Cacophony: made by Pandora

It's Odin's day . . . a ten day cooling trend is moving into Okieland with thunderstorms – predicates, perhaps, to Thor's day tomorrow.

Preaching to the choir (we who managed to avoid watching the GOP convention debacle), and a superb sermon it is from Heath Cox Richardson on “Letters from an American.”

Donald Trump is not inevitable. Four months is a long time in an election cycle, and a lot can happen. Trump has eluded justice in the courts, at least for now. But he doesn’t have to at the hands of the voters; that’s up to us. – Joyce Vance on “Civil Discourse”

In the now viral Trump shooting photo, who's left out of the frame? And why? The most common victims of gun crimes are not high-profile politicians but everyday people — approximately 326 each day in the United States, about a third of whom are killed. In the compulsive analysis of Trump’s image, in even the most well-meaning efforts to contend with its propagandistic dangers, we risk overlooking the mundanity of gun violence and its less mediagenic casualties. — Valentina Di Liscia, Editor of Hyperallergic.

Also from Hyper: What would Vincent van Gogh, who knows a thing or two about ear injury, have thought?

Metaphorically appropriate to the GOP/MAGA view of Earth II, Disneyland opened 69 years ago today in Anaheim, California.

Searching for a break from the cacophony … Reverie is always despised by those do not like the broad freedom it grants – David Whyte

Pandora Station

The song set not to music.

Odd the rhyme fixed

not in time of some kind.

Chaos has a harmony all its own.

– jab

Like time, the small invades like dust

It's Tew's day . . . and the heat-hammer spreads from Okieland to Portland, Maine.

We may think meditation will improve us, but it’s really about accepting ourselves as we are right now. We can still be crazy. – Pema Chödrön, whose 88th birthday was this past Sunday.

Today in 1945 the first atomic bomb was exploded at 5:30 a.m., 120 miles south of Albuquerque, near Alamagordo, New Mexico. It was the end result of the Manhattan Project, which had started six years earlier.

Missed while the dust was settling:

My homey Woody Guthrie was born 112 years ago this past Sunday in 1912 Okemah, Oklahoma. There's a superb museum in downtown TulseyTown right next door to an equally amazing archive dedicated to Bob Dylan. Two of America's greatest troubadors. Both are worth your time and there are hotels in short walking distance should you be so inclined to make the trip, which you “should.” If museums bore you, these won't.

Boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility. The former, it must be noted, breeds the latter. The more you learn about your own size, the more humble and compassionate you become to your likes, to that dust aswirl in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your table. Ah, how much life went into those flecks! Not from your point of view but from theirs. You are to them what time is to you; that’s why they look so small. – Joseph Brodsky, “In Praise of Boredom,” On Grief and Reason: Essays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1995

Let the last thing be song. – Poet and editor Hanna Fries

Intuitive dust settling . . .

It's Sol's day . . . reminding us, in case we forget, that it is in charge of this 100º day . . . Today's blog is bypassing the obvious news, I’m letting the dust settle . . .

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. – H.H. The 14th Dalai Lama

Remember that life is like a mirror: Everything you perceive reflects your inner world. Cleaning your dirty mirror of distorting smudges means clearing self-deception and coming closer to the truth. – Khangser Rinpoche

Speaking of truth: Why are democrats and pundits eating themselves up over Biden. Anthony Davis' video blog disabuses us from the media profit-motive propaganda machine.

Richard Rohr offers (for some) of us a counter-intuitive vision, echoing Khangser Rinpoche:

The Twelve Step Program parallels, mirrors, and makes practical the same messages that Jesus gave us, but without as much danger of spiritualizing the message and pushing its effects into a future world....[We are all] powerless, not just those who are physically addicted to a substance. Alcoholics simply have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways, and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments. – Fr. Richard Rohr

Watching the Sun Go Down

Time to say nothing, just watch,

without moving, without sound,

the sun reflected, shimmering,

setting on fire

the white length of an upturned kayak.

David Whyte, “Watching the Sun Go Down,” River Flow: New & Selected Poems (revised) Many Rivers Press, 2012.