Dying for democracy
Under a full “Flower Moon” the mailbox this lovely Summer morning held sobering reminders:
Yesterday, on June 4th, British prime minister Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons. Some 338,000 Allied soldiers had just successfully been evacuated from Dunkirk, in northern France, as German troops advanced. Fighting fascism, Churchill warned his people that the war would be neither easy nor quick. But, he promised, “...we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be...we shall never surrender....” We might take this as our own mantra today as we face the insidious challenge of fascist ideology attempting to destroy democracy here in the U.S.
Thirty-four years ago yesterday in 1989, students left a message written on a wall in Tiananmen Square that said, "On June 4, 1989, the Chinese people shed their blood and died for democracy."
The challenge is real and never ending. Speak up.
...my voice becomes both a breath and a shout.
One prepares the way, the other
surrounds my lonliness with angels. – Rilke The Book of Hours
Beannacht / Blessing
. . . .
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
by John O’Donohue from Echoes of Memory (Transworld Publishing, 2010)
Touring the magical mystery
In the Sun-day mailbox . . .
Love is the ontological “Ground of Being” – Paul Tillich. It is the air that we breathe, consciously or unconsciously, as any true mystic discovers. We do not have to be able to describe this in words to experience it. In fact, we can’t describe it. We can only live it and breathe it. – Richard Rohr
You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all. – James Baldwin
Curiosity animates everything. That we cherish art is ultimately more urgently interesting...than why we do. And how we do is just incredibly funny. Contemplating [the how] is like observing the way cats sit solitary by windows or pigeons perch sociably on city monuments. We’re all watching, that is to say, we’re all being watched, and we’re all playing the game in our own fashion, our own inimitable style. – Sebastian Smee on a photograph by Jim Gagnon
“Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.” — René Magritte in Maria Popova's Marginalian.
The “great mystery” is not a mystery because of all the evil, confusion, misunderstanding, and duality in the world. The “mystery” is great because of all the majesty and beauty in the universe beyond our comprehension.
The dead past, living . . .
It's Satyr's day in thunderstorm preoccupied Okieland . . .
Forgiveness has no need to pre-empt grievance.
Today, in 1936 Wichita Falls, Texas, Larry McMurtry was born.
Ten years earlier, in 1926, Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey. And on October 7th, 1955, He read “Howl” to a gathering at the Six Gallery in San Francisco and changed the poetry world forever:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked …
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull …
– Allen Ginsberg, from Howl, City Lights, 1956.
[The] dead past has a future...reverie can send ripples not only forwards, but backwards through the waters of childhood. ... Sophie Strand
Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.
– Mary Oliver, from “Wild, Wild,” New and Selected Poems, Volume Two. Beacon Press, 2006.
The majority of our perceptions are not consciously chosen based on reasonable deduction and reflection, but influenced or wholly generated by external factors or other people throughout our lives. When we fail to consciously explore our perceptions for their actual value, we are operating programmatically and without true intellectual independence . . . Through re-integration of . . . the ancient wisdom society has lost, we can reap the benefits of psychological and spiritual wholeness . . . Since a truly scientific hypothesis cannot be correct unless it can be proven incorrect, we should endeavor to inculcate new ideas and ways of thinking [in order to] escape the rigidity of our belief systems. – Anthony Gucciardi
Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given; gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. – David Whyte