No moss gatherin' on this rollin' stone . . .
It's Thor's day … despite continuing Northerlies, TulseyTown is sunny and warming up a bit . . .
The mailbox held a sad reminder that today in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
A somewhat happier note celebrated the birth today of Maya Angelou. The autogiographical author and poet was born Marguerite Ann Johnson in 1928 St. Louis, Missouri.
Today is also the birthdate of Muddy Waters. The blues guitar and harmonica great was born McKinley Morganfield in 1915 Rolling Fork, Mississippi. The “Hoochie Coochie Man” was a “natural born rolling stone.”
With acting in his natural born veins, Robert Downey, Jr. was born in 1965 New York City. The twice Academy Award winner turns 59 today.
And, 75 years ago today in Brussels, Belgium, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded.
Freedom is not silence and peace. Freedom is being at ease in noise and chaos. Are you bound by the categories you create? Forms and sounds are not the issue. Being bound by them is. – Guo Gu, from Passing Through the Gateless Barrier by Guo Gu. Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. 2016.
Pandora Station
Sad the song set not to music.
Odd the rhyme fixed
not in time of some kind.
Chaos has a harmony all its own. — jab
The Chaos I refer to in the poem is not the chaos of the mind of the self, of selfing, of unconscious habit patterns run wild. That mind of chaos is what is referred to in Buddhism as the source of dukkha, or suffering – a chronically stressed mind, of taking everything personally. Such a mind is the consequence of delusion, of believing that the self exists in the ways we/I have both conceived of, perceived, and lived with. With such a mind, we’re confined to experience within the fractured, dualist chaotic state we create with labeling, separating, judging, resisting, and clinging.
No, the Chaos I refer to in the poem is the reality independent of but not separate from that created by our symbol clinging that leads to our counter-productive attempts to separate. The chaos I refer to comes with its own music. It is a name I give to that which has no name. — jab