understatement

 I’m not optimistic

America will survive

It’s current president

Let’s be clear,

He is not good

For the country

fleets, repletes, conceits

 indict him, arrest him

take him off the streets

take a nap, close your eyes

don't get under sheets

the day grows old, I grow old

dusk and sundown one greets

identify with love, and you are home

 During Friday Evening Conversation we spoke a little about Heinz Westman’s Structure of Biblical Myths, The Ontogenesis of the Psyche, as well as Emmet Fox’s description of the etymology if the word/name Is ra el.

We spoke about the psychological underlying emotional culture currently gripping America and masterfully manipulated by the current president, namely, victimhood, resentment, complaining, anger, revenge, and bullying dominance. The message is we have been and are being taken advantage of and screwed by everyone everywhere and we will get you back.

At end, “politics” is identified as a crazy cousin to stay away from, an understandable aversion, not to be invited, but rarely, into the room. I wanted to disagree, so I did. Politics isn’t the snide and unpleasant barking at one another that we so often see. That’s the perversion of politics. 

politics

noun

  pol· i· tics ˈpä-lə-ˌtiks 

plural in form but singular or plural in construction 

 1.      a

: the art or science of government

b

: the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy

c

: the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government

 2

: political actions, practices, or policies

 3        a

: political affairs or business

especially  : competition between competing interest groups or individuals for power and leadership (as in a government)

b

: political life especially as a principal activity or profession

c

: political activities characterized by artful and often dishonest practices

 4     : the political opinions or sympathies of a person                                                                                                       

 5.       a

: the total complex of relations between people living in society

b

: relations or conduct in a particular area of experience especially as seen or dealt with from a political point of view

office politics

ethnic politics.             —Merriam-Webster 

Whether in its flourish or in its breech, we need to be looking at “the total complex of relations between people living in society."

That we currently have such an ugly representation with the arrogance of some manipulating the strings of political puppetry does not recuse the rest of us from participating in the correctives needed to attend properly to the organic and responsive health of the nation and its people. When boarishness enters the room there needs to be gracious civility present as well.

At end, Jude read from The Course in Miracles in her final circle:

What is the body? 

1 The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built to separate parts of his Self from other parts. It is within this fence, he thinks he lives, to die as it decays and crumbles. For within this fence he thinks that he is safe from love. Identifying with his safety, he regards himself as what his safety is. How else could he be certain he remains within the body, keeping love outside?

2 The body will not stay. Yet this he sees as double safety. For the Son of God's impermanence is "proof" his fences work and do the task his mind assigns to them. For if his oneness still remained untouched, who could attack and who could be attacked? Who could be victor? Who could be his prey? Who could be victim? Who the murderer? And if he did not die, what "proof" is there that God's eternal Son can be destroyed?

3 The body is a dream. Like other dreams, it sometimes seems to picture happiness but can quite suddenly revert to fear, where every dream is born. For only love creates in truth, and truth can never fear. Made to be fearful, must the body serve the purpose given it. But we can change the purpose which the body will obey by changing what we think that it is for.

4 The body is the means by which God's Son returns to sanity. Though it was made to fence him into hell without escape, yet has the goal of Heaven been exchanged for the pursuit of hell. The Son of God extends his hand to reach his brother and to help him walk along the road with him. Now is the body holy. Now it serves to heal the mind that it was made to kill.

5 You will identify with what you think will make you safe. Whatever it may be, you will believe that it is one with you. Your safety lies in truth and not in lies. Love is your safety. Fear does not exist. Identify with love, and you are safe. Identify with love, and you are home. Identify with love, and find your Self.      https://www.jcim.net/acim_us/WKBK-ST261.php

I take note of the words in the final paragraph, especially, “Your safety lies in truth and not in lies.”

We must continue to think about truth, avoid lies, and come to realize more acutely that “Love is [our] safety.”

The three poisons pointed out in Buddhist teaching — greed, anger, delusion — are being sold us day after day. We must cultivate generosity, kindness, and clarity as counterpoint to the perverted politics of our current abysmal leadership.

Come to think of it, who really wants to listen to the fingernails on blackboard, excruciatiion sent our way by one torturous side of the ruling political power. Still, in all, there are pleading voices of others who need to be heard, need to be listened to, need to be embraced.

Our political environment needs to return to civil conversation, wise compromise, and knowledgeable facts willing to be respected and acted upon.

Perhaps what we consider to be prayer to God is really a plea to one another.

Hear us, O Lord, [my fellow humans] graciously hear us, that we might hear one another, with kindness, generosity, and love!

out for doggie final pee

 Yellow eyes stare back at me

From behind green fence —

Mountain  unblinking

weeping love’s touch

 Christ 

Gathers;

Trump

Scatters —

I wish

To say

I do 

not believe

In Trump,

But wish

Him well

In hell

Where Christ

Will drag his

Sorry behind

Up and out

To do penance

Helping persecuted

Victims of his

Regain their lives —

Do not punish

Trump, make him 

Suffer forgiveness

Weeping love’s touch

let it

Rain in maine —

Sorely needed

Every drop

too far, too too far

The president indicts his petty vindictiveness.

He sits in his malicious power intoxication and orders another glass of personal poison.

His posse encircles him and admires his fine clothes.

His nakedness is obscene,

things equal to the same thing are equal to each other

In the video an ICE agent threw a woman to the ground in the street.

In another video another ICE agent threw a woman to the floor in a hallway.

What I notice is they are Donald Trump throwing women down.

Things are unequal here and inequality is the point.

baskets of olives and lemons

Read, upon waking of a Thursday, this: 

OPINION, INTERESTING TIMES, The Grand Strategy Behind Trump’s Crackdown on Academia, Ending the “culture of victimhood” on campus. Sept. 25, 2025, 5:05 a.m. ET, NYTimes)

A little heavy for wake-up reading, but the cat didn't uncurl herself from brown blanket and guests from away are still asleep down to Hosmer pond air b&b after arriving well after midnight. So, the reading.

By revealing that this is what I’ve just finished reading, I am not encouraging anyone to plow through the interview. A conservative opinion writer and a Trump administration official talking about government funding, meritocracy hiring, and anti-Semitic doings on campuses is just a little too weedsy for my understanding. Makes me understand better, if I didn’t before, my ill-equipped capacity to be either a tenured professor or a college president. My skills reside more in choosing muffins and donuts and half-n-half at grocery store than weighing through title vi subtleties and the strain of politics on its implementation.

But I do respect civil and knowledgeable discourse.

Just because racism and elitism clash with political right versus left in a time of growing warning signs of authoritarian takeover of our cultural, educational, business, judicial, civil and educational institutions with military backup force and carte blanche executive orders — doesn’t mean something beneficial isn’t happening for the country. It only seems (possibly) so to we the naive and the apparently unsophisticated side-liners.

So I turn to Cheslaw Milosz:

Campo dei Fiori

BY CZESLAW MILOSZ

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori

baskets of olives and lemons,

cobbles spattered with wine

and the wreckage of flowers.

Vendors cover the trestles

with rose-pink fish;

armfuls of dark grapes

heaped on peach-down.

On this same square

they burned Giordano Bruno.

Henchmen kindled the pyre

close-pressed by the mob.

Before the flames had died

the taverns were full again,

baskets of olives and lemons

again on the vendors' shoulders.

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori

in Warsaw by the sky-carousel

one clear spring evening

to the strains of a carnival tune.

The bright melody drowned

the salvos from the ghetto wall,

and couples were flying

high in the cloudless sky.

At times wind from the burning

would drift dark kites along

and riders on the carousel

caught petals in midair.

That same hot wind

blew open the skirts of the girls

and the crowds were laughing

on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

Someone will read as moral

that the people of Rome or Warsaw

haggle, laugh, make love

as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.

Someone else will read

of the passing of things human,

of the oblivion

born before the flames have died.

But that day I thought only

of the loneliness of the dying,

of how, when Giordano

climbed to his burning

he could not find

in any human tongue

words for mankind,

mankind who live on.

Already they were back at their wine

or peddled their white starfish,

baskets of olives and lemons

they had shouldered to the fair,

and he already distanced

as if centuries had passed

while they paused just a moment

for his flying in the fire.

Those dying here, the lonely

forgotten by the world,

our tongue becomes for them

the language of an ancient planet.

Until, when all is legend

and many years have passed,

on a new Campo dei Fiori

rage will kindle at a poet's word.

(--Poem by Cheslaw Milosz, Warsaw, 1943)

Have you ever read about Giordano Bruno?

We seem to be uncertain whether to retrieve and reimplement burning at the stake or other forms of assassination into our discourse and deportment against those holding views not of our liking.

Surely we will choose the better angels of our nature.

Surely some revelation is at hand.