yeah yeah yeah

I am a poor practitioner

so happy others 

have regular practices

my practice is kinhin

through kitchen

to reclining chair

boiling water for 

doggy breakfast, opening

cat can for the girls

I think I pray

think I sit zazen

I think love is all there is

lashon hara

 In prison Friday, old friend after long time stopped by to tell us how he is currently annoying everyone in the place. This time he is advocating the implementation of Lashon Hara. He had handouts and a list of ten ways to change the culture of the prison. The reception for his advocacy has been underwhelming.

1. Lashon hara (Hebrew for "evil tongue") is the Jewish halakhic prohibition against speaking negative or harmful things about someone else. Crucially, it applies even if the statement is entirely true. Because words can cause irreparable damage, Judaism views it as a severe ethical and spiritual transgression. [1, 2]

The Core Principles

• True but Harmful: While motzi shem ra is slander (spreading lies), lashon hara specifically refers to sharing true information that damages someone's reputation, finances, or emotional well-being. [1, 2]
• Beyond Speaking: The prohibition also extends to body language, gestures, and even repeating neutral stories with the intent to gossip (often categorized as rechilut). [1, 2]
• Listening and Believing: It is also forbidden to listen to lashon hara or to easily believe it. If you hear it, you are encouraged to judge the person favorably rather than accepting the negative report. [1]

When Is It Permitted?

Speaking negatively about someone is only allowed if it serves a strict, constructive purpose (like protecting an innocent person from harm) and meets specific halakhic conditions. According to the definitive work on the subject by the Chafetz Chaim, these requirements include: [1]

• You must have witnessed the incident yourself, not just heard it through a rumor.
• You must have first privately spoken to the person and gently rebuked them, if appropriate.
• Your intent must be entirely constructive (e.g., to help or warn), not out of anger or a desire to disparage. [1, 2]

You can explore comprehensive guidelines, daily study resources, and ethical texts on speech through resources like the Chafetz Chaim Heritage Foundation or Chabad.org's Speech Laws. [1, 2 ]

Cf. lashon hara

He is an immensely intelligent fellow, what the other men call ’scary smart’ with a forceful personality that is mostly off-putting to his fellow residents, correctional officers, and administrative staff.. He knows how to empty a room. He could probably single-handedly teach every class in any university curriculum while doing several doctoral directions on Middle Eastern esoteric theological, historical, and literary minutia.

We like him. He feels we are worthy con-versants in his whirlwind and is periodically willing to allow us to interrupt and engage/challenge his thinking. 

Here are the laws of lashon hara he is espousing.                          

                                   https://trusthashem.org/laws-of-lashon-hara/

Good rules.

I suspect the following of said rules would cut the articulatory interaction by about 90%.

Seems right.

We said goodbye at end of work and rec and went our ways — back to pod/unit and out to parking lot.

It seems he might just be the “wandering Jew” Elie Wiesel wrote about in Legends of our Time. 

His arrivals and disappearances seem to be historical evanescences. 

Evanescence refers to the quality of lasting for only a short time, then fading, vanishing, or disappearing quickly from sight or memory. It describes the fleeting or impermanent nature of something, like morning mist, a shooting star, or youth. [1, 2, 3, 4]) (AI)

We learned something new.

We always do.

With gratitude.

and so ends the nba season

 Good on the New York Knicks!

the tiresome evasion we’re tempted to run

 Watching criminal investigations

the banality of lies

shoving truth under mud

thick mouth covering words

when the police come to ask me 

what I know about someone murdered

I want to be alacrity and dispatch

words pirouetting to dance floor fully lit

nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison

The calculation the current administration is making is that very few will see how very small they are. At the same time, their ruse is that they are the largest and greatest that has ever led the American people.

Throughout a time in my life when I worked with psychiatrists and psychologists whose job it was to calculate and coordinate the proper dimensions of an individual’s being-in-the-world, I can imagine their alarm at the dangerous fluctuations of personality presentation coming from the White House. As an ordinary layman I am amazed at how he has been able to maintain a stranglehold on anyone in proximity to him and his delusions of grandiose supremacy and manipulative control. So many so cowed. 

This is a time that will be an historical treasure-trove study of psychological aberration and crowd mental health diminishment. A time when base instincts of revenge, personal greed and retribution triumphed over altruistic overtures of social health, service, kindness, and compassion.

About Jonathon Swift’s work:

In Lilliput Gulliver finds himself a giant among tiny people—according to the disposition of their eyes, he is an immense and thus almighty creature. He experiences greatness in its most literal form. But on his next voyage, to Brobdingnag, he realizes that he is now the tiny person in a land inhabited by giants. His own body has not changed, but its meaning has been transformed. He describes his shock:

In this terrible Agitation of Mind I could not forbear thinking of Lilliput, whose Inhabitants looked upon me as the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World; where I was able to draw an Imperial Fleet in my Hand, and perform those other Actions which will be recorded for ever in the Chronicles of that Empire, while Posterity shall hardly believe them, although attested by Millions. I reflected what a Mortification it must prove to me to appear as inconsiderable in this Nation as one single Lilliputian would be among us…. Undoubtedly Philosophers are in the Right when they tell us, that nothing is great or little otherwise than by Comparison: It might have pleased Fortune to let the Lilliputians find some Nation, where the People were as diminutive with respect to them, as they were to me. And who knows but that even this prodigious Race of Mortals might be equally overmatched in some distant Part of the World, whereof we have yet no Discovery?

What Gulliver experiences at this moment is the dizzying awareness that he can never really be at home again, either in his own body or in his own country. He can never be himself. He can never be normal. He must remember being his Lilliputian self, “the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World,” or his Brobdingnagian self, the contemptibly inconsiderable homunculus. Since “nothing is great or little otherwise than by Comparison,” he is forced to hover neurotically between greatness and littleness. The terms of this comparison are strictly binary—there are only the great and the diminutive. One is either massively aggrandized or utterly mortified.

(--from, Gulliver’s Warning, by Fintan O’Toole, NYRB, {Like Gulliver in Lilliput, “greatness” in the political realm depends on the existence of a group deemed puny or weak},.June 25, 2026 )

We wonder and worry about lone gunmen shooting up churches, temples, or schools. 

We watch as a troubled men arrange the killings of American citizens, blowing up of supposed foreign drug boats, bombing Iranians, stealing Venezuelan country and its oil, grifting billions of dollars from unsuspecting taxpayers in the United States, sending out hundreds of lies to confuse perceptions about Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia accomplices in Oval Office, government, corporations, and country clubs.

We live in an absurdist theater wherein up is sideways, down is whirligig, and Jesus Christ is supplanted by a megalomaniacal narcissist selling phones, hats, and false assurances of fair winds and following seas.

Meanwhile, the hull is breached, the engine is on fire, and the ship of state is listing on trump’s real estate torrential sea of lies and duplicity.

this lyrical martyr of your dying faith.

 In prison yesterday and at Friday evening conversation, this poem:

                                    Thank You Jesus

            Teri Ellen Cross Davis

 

When the blue and red sirens pass you,
when the school calls because your child
beat the exam and not a classmate,
when the smart phone drops but does not crack,
the rush escaping your mouth betrays your upbringing:
thank you Jesus—a balm over the wound.
When the mammogram finds only density,
when the playground tumble results
in a bruise, not a broken bone,
like steam from a hot tea kettle
thank you Jesus—and the pent-up fear
vents upward, out. Maybe it’s a hand
over breast, supplication learned deeper
than flesh as if one could shush the soul,
the fluttering heartbeat with three words.
Maybe it’s not so dire—an almost trip on the sidewalk,
the accumulated sales total showing savings upon savings,
maybe it’s as small as an empty seat on the Metro
or maybe thank you Jesus—becomes the refrain
every time your husband pulls into the driveway,
alive and whole, and no one has mistaken him
for all the black, scary things. You mutter it,
helpless to stop yourself from the invocation
of a grandmother who gave you your first bible,
you say it because your mother, even knowing
your doubt as a vested commodity, still urges prayer.
You learned early to cast the net—thank you Jesus
and it’s a sweet needle that gathers the fraying thread,
hemming security in steady stitches. From birth
you’ve heard this language; as an adult
you’ve seen religion used nakedly as ambition yet
this sacrifice of praise, still slips past your lips,
this lyrical martyr of your dying faith.

 

(—© 2017 by Teri Ellen Cross Davis. “Thank You Jesus” originally appeared in Harvard Review Online.)

Can we see what is occurring here?

speak well

 Where is it said

We are not people

Of the book, but

People of the word

as prayer becomes itself

 Holding bead 

Between fingers

Both bead  and fingers

Disappear 

In no movement —

Such is stillness

There is no movement

Bringing you to God

Where you are as you are

Is the dropping off into stillness —

There gone, there

Gone, here

of an evening

 Dizzy, dizzy,

Dizzy —

Like going under

Anaesthesia

Losing consciousness

Finding nothing

4:15am

 There they are

Dawn birds

Their song

Then

Silence

follow your prayer

 Do you pray?

        I pray all the time.

How so?

     I breathe.

Is breath prayer?

     Without ceasing

moverse a través de la creación

 as everything

disappears

what does

it mean

to move

through you

one more thing

 temporary 

loss of hearing --

sound of hardly 

anything

the body moves

(though awkwardly)

toward 

nothing at all

movement through

 it occurs

dropping mind

and body

there is no

experience, only

expression

aphasia

 I have gone loopy

A strange silence adheres

Ask me nothing

I’ll tell you no, (lies)

cat buddha hobo askance bamboo, παιδαγωγία*

 Green leaves

Still in sunlight

Wednesday morning 

Between two mountains

Nothing to  remember

nothing to forget

with no body

and no mind

everything is known

absent pedagogy*

if you dream

 Sleep

Alone

Satisfies

curriculum vitae

 am I buddhist?

    no, i practice meditative compassion

am I catholic?

    no, i practice contemplative universality

am I agnostic?

    no, i practice shunyata-kenosis not-knowing

am I atheist?

    no, i practice looking through God

yes?

    no! 

of course 

    not; mu

wherein to dwell

We look at one of the leaders (so-called) of the free world (so-called) and we think, “He don’t speak so good!”

There has been a deterioration of the language into mocking insults, grandiose proclamations of superiority, and simplistic non-verifiable statements of dubious falsity pattered absurdly pretending to be sensible facts accepted by everybody. It has become a drivel of non-sequiturs delivered with an idiotic smile and ‘what me worry’ inflection.

This country becomes a day school of toddlers spitting gibberish in sandpits with no adult supervision.  

Sociolinguistics

7 Language, Culture, and Ideology 

 

Another important strand of sociolinguistic research which can be traced to the influence of American anthropological linguists is the quest for a solution to the conundrum of the relationship between language, culture, and thought. Edward Sapir and his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf developed the hypothesis that language influences thought rather than the reverse. The strong form of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis claims that people from different cultures think differently because of differences in their languages. So, native speakers of Hopi perceive reality differently from native speakers of English because they use different languages, Whorf claimed. Few sociolinguists would accept such a strong claim, but most accept the weaker claim of linguistic relativity, that language influences perceptions, thought, and, at least potentially, behavior. 

 

More recently, sociolinguists such as Fairclough (1995) and applied linguists such as Pennycook (1994) have in quite different ways developed this approach. Fairclough's research uses a CDA approach to identify and expose the ways in which ideology and power are constantly instantiated and enacted in the familiar discourse of the media and of everyday interactions. Others have examined such issues as the continuing and increasingly subtle ways in which sexism, in the form of the derogation of women, or racist suppression or misrepresentation of ethnic minorities, are sustained through the ways language is used in the media or in public documents. Pennycook's controversial research also emphasizes critical awareness; he argues that the imperialist expansion of the English language has been at the cost of local languages in many countries. Not surprisingly, his views have been contested by those who regard the development of a wide variety of Englishes around the world as evidence that English no longer belongs to the English—nor even to the Americans.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/sapir-whorf-hypothesis 

A man from the Netherlands used to ask the young lad with whom I share familiar lineage from Massachusetts what foreign languages he was studying in school. Every time asked was every time answered -- ‘none.’ But now, decades later, that answer seems distracting. The only language and foreign language he was studying was English. The dialects, the regional distinctions, the relative simplicity or sophistication of intended meaning, nuance, emphases.

As I review my university teaching, I slowly learned that cursive was becoming extinct. For years some students receiving my comments on their college papers that I wrote in cursive did not let me know of their inability to glean my finely-turned reflections on their work. My flaw was not asking them to read my responses aloud until one day I did and learned of the one-sided non-dialogue we were having.

Today I read this:

Yes, cursive is still taught in schools, and its presence in the classroom has made a major comeback. More than half of U.S. states have passed laws requiring cursive instruction, with states like California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Kentucky bringing it back to ensure students can read historical documents and sign their names. 

While it faded from many curriculums in the early 2010s when Common Core standards prioritized keyboarding, state-level mandates have steadily reversed that trend. 

• Mandated States: Over 27 states (such as California, Florida, Virginia, and Texas) require cursive instruction, typically introduced in 2nd or 3rd grade. 
• Local Control: In other states (such as Maine and Montana), the decision to teach cursive is left up to individual school districts.
• The "Why": Educators and researchers cite its benefits for fine motor skills, brain development, and the necessity of learning a fluid signature for official legal documents. 
• 
  

Because rules vary by region, you can check your specific local requirements by consulting the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation or your local state department of education website. search 

 

It seems the current leader of the country geographically below Canada and above Mexico learned only how to speak grandiose hyperbole and write me-me-me, numbers-numbers-numbers, drivel-drivel-drivel.

Thus the thought proceeding from these fitbits of language that track the depth and repetitive usefulness of meaningful communication has been put on hold for the time being. We are in a desert of communicative thirst crawling through mirages of false nourishment arriving at the feet of some deranged ozymandias 

whose brain has turned to sand and whose delirium slips awkwardly through the fingers of our culture.

Our language is our thought in the same way, as Amos Wilder said, “Our language is our fate.”

Or "It is no nation we inhabit, but a language. Make no mistake; our native tongue is our true fatherland.” (--from Emil Cioran, Romanian philosopher.)

Or “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”(— Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Or, (in deference to the Netherlander), “He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.”(— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

As for me, I am learning how to speak.

I need to learn how to listen to the sound of what is being said.

I am looking for a new country of inspiration, meaning, and understanding wherein to dwell.

A migrant with an expiring passport.