Flourishing in Crisis

Now is the moment to start.
Imagine a pathway through the thick underbrush
of world events and manipulations

Where we, the loving inhabitants
the good, the decent, those with conscience
vision, hope and longing

Can come together
in a dialogue of honest evaluation
fearless in facing what is happening.

Once we understand what is taking place on earth,
and lose the last of our illusions
real adult dream-building can begin.

Let us hold hands to have the strength
to get past our denial, fears, anger, blame,
grieving

to imagine that we can Flourish
in a world that is seemingly
falling apart.

Now in a world full of less,
perhaps we can experience more of the best in us,
the fulfillment of what we were each created for.

Here your DREAMS are welcomed,
Your IDEAS are allowed to develop.
OUR friendship and harmony will sustain us.

I am with you in this process.
Love,
Judith Pordon blogging as JGrace

Material reflections of the soul

Douglas Hofstadter recounts an incident when he consoled his mother after his father’s death.  She is gazing at an old photo of her husband in his prime, and bemoans “What meaning does that photograph have?  None at all.  It’s just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on it here and there.  It’s useless”  Hofstadter replies:

In the living room we have a book of Chopin études.  All of its pages are just flat and foldable as the photograph of Dad — and yet, think of the the powerful effect that they have had on people all over the world...

[Pianists who play from these pages afford] all of us some partial access to Chopin’s interiority — to the experience of living in the head, or rather in the soul, of Frédéric Chopin.  The marks on those sheets of paper are...scattered remnants of the shattered soul of Chopin.

— from I am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter

‘I get a huge kick out of laughing at the hilariously unpredictable inflexibility of the computer models of mental processes that my doctoral students and I co-design. It helps remind me of the immense subtlety and elusiveness of the human mind.’

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

Poetry is the sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.

Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

— Carl Sandburg, born this day in 1878

“I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.”

Visualize whirled peas

As any of us move beyond the fear-based thought forms of separation and guilt to the truth of our eternal oneness, it becomes easier for everyone else to do so as well. Let’s give up the way-too-easy, so-American way of chiding either Israelis or Palestinians for their difficulty in forgiving the past. What both peoples have endured is almost unimaginable, and only the truly sainted among us should even for a minute consider judging either side.

With your eyes closed, see on one side of your inner vision the Israeli people. See their physicality, their mannerisms, as you recognize them on the material plane. Now see a light within their hearts, and slowly watch that light expand, extending beyond the confines of their bodies. See the bodies begin to fade before the greater light of their eternal selves.

Now with your inner eye look to the other side of your inner vision, and see there the Palestinian people. See their physicality, their mannerisms, as you recognize them on the material plane. Now see a light within their hearts, and slowly watch that light expand, extending beyond the confines of their bodies. See the bodies begin to fade before the greater light of their eternal selves.

Now using your inner eye - your greatest source of power - bear witness to what happens as the inner light of the Israelis begins to merge with the inner light of the Palestinians. Bear witness to the merging of their spiritual selves. Simply watch and focus, for what you focus on grows stronger. 

— Marianne Williamson

This is recommended as a supplement, not a substitute for traditional political activism. — JJM

God’s Acrostic

What if the universe is God’s acrostic?
He’s sneaking bits of proverbs into seismic variations;
Abbreviating psalms in flecks of snow.
Try to read them, says a comet,

If you dare.
Fine print. What you’ve been waiting for.

Twisted in the DNA of marmosets:
Hermetic feedback to your tight-lipped prayer.
Examine indentations left by hailstones in the grass;

Unearth their parallel soliloquies;
Note, too, the shifting patterns in the shibboleths
Initiating each communication.
Verify them. Don’t take my word.
Eavesdrop on the planets in the outer spheres; they may
Reverse the letters’ previous direction.
Silence, as you might imagine, has no bearing here.
Episodes of stillness—however brief—must be

Interpreted as unheard
Sounds,

Gaps that, with any luck, you’ll fill in later—
Or so you tell yourself, acknowledging
Delusion’s primal status in this enterprise.
Still, that’s no reason to slow down.

Abandonments are howling out around you:
Cast-off lamentations from the thwarted drops of rain
Reduced to vapor on their struggle down;
Observe, at the very least, their passing.
Sanctify them. Don’t succumb
To anything less potent than a spelled-out
Invitation to rule a not yet formulated nebula.
Calm yourself. You’ll hear it come.

— Jaqueline Osherow

No words

If I had a word
which when spoken
pierced the call of hearts broken
tears of joy and love of child
awe of nature fierce and wild
I would hold you close so close inside
and as I faintly breathe its sound
we become the universe expanding

— Author?

(I’m looking for the source of this quote.  It’s extracted from a poem called No Words which appeared on my computer four years back.)

Dona nobis pacem

I’m sure that someday children in schools will study the history of the men who made war as you study an absurdity. They’ll be shocked, just as today we’re shocked with cannibalism.
— Golda Meier

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
— Baruch Spinoza

We must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. ‘’ 
— Martin Luther King, born this day in 1929

“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged”

— Benjamin Franklin, born this day in 1706

(except, perhaps, in China
           — JJM)

I have come into the world to see this:

I have come into this world to see this:
the sword drop from men’s hands even at the height
of their arc of anger

because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound
and it is His — the Christ’s, our
Beloved’s.

I have come into this world to see this: all creatures hold hands as
we pass through this miraculous existence we share on the way
to even a greater being of soul,

a being of just ecstatic light, forever entwined and at play
with Him.

I have come into this world to hear this:

every song the earth has sung since it was conceived in
the Divine’s womb and began spinning from
His wish,

every song by wing and fin and hoof,
every song by hill and field and tree and woman and child,
every song of stream and rock,

every song of tool and lyre and flute,
every song of gold and emerald
and fire,

every song the heart should cry with magnificent dignity
to know itself as
God:

for all other knowledge will leave us again in want and aching —
only imbibing the glorious Sun
will complete us.

I have come into this world to experience this:

men so true to love
they would rather die before speaking
an unkind
word,

men so true their lives are His covenant —
the promise of
hope.

I have come into this world to see this:
the sword drop from men’s hands
even at the height of
their arc of
rage

because we have finally realized
there is just one flesh

we can wound.

— Daniel Ladinsky, after Hafiz
from Love Poems from God

Serenity

Partially paralyzed and blind from syphilis, dictating his scores for transcription, Frederick Delius composed serene and quietly joyous music.

Listen to Song Before Sunrise, for orchestra

Delius was born this day in 1862.

Mindfulness meditation, in a sentence

  ‘The habit of employing self-deception to maintain one’s self esteem has often become so ingrained that the first step to developing accurate self-awareness is honest acknowledgment of the existence of hidden emotions, motives and tendencies in the mind without immediately suppressing them.’

— from Satipatthana, by Analayo

Now that that’s perfectly clear...

“Be what you would seem to be — or, if you’d like it put more simply — never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”

— Lewis Carroll, born this day in 1832

Immortal medusa

It’s an iron law of biology: stem cells can turn into ‘differentiated cells’ (other kinds of functional cells that make up the body), but differentiated cells can never turn into stem cells.

Benjamin Button, meet Turritopsis nutricula, a jellyfish that reverts to its larval state (a “polyp”) after reproducing. Turritopsis has solved the mortality problem.

It’s the world’s most dramatic demonstration there is that there is nothing inevitable about wearing out with age. The truth is that mother nature can do anything she wants to with her children, and if most of us get old and die, it’s because she’s arranged it that way for her own reasons.

London Telegraph article

Grace under pressure

Jackie Robinson had to be bigger than life. He had to be bigger than the Brooklyn teammates who got up a petition to keep him off the ball club, bigger than the pitchers who threw at him or the base runners who dug their spikes into his shin, bigger than the bench jockeys who hollered for him to carry their bags and shine their shoes, bigger than the so-called fans who mocked him with mops on their heads and wrote him death threats.

When Branch Rickey first met with Jackie about joining the Dodgers, he told him that for three years he would have to turn the other cheek and silently suffer all the vile things that would come his way. Believe me, it wasn't Jackie’s nature to do that. He was a fighter, the proudest and most competitive person I’ve ever seen. This was a man who, as a lieutenant in the Army, risked a court-martial by refusing to sit in the back of a military bus. But when Rickey read to him from The Life of Christ, Jackie understood the wisdom and the necessity of forbearance.

To this day, I don’t know how he withstood the things he did without lashing back. I’ve been through a lot in my time, and I consider myself to be a patient man, but I know I couldn’t have done what Jackie did. I don't think anybody else could have done it. Somehow, though, Jackie had the strength to suppress his instincts, to sacrifice his pride for his people’s. It was an incredible act of selflessness that brought the races closer together than ever before and shaped the dreams of an entire generation. Before Jackie Robinson broke the color line, I wasn’t permitted even to think about being a professional baseball player. I once mentioned something to my father about it, and he said, “Ain’t no colored ballplayers.” There were the Negro Leagues, of course, where the Dodgers discovered Jackie, but my mother, like most, would rather her son be a schoolteacher than a Negro Leaguer. All that changed when Jackie put on No. 42 and started stealing bases in a Brooklyn uniform.

— Hank Aaron, writing for Time Magazine

Jackie Robinson was born this day in 1919.