The Secret History of ISIS, a Frontline Documentary, May 2016, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/the-secret-history-of-isis/
With wet cloth on head, deep chills, self imposed quarantine, aspirin, kombucha, two triscuits as meal, getting updated on Middle East sorrow and tragedy,
It is possible that terror and clashes of cultures have become steady state in a world gone unsteady in its spinning.
In the USA the politics of upcoming elections play out like a television reality show between two damaged candidates. In the background, organizations such as CIA, FBI, NSA, Military Intelligence Agencies, and local clairvoyants either don't see anything useful, or, seeing it, cannot share well with others to arrive at meaningful activity.
It is a hard time for the world. Our leaders have not been impressive with their decisions -- from Bush and Cheney to Obama and their cabinets and councils.
One of the benefits of not feeling well is a latitude for discouragement. And yet it seems that petty, personal, bourgeois fixations on the cult of personality and celebrity -- to even the smallest degree -- is a bland treachery of disproportionate ignorance as to what and how being in the world might possible mean. To see the bombs, beheadings, and blowhards masquerading as business as usual is disappointing.
I'm tired of all the God talk. It falls flat on my ears.
I turn to an O'Donough poem:
Swanlight
— John O’Donohue © 2001
If it could say itself January
Might brighten its syllables on the frost
Of these first New Year days whose cold is blue.
Meanwhile in this corner of its silence
A weak winter sun lowers down behind
The moor that rises away from the lake.
Beyond reach of light, the shadowed water
Succumbs to this darkening of spirit
That would deny the bog today’s twilight.
All of a sudden something else breaks through
To appear at the far end of the lake
In two diagrams of white, uneven light.
I have never seen white so absolute
And alone, glistening in awkward form
Dreaming across the water a bright path.
As it stirs and changes I see what it is:
Two swans have found the mirror in the lake
Where a V of horizon lets light through
To make them light-source and light-shape in one.
Now they swim and fade through windows of reed
And disrobe the lake of apparition.
I look and look into their vanishing
See nothing. Departing that perfect ground
I knew I had been hungry for a blessing.
(--Poem by John O’Donohue)We have need for a blessing.
I can’t quite fathom what that might look like.