resistance
#RESIST
July 28, 2019“Wealth is Wasted on the Wealthy”
“Beware Billionaires in Philanthropic Clothes”
-McKinley Lentz, 21, Greenbay, Wisconsin
#FreeSpeach
‘Since oney is what it is, I do not deny that you may be worthy of all praise if you light your cigarettes with it. That would show you had a deep, pure sense of the ontological value of the dollar. Nevertheless, if that is all you can think of doing with money, you will not long enjoy the advantages that it can still obtain.’
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
And…
Even where totalitarianism has not yet completely wiped out all liberty, men are still subject to the corrupting effect of materialism. The world has always been selfish, but the modern world has lost all ability to control its egoism. And yet, having acquired the power to satisfy its material needs and its desire for pleasures and comfort, it has discovered that these satisfactions are not enough. They do not bring peace, they do not bring happiness. They do not bring security either to the individual or to society. We live at the precise moment when the exorbitant optimism of the materialist world has plunged into spiritual ruin. The result is an agony of ambivalence in which each man is forced to project upon his neighbors a burden of self-hatred which is too great to be tolerated by his own soul.
-Thomas Merton, The Living Bread
In that place where there are shadows may I bring light. – St. Francis
‘The lies we tell are like toys,
easy to break. Like gardens
where we play hide and seek,
and, in our excitement, make a sound
so people will know where to look.’
-Rilke, Collected French Poems
Barry Lopez:
We reject the assertion, promoted today by success-mongering bull terriers in business, in government, in religion, that humans are goal-seeking animals. We believe they are creatures in search of proportion in life, a pattern of grace. It is balance and beauty we believe people want, not triumph. The stories the earth’s peoples adhere to with greatest faith–the dances that topple fearful walls; the ethereal performances of light, color, and music, the enduring musics themselves–are all well patterned.
We feel cold.
Our goal is simple, we want our country to flourish.
Le Guin
January 25, 2018
Soften and embrace.
April 24, 2017
Only love, with no thought of return,
can soften the point of suffering.
‘Water in its clear softness fills the whatever hole it finds. It is not skeptical or distrusting. It does not say this gully is too deep or that field is too open.
Like water, the miracle of love is that it covers whatever it touches, making the touched thing grow while leaving no trace of its touch.
Most things break instead of transform because they resist. The quiet miracle of love is that without our interference, it, like water, accepts whatever is tossed or dropped or place into it, embracing it completely.
Of course.
Of course, we are human and are easily hurt if not loved back or if loved poorly. But we waste so much of life’s energy be deliberating who and what shall be worthy of our love when in the deepest elemental sense, these choices are not in our province, anymore that rain can choose what it shall fall upon.
And over a lifetime, the pain of withholding this great and quiet force is more damaging than the pain of being rejected or loved poorly.
For love, like water, can be dammed, but toward what end?’
-Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening