don’t ask

We are not

Two

Nor are we

One

clear and cold moving through grief

Eight of us in prison this morning around a circle talking with one another about Rumi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddha, and Ezekiel.

Ten of us at poetry midafternoon in Nursing Home reading Poe, Collins, a Sung poet, a Tang poet, David Whyte, and Robert Frost.

Eight of us on evening hermitage porch spoke about safety, the meaning of the word "individual," critical thinking, how to argue without creating "other," and one person saying that there is no outside for her -- we are what is within everyone and everything.

A Friday.

A joy!

friday

Cool morning on mountain

Scat inside barn door —

Visitor scouting lodging

the gamble

This is news today:

On Wednesday, we learned from Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, under questioning from Democratic senators: 

• He cannot say whether a president can promise a pardon in exchange for a witness’s silence. • He won’t say whether the president is subject to a subpoena to give live testimony in an ongoing criminal matter. • He cannot say whether firing a prosecutor looking into the president’s wrongdoing (akin to the Saturday Night Massacre) is acceptable, even though he opined on the subject in 1998. • He refuse to say whether a president can  self-pardon. • He will not recuse himself from matters pertaining to the president’s status as, in effect, an alleged co-conspirator to defraud voters. • He would not answer a question from Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) as to whether a president could, as President Trump did in deploring prosecution of Republican House members, use federal agencies to help friends and punish enemies.

(—from,  Kavanaugh is daring the Senate to gamble with the Constitution, By Jennifer Rubin, September 6 at 09:15 ET, The Washington Post)

country

Darkness descends. Restless night. Uncertain path

is this so

The way we think of the world is how we treat one another.

Look at mind.

Learn your ethical character.

betwixed and between

I like “structural invisibility.”

In “Liminality and Communitas,” Turner begins by defining liminal individuals or entities as “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony” (1969: 95). He then goes on to name the non-structure or anti-structure that he continuously refers to in “Betwixt and Between” through such concepts as the “realm of pure possibility” and structural invisibility. He chooses the Latin term “communitas” to express this idea of anti-structure, and refers to social structure and communitas as “two major ‘models’ for human interrelatedness.” These models are defined as follows:

The first is of society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of “more” or “less.” The second, which emerges recognizably in the liminal period, is of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders. (1969: 96) http://www.liminality.org/about/whatisliminality/

 Is integral consciousness without structure?

ephemeral

Mono no aware