A zoo, full.

It's Freya's day . . . here in TulseyTown we are getting a preview-of-coming-Summer-attractions . . .

If you can, show them the better way. If you cannot, remember that this is why you have the gift of kindness. – Marcus Aurelius

In case you missed these calls to attention:

The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn't Happening at College – Ted Gioia in his Honest Broker blog.

Mainstream culture is changing at warp speed. The post-entertainment society is neither pretty nor healthy.

And a letter from a high-school student in response to Gioia.

Laughter is a word that just looks weird written

Allow me merely to confirm: our species

is the most curious, contradictory, and

downright laughable in the zoo.

Taking any of them, including oneself,

not to exclude myself, seriously,

sustains my hypothesis.

– jab

No moss gatherin' on this rollin' stone . . .

It's Thor's day … despite continuing Northerlies, TulseyTown is sunny and warming up a bit . . .

The mailbox held a sad reminder that today in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

A somewhat happier note celebrated the birth today of Maya Angelou. The autogiographical author and poet was born Marguerite Ann Johnson in 1928 St. Louis, Missouri.

Today is also the birthdate of Muddy Waters. The blues guitar and harmonica great was born McKinley Morganfield in 1915 Rolling Fork, Mississippi. The “Hoochie Coochie Man” was a “natural born rolling stone.”

With acting in his natural born veins, Robert Downey, Jr. was born in 1965 New York City. The twice Academy Award winner turns 59 today.

And, 75 years ago today in Brussels, Belgium, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded.

Freedom is not silence and peace. Freedom is being at ease in noise and chaos. Are you bound by the categories you create? Forms and sounds are not the issue. Being bound by them is. – Guo Gu, from Passing Through the Gateless Barrier by Guo Gu. Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. 2016.

Pandora Station

Sad the song set not to music.

Odd the rhyme fixed

not in time of some kind.

Chaos has a harmony all its own. — jab

The Chaos I refer to in the poem is not the chaos of the mind of the self, of selfing, of unconscious habit patterns run wild. That mind of chaos is what is referred to in Buddhism as the source of dukkha, or suffering – a chronically stressed mind, of taking everything personally. Such a mind is the consequence of delusion, of believing that the self exists in the ways we/I have both conceived of, perceived, and lived with. With such a mind, we’re confined to experience within the fractured, dualist chaotic state we create with labeling, separating, judging, resisting, and clinging.

No, the Chaos I refer to in the poem is the reality independent of but not separate from that created by our symbol clinging that leads to our counter-productive attempts to separate. The chaos I refer to comes with its own music. It is a name I give to that which has no name. — jab

Living up to her name . . .

It's Odin's day … opening the Way's mailbox on another blustery-cold-Northwesterly-windy-Spring day . . .

A 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck off the east coast of Taiwan this morning – the strongest to hit Taiwan in 25 years triggered tsunami warnings as far as Japan and the Philippines. The toll of deaths and injured is still underway.

… celebrating the day nonetheless . . . today is the 90th birthday of Jane Goodall. born 1934, London, England, her discovery in 1960 that chimpanzees make and use tools is considered one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century scholarship.

Exodus 15:21

Here I am left on the fringes.

… Nothing is the mother

I bring close to my milkless bosom.

Here, I sing to the Lord America’s

requiem. Here, I hold her close as if

we were no longer the parted sea. – Miguel Barretto Garcia, from “Poets Respond,” in Rattle, March 31, 2014