Wild peace . . .

It’s Satyr’s day and my search for a used car to replace my Prius continues . . .

A wonderful result of letting go is to experience each moment as being enough, just as it is. It allows us to be present for our experience here and now with such clarity and freedom that this very moment stands out as something profound and significant. – Gil Fronsdal from Letting Go

We can't seem to “let go” of the “man the hunter myth” – Faye Flam in Noema.

Living with fears without trying to avoid them may be one part of fearing well, and one for which a culture of fear-as-failure has not prepared us. – Ami Harbin

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake ,,, in fear
… I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

and I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world . . .

– by Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things, Penguin, 1968.

Faith worth keeping . . .

It's Thor's day … and the mailbox received several notes regarding “faith.”

We know how much pain is involved in our lives, how many problems there are already. We have no way of avoiding our neurosis. Acknowledging that is one step toward faith. – Chögyam Trungpa

Today is the 242nd anniversary of the end of the American Revolutionary War. The British surrendered on this date in 1781 Yorktown, Virginia, after Skirmishes between British troops and colonial militiamen kicked off the armed conflict in Lexington and Concord six years earlier in April 1775.

The spy novelist David Cornwell (writing) under the name John le Carré), was born on this date in 1931 Poole, England. His spies aren't sexy or daring, like James Bond, but tired, lonely men, who have little faith in their own government more than they trusted their enemies.

Keeping the faith? Jeffries has a plan.

Sometimes as an antidote / to fear of death, / I eat the stars. – Rebecca Elson, in A Responsibility to Awe, Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 2001. Read and listen to the entire short poem read by physicist Janna Levin on Maria Popova's Marginalian (scroll down to the reading by Levin).

Speaking of faith in poetry: Louise Glück has died. The laureate of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature passed into the wherever on this last October 13, 2023.

I am wondering if I have ever understood faith—or if I want it now that I am getting the point.

Now I know that faith is not believing-certain-ideas-all-evidence-to-the-contrary. It is not dogged loyalty to childhood conditioning or pledges of allegiance to sacred formulas and official explanations. It is surely not the addictive repetition of rituals or practices that keep [their notion of] God under control. These approaches give the ego comfort, but they give little comfort to truth … Faith seems to make people spacious … to contain and receive all things, to hold onto nothing, with almost no need to fear or judge rashly … people of faith are comfortable with the totality. – Richard Rohr

“One Ambition”

All I ever really wanted
was to whistle with my fingers . . .

now that was something

I thought that if I gave my life to
I might attain.

– by Paul Hostovsky from Is That What That Is. Future Cycle Press, 2017.

Ishmael is still with us . . .

It's Odin's day . . . First the lighter mailbox notes:

Today is the 95th anniversary of Chuck Berry's birth. The seminal rock musician was born on today's date in 1928 St. Louis, Missouri.

The BBC was established on this day in 1922.

In 1851 Moby Dick was published in London as The Whale. Herman Melville's most famous novel, he authored several other sea-adventures before turning to poetry later in his literary career.

And then:

After eight years of self-imposed exile, Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakisatan only to be the target of politically motivated assassins.

When politicians act like children, children wind up dying.

We used to be able to assume that Americans did, in fact, play by the rules, accepting the principle of the rule of law. That principle is now openly challenged here in the U.S. – Heather Cox Richardson, in Letters from an American, October 16, 2023

Caught as we are amid the flotsam and jetsam of The Way, Soren has offered his reflection

Games Played by People

If it is true — and it is — that we have all done things we ought not to have done, / and not done things we ought to have done, /

why, then, do we penalize, if not literally in deed, then in minded thought, / those who's deeds done, not done, and even, /

perhaps undone by some unknown, who's transgressions we ourselves hold dearly, / as secrets in the dark, denied by light of day? /

With a preference for the great game of magic, we are outraged when the phantom is unmasked /

and the play becomes real.

– jb