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 13 May 2008 @ 09:52
Winter solitude---
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.
---Basho
Loneliness, my everyday life.
The sweeping winds pass on the night-bell sound.
---Ching An
Science...means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an end which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp.
---Max Planck
The fresco is titled The End of the World, Apocalypse, created by Luca Signorelli from 1499 through 1502, in Orvieto Cathedral, San Brizio Chapel, Orvieto, Italy.
Bill McKibben's latest essay, Civilization’s Last Chance: The Planet Is Nearing a Tipping Point on Climate Change, and It Gets Much Worse, Fast, may have appeared first in Sunday's Los Angeles Times, but it's making the rounds fast. Common Dreams put it up yesterday and it has 146 comments so far. [link] When I read it my first thought was to send it out too, but then I realized I was too depressed to do it. What's the use, I thought. People who will read it already know and either are changing their own personal habits or sending money somewhere. Those who won't read it are the problem.
Psychotherapist and professor of history Carolyn Baker linked it in her newsletter and made this comment: "I have great respect for Bill McKibben, but unlike me, he is still waiting for some miracle of mass consciousness to save civilization. In this article he says we are 'nearing' a tipping point which in my opinion, we have already crossed. I believe that climate change now has a life of its own and that our best human efforts cannot stop it. In contrast to McKibben, I believe that it is only the END of civilization that can save what is left of the earth and its inhabitants, and for me, that cannot happen soon enough."
A friend of mine said a couple years ago, "The sooner we run out of oil the better. Aren't a hundred years of war about the stuff enough?" NASA climatologist James Hansen, quoted in McKibben's article, thinks burning coal to make our electricity is what's done it. President Bush said the U.S. is "addicted" to oil...and then advises us to go shopping. The guy sounds like a pusher. I remember his father being interviewed on television, sitting on the family cabin cruiser in Kennebunkport, in the midst of the gasoline shortage during his administration. At the end of it he was asked if he didn't want to urge Americans to conserve gas. He chuckled audibly...and then said, "Sure, conserve."
Is this the problem? Are we addicts now? I mean real addiction to stuff. Do we think we can't live without gasoline engines and the shopping mall? Or is it I don't want to live if I can't have it? I remember a guy in AA telling me once, "Before I gave it up I used to feel all I wanted to do was drink and smoke until I die." Maybe AA is the answer for consumerism too. Carolyn Baker thinks it is...and so last week she offered her 12 Step Plan to kick the habit. Maybe she's got something here. More >
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 24 Feb 2008 @ 13:25
We must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.
---Indira Gandhi
If we knew that tonight we were going to go blind, we would take a longing, LAST real look at every blade of grass, every cloud formation, every speck of dust, every rainbow, raindrop---everything.
---Pema Chodron
An adult is one who has lost the grace, the freshness, the innocence of the child, who is no longer capable of feeling pure joy, who makes everything complicated, who spreads suffering everywhere, who is afraid of being happy, and who, because it is easier to bear, has gone back to sleep. The wise man is a happy child.
---Arnaud Desjardins
The photo of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, taken by Melanie Burford for the Dallas Morning News, held my attention this morning from the instant I saw it. I think it's a great American face there, worthy of Mt. Rushmore. I'm not kidding, and I'm not saying it's a stone cold face. I mean that's a presidential face we're looking at. There's no doubt in my mind this candidate could handle the job. Except...except...
What is wrong with that picture? This is a portrait of a person in conflict. Cover the left side of her face as you're looking at her. In the half you see there's even a flicker of a smile, an openness, a quality of friendliness that I know she has. Now cover the other half. Woe, there is a person you wouldn't want to cross. Something unforgiving there in someone who's been banged around a lot.
I attempt this crude and rather adolescent psychology on Hillary Rodham Clinton because a certain unpredictability has permeated her campaign as well. If you watched her in debate with Barack Obama Thursday night, you saw it too. I didn't know what she was going to do next. She seems genuinely to like the man when she's standing right in front of him, looking him in the face. But then she'll go back to the it-should-be-in-your-own-words thing, and draw a shudder of disappointment from Obama, and boos from the crowd. Who is this person?
Maureen Dowd goes after it this morning, and while I do some shuddering myself at the masculine/feminine behavior characteristics in the column, I think she's on to something. She thinks Clinton is calculating her different approaches to impress various voting groups. She wants to be tough and macho for some, and sensitive and understanding for others. I think I have to differ with Ms. Dowd on this, though I'm really glad she noticed the stuff and decided to write about it. I'm not sure Senator Clinton is in control of how she's coming off. I think she's reeling from blows received in the ring.
Bill Clinton will be in Athens tomorrow, and I'm afraid the announcement came too late for me to clear my calendar. I do hope to get to it before it's all over, trusting he'll be an hour late like most of these guys. Former President Clinton is the first, and I hope not the last, of the big names to get to this important corner of the state. As the rest of the Ohio continually reminds us, we're rather different here. Some people even refer to Southeast Ohio as the West Virginia part of the state. There's some truth to that, going all the way back to glacial times. But let's not get into climate change.
Or maybe we should. When ARE these candidates going to mention it? And did you see McCain's record of environment votes? [link] Check out the fascinating final part of that blog entry to see how the new legislators, who replaced NINE of the 12 so-called "dirty dozen" in the last election, are doing.
Here's the link to Maureen Dowd's column this morning. [link] Let me say in another criticism of it (and I'm grateful to my online acquaintance Elle for reminding me of this), while Shirley Chisholm's presidential run in 1972 may not have been taken seriously she definitely was a serious candidate. I supported her too, just as far as she could go. [link] More >
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 22 Dec 2007 @ 13:11
Four years ago I wrote an article about a radio production of Dickens' Christmas Carol that my father constructed in our hometown back in the 1940s. He had based his presentation on an RCA Victor set of 4 12" 78 RPM records of the story, produced by famed radio personality Ernest Chappell in 1941. Nothing I've ever written has yielded such a prolonged response. Google still carries it and eventually Wikipedia picked it up in its entry about Chappell.
Each year I get requests from people in at least the English-speaking world for CD copies of that old RCA release, which of course is long gone in its original form (although EBay sometimes offers one I understand). In my original essay, I offer to make a copy for anyone---and that offer still stands.
In honor of radio drama and all the actors who made a living in that unique format---and who had such a huge impact on my life---I've decided to re-post the article...and some of the comments that have appeared since. My main motivation is the interactions with those people who want a copy, and the stories they tell of how much this production meant to them and their families. Hopefully the search engines will be reinvigorated and other people will get some answers---and maybe provide more!
The image accompanying this version is of the cover of the original set of records. It was sent to me by a contact this year in Ontario. The photograph I refer to at the beginning of the essay can still be seen at the original printing here [link] . More >
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 17 Sep 2007 @ 09:57
People in the West are always getting ready to live.
---Chinese proverb
If you're afraid of being grabbed by God, don't look at a wall. Definitely don't sit still.
---Jiyu Kennett
When the mind is not aroused, this is discipline.
When the mind is unmoved, this is concentration.
When the mind is not obscured, this is insight.
---Hseuh-Yen
Frank Rich is a columnist for The New York Times who focuses on American politics and cultural trends. His column yesterday~~~
Will the Democrats Betray Us?
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 16 September 2007
"Sir, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.
Not that many Americans were watching. The country knew going in that the White House would win its latest campaign to stay its course of indefinitely shoveling our troops and treasure into the bottomless pit of Iraq. The only troops coming home alive or with their limbs intact in President Bush's troop "reduction" are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet again, mobilize more reserves or bring back the draft.
On the sixth anniversary of the day that did not change everything, General Petraeus couldn't say we are safer because he knows we are not. Last Sunday, Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the C.I.A.'s Osama bin Laden unit, explained why. He wrote in The Daily News that Al Qaeda, under the de facto protection of Pervez Musharraf, is "on balance" more threatening today that it was on 9/11. [link] And as goes Pakistan, so goes Afghanistan. On Tuesday, just as the Senate hearings began, Lisa Myers of NBC News reported on a Taliban camp near Kabul in an area nominally controlled by the Afghan government we installed. It is training bomb makers to attack America. [link]
Little of this registered in or beyond the Beltway. New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we're back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland security official, "is virtually impotent." Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in charge of America's P.R. in the jihadists' world, recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international "special sports envoy." We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn.
This is why the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, including those more accurate than Mr. Bush's recent false analogies, can take us only so far. Our situation is graver than it was during Vietnam. More >
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 25 Jun 2007 @ 11:12
O to be delivered
from the rational
into the realm of
pure song...
---Theodore Roethke
Remember these teachings, remember the clear light, the pure bright shining white light of your own nature. It is deathless.
---The Tibetan Book Of The Dead
The healthy person doesn't torture others. Generally, it's the tortured who turn into torturers.
---C.G. Jung
The Torture Of St. Victor was created by an unknown painter in 1490.
I've never been comfortable with the notion of the United States as a Christian nation. Even as a child, I wondered what trusting in God was doing printed on all our money. Was it supposed to be a reminder not to get too involved in the things of this earth? If so, I'm not sure that strategy has worked.
I knew no Pagans, Muslims, Buddhists or Hindus in the 1940s, but Jews were among our neighbors and family friends. A classroom assignment in the second grade in which we were supposed to write a paragraph about our family's Christmas celebration and then read it aloud reduced a Jewish friend to tears when it was his turn. He read, "In my family we have no Christmas. We have no Christmas tree. There is no Santa Claus or presents." And he put his head down on his desk and cried. That's a long time for me to remember that essay. Obviously it changed me forever.
In the 1950s during the "Red Scare" and McCarthy's era, I remember distinctly when "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. We said the pledge in school everyday, and at first nobody could get it right. The teachers finally said we didn't have to say the new thing if we didn't want to, but just be silent during the time others might say it. I still don't say it.
So it's been quite a stretch for someone as old as me and so often described as a kid who always was thinking about things to get my head around the policies my government has evolved the last quarter century. Bush described his foreign policy at first as a Crusade. He quickly was shut up, not so much because it didn't describe the spiritual nature of Globalization, as his family saw it, but because the term obviously brought back some memories for followers of Islam...and after all, some of those guys are clients.
When the first photographs from Abu Ghraib came out, I thought sure the White House game was up...and I said so. I remembered a couple of photos from Viet Nam that lost us that war, or whatever it was. But the years and months and deaths have dragged on since then. Aren't Americans affected anymore? And what of the Republican "Christian base?" How do they theologize treatment of "detainees?" Do they think about it? Do they pray for them? Do they forgive? Do they love?
As I've written before, we have a new priest at The Church of the Good Shepherd. Bill Carroll and his family have been with us a year now, and so I'm glad to let him know he's not "new" to me anymore but instead a wonderful leader and accepted easily as my personal priest. His wife Tracey is a priest too, although understandably she ministers as Mother more to their 2 children than to us right now.
Both share strong academic backgrounds and Bill clearly is a biblical scholar and Anglican historian. Sometimes his sermons reflect a prior career of lecturing to theology students...which is fine with me. Perhaps there's some of that in the message he delivered yesterday. He used as his text a line from Psalm 63, which we had chanted earlier in the service, and spent most of the sermon differentiating between an idol and an ikon. That's an important distinction to make in one's worship, in whatever religion, but why am I writing to you about it this morning?
It's because at the end, he suddenly made a connection between idolatry and the frame of mind it must take to torture someone that I find stunning. And of course it's because Christians worship Christ who was tortured to death. More >
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