each one, and each none

This heartbeat

This heartbeat

skip

This heartbeat 

skip

This heartbeat

skip

skip

Comes Holy Spirit 

seeing through God

There’s no path to follow

No way to embrace

Only this:

There’s no seeing God

only seeing through God

as air between us is seen through

as breath coming and going is breathing us

Walt

The 97 yr old man read a poem to the group about growing lovely growing old.

Then he said it was the last time he’d be coming to the Poetry, Tea, & Thee group after 7 years.

The ordeal to get there was too much for him.

He thanked us and said he loved us.

He cried. 

Everyone did.

Let Me Grow Lovely  

Let me grow lovely, growing old-- 

So many fine things do: 

Laces, and ivory, and gold, 

And silks need not be new; 

And there is healing in old trees, 

Old streets a glamour hold; 

Why may not I, as well as these,

 Grow lovely, growing old?  

                               (--Poem by Karle Wilson Baker)

how get rid of fools

Time

sunlight on new green

It is June.

Things
are

Still.

egomaniacs are people for whom others don’t exist

Republicans vowed to dismantle the US government.

They elected Mr. Trump to carry out their desires.

He’s doing so.

Perhaps nobody listened.

This year Hannah Arendt is alarmingly relevant, and her books are selling well, particularly On the Origins of Totalitarianism. She’s been the subject an extraordinary essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books and a conversation between scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge and Krista Tippet on the radio show “On Being.” Stonebridge notes that Arendt advocated for the importance of an inner dialogue with oneself, for a critical splitting in which you interrogate yourself—for a real conversation between the fisherman and his wife you could say: “People who can do that can actually then move on to having conversations with other people and then judging with other people. And what she called ‘the banality of evil’ was the inability to hear another voice, the inability to have a dialogue either with oneself or the imagination to have a dialogue with the world, the moral world.”

Some use their power to silence that and live in the void of their own increasingly deteriorating, off-course sense of self and meaning. It’s like going mad on a desert island, only with sycophants and room service. It’s like having a compliant compass that agrees north is whatever you want it to be. The tyrant of a family, the tyrant of a little business or a huge enterprise, the tyrant of a nation. Power corrupts, and absolute power often corrupts the awareness of those who possess it. Or reduces it: narcissists, sociopaths, and egomaniacs are people for whom others don’t exist.

(-- REBECCA SOLNIT: THE LONELINESS OF DONALD TRUMPON THE CORROSIVE PRIVILEGE OF THE MOST MOCKED MAN IN THE WORLD), in LITERARY HUB,CREATED BY GROVE ATLANTIC AND ELECTRIC LITERATURE

as in paradise

Is it

possible

God

Is each

One of

Us

each, one, of, us

I shall not want.

Everything is given and available.

Attention, awareness, and appreciation are the necessary conditions.

And the realization that anything happening anywhere affects everyone everywhere.

It is the character of authentic soul that the web of interdependence is connected within and through each one of us.

Not to see this is to risk the integrity of existence.

We must submit to this integral whole or remain as fragmented desolation.

Choose life. Choose what life longs for. 

Choose this longing for this revealing itself -- to and as, each, one, of, us.

yes, the dead and deadened

This Memorial Day

We

remember

And pray for

All

Dead

And deadened

By war.

antipathy

Beginning season one of West Wing (1999-2006). Intelligent, witty, fast-paced, and poignant.

Meanwhile, back in real time, the actual occupant of the White House returns from overseas to the simmering turmoil of investigation, lies, and obstruction.

We seem to forget that the stated goal of the majority ruling party is to dismantle government in favor of private interests and corporate power brokers.

A large portion of the populace is confused and uncertain now that the actions equivilate the intent. It feels like there is a long desolate desert looming large into the horizon.

I'd prefer it were different, but it is the way it is.

Feels like a coup d'etat.  Feels like something equally revolutionary will rise up to offset the smallness shrinking the spirit of America on the part of one particular party in power.

I wait to see what arises.

I'm uncertain what it will look like.

I'm afraid an ugly time is rapidly forming.

Antipathy.