In the flash of a single thought,
The agitated mind is put to rest.
All the inner and outer sensations
Become lucid and transparent.
Breaking the great void
By a turning of the body,
The ten thousand phenomena
Of the majestic world
Rise and disappear.
—Han-Shan Te-Ch’ing, dailyzen
I've heard enough.
Political speech eviscerates sanity and integral intelligence.
The carnival show of ex-cons, soon to be sentenced, and unhinged poseurs finishes its four night cacophony and double-tongued mendacity.
But, cheer up. No one can sustain lugubrious pathology for long when there are sane and intelligent people in your audience.
Right?
Madness, the way they gallop off to foreign shores!
Turning to the One Mind I find Buddhahood,
Above self and other, beyond coming and going.
This will remain when all else is gone.
--Tanzan (1819–1892) dailyzen
It's hard to understand the conversation that suggests the current m.a.g.a. variation of the Republican Party has any real cogency or comprehensive clarity. Not in the United States. It resembles a cocaine or methamphetamine temporary high replete with the goofing cynicism that "Nah. I'm only kidding ya!" vibe.
(I guess you can tell I'm not a fan of insincere and scam personalities performing for their donors and shilling for millions of dollars to fix mega-donors' entitled investments and future projects.)
My naïveté is inexhausible. I have a nine-year-old's sense of justice and morality. I'm not ready to abdicate a trust in the presence of a divine energy that somehow cares for truth, justice, and the humane way.
Perhaps Buddhahood is possible. Perhaps Christ-heart is nearby. Perhaps The Way and Its Power is approaching. Perhaps Yogic Union is at work. Or Integrity. Or the Breath of Life. Or Love-Itself lingers.
Please, fault me my irrational displeasure and instinctual dissatisfaction. It's a Noble Truth.
Perhaps if we look (together)...
meditate (together)...
pray (in solitude)...
contemplate (alone)...
surrender illusion...
take refuge in enlightened thought and aware action...
perhaps --
madness will tire of us, turn around, and go away.
The conflicting experience of partially watching someone give a speech.
Earth Poem
(by Mahmoud Darwish)
A dull evening in a rundown village
Eyes half asleep
I recall thirty years
And five wars
I swear the future keeps
My ear of corn
And the singer croons
About a fire and some strangers
And the evening is just another evening
And the singer croons
And they asked him:
Why do you sing?
And he answered:
I sing because I sing…
And they searched his chest
But could only find his heart
And they searched his heart
But could only find his people
And they searched his voice
But could only find his grief
And they searched his grief
But could only find his prison
And they searched his prison
But could only see themselves in chains
(translated by Abdullah Al-Udhari)
(according to F. Pessoa)
middle July heat
doldrums, no birds, feeders bare
fans move air through room
At roundtable with intelligent conversant felons Monday morning, the following sentence was spoken about one of the presidential candidates, "I wish he were a better man."
It arose out of a long conversation. It might have been me who said it. I think it was. In fact, it was me.
He survived, thankfully, an assassin's bullet. The comedy of who is responsible for the carnival disarray of a shot being shot and who can we blame for the near tragedy (murder is always tragic) is in high dudgean over opinion airways and sniping platforms of X and Threads.
That said, the premise still stands -- I wish he were a better man.
"I'm the size of what I see." -- writes Pessoa.
Elsewhere he writes:
Knowing how easily even the smallest things torture
me, I deliberately avoid contact with them. A cloud
passing in front of the sun is enough to make me
suffer, how then should I not suffer in the darkness
of the endlessly overcast sky of my own life?
My isolation is not a search for happiness, which
I do not have the heart to win, nor for peace, which
one finds only when it will never more be lost; what I
seek is sleep, extinction, a small surrender.
To me the four walls of my miserable room are
both prison cell and far horizon, both bed and coffin.
My happiest hours are those in which I think noth-
ing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but
lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss
growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bit-
terness I savour my absurd awareness of being noth-
ing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.
I never had anyone I could call ‘Master’. No
Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right
path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or
Athena appeared to me to enlighten my soul.
(--in The Book of Disquiet, 1982, by Fernando Pessoa.
cf. The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego: Composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa) is a work by the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). Published posthumously, The Book of Disquiet is a fragmentary lifetime project, left unedited by the author, who introduced it as a "factless autobiography." The publication was credited to Bernardo Soares, one of the author's alternate writing names, which he called a semi-heteronym, and had a preface attributed to Fernando Pessoa, another alternate writing name or orthonym. (wikipedia)
His words need a warm sweater. Or, if read in summer, a cool breeze.
Difficult yet comforting to read, troubling yet necessary to quote, Pessoa was introduced to us by an elderly and lanky psychologist (psychiatrist?) who used to attend our Saturday poetry conversations at the bookshop/bakery (1996-2009). He, himself, was Pessoa-esque with tilt of head, an eponymous wanderer down winding cobblestone streets of curious identity.
Don't we love those who season our walkways!
Finishing novel Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse for third or fourth time.
Beginning Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet.
A little weary of world news, opinions, outrage, and unceasing accusations of one side to the other, the legal chicanery and judicial politics no longer attempting to mask favoritism and cronyism.
It is too hot — both weather and tempers. Absurdity abounds.
This breath and this breath, without aim, without goal.
The mind needs be at liberty.
Jake brakes thump down hill from Hope.
There are no arrivals, only departures.
no one wants
the former president
dead
rather that justice
take him away
from public office
now a new narrative
a new victimhood
to sell bling
the day goes on
God longs to be born
in good hearts, kind minds