Way off

I don't understand why it is ok for the government to assassinate people whenever they want.

Am I missing something?

A magic trick

When Friday ends, it will be Saturday.

Turning around, returning home

Thursday morning at the harbor. Ellens Dritter Gesang (Ellens Gesang III, D839, Op 52 no 6, 1825), in English: " Ellen's Third Song", composed by Franz Shubert begins classical music on Maine Public Radio with Suzanne Nance.

The piece was composed as a setting of a song from Walter Scott's popular epic poem The Lady of the Lake, in a German translation by Adam Storck (1780-1822), and thus forms part of Schubert's Liederzyklus vom Fräulein vom See. (Ave Maria, Schubert, Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria_%28Schubert%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria_%28Schubert%29

At harbor the schooners ready for their season. Lewis French, Olad, Lazy Jack, Surprise, Angelique, Grace Bailey -- are finishing scraping, painting, varnishing, and polishing. And then the gray Mary Day arrives back, is turned by yawl boat, reversing into berth.

The harbor life and coastal stretch from bell buoys to weathered pilings becomes a kind of poetry. I daily row the poesis, the making-creativity of nature's hand, composition.

"La poesia es la conciencia de la tierra." (--Alfonso Cortes: Poetry is the conscience of the earth.)

A group wants to work toward returning parole to the State of Maine. I'm for it. I'd also like to return respect for parole, (voice, spoken word) as it arrives at and passes through us.

Mike Divine greets the sitting sipping surveyor with his cheery assessment of how fortunate we are to live here. And we are.

We secure lines, offload gear, feel solid ground underfoot, and get sent off with the encouraging appreciation of crew.

Who's next?

articulating one's own being in a new way

If some wonder if they or I have lost faith, tell them this: faith is our profound longing for truth, and is not lost. Belief, however, is what we temporarily hold as true until we experience the ungraspable nature of truth. 

Thus it is that faith remains while belief is lost.

Keep faith, lose belief. Truth emerges within and through everything. 

Humility recognizes ungraspable emergence. Arrogance ignores what it doesn't comprehend.

Keats called it "negative capability."

In a letter dated 22 December, 1817, the poet John Keats coined the term “negative capability” and defined it this way:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

http://santitafarella.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/negative-capability-defined-walking-in-mysteries-and-the-shoes-of-others/

Later, in his blog PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, the author adds:

In the Virginia Quarterly Review (April 1, 2005), the poet Galway Kinnell offers a similar expansive spin on Keats’s notion of negative capability, suggesting that negative capability includes not just a metaphysical suspension of judgment—allowing mysteries to be mysteries—but the Shakespearean power to “obliterate” oneself and walk, as it were, in the shoes of other beings (human and non-human!):

Walt Whitman had Keatsian “negative capability”—a certain shapelessness of personality, a peculiar power to obliterate himself and flow into some other being and speak it from within—and speak himself in the process. “I am the man—,” he wrote, “I suffered—I was there.” A transaction seems to occur: Whitman gives whatever he flows into a presence in human consciousness, and in return, this other thing or creature gives Whitman a situation and vocabulary which enable him to see and articulate his own being in a new way.

(ibid)

It is akin to the title of Pema Chodron's book "Comfortable with Uncertainty."

Cool water for thirsty bodies!

If you meet the Christ on the road...

There used to be an argument over who killed Christ. It was a silly diversion. No one killed Christ.

But the church is trying.

The church is becoming a silly diversion.

I'll tell you what. Christ stepped out from the back of the church to catch a breath of air.

I wish Christ well. It's an uneasy walk down those stairs and off into the countryside.

Unless the seed breaks open

Easwaren points out that the skin of the snake must be sloughed.

Old ideas, failing institutions, dead practices.

We are in trouble.

Fear, not love, could be our fate if no regeneration.

SOUTH India is full of snakes, and every year as I was growing up, when the earth was warm after the monsoon rains, I used to marvel at the sloughed-off snakeskins scattered across our fields. “Doesn’t it hurt a snake to shed its skin like that?” I once asked my grandmother.

“It has no choice,” she replied. “It will strangle if it can’t grow. It has to slough its skin or die.” In the same way, I would say, civilisation outgrows the skins of old ways that begin to strangle it. If they are not discarded, they become so constricting that civilisation begins to turn on itself and become self-destructive.

In the last fifty years, we have come to a crisis in human evolution where we have to choose between violence and non-violence. If we choose to tread the path of violence, not only do we
impede our evolution, but we invite destruction upon all of us.
(--from The Power Within, by Eknath Easwaren)
http://122.183.185.202/globaladjustments/?q=book/export/html/397

The customs we cultivate and costumes we don take on their own officiating insistence to behave in accordance with some haberdasheric dictate arising when final button is secured.

We must slough our bad ideas and useless patterns of mental formations that we've carried too long and at great debilitating price to our body-mind longing to enter a new freedom for love and joy.

Let shells of seeds and shell casings of armaments fall to ground, empty.

Begin at Home
We don’t have to begin peacemaking on an international scale. We can start to make our contribution right in our own city – beginning, like Gandhi, in our own home.

Here I can make a few practical suggestions. First and foremost, the roots of non-violence need to be planted in the home. Non-violence is the absence of violence.

A non-violent home is a home that eschews violence in every form: not only in action, which is absolutely necessary, but also in word and even thought. A home that is non-violent in thought, word, and deed is governed entirely by love.

Sow Non-violence
When we sow non-violence, we begin to reap peace. We should not expect a civilisation to change as easily as a snake sheds its skin. Progress is won slowly, over centuries. Despite appearances it is we, the ordinary people of the world, who have the power to change our lives. We make history together, all of us, by the sum of our choices and desires.
(--Easwaren, ibid)

Let us begin with "being." By the "sum," he says. Might he be referring to "sum, esse, fui, futurus?" I am to be (what) I have been (and am) going to be.

Realize this!

Enter Being Whole!