering and weaving in and through our consciousness. We continue to pray for a good life, productive life, a life that has meaning and conscious kindness.

Optimism is possible. 

We hide and we seek similarly. We know when we do wrong. We know when we do right. We are not ignorant. Ignorance is a costly excuse pretending we do not understand our behavior.

Even if we cannot fathom there is a God (or there is God) we ought to pray. As a youth I was taught that "Prayer is the lifting of the mind and heart to God." 

Even if you subscribe to the awkward notion that "God is not yet," you could understand the thinking that suggests that manifestation is the continual origination of what is coming to be.

This line of thought is generative. 

Perhaps we've not understood creation and procreation. If not to enrich existence and enliven reality for the benefit of all life, then why bother?

If there was another line to Szymborska's poem, perhaps: 

        "So add nothing, let out source and grace." 

Radically, at root, there is for us, source and resource, eternal invitation, to resound and rejoice. 

sure and begorrah

 it has been cold here

yesterday was warm, hoo-ray!

Enso eats outside

I’ve decided not

to die this week, maybe next

on Saint Joseph’s Day

no irishman should

die on seventeenth, when doors

of heaven are closed

now gone, to sight

Tonno wrote: 

Under evergreens 

 

I walk along a pathway 

 

Now gone to sight 

 

Beneath autumn leaves strewn there 

 

By winter’s mountain winds.

Tonna (1289-1372)

 

I add:

snow plough piles 

up by boat, surprising

dooryard they sink 

into themselves --

coffee perks on stove

wfh (1944-20-?)

It seems sun light and warmth return from long vacating jaunt out through space and dark matter turning back to small blue marble earth not a minute too soon where we in northeast thought dread was another wool blanket about be drawn over face dark nights dark mornings cold news.

We welcome this prodigal meandering back into closer sphere encircling our stoic patience to ground where thousands of cracked seed shells and grateful finch cardinal squirrels gray and red grasp edge of winter coming to end in few more days pulling spring threads forward millimeter by millisecond to red farmhouse.

learn well

 Slowly

Turn

Slowly 

Walk

In

Peace

if you don’t count

Mineral water, 

cheese

Sliced turkey

mayonnaise—

Afternoon

Nap time

surprise open windows

 warm sun melts yard snow

trickling mud teeters down mud-

licking winter stones 

a point of nothingness . . . of pure truth

Who are we

In one another’s life

In prison yesterday

Reading Andy Weir’s The Egg

We’re five expressions

Of one person and one dog

Pondering the ontology

Of such a circle theorum 

Where two radii of a circle

Form an isosceles triangle

Lines and angles equal

To each other — the dog

Not having any of it

Stretched on rug between us

back at Ragged Mountain, 

I remember Merton’s writing:

AT THE CORNER OF FOURTH AND WALNUT IN LOUISVILLE

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun….

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…. 

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our son-ship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

(Excerpts from Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Part Three, The Night Spirit and the Dawn Air, pp. 156-58, in old Image paperback edition) https://ancientanswers.org/words-to-live-by/thomas-merton/at-the-corner-of-fourth-and-walnut-in-louisville/

n’autre (no other)

I feel, lately, I have nothing to say. 

“Negation is a refusal of existence. By means of it a being (or a way of being) is posited, then thrown back to nothingness.” (--p.11, Being and Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre)

...

Consciousness moreover can not produce a negation except in the form of consciousness of negation. No category can "inhabit" consciousness and reside there in the manner of a thing.

The not, as an abrupt intuitive discovery, appears as consciousness (of being), consciousness of the not.  

In a word, if being is everywhere, it is not only Nothingness which, as Bergson maintains, is inconceivable; for negation will never be derived from being. The necessary condition for our saying not is that non-being be a perpetual presence in us and outside of us, that nothingness haunt being.   (p.11 ibid)

 I dwell in a haunted house of appearances and disappearances.

An hour was lost in the middle of night just gone by.

And the current war?

March 5 - Scores of people have been killed across the Middle East since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, with Gulf ​states that host U.S. military bases and personnel as well as Lebanon ‌quickly drawn into the conflict.

Here are the death tolls from the war as reported by countries as of March 5, the sixth day of the war. Reuters has not independently verified ​these deaths.

The Reuters Iran Briefing newsletter keeps you informed with the latest developments and analysis of the Iran war. Sign up here.

IRAN At least 1,230 people killed, including 175 schoolgirls and staff killed ​in a missile strike on a primary school in Minab in ⁠the country's south on the war's first day, according to the non-profit humanitarian ​group Iranian Red Crescent Society. It was unclear if the overall death toll included ​Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps military casualties. 

 

ISRAEL Ten civilians killed, including nine people in an Iranian missile strike on Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem on March 1, according to Israel's ambulance service Magen David ​Adom. The Israel Defense Forces has not reported any military casualties. 

 

LEBANON At least 77 ​people killed in Israeli strikes, according to Lebanon's health ministry. 

 

BAHRAIN One person killed after fire broke out ‌in ⁠Bahrain's Salman Industrial City following missile interception, according to the interior ministry. 

 

KUWAIT Three people, including two Kuwaiti soldiers, killed in Iranian attacks on the country, according to Kuwait's health and foreign ministries. 

 

OMAN One person killed after a projectile hit the Marshall Islands–flagged product ​tanker MKD VYOM off ​the coast of ⁠Muscat. 

 

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Three people killed, according to UAE's defense ministry. 

 

U.S. MILITARY Six U.S. service members were killed in a strike on a ​facility in Kuwait, according to U.S. Central Command. 

 

SYRIA Four people were ​killed when ⁠an Iranian missile struck a building in the southern Syrian city of Sweida on Saturday, state news agency SANA said. 

 

• IRAQ At least 13 people were killed, according to ⁠Iraqi ​health authorities, including 11 militiamen, one army soldier and ​one civilian, based on health registration figures.

Compiled by Jonathan Allen, Jana Choukeir, Menna Alaa El Din, Maayan ​Lubell, Pesha Magid and Ahmed Rasheed; Editing by Don Durfee, Cynthia Osterman, Aidan Lewis

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-people-have-been-killed-us-israel-war-iran-2026-03-03/

These are some instances of refusing existence. The minds of two men at censorious play. 

As much as my evaluating and calculating mind might urge the non-existence of Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, and Mohammed bin Salman, and the reconstitution and re-existence of Jamal Ahmad Hamza Khashoggi along with the return of the above referenced de-existence of the war-dead, there seems to be no current physical or spiritual mechanism to reliably effectuate such miraculous apparition.

No one has found the lines of communication once operated by Edgar Cayce and Jesus of Nazareth. Our sick and dead remain sick and dead (as far as we know) for now.

And, up in the Russia Ukraine sorrowful fiasco?

AI Overview

Estimates for the Russia-Ukraine war show significantly higher Russian casualties, with sources like CSIS suggesting Russia has around 1.2 million total casualties (killed, wounded, missing) and 275,000-325,000 killed, compared to Ukraine's 500,000-600,000 total casualties and 100,000-140,000 fatalities; this translates roughly to a 2:1 or 2.5:1 casualty ratio favoring Ukraine, though figures vary, and both nations keep precise data secret, with battlefield losses for Russia estimated at roughly double Ukraine's. 

Key Casualty Estimates (as of early 2026):

Russia: ~1.2 million total casualties (killed, wounded, missing), with ~325,000 killed. 

Ukraine: ~500,000-600,000 total casualties (killed, wounded, missing), with ~100,000-140,000 killed. 

Ratio & Context:

Ratio: Russian battlefield losses are often cited as roughly double Ukraine's, around a 2:1 or 2.5:1 ratio. 

Scale: Russia's losses are staggering compared to major conflicts since WWII, exceeding its losses in all previous wars combined, according to CSIS. 

Data Challenges: Both sides protect their military data, so figures come from intelligence estimates, independent analysis (like CSIS), and open-source investigations. 

In essence, while exact numbers are elusive, reports consistently indicate Russia is suffering disproportionately higher casualties in the conflict. 

 Also see CSIS, Center For Strategic and International Studies, "Russia’s Grinding War in Ukraine”.

I used to think Sartre’s book Being and Nothingness too large and too difficult to navigate, preferring (oddly) Heidegger’s Being and Time for casual reading in my Audible library. I’ve long enjoyed Sartre’s Huis Clos (No Exit) with its “Hell is other people” vibration. Over the years, for those who suspect a cynic’s dépêcher message of misanthropic scorn, I’ve adopted a semantic somersault that posits there are no “other” people and hence no hell. 

The n’autre (no other) realization throws all of existence and negation into a new kettle of fish that gurgles on low heat filling kitchen with a new fragrence the ghosts of Sartre and Heidegger take in with their French wine and German beer.

We are killing ourselves. Tell that to Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, and bin Salman. They won’t understand it, They’re counting the money coming through their doors, human life be damned.

They have no consciousness of the not.

And the rest of us? What are we conscious of?

What haunts us?

What haunts you . . .

My friends?

an eremite, the desert, absorption

 Ignore me

I shuffle by

I finish

Nobody’s Girl

The grief

Posthumous 

Raw ambiguity 

The cost, wrenching

Money money poison 

She is alive on last page

But reader knows

Nihil obstat death

In my deep dark basement

I want to slit throats 

Climb stairs

Walk away

Sit on harbor bench

No moorings, gull 

On piling, just dawning

The impossibility of this

Existence, the ambiguity

Of suicide, whose hand

Whose mind are you out of

Who manipulates the narrative?

A cynic looks, not at anything 

Other than despair, the sadness

The long unselfing, the critical

Relentless disappearance

No happy ending, just perpetrators 

Snug in their insouciant arrogance

Ticker tape smug, the sadness  drips

Through veins, a blur of uncaring

Blindness, a gouging darkness —

An end of night office

Monks absorb world’s sin

Leave sanctuary with her in heart

New and now silent psalm tone

Walks within her each raindrop

nada lo explica, nada lo justifica

We seem to have been a culture of pedophiles for quite a while, what with Epstein and Trump, Maxwell, Prince Andrew and Harvard faculty, unnamed billionaires and powerful business people, priests and ministers, and (no doubt) some rabbis and imams, as well as dads, uncles, and older brothers, not to mention moms and aunts and cousins all. The literature on abuse, trafficking, and horrific behavior is sobering and sickening.

One example:

A blistering report issued Wednesday describes decades of child sexual abuse in Rhode Island’s Catholic churches, documenting accusations against dozens of priests involving hundreds of victims.

The report from Peter F. Neronha, the state’s attorney general, also lays out repeated failures by the Diocese of Providence to remove priests or bring in law enforcement in response to accusations. Instead, investigators working for Mr. Neronha found, the diocese chose to handle reports of abuse internally, primarily by moving offending priests to new parishes.

The diocese transferred at least 30 accused priests to new jobs at least five times each, Mr. Neronha said in a news conference on Wednesday.

“So much hurt and harm could have been avoided” had the diocese removed the priests from their duties, he said. “Nothing explains it, nothing justifies it.” 

 

(Rhode Island Priests Abused Hundreds of Children Over Decades, Report Finds, By Jenna Russell March 4, 2026, Nytimes)

 No, nothing does explain nor justify what has become tendentious and horrendous and all too familiarly  happenstance. Who hasn’t had an iffy uncle or creepy guy on the street you live?

Sexuality and sexual behavior now fit right in with every commercial advertisement on internet or tv.

These kids, it seems to go, are here for our pleasure. 

We become predatory and perverse.

Would that we had a sense of justice and decency to counter our greed and exploitation.

le sens n'est pas ce que vous croyez

 waddya mean your life is meaningless?

            it’s meaningless.

waddya mean by that?

            that it’s meaningless?

yeah, that it’s meaningless?

            that it has no meaning.

is that so?

            yeah, that’s so.

well, I have to get back to my life.

            is it meaningful?

yes, it is, meaningful.

            good for you!

and good for you as well.

            thank you!

even on its way out

The Mud Season

Patience darling,
it’s still too early
to trust the season
with that tenderness you hold
in your globed hands.

I can feel it, too—
the yearning to plant
your fingers in the warming earth
and release what’s so alive in you
into the scrum of all life.

But the ground’s still frozen 
beneath all this mud.
And winter, even on its way out,
will take with it anything
that opens too soon.

So hold your longing a little longer
in the sheltered care of your body,
like soft green starts 
on the windowsill of your heart,
seedlings from the tree
of good and evil.

–From book, The Wilderness That Bears Your Name, JAMES A. PEARSON

https://jamesapearson.com/the-mud-season-poem/

as callous as

 Best left without comment:

The United States is at war. Americans, at such a time, might expect their government to speak to them regularly and report on U.S. goals—and casualties—but so far, they have gotten little beyond prerecorded videos of the president and some sound bites from various officials. Even Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has held only a few briefings. 

 

Perhaps the Pentagon chief’s reluctance to speak to the press is just as well, because many Americans would be alarmed to realize that their sons and daughters in combat are being overseen by a person as callous as Pete Hegseth. 

 

This morning, the defense secretary gave a briefing on the war that quickly degenerated into Trumplike bombast. (Wisely, the Pentagon scheduled this at 8 a.m. eastern time, when most of the country is either sleeping or busy starting their day.) Hegseth apparently prefers to sound more like a Call of Duty player leading a raid than a sober and judicious secretary of defense: “Death and destruction from the sky all day,” he said, along with other empty phrases such as “We’re playing for keeps.” (As opposed to what, exactly?) 

 

Most reporters are now accustomed to Hegseth’s drama-laden antics. But even by the low standards he has set, he managed to shock many of them when he cynically used the deaths of U.S. military personnel to air his own grievances with the press. 

 

On Sunday morning (local time), an Iranian drone hit a makeshift operations center in Kuwait. The Pentagon says that six Americans are dead. Not only is this event a tragedy, but it also requires an explanation: The drone reportedly snuck through U.S. defenses without setting off any alerts, and struck a target that now seems to have been unduly vulnerable to aerial attack. 

 

The defense secretary, the man who is supposed to carry this news to the American public and mourn with them, instead whined about the unfairness of it all. “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it,” Hegseth told the reporters, military personnel, and civilians gathered this morning in the Pentagon. “The press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality. The terms of this war will be set by us at every step. As I said Monday, the mission is laser-focused.”  

(--Pete Hegseth Treats Fallen American Soldiers as a PR Problem, from His use of the Iran-war dead to attack the media was disgraceful. by Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, March 4, 2026)