A sinful old moon tempts a Coyote

It's the Moon's day if ever … we are being gifted by a rare cosmic combination of a supermoon and blue moon. The Super Blue Moon follows the peak of the Perseid meteor shower last week and is the first of the year’s four consecutive supermoons, and will be visible easily after sunset. The next Super Blue Moon won't be until 2037.

The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without… That inward world… can be more volatile and mobile, more terrible and impoverished, yet withal more ennobling in its self-consciousness, than the universe that gave it birth. – Loren Eiseley (whose birthdate is coming up next month) in Maria Popova's Marginalian.

And while on the space frontier, today is the birth anniversary of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, in 1921 El Paso, Texas.

…the majority of Western Buddhists are secular and many don’t meditate, wear robes, shave their heads, or believe in reincarnation...the mental/physical states achieved by Buddhist practice are universal human states, ones we may already be familiar with but perhaps never considered as possessing spiritual dimensions. – Peter Coyote (yes, the actor/narrator who is also a Buddhist priest), whose new book “Zen in the Vernacular: Things As It Is” has just been published.

If you are so inclined, you can get a taste of Coyote's latest, excerpted in the Fall issue of the Tricycle Magazine, with the title “Welcome to Delusionville: Our self is not what we think it is.”

You can also catch a recent video with Coyote on a tribute to Gary Snyder's recent 94th birthday with a brief insight into the “Zen in the Vernacular” perspective.

Other birthdays today: Author Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes) was born in 1930 Brooklyn, New York; and the humorist poet Ogden Nash was born in 1902 Rye, New York.

Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man

It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important,
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant,
And the other kind of sin is just the opposite and is called a sin of omission
and is equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking people, from
Billy Sunday to Buddha, and it consists of not having done something you shuddha.

…

you never get any fun
Out of things you haven't done,
But they are the things that I do not like to be amid,
Because the suitable things you didn't do give you a lot more trouble than the
unsuitable things you did.
The moral is that it is probably better not to sin at all, but if some kind of
sin you must be pursuing,
Well, remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing.

– Ogden Nash, “Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man”

Angels Sounding

It is truly the Sun's day here in Okieland with heat indices headed for 112º

Consciousness may be a fundamental feature – the very fabric -- of the universe, parceled out through the individuated experience of awareness. Or not. – Nathan Gardels in Noēma, 8.15.24

A big day on this date in 1920: The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified after Tennessee—by just one vote—became the 36th state to approve it, capping the 72-year fight to win women the right to vote in the United States.

The word “mentor” comes from Greek mythology. Mentor was the name of the wise and trusted counselor of Odysseus. When Odysseus went on his long journey, he put Mentor in charge of his son, Telemachus, as his teacher and guardian … We long for believable mentors on every stage of our journey. In Western culture and even in the Christian tradition, we have few guides to lead us deeply into life’s full journey. – Richard Rohr

There has never been a generation more enthusiastic about female mentorship than the one preparing to enter the workforce today...Unsurprisingly, there is a pronounced gender discrepancy when it comes to American mentorship; 82% of men have had male mentors, while just 69% of women have had female mentors. – Dianna Chane

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. --Pema Chodron

Three Angels

Three angels up above the street,

each one playing a horn

dresses in green robes with wings.

They've been there since Christmas morn.

...

The angels play on their horns all day,

the whole earth in progression seems to pass by.

But does anyone hear the music they play.

Does anyone even try?

– Bob Dylan

Making an impossible . . .

It’s the Satyr's day . . . The moon waxing toward a full soon-Moon-day.

The U.K. poet laureate Ted Hughes was born on this date in 1930 Mytholmroyd, England.

A.I. nationalism — the idea that a country must develop its own tech to serve its own interests — is spreading. The E.U. is leading the push for regulation.

Joyce Vance underscores how important turnout is in this election. Trump needs to be defeated by such overwhelming numbers of votes that it’s virtually impossible to claim fraud.

The longstanding rhetoric that positions Republicans as true Americans defending the country against those who would destroy it has metastasized into the determination of MAGA Republicans to replace American democracy with a Christian nationalism that cements the power of white patriarchy. – Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American.

Earth-Moon

Once upon a time there was a person
He was walking along
He met the full burning moon
Rolling slowly twoards him
Crushing the stones and houses by the wayside.

…

Till it was nothing
But a silk handkerchief, torn,
And wet as tears.
The person picked it up. He walked on
Into moonless night
Carrying his strange trophy.

– Ted Hughes, “Earth-Moon,” Earth-Moon, Rainbow Press. 1976.