Silent Thunder
It's Freya's day . . .
The last retrograde of the year continues to Jan. 1, 2024. To help with some of the shifting going on under the Mercurial umbrella:
The fewer devices you have to charge, the more charge you have for your mind. – Abhijit Naskar
The Way brings a deeper state of mind...
There’s a meditative state described in ancient Buddhist scriptures that is hard to imagine because it is not something – but nothing. Referred to as nirodha-samāpatti, it roughly translates as ‘the cessation of thought and feeling’ – Shayla Love writing for Psyche, 12/28/23.
On this day in 1170, Thomas Beckett was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by four Knights of King Henry II.
"I sense we are in moments of descent. Moments of embarkation. Do you sense this as well? … I think so. The surface – for long the political project of white modernity – can no longer sustain the burden of proliferating the dissociated individual self, the lynchpin of its civilizing ethic.” – Bayo Akomolafe
It is a curse of history that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability. But it is never too late to change the future. – Heather Cox Richardson
The near silent thunder
rolls away and with it
the past
while light arrives
from the future
into the present.
– jab
Slouching toward Bethlehem
In Thor's day's mailbox . . .
The last retrograde of the year continues to Jan. 1, 2024. To help with some of the shifting going on under the Mercurial umbrella:
Very often . . .the subject being discussed is not the subject at all. – Sharon Salzberg
Birthdays of creatives on today's date:
Maggie Smith is celebrating her 89th birthday today. The actress was born in 1934, Ilford, Essex, England. The American actor Denzel Washington was born 69 years ago today in 1954, Mount Vernon, New York. And John Legend turns 45 today. The musician, singer, songwriter was born in 1978, Springfield, Ohio.
Also on this date In 1065, Westminster Abbey was consecrated by Edward the Confessor.
And, Woodrow Wilson was born on this day in 1856 Staunton, Virginia. The 28th President of the United States, Wilson's League of Nations design, adopted in Europe at the end of WWI and rejected by the U.S. Congress, nonetheless became the model for the present day United Nations.
In 1973 on this date the Endangered Species Act was signed into law by U.S. President Richard Nixon, as a major extension of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Humans have yet to be placed on the endangered species list … but one wonders how long that might take . . .
Conventional medicine continues to lag decades behind the advances made in Functional Medicine and the science of longevity...the gap between public healthcare and breaking science is widening; the generational leaps made in our understanding of biology and the mechanisms of aging remain frustratingly mute, overshadowed by an outdated framework of medicine and nutrition that leaves the vast majority of the population with little understanding of how their complex bodies work (let alone, how to fix them). – Mark Hyman, M.D.
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 The Second Coming, poem now in public domain.
Carpet crawlers heed their callers (We've got to get in to get out)
Listening to the wind in our sails
It's Odin's day... and the winter Solstice in Okieland continues with Northerlies, and a full “Cold Night Moon”...
On this date in 1831 Charles Darwin set sail from England on the HMS Beagle for the Galapagos.
Marlene Dietrich was born today in 1901. And in 1947 the first "Howdy Doody Show" premiered on the NBC television network.
The last retrograde of the year continues to Jan. 1, 2024. To help with some of the shifting going on with the Mercurial winds:
When we are no longer able to change a situation … we are challenged to change ourselves. – Viktor Frankl
These Winters can engender psychic darkness, notwithstanding longer days ahead. That said, it's not a necessary consequence.
THE WINTER OF LISTENING
No one but me by the fire, / my hands burning / red in the palms while / the night wind carries / everything away outside. /
… What is precious / inside us does not / care to be known / by the mind / in ways that diminish / its presence. /
… Inside everyone / is a great shout of joy / waiting to be born
… So let this winter / of listening / be enough / for the new life / I must call my own.
– from David Whyte, The Winter of Listening, Essentials, Edited by Gayle Karen Young Whyte, Many Rivers Press, 2019.
The winds of grace blow all the time. All we need to do is set our sails. – Sri Ramakrishna