Saturday, July 27, 2019

these days

thinking about truth

it cannot be seen

it is God

and who believes in God

just sitting, saturday morning

I don't know

what to think

about this.

...

I don't

know what

to think

about this

...

I

don't know

what

to think about

this

Friday, July 26, 2019

but a whimper

There is a denial of responsibility on part of senate to attend to election health for the country. 

Their tired excuse of staying partisan efforts is ludicrous. 

We are going to have to replace intransigent legislators or see our representative democracy replaced by foe and fiend.

Thursday, July 25, 2019

getting on with it

ok

Senate & McConnell refuse election security legislation.

Two things:

I. I'm ok that democracy has run its course with the Republicans in power.
2. I'm ok that Trump has beaten the system and justice, and gotten away with everything.

Now then, my two mile walk through cemetery and harbor side was useful.

And, having watched the Netflix documentary The Great Hack, then, Carole Cadwalladr on TED, I feel what Martin Heidegger's essay on technology warned about has come into play.

Democracy and fairness in elections has played out.

Justice for wrongdoing of people in privileged high places is no longer in play.

ok

Let's get on with it.

Whatever that means.
Lament
BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY 
Listen, children:
Your father is dead.
From his old coats
I'll make you little jackets;
I'll make you little trousers
From his old pants.
There'll be in his pockets
Things he used to put there,
Keys and pennies
Covered with tobacco;
Dan shall have the pennies
To save in his bank;
Anne shall have the keys
To make a pretty noise with.
Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why. 

jittai

What does being alive mean?
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Is ‘being’ alive?

Is that the switch? Not that we come to an experience of our aliveness — because such an experience could still leave us alone in our aliveness. Rather, it is ‘being’ that is alive.

Hence, an experience of ‘being alive’ is the first step out of separated existence toward integral existence wherein everything is alive and we are part of vital reality.

It is the first step toward beginning to experience and understand what has been known as the ethic of reciprocity, or, the golden rule.

If everything is alive, and our task is to learn to live in proper relationship with everything and everyone, our attitudes, judgments, laws, and interactions take on a new and profound viewpoint.
Your children are not your children. 
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. 
They come through you but not from you, 
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
(—Khalil Gibran, The Prophet, On Children)
 Life’s longing for itself. 

We long for the ‘Itself’
実態, じったい 
  • jittai
  • true state 
  • actual condition 
  • reality

 Itself.

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

radio drama

Judiciary committee done; Intelligence committee convenes.

If you like the dynamics of rhetoric and persuasive speech, the hearing satisfies.

As a nonpartisan member of the radio audience I appreciate the pro and con efforts of partisan adversaries.


Mueller is hammered, then courted. As a fellow 74 yr old I empathize with the former fbi director’s sometimes stuttering response to the rapid fire shoehorned questions while thumbing through a 400 page report in front of him.

Two things:
1.
I admit to making use of dithering elderly privilege when I dislike any interrogatory sent my way.
2. 
This to Nytimes Bruni op-ed today:
If you’ve read the report you’ve earned the right to be crazed with the obliviousness of those that haven’t. The thing about truth is that it doesn’t care who holds it or who pushes it aside. Truth is it’s own best company. Truth knows that solitude is what it is most given.
Sitting by river in Milo Maine, dog licking water from his coat, the second hearing begins.

Mueller must be tired of the questions. 

So many of us are tired of what the presidency has become and what Congress is not.

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

surround it with inner space

There is great delight in close and reflective reading, in intelligent and insightful conversation.

Bill Moyers is known for facilitating both.
Bill: What about the notion of creating something from nothing? 
Hugh: You have to have nothing in order to really make something. You have to enter yourself in order to find. He power — to get the gift of being able to emanate something. You have to create space — or allow space to occur. Rilke once said that in order to know a tree, you have to surround it with inner space — only in your renouncing is it truly there.
 (P.6, Bill Moyers, Genesis, A Living Conversation) 
It is a time in our culture and mythology for a new metaphor to stretch us into the contemporary and atemporal beyond.

Inner space is outer manifestation.

Behold what is within without.

Monday, July 22, 2019

finally

Tolstoy wrote of Mosaic Law and Eternal Law

Jesus, he said, acknowledged the former but proclaimed the latter --

Something passing passes; what is perennial is loving wisdom  

superstition stupor-nation

If you step in shit,
it's hard to ignore

America has lost
its sense of smell

same shoes
every day

walk through
people's house

people's halls
as heads turn

left foot
right foot

pretending no stink
proclaiming perfume

reasonable haiku

I would like to be
depressed for a while — do not
attempt to reach me

haiku (after reading news)

too many places
so dark
where go to find light —
save yourself here now

background feuerbach

Is God

Itself?

Our not

Seeing God

Our blindness?

What is

In itself

A matter of

Experience

With no

One experiencing

Sunday, July 21, 2019

a lucky hand

Suboxyn, the men said, in prison Friday. So began the tutorial. Its use in recovery programs. Its relation to heroin. Its substitutionary function. How one proposed reentry house was refusing to sponsor it for proposed population in proposed newly purchased house.

Two of men in our room had been heroin users. They knew suboxyn, explained the feeling, explored the politics, stated their own positions, supported the drug-free stance for returning to the street.

These were serious men in for serious crimes expressing serious consideration for a serious issue of our time, and their time. They’ve been working on themselves. They have practices and points of view. You can feel it.

Someone brought The Science of Mind, a book by Earnest Holmes. We read around. Another was paging through Zen and The Birds of Appetite by Thomas Merton. A new fellow was going through Tricycle magazines.

Men came in and out. We silently sat. We did walking meditation. We talked. It’s a Friday morning ritual over twenty years running. I greet one man in German. Four, five, six in hallway — our brief yet sufficient re-up. These are friends. One tells me of another man in smu having a shitty time of it.

After final silence and final circle, we embrazzo, shake hands, extend greetings to absent woman and dog, and I wander through heavy steel doors. A short-timer wants to know if he could attend a meetingbrook conversation when he gets out in four weeks. Come on by, I say.

Signing out at captains row woman introduces herself as part time chaplain while regular chaplain is doing military chaplain training duty. She’d done it, she says, happy to be filling in, hoping to stay on, proud that her father had been baptized in prison many years ago and she’s now here.

The walk out is, as always, a practice of gratitude for having walked in and being able to walk out. Desk officer as I sign out says same thing to me. “So, they’re letting you out, eh? He reaches over and shakes my hand. Something very profound is acknowledged in haiku brevity.

A work crew is removing the large stones from failed path cut into grassy oval years after the failure was apparent the day after laying it. Something new, asphalty, will be coming. Men from the farm shovel and rake the rehabilitation in hot sun.

I started teaching college courses in the old prison thirty years ago, eleven years before the millennium. I’ve sat with and learned with a lot of men. Something more unexplainable than fondness is felt, is in the bones.

Somebody up there likes me.

Or, it’s been a lucky hand.

DeThe Science of Mind, a book by Ernest Holmes.

resist punching in nose

There’s no dealing with bullies. Bullies in schoolyards and corner stores stay bullies in business, become bullies in White House. 
In my old neighborhood, which was not far from toughguy-in-chief, there was always someone with nobility and character who would shrivel the Bluto with a withering look — no need for a punch in the nose. 

Tolstoy became fascinated with the words, “Do not resist evil.” He, along with that fellow from Nazareth, had serious credibility when looking at errant misguided baloney. 


Where is that real-deal moral embodiment today?