The untethered boat . . .
Okieland's transitional Spring rains and storms continue in the forecasts for today into tomorrow.
Speaking of today, it's Satyr's day … named by the Greeks in an attempt to tame the indigenous spirit of Dionysus.
Clinging to separates, letting go unifies. Human desire to transcend separation is at least 4,000 years old, dating to the Pre-Greek, if not Stone Age, rites of Demeter and Persephone. The rites themselves were never disclosed, but are, perhaps, being discovered in contemporary rituals of non-dual mindfulness. The message, then and now, remains the same: We are spirits in a material world.
Today is the 54th anniversary date of what has come to be known, simply as “Kent State.” On this day in 1970, an anti-Vietnam War demonstration at Kent State University turned deadly when the Ohio National Guard shot four unarmed students and wounded nine others, further turning public opinion against the war. Protests against injustice continue apace.
Culture change taking us at warp-speed into a bumpy future . . .
A future with a re-elected Trump was recently outlined by Heather Cox Richardson.
We are moving at the speed of light into the future while looking in the rear view mirror of a Model T Ford.
Notes of Late Spring
Living in a dark alley behind shambled gates,
my perfect lover stays on only in my dreams.
The screech of magpies in my unused yard
churns up the youthful restlessness I feel.
How can I keep chasing such worldly things
when I know this body
is the same as an untied boat?
– Yu Xuanji, in Yin Mountain, The Immortal Poetry of Three Daoist Women, transl. Peter Levitt & Rebecca Nie, Shambhala Press, 2022.
We have not always been the world
It's Freya's day . . . more rain, more rain, here in Okieland, where some old-timers call some downpours “frog-stranglers.”
Joyce Vance is calling attention to our frog-like circumstances . . .
After decades of “giggles” from uninformed critics, NASA has thrown the gauntlet and has opened the door into astrobiology in a big way. The search for alien life is no longer a joke, having reached the status of serious science.
What you are, the world is. And without your transformation, there can be no transformation of the world. – J. Krishnamurti
We can begin transformation in any moment. Conscious transformation looks like love and is non-dual. Duality impedes.
Don't miss Art Happens Here With John Lithgow, a one-hour PBS special
Summarizing the full truth about the Covid vaccines.
Yesterday, Heather Cox Richardson provided context for the campus protest movement currently underway.
Commercial Art
Business – it is said Ms. Dickinson said –
is not the business of poets. So true dat
that the trustees of Amherst
and the fellows of Harvard
not to omit its President
and the Belknap Press of same
has seen fit to copyright
no less than five times the volume
of her collected works
to which
she never
gave a name.
– jb
Happiness and the desires of the Moon . . .
It's Thor's day … and his thunder is forecasted to be experienced today through Monday here in TulseyTown.
If we are to be visionaries for the future, we need to learn how to live fully in the present. Poetry, indeed all the arts, is what they do for us – each “presences” us more and more.
Night before last, the Academy of American Poets produced a fabulous celebration to end National Poetry Month, titled Poetry and the Creative Mind. 18 poets, actors, and laureates shared favorite poems. The list included Meryl Streep, Paul Giamatti, J.D. Vance, Sterlin Harjo and Joy Harjo among them. Here's a link to the event program, poets, and their poems posted yesterday by the Academy.
Herewith: a most worthwhile description of expanded states of consciousness by Deepak Chopra unifying “reality.” In my jargon: the ego is a construct of Yang, preoccupied with control by way of a languaged duality, and while nothing more than a mote in a sunbeam thinks itself the sun. Fearful of the moon and anything it cannot see. Yin, while largely silent and equipped with extremely powerful non-verbal receptors, may use language to discern the desires of the moon in order to unify the sky with the earth – think the three witches in Shakespeare's play, the name of which is not to be spoken in the holy theatre except by designated actors.
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch.
– Naomi Shihab Nye, from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, Far Corner Books, 1995