Cat.
March 23, 2017
‘They’d never seen anything like the boy with the moon and star before.
And people would ride from far and wide just to seek the word he spread
I’ll tell you everything I’ve learned, and
Love
is all, he said.’
[The Boy With a Moon & Star On His Head]
☾ ☆
Yusuf Islam
We fly.
[Sea of Cortez, Baja California]
‘Unlike birds, we confuse our time on Earth, again and again, with obsessions of where we are going – – often to the point that we frustrate and stall our human ability to fly. We frequently tame and hush our need to love, to learn to know the truth of spirit, until we can be assured that our efforts will take us somewhere. All these conditions and hesitations and yes-buts and what ifs turn the human journey upside down, never letting the heart, wing that it is, truly unfold.
Yet, without consideration or reservation, it is simply the presence of light that stirs birds tossing and lift. They do not understand concepts such as holding back or only investing if the return seems certain. In this, we are the only creatures that seek our guarantees, and in so doing, we snuff the spark that is discovery.
Just how often do we cripple ourselves by not letting love with all its risks teach us how to fly? How many times do our hearts stall because we won’t let the wingspan of our passion open us fully into our gifts? How frequently do we search for a song of guidance that can only come from inside us?
I know that over the years, through fear and expectation, my mind has gathered an horded places I needed to go, things I needed to have, selves I needed to be. But here I am, without most of them – – the goals and wants all used up in learning how to love.
So try as I do to imaging and construct where I am headed, try as I will to plan and know what this life of feeling means, it is the pulse of what I feel itself that lifts me into spirit. In truth, wings don’t grow any differently to fit south or east or west, and our lives, no matter how we train ourselves, are more fundamental than any direction of worldly ambition. We, like the birds are meant to fly and sing – – that’s all – – and all our plans and schemes are twigs of nest that, once outgrown, we leave.
Mark Nepo
Carl.
‘Every transformation demands as its precondition the ending of a world – – the collapse of an old philosophy of life.’
Carl Junge
Man and his Symbols
El Sueño Americano.
March 22, 2017
Rosaries confiscated from undocumented migrants by US border patrol agents.
“Tom Kiefer was a Customs and Border Protection janitor for almost four years before he took a good look inside the trash. Every day at work—at the C.B.P. processing center in Ajo, Arizona, less than fifty miles from the border with Mexico—he would throw away bags full of items confiscated from undocumented migrants apprehended in the desert. One day in 2007, he was rummaging through these bags looking for packaged food, which he’d received permission to donate to a local pantry. In the process, he also noticed toothbrushes, rosaries, pocket Bibles, water bottles, keys, shoelaces, razors, mix CDs, condoms, contraceptive pills, sunglasses, keys: a vibrant, startling testament to the lives of those who had been detained or deported. Without telling anyone, Kiefer began collecting the items, stashing them in sorted piles in the garages of friends. “I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he told me recently. “But I knew there was something to be done.”
Divine love in chaos and uncertainty.
March 18, 2017
Renew a steadfast spirit within me.
-Psalm 51:10
Change the consciousness and the false condition will disappear.
-The Science of Mind
‘Especially during those times when life seems to be a churning whirlpool of turbulence do we benefit from letting ourselves relax into it, accepting what is and releasing the urge to struggle against it. These are times that offer opportunities to grow spiritually, in the midst of the turmoil we may be tempted to allow fear to take control of our thinking.
Keeping in mind the image of the calm flow of divine Love in which we are safely and easily carried through all of our life’s events and circumstances, we leave behind the storm weather of false appearances and fear.
We remember to feel the flow of ease, peace and harmony.’
Must read.
The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency
How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency.
By, Jane Mayer
[Dark Money, The Dark Side, Strange Justice]
“Robert Mercer now owns a sizeable share of the United States Presidency.
[…]
Mercer’s influence has been huge .He’s not the first person in history to use money in politics, but in my view Trump wouldn’t be President if not for Bob. It doesn’t get much more effective than that.”
Unconscious complexity.
March 14, 2017
The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.
Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other
Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze itself; it has to be created between people.
Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it’s a movement into evolution.
The unconscious wants truth, as the body does.
When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For a while, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness.
Adrienne Rich
‘Truth’ is the central ethical problem within the field of communication ethics. Even as the standard of justice belongs in a particular sense to politics and the norm of stewardship to business, so truth, or truth telling, is the fundamental issue in communications.
How is human dignity manifested? For whom and under what conditions are speakers establishing the vernacular? How are worldview articulated?
Dear God, lead us to the truth, but save us from those that have found it.
-Dr. Clifford Christians
How will Post-truth and alternate fact dialogic interaction on a national platform seep into our common and everyday interpersonal communication?
People Power
March 12, 2017
ACLU rallies tens of thousands of people across the US on Saturday, March 11th, to organize and #resist.
Washington Post
3.12.17
David Weigel
The ACLU is spending millions of dollars on a plunge into grass-roots politics — a “People Power” campaign. It’s the newest and largest development from a sprawling “resistance” movement that regularly moves faster than the Democratic Party’s leaders can think and isn’t waiting on politicians for cues.
People Power debuted this weekend in south Florida and, by the organization’s estimate, at thousands of weekend house parties nationwide. Everyone who showed up received a nine-point plan to turn blue America into a network of “freedom cities” by defying the president’s executive orders, his health-care agenda and his Justice Department. Anyone who missed it could click on PeoplePower.org, the latest catchall website to find actions that would get results.
The key to the effort: targeting Trump’s policies, rather than the man or his words. If 2016 taught Democrats anything, it’s that attacking Trump isn’t enough.
“We’ve seen this exponential growth in people becoming card-carrying members of the ACLU,” Romero (Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union) said in an interview after his speech. “They’re younger. They’re in every state around the country. The biggest danger was in not doing something like this, where people get apathetic and they fall asleep.”
There’s little apparent risk of that, and the biggest organizations on the left, broadly defined, are staffing up to give it direction. The Center for American Progress is planning a grass-roots conference for “rising” activist groups in California next month, and an ideas conference in Washington one month later. Super PACs such as American Priorities have become promotion machines for the Indivisible movement, which in just a few months has begun to organize some local chapters as official nonprofit groups.
…no organization is transforming as quickly or as boldly as the ACLU. Since the 2016 election, it has tripled its membership to more than 1.2 million and raised more than $80 million, with plans to add 100 staff members to a team of about 300.
Inspire. ❥
March 10, 2017
Sociolinguistics & Power & 1930’s
March 9, 2017
Washington Post
March 9, 2017
[45] and his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, have introduced a new political language to Washington — a populist and nationalist rhetoric that cuts across traditional Republican vs. Democratic divisions.
Some of the words and phrases the administration has injected into Washington’s political vocabulary previously thrived on the far reaches of both left and right.
“…economic nationalism,” which Bannon defined as a singular focus on American jobs. The idea, according to two senior administration officials, is to pull back from multilateral trade agreements, multinational organizations, and the free flow of goods (and, to some degree, workers) that the previous four presidents emphasized. This was the “new world order” that President George H.W. Bush envisioned after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 — a system of interlocking, international agreements and alliances that he hoped would replace the Cold War faceoff between communism and capitalism.
Insert: New retired US Ambassador Daniel Fried on MSNBC with Rachel Maddow: “West (Western countries) at lowest we’ve seen since the 1930’s”
That system, Bannon and Miller believe, has failed. Bannon wants to replace it wholesale — a blizzard of change “as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution,” he said — with a system that used to be known as “protectionism,” using tariffs and other government action to press U.S. companies to bring offshored jobs back home and make their goods here. Most economists dismiss the idea of economic nationalism, saying that automation, far more than globalization, has reduced the supply of manufacturing jobs. They cite Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish economist, who called the concept of a balance of trade “absurd” and wrote that tariffs are a tool of “national prejudice and animosity.”
Enemy of the People
Globalist
Corporatist
America First
As far back as the 16th century, Roman political operatives composed nasty sonnets about the candidates they opposed and posted them for voters to read, according to the historian Robert Darnton. In the United States before the Civil War, fake news about rapes and assaults by slaves sometimes sparked attacks against slaves by white mobs. And in the 1930s and ‘40s, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party used fake news accounts of purported crimes by Jews to spur Germans to attack their Jewish neighbors. Accusations of fake news by political extremists have been used through the centuries to deepen divisions in societies to help minority parties gain a foothold on power.
More from Daniel Fried:
“I’ve learned never to underestimate the possibility of change, that values have power, and time and patience can pay off especially if you’re serious about your objectives. Nothing can be taken for granted and this great achievement is under attack by Russia […] it is for the present generation to defend […] the very notion of liberal democracy is being questioned and that is disturbing.”
In response to Russia’s motivations and the current depletion of the State Department under ’45’: “…to diminish us across the board – to undermine the Western liberal order – to to make us uncertain about ourselves.”
Read Fried’s full retirement speech from Feb. 25, 2017, warning against isolationism: http://time.com/4682994/diplomat-daniel-fried-retirement-speech/
“…for those of you remaining in government service, I say this: serve your nation and this Administration as you serve all Administrations: with loyalty, dedication and courage.
And as you serve, you will, as I did, always remember your oath to the Constitution, and to that principle behind the Constitution: our nation is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Have faith in our nation, in our Constitution and in that proposition. Have faith in yourselves, thus inspired, and in each other.
And therefore, as Lincoln said, “LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.”
‘Mercy, walking with your hands open.’
March 7, 2017
In a world that lives like a fist
mercy is no more than walking
with your hands open.
-Mark Nepo
‘So much more can happen with our hands open. In fact, closing and stubbornly maintaining our grip is often what keeps us stuck, though we want to blame everything and everyone else, especially what we’re holding on to.
There is an ancient story from China that makes all this very clear. It stems from the way traps were set for monkeys. A coconut was hallowed out through an opening that was cut to the size of a monkey’s open hand. Rice was then placed in the carved-out fruit which was left in the path of the monkeys. Sooner or later, a hungry monkey would smell the rice and reach its hand in. But once fisting the rice, its hand could no longer fit back out through the opening. The monkeys that were caught were those who would not let go of the rice.
The trap worked because the monkey’s hunger was the master of its reach.
The lesson for us is profound. We need to always ask ourselves, what is our rice and what is keeping us from opening our grip and letting go?
The truth is that food is every where.’
[The Book of Awakening. 2011.]
This land is our land. ✿
We are members one of another.
-Ephesians 4:25
Right thought, constantly poured into consciousness, will eventually purify it.
-Science of Mind
Think now of an open field.
This open physical space is a metaphor for how we are affected by others through a unity of relationship (Ernest Holmes). ✿ Consider someone has divided virgin land into one-acre plots, and given an acre apiece to a number of individuals who are free to raise whatever they want.
“After years of cultivating our individual gardens, what will we fine” (Holmes)?
We will find much in our garden that we did not plant. Seeds from nearby plots of land have blown onto our plot, or birds have brought seeds. ✿ Those seeds have produced plants we do not want, yet we were not able to prevent their growth.
No matter how well we have tended our own garden, it is affected by other lands nearby. ✿ All pieces of land are affected by the others. Similarly, our individual consciousness is not separate from the Universal. There is only one Mind and each of us is part of this unity.
The consciousness of each person influences the collective field. ✿ Other people experience that which we cultivate in our consciousness, and we are affected by the consciousness of others.
We contribute to the overall well-being of the world when we cultivate a beautiful garden in our mind. ✿ We can do so by eliminating unloving thoughts and by planting instead only those ideas that generate condition we ourselves desire to experience.
[Science of Mind. March 2017. p. 42]
“I cultivate a beautiful consciousness.”
Oliver.
March 6, 2017
‘In the country, far from the lights of the city, I saw the entire sky “powdered with stars” (Milton).
It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left.
My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience – and death.’
Gratitude [2015]
The graceful and transient words of Oliver Sacks, writing in the months prior to his transition.
Feel the one direction.
March 2, 2017
Live deep enough
and there is only one direction.
‘No matter whom the apprentice talked to, if she listened close enough and long enough, the words all went back to the same source, as if there were only one large thing speaking. No matter how many eyes she looked deeply into, they all eventually reveled the same shimmer, as if there were only one large thing seeing. No matter how many pains she soothed, the cries all sounded from the same human hurt, as if there were only one larger thing feeling.
When she brought all this to her master, her master walked her in silence through the woods to a clearing, where they sat on a fallen tree. The light was flowing through, covering everything. The master placed a stone in one hand and a small flower in her other hand, and said, “Feel the warmth from both stone and flower. See how both are covered differently with the same light. Now trace the light of each back to the sun.”
The apprentice heard the one large thing speaking in the master’s voice, saw the one large thing shimmer in the master’s eyes, and even feel the same human hurt in the master’s soft silence. The light grew even stronger and the master said, ‘We are all just small stones and little flowers searching for our sun. What you have seen under words, behind many eyes, and beneath all cries is the one direction.’
-Mark Nepo