Be wary wanderer

Freya's mailbox is filled with challenging reminders . . .

The world becomes only what it is, the flow of an unfathomable river. – Jim Harrison

There’s always some Solomon cutting down Lebanon’s cedars, building a house for a God who moves on. – Michael Kriesel from “As Crickets Chip Away at the Light” posted to Rattle 7.18.23

We don’t have time for group-centric religion anymore. There is too much suffering . . . from the millennia-old prejudices and discriminations of the male-dominated cultures of both East and West, from rampant socio-political exploitations, and from their structural vulnerability. The consequent insistence on our individuated separateness has turned us into the flotsam and jetsam of The Way, stuck in an eddy contradicting the very thing we are told we must become. We have robbed ourselves of our personhood, rendering us as individual no-bodies. Yet we continue to gather in our tribal collectives perpetuating the contradiction. – adapted and edited from Fr. Richard Rohr's Meditations.

[There is] a deep, ongoing political project of forgetting – of teaching others to forget themselves and teaching ourselves to forget, too. This collective amnesia manifests through the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures [in the literal thousands], but also through the older ideologies and institutions that sought to ‘correct’ outsiders who did not align with the values of a seemingly progressive, modern world. Do not forget them. – Steve Minton

Almost

I wish I knew another language

so I could translate the poems

and life of others in that far place

free of the tethers of my past

binding me

to what I now would forget.

Looking through the silence

I can almost see the mountain

across the river

where I would live next door to you

listening through the mist

to something almost near a song

so long forgotten no one remembers.

– jb, unplublished collection “Prelude to the Afternoon of an Echo.”

Beware wanderer, the road is walking too...listen to the gods, they're shouting in your ears. – Jim Harrison