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 1 Mar 2007 @ 10:27
Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now.
---Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A monk asked the master: "How are you when death arrives?"
The master replied: "When served tea, I take tea. When served a meal, I take a meal."
---Zen mondo
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
---Marshall McLuhan
Photo of members at worship around the "table" at an Episcopal church in Indiana.
This is not an evangelical attempt to missionary you folks who aren't Episcopalian. Our denomination has been in the news lately, and mostly we've just gone about our Lenten business trying not to get too excited about it. One Lutheran professor a couple years ago put it to our congregation this way:
The difference between you Episcopalians and us Lutherans is we'll have a huge study committee set about to spend a few years deciding whether openly gay people ought to be bishops, but you guys just consecrate one and figure out the theology later.
That seems to be true about us. And if pressed and even threatened by the Anglican world on this, we'll just elect a woman to be our Presiding Bishop. Is this impudence or what? Are we the wise guys of the Christian community? Now the big meeting in Tanzania has given us 30 days or something to straighten up our act here in the States or else. Increasingly I hear people around my parish say, "Well, if we get thrown out it won't be so bad." Generally I don't like to see liberal groups splintering up all the time, so I was relieved this morning to read an editorial piece in The New York Times~~~ More >
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 5 Dec 2006 @ 10:05
Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
---Malachy McCourt
I appreciate people's opinions, but I'm more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world.
---George W. Bush
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried...to practice these principles in all our affairs.
---Twelfth Step of Alcoholics Anonymous
First a word about these quotations. The statement about resentment has become quite popular and a number of people seem to be credited for it, but chief among them is Mr. McCourt, a colorful figure one might have to sum up as a storyteller of some sort. The actual source for the comment apparently is not known. President Bush was talking about the media to FoxNews's Britt Hume at the end of a 2003 interview found here [link] . The official Internet site of AA is www.alcoholics-anonymous.org/ . And while I'm giving credit, the lithograph by George Bellows was published as an illustration for an article in Good Housekeeping explaining Prohibition in 1924. The original currently is housed in the Library of Congress.
Second, let me say I don't know if the President is alcoholic. We have a history of ambivalence about alcohol in this country. We find drunks comical, as we do not so often people experiencing the effects of other substances that may cause dependence or addiction. We tried to prohibit its manufacture and consumption once, but apparently found enforcement too difficult. Most families include or know of someone with a "drinking problem," but addressing the issue with the person is somehow extremely sensitive. There doesn't seem to be a medical test that proves someone actually has what many describe as a "disease." People are sent to Alcoholics Anonymous by courts and various recovery units, but many folks show up having diagnosed themselves just as they previously "medicated" themselves. You don't have to confess to alcoholism to go to any meeting of AA anywhere, as long as you profess an honest desire to stop drinking.
Third, whether George Bush is alcoholic or not should be none of my business. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of AA, and the main reason for that is not so much secrecy anymore as it is for the purpose of learning humility. It means the member is trying to drop the behaviors of the big shot egomaniac that alcohol obviously encourages and creates. I don't know that the President is NOT in the fellowship of AA, but his biographies say he gave up drinking after a transforming interaction with Billy Graham. Others say Bush's handlers encouraged that story to attract his Evangelical base for his Presidential run. Stories about Bush's drinking in Houston and "disappearance" to Alabama in 1972 [link] and his DWI at the family compound in Maine in 1976 [link] remained secret or of no interest the whole time he was Governor of Texas. (You may notice at the CBC site a quotation from his autobiography in which Bush says he just woke up one morning with a hangover and stopped drinking; there's no mention of any born again conversion.) It may be a run for the Presidency made Bush come up with something about his substance abuse and try to beat the media to the punch (no boozy pun intended). More >
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 3 Sep 2006 @ 10:02
You are the light,
You are the refuge,
There is no place to take shelter but yourself.
---Inscription over the Buddha's ashes
Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.
---Ralph Waldo Emerson
The morning after the storm
the melons alone
know nothing of it.
---Sodo
Patricia McDonough, a professional photographer with a fisheye lens, made this picture from her apartment’s living room within minutes of the first airliner’s impact.
You have to grit your teeth just to get through Garrison Keillor's gripping review this morning of a new book called Watching The World Change: The Stories Behind The Images Of 9/11. I'm trying to imagine what reading the book would be like. Here is Garrison, taking you through it~~~
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The New York Times
September 3, 2006
Bearing Witness
By GARRISON KEILLOR
It was a perfect late-summer day in New York, the sort of day when a person feels terribly lucky to be in the city. A man named Pavel Hlava was showing his brother Josef around town and raised his video camera toward the World Trade Center just in time to catch a bright object flashing in the sky and then a puff of smoke from the north face of the north tower. A French filmmaker, Jules Naudet, who was making a documentary about firefighters, was with a fire truck responding to a gas leak at Lispenard and Church Streets downtown when he heard the roar of a jet engine and raised his camera to catch the plane too. And so did two Webcams from an apartment window in Brooklyn. It was 8:46 a.m. on the 11th of September, 2001. At 8:49 a.m., CNN went live with a shot of the towers from a camera on the West Side. The second plane hit the south tower at 9:03, and by that time dozens of cameras were on the scene, aiming upward. More >
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 3 Jun 2006 @ 08:31
The important thing is to do, and nothing else; be what it may.
---Pablo Picasso
You yourself are time---your body, your mind, the objects around you. Plunge into the river of time and swim, instead of standing on the banks and noting the course of the currents.
---Philip Kapleau
Who whispered, souls have shapes
So has the wind, I say.
But I don't know.
I only feel things blow.
---Stanley Kunitz
John and Grace Tagliabue were photographed in the Muskie Garden at Bates College in 1998 by Phyllis Graber Jensen, shortly before their move to Providence, R.I. John died on May 31.
You can, you do...prepare---sometimes for years---for the last word, the final departure...of a friend, a loved one. But we're never really ready when it comes. Still the shock. The welling up, unexpected sobbing. Breaking down...alone or with a comforting hand upon one's shoulder. It cannot be contained. The grief.
And so it came...yesterday afternoon, while I was down at the garden, the phone call's recorded message telling me John Tagliabue is gone.
Exactly a month ago his last letter arrived announcing the "big operation" would be "tomorrow morning, might take 4 - 7 hours!!" Nearly 83, John had agreed to extreme measures to remove part of a pancreas gone bad. There were complications...and another surgery...and then the final morphine drip. With wife and 2 daughters in the room reading him his poems, John gave us the slip and danced lightly further into the fantastic. May I share with you just a few of the last things he wrote?
++++++++++++++++++++ More >
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 12 Mar 2006 @ 22:28
The picture is of John Tagliabue in the full flight of reading, at Bates College Reunion '98.
Now, what is poetry? If you say it is simply a matter of words, I will say a good poet gets rid of words. If you say it is simply a matter of meaning, I will say a good poet gets rid of meaning. "But," you ask, "without words and without meaning, where is the poetry?" To this I reply, "Get rid of words and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry."
---Yang Wan-Li
Poetry, to the poet, is the most rewarding work in the world. A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself, and the world around him...
---Dylan Thomas
If there is any absolute, it is never more than this one, you, this instant, in this action.
---Charles Olson
I wonder whether friend and mentor, John Tagliabue, would agree with fellow poet Olson on that notion. I never try to corner a poet about the Absolute. I prefer to follow them about to see what spouts. Our Anglican priest in sermon today shared the Jewish blessing, "May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi!" The point is get close to your teacher, maybe especially around his feet.
At any rate, Tagliabue sent me this poem recently on sort of the same Charles Olson subject~~~
With sometimes Song
and its myriad descendents
Being
cast with the dice & the stars
there is no winning or losing but
Being More >
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