rain and snow, come and go

Feel what you feel.

Think what you think.

Only, don't become attached to what you feel or think.

Everything changes up.  Two candles. One light.

still

In Staten Island
breath is
held cheap --
Eric Garner
still
can't
breathe

the war on black men by officials and police just became a little scarier

Policeman, (nor the assembled hold-him-down, kneel-on-his neck-and-head officers) who killed Eric Garner with banned chokehold for selling individual cigarettes, is not indicted for the homicide.

He pleaded for breath.

Nobody, then or now, helped Mr Garner. 

Bramhall’s World, Justice system and Eric Garner

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/bramhall-cartoons-december-2014-gallery-1.2028602

Alice Walker on who actually killed Eric Garner.

 Gather

 ©2014 by Alice Walker for Carl Dix and Cornel West

It is still hard to believe

that millions of us saw Eric Garner die.

He died with what looked like a half dozen

heavily clad

policemen

standing on his body, twisting and crushing

him

especially his head

and neck.

He was a big man, too.  They must have felt

like clumsy midgets

as they dragged him down.

Watching the video,

I was reminded of the first lynching

I, quite unintentionally, learned about:

it happened in my tiny lumber mill 

town before the cows were brought in

and young white girls

on ornate floats

became dairy queens.

A big man too,

whom my parents knew,

he was attacked also by a mob

of white men (in white robes and hoods)

and battered to death

by their two by fours.

I must have been a toddler

overhearing my parents talk

and mystified by pieces of something

called “two by fours.”

Later, building a house, 

i would encounter the weight,

the heaviness, of this varying length

of wood, and begin to understand.

What is the hatred

of the big black man

or the small black man

or the medium sized

black man

the brown man

or the red man

in all his sizes

that drives the white lynch mob

mentality?

I always thought it was envy:

of the sheer courage to survive

and ceaselessly resist conformity

enough to sing and dance

or orate, or say in so many outlandish

ways:

You’re not the boss

of me!

Think how many black men

said that: “Cracker,* you’re not the boss

of me;” 

even enslaved.  Think of how

the legal lynch mob 

so long ago

tore Nat Turner’s body

in quarters

skinned him 

and made “money purses”

from his “hide.”

Who are these beings?

Now we are beginning to ask

the crucial question.

If it is natural to be black

and red or brown

and if it is beautiful to resist

oppression

and if it is gorgeous to be of color

and walking around free,

then where does the problem

lie?

Who are these people

that kill our children in the night?

Murder our brothers in broad daylight?

Refuse to see themselves in us

as we have strained, over centuries, 

to see ourselves in them?

Perhaps we are more different

than we thought.

And does this scare us?

And what of, for instance,

those among us

who collude?

Gather.

Come see what stillness

lies now

in the people’s broken

hearts.

It is the quiet force of comprehension,

of realization

of the meaning

of our ancient

and perfect

contrariness;

of what must now be understood

and done to honor

and cherish

ourselves:

no matter who

today’s “bosses”

may be.

Our passion

and love for ourselves

that must at last

unite

and free us.  As we lay our sacrificed

beloveds to rest

in our profound

and ample caring:

broad, ever moving,

and holy,

as the sea. 

*Cracker:  from the crack of the whip wielded by slave drivers. http://aliasbruce.typepad.com/alias_bruce/2014/09/alice-walker-on-who-actually-killed-eric-garner.html

"Advent, when ladder climbing stops we are ready to gather around the manger"

Something this way arrives from louie, louie this morning.

"Alexandra Bircken’s site-specific installation Deflated Bodies in the Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield, forms part of her Eskalation 2014 exhibition."

"In the face of such injustice and harm the Bible prophetically kicks away the ladders and gives the lie to seductions of ladder climbing and ladder making. Seen through a biblical lens Alexandra Bircken’s Deflated Bodies portrays the horrific cost and the appalling waste of the thinking which blighted our world then and which continues to do so now. It makes plain all that God desires us to subvert and overthrow.”             

(--from art exhibition,  http://visualtheology.blogspot.com/2014/11/advent-when-ladder-climbing-stops-we.html

This morning watched night become dawn breathing light arriving shapes of mountain, tree. road. 

After Wallander & The Troubled Man

To remain safe & sane it is wise to ignore lies & secrets of government, corporation & institution. 

So...wise is humbling & foolish, eh? 

Yep!

I think: to know? what? don’t

I don’t know

what

to think.

The realm of non-thinking 

Can hardly be fathomed by cognition;  

In the sphere of genuine suchness 

There is neither “I" nor "other."               

                 - Yunmen (864-949)

To think,
know
what I don’t.

What to
think?
“I"?
Don’t know

missing; nothing

Cat spat at 3am. 

In the dream I sit on floor with one of Del Mastro brothers I knew in the 1960s. He is in brown habit. He died at thirty. He is telling me there will be a talk by a theologian, something about the abc's of Ten Commandments. While in the past an encounter with woman from early seventies. Can one be happy finding the particulars of past circulating in dream state?

Everything emerges from silence. Sounds itself. Returns to silence.

Are we, each of us, an articulation drawing us into form of something seen something heard, a moment's manifestation, then a Doppler diminishing, a fading image on screen going to disappearance?

We live, it is said, as dream within a dream. We feel this mirage real, we look at it, we are seen as it.

And so, take naps. Dream within the dream that resides as dream of Dream.

There's no need to wake up.

It's dream all the way down.

Cat, kneading her way with inner motor purring with momentary rest, decides to go to window again to see what she is missing.

I suspect it is nothing.

first candle; coming toward

New liturgical year. 

Repeat: arriving, always arriving.

One whole through billions of particulars.

Becoming apparent.

landing, intuition

Something gives way in peapod. At tie-up along harbor dock she fills with water. There's a time for each of us to come ashore.