2/28/2020

QUESTIONNAIRE by Wendell Berry


1) How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade? Please name your preferred poisons.
2) For the sake of goodness, how much evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks with the names of your favorite evils and acts of hatred.
3) What sacrifices are you prepared to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines, and works of art you would most willingly destroy.
4) In the name of patriotism and the flag, how much of our beloved land are you willing to desecrate? List in the following spaces the mountains, rivers, towns, farms you could most readily do without.

5) State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes, the energy sources, the kinds of security, for which you would kill a child. Name, please, the children whom you would be willing to kill.


2/20/2020

Pale blue dot

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

Nine Mile Canyon

The Nine Mile Canyon is located deep in the Utah desert in the Western United States. It is known as “the world’s longest art gallery” because is filled with tens of thousands of petroglyphs and pictographs, some over a thousand years old. Most of the art was created by the Fremont culture and the Ute people. This unique canyon is an international treasure.

Imagine


When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.

MILLER

Perhaps it is curiosity — about anything and everything — that made me the writer I am. It has never left me. With this attribute goes another which I prize above everything else, and that is the sense of wonder. No matter how restricted my world may become I cannot imagine it leaving me void of wonder. In a sense I suppose it might be called my religion. I do not ask how it came about, this creation in which we swim, but only to enjoy and appreciate it.

Indeed

"In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don't try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present."
~ Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching

2/18/2020

Shinzen

“The most awesome aspect about death:
you survived it before.” -Shinzen

2/07/2020

Satyagraha

Satyagraha loosely translated as "soul force"[1] or "truth force" is a particular philosophy and practice within the broader overall category generally known as nonviolent resistance or civil resistance. The term "satyagraha" was conceived and developed by Mahatma Gandhi. He deployed satyagraha in the Indian independence movement and also during his earlier struggles in South Africa. Satyagraha theory influenced Nelson Mandela's struggle in South Africa under apartheidMartin Luther King, Jr.'s campaigns during the civil rights movement in the United States, and many other social justice and similar movements.[2][3] Someone who practices satyagraha is a satyagrahi.

Truth to Power


Rashani ~ While Learning to Sing


Epigraph


2/04/2020

Merton and Vanishing Star

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us… It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely… I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. 
But the gate of heaven is everywhere.” ~ Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander