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 12 May 2005 @ 08:22
Sun rising over
the mountain path---
scent of plums.
---Basho
Everything is miraculous. It is a miracle that one doesn't melt in one's bath.
---Pablo Picasso
I learn every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: PATIENCE is everything.
---Rainer Maria Rilke
Remember when the American Legion or the Daughters of the American Revolution used to sponsor that essay contest for schoolkids? They probably still do, and maybe the prizes are the same---and the best behaved student in the class still cranks out that same essay...and even reads it to us at some compulsory assembly. I never tried to write one because, even as a kid, the topic seemed so huge I just couldn't get my head around it. More >
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 29 Dec 2004 @ 10:50
He who sees what is now has seen all things,
whatsoever comes to pass from everlasting and
whatsoever shall be unto everlasting time.
---Marcus Aurelius
What is this true meditation? It is to make everything: coughing, swallowing, waving the arms, motion, stillness, words, actions, the evil and the good, prosperity and shame, gain and loss into one single koan...with the principle of pure, undiluted, undistracted meditation before your eyes, attain a state of mind in which, even though surrounded by crowds of people, it is as if you were alone in a field extending tens of thousands of miles...if at this time you struggle forward without losing any ground, it will be as though a sheet of ice has cracked, as though a tower of jade has fallen, and you will experience a great feeling of joy.
---Hakuin
Quietness and emptiness are enough to pass through life without error.
---Nobutada
The comment in the subject line was made via email by John Kerry's attorney in Ohio on Monday evening. He was speaking for both Kerry and Edwards in answer to questions Keith Olbermann was posting as to how involved is the Democratic Party with charges of fraud and illegitimacy. The attorney goes on, "There are many conspiracy theorists opining these days. There are many allegations of fraud. But this presidential election is over. The Bush-Cheney ticket has won. The Kerry-Edwards campaign has found no conspiracy and no fraud in Ohio, though there have been many irregularities that cry out to be fixed for future elections. Senator Kerry and we in Ohio intend to fix them. When all of the problems in Ohio are added together, however bad they are, they do not add up to a victory for Kerry-Edwards. Senator Kerry's fully-informed and extremely careful assessment the day after the election and before he conceded remains accurate today, notwithstanding all the details we have since learned." [link] More >
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 30 Oct 2004 @ 09:30
God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.
---Dag Hammarskjold
Keeping on and on,
a traveler gets farther, farther away;
dust without cease
follows a horse through the world.
---Chia Tao
The butterfly counts not
months but moments,
And has time enough.
---Rabindranath Tagore
Les photographies de l'éclipse du 27 octobre 2004 seront bientôt disponibles ici par Sébastien Gauthier.
[link]
My title attempting summary doesn't intend grandiosity. Far from it. I think most of us here---both parties plus 3rd parties and independents...and we've got plenty of all in Southeast Ohio---are nearly fried with last minute efforts to phonebank, canvas, contribute, get to rallies (Jesse and Michael Moore will descend on OU this afternoon), avoid talk radio, only very selective TV, dress up for Halloween, and figure out what all to take with us when we attempt to vote Tuesday. What about Saturday chores? Groceries? Firewood? A ton of political mail piles up on the dining room table. Where can I find a space to eat supper tonight? More >
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 8 Oct 2004 @ 08:37
White dew on the bramble,
one drop
on each thorn.
---Buson
An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.
---D.H. Lawrence
From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth.
---Albert Camus
While I was in college in the late 1950s, the Government Department at Bates changed its name to Political Science. I feared the worst, and began to read poetry instead of constitutional law. Political scientists (if there be such things) not only tell us what happened in 2000, they go on to predict 2004. With the mess in Florida lurching the entire world into the US Supreme Court back then, a few states in this country have been seized upon as "swing states," in which our presidential election will be decided. I'm sure someone other than a fortune-teller can tell us how such precognition is determined. I can't though, nor have I been interested in finding out such things since Government changed its name.
Ohio is one of these states. Even if those scientists of the polis hadn't told me, I might have guessed something was up, since at least one of the major candidates is here every day. Most Ohioans I talk to are delighted to receive all this attention and up close contact with these guys. Friends elsewhere in the country and around the world envy us and ask for insight as to what's going on---somehow not satisfied with American news services anymore. Until this week I've felt the giddy power of a junior high school kid who knows a secret everybody wants to find out. Unfortunately that party now is over, and the story breaking out of Ohio is frightening in the extreme. More >
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 27 Aug 2004 @ 15:33
I pack no provisions for my long journey---entering emptiness under the midnight moon.
---Chinese sage
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.
---William Wordsworth
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore,
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.
---Ralph Waldo Emerson
My "nature pictures" are a family joke. There will be a landscape of some sort, and then I must point to a black dot, vague and nearly invisible. That dot might be an owl or a dolphin...perhaps an eagle, a fox. All my nature pictures looks the same, because of the dot. The answer to my problem is simplicity itself: I need a telephoto lens...but it remains a low priority item somehow on my wish list. More >
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