To pray is to enter the unknown. It is more than reciting prayers,
The one who prays has no idea where prayer goes and whence it travels.
But return it does.
To earth.
To cosmic expanse.
And we are changed.
The one who prays becomes one in prayer.
To pray is to enter the unknown. It is more than reciting prayers,
The one who prays has no idea where prayer goes and whence it travels.
But return it does.
To earth.
To cosmic expanse.
And we are changed.
The one who prays becomes one in prayer.
I worry MAGA men
are drifting into misogyny
and headship fantasy
to the squirrelly
unpredictability
of our
impressionable
masculinity
Senator Chris Murphy says we’re heading for dystopia.
Joyce Vance writes about the not-so-stealth arrival of Project 2025 at the back door of the incoming administration.
Vance writes:
The bottom line is that all of the pieces of Project 2025 that we’ve discussed for the last year are in play. We’ve known that here, even though Project 2025 seemed to fall off the radar screen after Trump's ersatz denial. Now it’s clear that all of the horribles are on the table, everything from the end of the Department of Education to the discontinuation of the weather warnings NOAA provides. In July, Roberts said on a podcast, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” If the left won’t “allow” the proponents of Project 2025 to have their way, they’re going to force it on us, and apparently, they’re willing to engage in bloodshed if Americans stand up for democracy.
We are headed into a holiday week, and folks are still weary and demoralized from the election. But it’s time. It’s time to reengage and decide what role we’re going to play. Project 2025 isn’t about the best interests of the American people. It’s about a powerful president who can carry out the policies that people like Vought and Roberts have spent years crafting—whether we like them or not. Let’s pay attention.
—Joyce Vance, Substack, Projrct 2025: It’s on (Predictably )
The United States voting citizenry elected Donald Trump and his Project 2025 agenda — even though he deceptively claimed he knew nothing about it or anyone associated with it. Now he has put forward the name of one of its authors to lead the OMB which will be the primary administrator of Project 2025 going forward.
So it will be.
In other news, it rains this morning.
Cat stands on my chest.
Cool air blows through open window.
We’re coming to American Thanksgiving.
Poet W.S. Merwin gives us a version of the time. We conversed about it in prison Friday morning::
Thanks
BY W. S. MERWIN
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
—Copyright Credit: W.S. Merwin, "Thanks" from Migration: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by W.S. Merwin.
What kind of sardonic irony, (or, is it) veiled sincerity, are we facing here?
Cat kneads. Claws punctuate.
Freedom takes imagination and intelligence.
Not everybody has what it takes.
Reading wolfhart pannenberg earlier.
It takes some concentration to stay with a theologian and christologist.
I was happy when the tomato soup and sandwich were ready.
Which makes more sense — the man? Or the community’s faith-stories about the man?
Looking over what I have been saying, surely I haven’t learned anything.
In his early teachings, the Buddha identified “three poisons,” or three fires, or three negative qualities of the mind that cause most of our problems—and most of the problems in the world. The three poisons are: greed (raga, also translated as lust), hatred (dvesha, or anger), and delusion (moha, or ignorance). The three poisons are opposed by three wholesome, or positive attitudes essential to liberation: generosity (dana), lovingkindness (maitri, Pali: metta), and wisdom (prajna). Buddhist practice is directed toward the cultivation of these virtues and the reduction or destruction of the poisons; practitioners identify those thoughts that give rise to the three poisons and don’t dwell on them, while nurturing the thoughts that give rise to the three positive attitudes.
We don’t need to look far to see the three poisons at work. We see them every day in the news and in the streets, and if we pay attention, we can see them in our own mind and actions. The arising of these feelings may be outside our control—we don’t choose to be angry, for instance. But recognizing how greed, hatred, and delusion cause tremendous harm in the world can help us learn to manage them. Likewise, just as swallowing poison later causes sickness, nurturing these harmful attitudes leads to negative behaviors we will later regret.
Though commonly referred to as poisons, the Buddha first introduced these mental attitudes as fires in the Fire Sermon (Adittapariyaya Sutta): “Monks, all is burning . . . Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.”
Fire is a central metaphor of Buddhism, typically as a negative quality of mind or consciousness. Putting out these fires is the goal of Buddhist practice. The word nirvana is derived from the extinguishing of fire. Sariputra, one of the Buddha’s chief disciples, was once asked, “What is nirvana?” He answered, “The destruction of greed, the destruction of anger, the destruction of delusion—this is nirvana.”
The three poisons are depicted at the center of the Wheel of Life (bhavachakra), a visual representation of the sorrows of samsara. Greed is depicted as a rooster, hatred as a snake, and delusion as a pig. Importantly, they literally feed off one another; each animal consuming the tail end of the other in a vicious cycle of delusion. The centrality of the three poisons demonstrates their role in powering the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, the escape from which is nirvana.
(—from, What are the three poisons? (Greed, hatred, and delusion), in Tricycle)
Do I even know where my cushion is? (Voice asks)
Uh…?
Find it! Sit on it! Become antidote!
And accumulated dreck becomes our political refuse.
Water dripping ceaselessly
Will fill the four seas.
Specks of dust
Not wiped away
Will become the
Five mountains.
—Shih Wang Ming (6th c)
I understand that radical acceptance is an option.
I’d have to be able to not be comatose and receive help up off this cement slab.
Polygluttonous
guitar grifter
Banana
Bible-lyrics
A cartoon
Clownish
Caricature invades
America’s Id
Boléro
BY KEITH LEONARD From the kitchen, I catch the neighbor cross the street to switch off my car’s interior lights. He returns to his house without announcing the favor. For the last three years, a friend has woken early and walked the beach, combing for bottle caps and frayed fishing line. She mentions this only casually at lunch, after I’ve asked what she did that morning. Care has a quiet soundtrack: the sycamore’s rustling leaves, your nails tracing my shoulder blades. A melody that repeats—a bit like Ravel’s Boléro. When it was first performed, a woman shouted, Rubbish! from the balcony. She called Ravel a madman. I think I understand. I wish I didn’t. I’ve been taught that art must have conflict, that reason must meet resistance.
Source: Poetry (December 2023) (for audio)
When I was involved with agencies of "care" I'd blithely say that "Care is being-with in everydayness."
I taught staff in agencies caring for the profoundly mentally disabled, those abandoned and neglected, those requiring alternative or special education, or those dependent and abused. We'd wrestle with "care" -- other-care, self-care, Care-itself. We'd use poetry, theater, psychology, philosophy, social science, and personality preferences.
Leonard is right. Always conflict. Always resistance.
In prison yesterday one of the men, while reading about mind and rationality, gaps in time and breath, put down the text and wondered whether those with Down Syndrome had anything to do with, what he called, (I think) "originary brain" in contrast to rational brain. He wondered if the sweetness and affection so often displayed on the part of a Down syndrome person was the consequence of some original state of wisdom that hides behind-below-beyond our typical exercise of knowledge, reason, logic, and calculation.
A compelling
meditation:
non-resistance,
conflict-less
being-with
one an-other
as care
just might
be
sounding through