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

it begins now

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."
(Isaac Asimov)

I sat with him last Saturday night four hours as he breathed from a deeply restless but subdued place.

I sat with him tonight an hour and a half as his breath, gone, left his body quiet and still.

“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth."

(Buddha)

Family gathers. It begins now. The way we navigate new transition.

for me it is new year’s eve

31 aug.

Comes September

A new year

Give a man a mask and he will show his true face. (Oscar Wilde)

It is time to face our true face.

Happy birthday, laddie!

watching the play

When the time comes, do we expect anyone to do the right thing?

Becoming an ethical and moral individual requires self-awareness as well as a real connection with fellow beings.

An actor, whether true or charlatan, will ultimately exit the stage. 

Words, however trippingly, end

losing faith

Walking mountain

hot morning

Step by

step slowly

rooster call

Night holds on, barely

It’s only words, sounds of waking

Neutrinos billons of miles

And years from home

mourn the loss

Perhaps part of the outpouring for John McCain following his death is the stark awareness and contrast with that which is not John McCain in our midst. Not only do we mourn the loss of this funny, irascible, dedicated man — we also mourn the loss of the kind of man he presented to us to look up to, argue with, and respect. To respect a respectable man is ennobling. 

It is good practice to disagree with an agreeable man. Preferable to disagreeable men whose habits involve denigration and detraction, theft of honor for sport and personal profit.

We mourn the loss of McCain. 

He takes with him a good part of us.

from huh, to care for, through in/as, to with

Jane Hirshfield says it well.

She does so by saying what poets have said about relationship with nature.

https://youtu.be/4MZl5mdCzuY

the physics of cyberspace

The power and extent of cyberattack possibility is under-emphasized and under-appreciated.

There is more here than the skin of a wounded executive in a compromised office of a vulnerable country.

Almost everyone who has studied NotPetya, however, agrees on one point: that it could happen again or even reoccur on a larger scale. Global corporations are simply too interconnected, information security too complex, attack surfaces too broad to protect against state-trained hackers bent on releasing the next world-shaking worm. Russia, meanwhile, hardly seems to have been chastened by the US government’s sanctions for NotPetya, which arrived a full eight months after the worm hit and whose punishments were muddled with other messages chastising Russia for everything from 2016 election disinformation to hacker probes of the US power grid. “The lack of a proper response has been almost an invitation to escalate more,” says Thomas Rid, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies. 

But the most enduring object lesson of NotPetya may simply be the strange, extra­dimensional landscape of cyberwar’s battlefield. This is the confounding geography of cyberwarfare: In ways that still defy human intuition, phantoms inside M.E.Doc’s server room in a gritty corner of Kiev spread chaos into the gilded conference rooms of the capital’s federal agencies, into ports dotting the globe, into the stately headquarters of Maersk on the Copenhagen harbor, and across the global economy. “Somehow the vulnerability of this Ukrainian accounting software affects the US national security supply of vaccines and global shipping?” asks Joshua Corman, a cybersecurity fellow at the Atlantic Council, as if still puzzling out the shape of the wormhole that made that cause-and-effect possible. “The physics of cyberspace are wholly different from every other war domain.” 

In those physics, NotPetya reminds us, distance is no defense. Every barbarian is already at every gate. And the network of entanglements in that ether, which have unified and elevated the world for the past 25 years, can, over a few hours on a summer day, bring it to a crashing halt. 

(—from, THE UNTOLD STORY OF NOTPETYA, THE MOST DEVASTATING CYBERATTACK IN HISTORY, Crippled ports. Paralyzed corporations. Frozen government agencies. How a single piece of code crashed the world. 

by Andy Greenberg (@a_greenberg) is a WIRED senior writer. This story is excerpted from his book Sandworm, forthcoming from Doubleday.)https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world/

A day will come, I’m sure, when I will look at these computational devices reliant on a fragile network of signals and switches as quaint relics of a time when information and artistic entertainment  flowed easily to them in homes and public places. They will gather dust.

I will be reading a book.

Underlining and making notations in margins.

The war will be history.

do you have a reservation

One by one

Coming to final hours

Saturday evening

troubling of a star

That everything is connected is not easily evident.

Yet, everything depends on such knowledge.

When to the new eyes of thee
All things by immortal power,
Near or far,	30
Hiddenly
To each other linkèd are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star; (--from 'The Mistress of Vision' by Francis Thompson, 1859-1907)

https://www.bartleby.com/236/240.html

It is our fundamental ignorance that says we are detached and self reliant.

Scoundrels and hypocrites prey on this ignorance for their own gain.

We must learn to love what poetry tries to reveal to us

ringing clear

Bells warn off

Invite silence

Note the holy

an enemy did this

What do you do with weeds choking things?

Matthew 13:24-30 New International Version (NIV) 

The Parable of the Weeds 

24 Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field.  

25 But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away.  

26 When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.27 “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’ 

28 “‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’ 

29 “‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them.  

30 Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’”

Is there something useful here?

Maybe mowing tomorrow.