Leave a dime on the sidewalk . . .
Sunday, July 6, 2025 . It's Sol's day . . . Moderate Southerlies and a cloudy morning bring sunshine to the forecasts shared with clouds this afternoon with a 50/50 chance for rain near sundown. Upper 80's.
Today is the 90th birthday of Tenzin Gayatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Born in 1935, Taktser, Tibet, he is the first Dalai Lama to become a global figure, largely for his advocacy of Buddhism and of the rights of the people of Tibet .
This is the day in 1942 that Anne Frank and her family went into hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam.
Painter and feminist icon Frida Kahlo was born on this day in 1907, Coyoacán, Mexico.
If our inner journey does not match and lead to an outer journey of liberation for all, we have no true freedom or “salvation.” That is what liberation theology is honest enough to point out. – Fr. Richard Rohr, Meditations, The Center for Action and Contemplation.
The egoism of the rich presents a more serious problem than Communism. – Brazilian Archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara
Sometimes all it takes
to be happy
is a dime on the sidewalk.
[…]
How is it that the rich always know
what is best for the poor?
– Jim Harrison and/or Ted Kooser, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry. Copper Canyon Press, 2003.
Dragon training . . .
Saturday, July 5, 2025. It's the Satyr's day . . . Sun, clouds, Southerlies, low 90's and a 15% chance for a stray, seemingly spontaneous thunder shower – a typical Summer day for TulseyTown and Okieland.
Today is the birth date of Jean Cocteau. The French poet, novelist (les infantes terribles) and filmmaker (Beauty and the Beast) was born in 1889, Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris, France.
Great art and literature are the only models we have to help us stop lying to ourselves, replacing denial and self-pity with awe at the complicated mystery of all living things...We have to get used to the flavor of bitter truth. – Robert Bly, “Making a Hole in Denial,” The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, Harper Collins, 1992.
The most popular form of denial in this moment is the agreement television anchors have to not become excited about anything. – David Ignatow.
On Training Dragons to Deliver Pizza and Chocolate
by Harriet Anead StoneCypher1
It has been written that “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” A truism if ever there was one. All a woman really needs is a trained dragon. And, guys, this you can't fake.
“Faking it” is not an art. It is, rather, an art form. Rather, it's a science, rooted in symbolic logic in an attempt to co-opt the ontological universe. Art, out of which grows the capacity to train dragons, is, well, a thing in itself about which hundreds if not thousands of books and essays have been written by men to disect and discuss forms. Meanwhile, the feminine principle, out of which the ontological core of the universe manifests, continues to evolve. The paintings in the caves at Lascaux and Altamira are not symbols. They are signs. Rather, they are more like sighs. They are voices still speaking in metaphors. The masculine form of which is usually written as “echoes,” totally missing the meaning. In short and more to the point, the masculine measures what he can name, the feminine trains the nameless.
1 Chasing down Wiley Miller for permission to thank him for the NonSequitur epiphany that prompted this essay was nigh on impossible. There is no such person as Harriet Anead StoneCypher listed in the residential directory for Whachacallit, Maine.
A single leaf of grass . . .
Friday, July 4, 2025. It's Frey's (Frigg's) day … and moderate Southerlies bring a few clouds to TulseyTown along with the seasonal 15% chance for a surprise thunder shower. Upper 80's are in store.
It's the 4th of July
The Statue of Liberty was presented to the United States by the French in Paris.
...the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence — freedom and liberty, civil rights and democracy, self-determination and equality — are all under assault at this moment from the government itself...so, Celebrating the Fourth of July this year may feel a bit strange to some. - Joyce Vance, in The Contrarian: Democracy Index, 7.1.25
Essayist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau moved to his retreat at Walden Pond,
Walt Whitman first published Leaves of Grass.
A leaf of grass
is no less
than the journey work
of stars.
– Walt Whitman