The festive clothing of Autumn

In the mailbox this Tew's day . .

Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain. One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.” – Ida Tarbell, the journalist was born this past Sunday...on a 1857 farm in Erie County, Pennsylvania

We know poetry plays a part in healing . . . Gloria Mindock (my soon to be publisher) is surely playing her part with her new book "Grief Touched the Sky at Night" just published by Glass Lyre Press. Check it out.

. . . many people think religion has to do with ideas and concepts and formulas from books. That’s how clergy and theologians were trained for years. Many of us went away, not into a world of nature and silence and primal relationships, but into a world of books . . . and that’s not where religion begins. It begins in observing “what is.” The term in Buddhism is Tathātā, referring to “suchness” – the nature of reality free from conceptual elaborations and the subject–object distinction – encountered in meditation. Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr calls it “contemplation – meeting reality in its most simple and direct form unjudged, unexplained, and uncontrolled. . . . .it’s all gift, and it’s all free, and we already have it, and all we can do is learn to enjoy it. ”

In autumn, folded like festive clothing

in the memories of poets,

lovers of one brief hour

awaken desire, making

a place where pain can enter

… inheriting the love to which

they gave themselves so blindly,

as in a sleep. – Rainer Maria Rilke (adapted) from The Book of Hours, transl. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. Riverhead Books.1996

Opposites disintegrating

Old Sol and Southerlies have begun to move the morning clouds apart as I open the mailbox . . .

Yesterday was the 144th anniversary of Will Rogers' birth. “America’s Cowboy Philosopher” was born in what is now Oologah, Oklahoma – then part of Indian territory – in 1879. The high school I attended in Tulsa was named after him.

Senator Barack Obama became the 44th U.S. president, yesterday in 2008, while in 1980, Ronald Reagan became the 40th.

Today is Guy Fawks day in England, the anniversary of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, a protest against the persecution of Roman Catholics by the authorities. Led by Robert Catesby, a group including Guy Fawkes plotted to blow up Parliament in the hope of bringing down the government, and they almost pulled it off. To mark their defeat, bonfires are lit and an effigy of Guy Fawkes is burned. Traditionally in England, Halloween pales in significance compared to the more popular Bonfire Night.

The opposite of patriarcy is not matriarcy – that's just another myopic classification that serves only to separate. The opposite of civilization is not an idealized return to Paleolithic hunter/gatherer. The opposite of our current predicament – climate collapse, extinction, solastalga, genocide – is, in fact, the disintegration of opposites altogether. We are increasingly aware that even mushrooms are sentient. Everything is both/and. – after Sophie Strand in The Flowering Wand.

Speaking of traditions from long past:

. . . how silly it was of us Franciscans to think we brought religion to New Mexico four hundred years ago! . . . I only know enough to know that I don’t know much at all . . . As in every religion, there are times, places, and people who “get it”—the mystery of divine/human union—more than others. – Richard Rohr from Praying with Nature.

Off the rails . . .

In the Saytr's day’s mailbox . . .

And, if it hasn’t occurred to you, philosphy has become both conventional and specialized. . . The blight of specialization, remains stubbornly engrained in [almost every area of academia], and “represents an artificial barrier to the free traffic of ideas.” — David Bloor

The center cannot hold …there is a power to be found in unconventional thinking, according to David McWilliams

Poets are those who reach directly into the abyss during the ‘world’s night’ – Martin Heidegger

The journey to giving up one's confirmation biases is a lonely, rocky road.

These loners choose longing over belonging, preferencing being to doing

while serving as eyes to the present in living rooms designed by the past. — jb

Long time friend Allyson recently responded to a cartoon I sent to her. The cartoon noted : “I've reached an age where my train of thought often leaves the station without me.” She replied : “My train of thought often goes of the rails, and in my lucid moments, I comment to myself, 'well look at that, my train of thought went off the rails! '”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

– William Butler Yeats, from his poem “The Second Coming” in 1911.