Sailing toward peace . . .
It's another Moon Day . . . a slow cooling begins here in Okieland, a week away from the Fall Equinox ...
Today in 1620, English colonists aboard the Mayflower set sail for America, where they founded Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. turns 74 today. The literary critic , professor, historian, filmmaker and host of Finding Your Roots on PBS TV was born on this day in 1950 Keyser, West Virginia
It has been 61 years since a white supremacist’s bomb went off at 10:22 a.m. at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls who were getting ready for church services. – Joyce Vance, Civil Discourse.
Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart. -- St. Francis of Assisi
Our world is noisy. People are stressed out, angry, and scared. Our futures feel uncertain. American monk, mystic, and social activist Thomas Merton summed up this moment well in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander many years ago. He wrote:
“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activity neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful." – posted by Maria Shriver, Sunday Paper, 9.15.24
If our heart inside is feeling happy and peaceful, what other people do is not going to worry us nearly as much. It is because we have this anger inside ourselves that we are not dealing with that makes everyone else an enemy. When we give loving-kindness and compassion to ourselves then naturally this is also going to spread out toward others. – Jetsunma Tenz in Palmo
Doubting doubt . . .
It's Sol's day . . . and summer is holding on in Okieland . . .
We do not attain anything by our own holiness but by ten thousand surrenders to mercy. A lifetime of received forgiveness allows us to become mercy. Mercy becomes our energy, our meaning. Perhaps we are finally enlightened and free when we can both receive mercy and give it away—without payment or punishment. – Fr. Richard Rohr
The interaction of your thought with the physical world around you creates the changing physical world around you. Take responsibility for your thoughts — they are not coming to you but arising from within you.
More thinking about thinking: Breaking the thought chain.
Doubt has a place in life; doubt the negativity in yourself and the people around you. Then trust in our life grows naturally and trust is innocence. When there is trust, there is no fear in life. – Gurudev
And its the birthdates of three doubters who never managed to get completely free of negativity:
Agatha Christie was born in 1890 Torquay, Devon, England
The humorist, writer, critic, actor and film director, Robert Benchley, was born in 1889 Worcester, Massachusetts.
And film director Oliver Stone turns 78 today. He was born on this day in 1946 New York City.
“Seeing is believing” because these days we believe first, then see. There was a time when we saw without belief, then we were taught that things were supposed to make sense.
Golf pants and divine wrath...
It's the Satyr's day . . . with only the slightest chance for lightning as the day unfolds here in Okieland …
Have tea (metaphor: whatever) in the store when it seems full of misbehaving children – and what does this have to do with democracy? – Tara Brach
Compassion is not an idealized state. It is the profound realization that we are not separate from one another, and it requires the ability to feel another’s suffering. Like loving-kindness, it is fundamentally interactive and ultimately has no subject and no object. Loving-kindness and compassion are the perfume of interconnectedness, the fragrance of nonduality. – Joan Halifax
Lightning, divine wrath, and yellow golf-pants. – Garrison Keillor
Blessing for Different Sounds
even in that spacious music
we call silence
I am still waiting here
to decipher your ancient language,
– David Whyte, “Blessing for Different Sounds,” -from The Bell and the Blackbird, Many Rivers Press, 2018.