Full dark moon . . .
It's Thor's day . . . with cloudy skies here in TulseyTown obscuring the full “Flower Moon.”
In honor of Mothers' Month, check out Danielle Lisa's lovely poem published online by Rattle, yesterday, Wednesday the 22nd.
Today is the birthdate of the author of the classic children's book Goodnight Moon: Margaret Wise Brown. She was born in 1910 Brooklyn, New York.
The scientist Edward Norton Lorenz was born on this day in 1917 West Hartford, Connecticut. Lorenz authored one of the 20th century's most revolutionary scientific ideas: Chaos theory, and coined the term “butterfly effect,” to explain causality occurring in otherwise seeming random events.
Dark Trees
On a clear night dark trees / against a dark sky / all but disappear.
Tonight, cloud cover / filters the city's lights. / A fog curtain listens /
as if after the last note / of the Moonlight Sonata / has drifted into where /
there ought to be the moon. / Spring buds on that eighty-foot Sycamore /
across the street / stand out in place of missing stars.
– jab
Parting the seas . . .
It's Odin's day . . . with thunderstorms and a full moon over Okieland today and tomorrow …
Yesterday, The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) issued an historical opinion – with major potential consequences – that greenhouse gas emissions are marine pollution under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and parties to the treaty "have the specific obligation to adopt laws and regulations to prevent, reduce, and control" them.
Also yesterday: True to form, Trump declined to testify despite all his protestations outside the courtroom in Manhattan at his criminal trial where final arguments are due next week. Juries cannot consider in any manner the fact that a defendant doesn’t testify. But the court of public opinion is under no such obligation. And, notably, it is the court of public opinion that is voting in November. – in today's Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson.
The Handmaid’s Tale Halloween costumes are no longer ironically funny. Especially not with Trump and his “unified Reichs” on the ballot this year. – Joyce Vance
However the world manifests itself, we have a job to do: Offering our own peace of mind.
What it takes to find true peace of mind:
(1) seeing what is;
(2) grounding in nondual wisdom;
(3) avoiding fundamentalist thinking; and
(4) embracing the boundless nature of the vow to bring this awareness to every being.
Rain
I do not anymore wish to be “useful,” to lead
children, the innocent, the ignorant, into another text
of civility to teach them that they are (they are not)
better than the grass, nor the sea.
– after Mary Oliver, “Rain,” in New and Selected Poems: Volume One, Beacon Press, 2004.
Relentless weather across the Empire
It's Tew's Day . . . and thunderstorms are once again in the forecasts for Okieland and the mid-West all the way to the Great Lakes.
The morning mailbox was full of politicality . . .
It is time for Democrats to take on Trump's lies. Republicans won’t...there needs to be national direction and focus on this issue to make sure it breaks through. This election is one where democracy is literally at stake and Trump isn’t shy about telling us so. – Joyce Vance
The next time you overhear that Biden hasn't done anything … don't be silent. Since we’re not going to remake or replace the media between now and November, it’s up to us to do their work, one brother-in-law, one cousin, one neighbor, one housemate or workmate at a time.
And, in case you missed it, in a rare interview, Pope Francis spoke out (on CBS) against closed minds and a "suicidal" opposition to reform.
Of the Empire
We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the many...
and they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
– Mary Oliver, “Of the Empire,” Red Bird, Beacon Press, 2008