A more beautiful noise . . .

In Tew's day's mailbox . . .

So much of the noise being fed to us is just that: noise. And most of it is purposeful, much of it designed to keep us indoors with our doors locked and guns loaded. Short version: be afraid. That way you can live in a cocoon of your own making and feed your head with the stuff you've already fed your self that has led to your last venture outside when you went to the gun show and stopped in Lowes or Home Depot for a new lock set, so that you can be fearful not only of the next door-to-door political campaigner, but of the state police arriving after you've shot someone on your porch, or your kid has taken your pistol to school to exercise his new and rapidly growing ego. All of this is fiction. Too much of it is true.

Instead, think for a moment about sharing the reality of The Way:

Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts. . .suck up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. . .minister to it with positive, mischievous energy, seek spiritual enrichment and . . .see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. – after Nick Cave

How many of these walkers and runners [on an April day in Central Park] believe that the Illuminati use vaccines to cause autism, that the government is withholding the cure for cancer as a favor to Big Pharm, that a federal research facility in Alaska is engaged in mind control, that Bigfoot is drinking the blood of small children in Roswell, New Mexico, and that the shots came from the grassy knoll and not the School Book Depository? Not many, I would guess. The constant social interactions of urban life tend to erode the sharper edges of lunacy. – Garrison Keillor

Speaking of sanity:

Today is the 84th birthdate of poet Ted Kooser. Born in 1939 Ames, Iowa, He's been U.S. Poet Laureate, one of the few from the plains states, as well as a Pulitzer Prize honoree.
It is also the 106th anniversary of the birth of the “First Lady of Song" Ella Fitzgerald. The queen of jazz was born in 1917 Newport News, Virginia.

It does not matter if you are a man or a woman, wealthy or poor, an insider or an outcast – an action based on greed and grasping results in fear – of loss and an action of defensiveness – while an action based on love results in an open expansiveness, relaxation, and joy.

I want you to knock gently on your own door and stand there astonished as I do unable to speak to the one who has come out to meet you. Like Rilke's visiting angel of the Annunciation who forgot his message to Mary, and could only fall back to singing her praises, stuttering and overwhelmed as he was, by the untroubled beauty of her soul. – David Whyte, adapated and edited from The Bell and the Blackbird.

A strange passion is moving in my head.

My heart has become a bird

which searches in the sky.

Every part of me goes in different directions.

Is it really so that the one I love is Everywhere? – Rumi

All's Well That Ends Well . . .

The earth on this Sun-day continues on The Way of its continual re-creation . . .

Solistaligia is a human made, capitalist driven, real disease arising from the ecosystem in distress. While so far diagnosed as a human form of negative mental health, no doubt all sentient beings are suffering. It is the epitome of Buddha's first noble truth – that the true problem, the true suffering we all face, is that we actually perpetuate the arising of problems ourselves. If we don't stop creating more problems for ourselves, they will never stop coming.

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language...This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body, of aches and lagging strength...tense and tight with foreboding, the ever-present certainty that somebody else will die, that more will be lost. – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

When we are grieving

we are not only being sad –

we are also experiencing

a sense of wonderment,

perhaps not unlike our ancestors'

spirits gathering to remind us

there is something holy at the

center of our heartbreak.

– after Mirabai Starr

“I almost never go to the beach. It makes me cry.” – Christina Castillo, Costa Rica

Assuring people there’s hope, including myself, is not all that useful. In Buddhism, there is no word for hope. It would be viewed as a distraction from what’s at hand. It takes you out of the present moment and into conjecture. I think all we can really affirm is where we want to put our attention. I have a choice: do I want to give up and surrender to the great unraveling, or do I want to join those who are working for a liveable future? Since the outcome is uncertain, we have to enjoy doing something exhilarating and useful without knowing for sure if it’s going to work out. – Joanna Macy

Today is traditionally held to be the birthday of William Shakespeare, who was baptized on April 26, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England.

And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything. – As You Like It, Act 2 Scene 1

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven. — All's Well That Ends Well, Act 1 Scene 1

Earth Day

In the mailbox this Saturday with a strong, disruptive, Northerly wind.

Nobel Prize poet Louise Glück was born on this day in 1943 New York City.

It is also the 299th anniversary of the birth of Immanuel Kant. The philospher was born on this day in 1724 Königsberg, Prussia. Kant is considered a central figure, even among contemporary philsophers. Among his many significant contributions, the “Categorical Imperative”: namely, that we should judge our actions by whether or not we would want everyone else to act the same way, remains applicable – perhaps even moreso – in these times of ecological crises.

There is power in our lament: to speak the truth that all is not well … grief, spoken aloud, is the counter to denial. Our lives are held, connected, one to the other … we are bound up in a beautiful, multicolored, homespun fabric, both an ecological truth and a theological truth, reflecting the world as it was and continues to be made—a relational world, a connected world, an interdependent world.

The land’s mourning speaks simultaneously of a vision of the world as it ought to be—that beautiful fabric—and the truth of the world as it is: too much injustice and too little love fraying the threads that hold us all. The land feels those fraying threads. The land grieves those fraying threads. The land mourns.

Mourning together, in true solidarity, we name the truth of what’s wrong. And in so doing, we begin to make it right. – Fr. Richard Rohr, in Meditations (edited).

from Awakening by Robert Bly

From the long past
Into the long present
A bird, forgotten in these troubles, warbling,
As the great wheel turns around, grinding
The living in water.
Washing, continual washing, in water now stained
With blossoms and rotting logs,
Cries, half-muffled, from beneath the earth, the living awakened
at last like the dead. – Robert Bly

from Afterward

Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks.
And the sun says yes.
And the desert answers
your voice is sand scattered in wind.

– Louise Glück