Significance . . .

In Thor’s mailbox this sixth day in 2023 April . . .

Today is the 92nd anniversary of Ram Dass' birth. He was born Richard Alpert on this day in 1931 Boston. Ram Dass was a psychologist, writer, and spiritual teacher. His best-selling 1971 book Be Here Now, helped popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga in the West. I met him twice in Colorado “back in the day.” Suffice it: he changed me in profound ways beyond detailing here, for which I continue to be deeply grateful, not the least of which became the underlying motive for this website/blog.

Earlier this week, I referred to “getting out of your head.” Below are some notes regarding some science around that suggestion.

Twenty years of hard data research into Stress Management: Mindfulness Protects Attention Against Distractions by Dr. Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist and associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami.

Re: Dr. Jha's reference to Jack Kornfield Re: Mindfulness training (free),

[W]hat do members of a society owe to one another? How we answer this question determines what safety nets societies provide for their members, and so helps to shape the structure of the society at large. It is crucial, then, that we formulate a method in which to figure out What, at a minimum, do we owe to others. The way to do that is simple: we should consider whether we would be content to live the lives that the least fortunate in our society actually live. – Nicole Hassoun

What I Didn't Say

I didn’t say that once you were gone I would stop

suffering in the old way and start suffering in the new way.

And I didn’t say that living in the crater of your death would be my burden

and that sleeping in your bed would be my solace

and that you would die again every morning the moment I woke up.

. . .

But I did say that I would take care of your cats

And then I did

– by Beverly Hartz, What I Didn't Say, The Sun Magazine, May 2022.

Peace, love, politics, history and mental health.

In Odin's mailbox as Northerlies return to Okieland . . .

Instead of showing up to rubberneck the arraignment Tuesday, people should perhaps tend to more exigent problems of democracy, like resoling their pumps and checking the air pressure on their tires. In other words, what if America held a Trump indictment and nobody showed up to fuss about it? That could be proof of something truly awesome. Indeed, it would highlight the awkward reality that Trump’s first indictment is hardly a shocking event; the fact that he thrived in a country with a justice system for many decades without having been indicted until April of 2023 is the real outlier. – Dahila Lithwick

There were far more Trump opponents than supporters in the crowd outside the courthouse, and while Trump-allied representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and George Santos (R-NY) were there, other Republican lawmakers steered clear. – Heather Cox Richardson

Republicans are losing across the country, even in historically red areas—Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin. The abortion bans, climate denial, gun idolatry, anti-democratic behavior and extremism has lost them entire generations of Americans. – Brian Tyler Cohen

Progressives won their first majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 15 years on Tuesday night when Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz won a lopsided victory that will have huge repercussions for voting rights and abortion access.

What the newspaper can’t cover very well is ordinary happiness because there is much too much of it and for us happy people, that is completely proper. You want to be able to eat your eggs and hash browns and sausage in the Chatterbox Café without a man with a pad and pencil interviewing you as to the cause of your good temper. One cause is that you look back at your mistakes and know for a fact that you won’t do anything that dumb again. – Garrison Keillor

The problem with history is that there's too much of it – after Jim Feeney's poem “Irish History.”

Our only truly essential human task . . . is to grow beyond the survival instincts of the animal brain and egoic operating system into the kenotic joy and generosity of full human personhood. . . . Dwell not in WHAT you are, but THAT you are. From divided awareness to expanded awareness, using the modality of sensation – Cynthia Bourgeault

From time to time, it is most worthwhile to just . . . get out of your head.

Transformations

In Tew's mailbox along the shore . . .

We humans become “woke” through an accident of life of one kind or another. The pain, the suffering of all kinds, the misery, and the chaos that are part of life, begins to wake us, shake us. From that comes the questions that lead to transformation: “Who am I? What am I? How is it that all these things are happening?” A realization arises that there is something in them that is asking those questions, something that is, in fact, intelligent and not exactly confused. – Chӧgyam Trungpa

Transformation comes, slowly often, but it comes. Always out of error, being wrong when we were insisting on our misguided righteousness. The Way has its Way with us. Sometimes It brings us a stone in our shoe, or, like Jona in the biblical story, a whale. –after Richard Rohr

April 5-13, 2023 Passover celebrates the emancipation of the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery

Passover – by Lynn Ungar

Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . . and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt. —Exodus 12:7 & 13

They thought they were safe
that spring night, when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.

"Passover" by Lynn Ungar in What We Share: Collected Meditations, Volume Two, edited by Patricia Frevert (Skinner House, 2001).

There is no cure for grief...grief is not a malady. No one can fix you because you are not broken. Your grief is a wild, holy thing to be honored when it comes. And it will come. – after Mirabai Starr

Sometimes we come to realize our capacity to care only after having cared.