Imprisoned

"The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear.  This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand.  We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think."  ~Richard Buckminster Fuller (source)

•

"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery,  none but ourselves can free our minds."  ~Bob Marley

Frederick

 

My favorite book as a child was Frederick by Leo Lionni.

It made me happy when they put him on a stamp.

There He Is

 

(clicking imbiggens)

Pearls Before Swine by Steven Pastis is one of the most consistently good comics still being made.  You can read it online HERE, and read his derelict blog HERE.

Why not?

 

(clicking Imbiggens)

Blondie isn't typically one of my favorite comics.  I'm convinced that it has lasted not because it is funny, but because it's safe; a newspaper editor can slip a Blondie in a slot and never have to worry about an angry letter from the public.

But the strip above is a cut above, and it has stuck with me.

Clean the Atmosphere

 

A double-decker bus appears out of the London fog in the cold winter of 1952.

Photograph from The Daily Mail

Back in the 1950s, London used to have a lot of fog. When the fog combined with the smoke from thousands of coal fires, it created what the Londoners called ‘a real pea-souper’ because they experienced it to be just like the local pea soup!

Have you ever been in such a thick fog? Sometimes you can’t see in front of your eyes for more than a few feet. Any object coming towards you, like a horse, a walking man, or this double-decker London bus, can only be seen as a blurred shape until its very close. It can be difficult to find your way in such a fog. Sometimes you can even become completely lost.

People can generate fog too. Its not made up of ‘pea soup’ or even particles of water. Its made up of particles of conversation, emails, and website posts. When people come together to form groups, and groups come together as larger organisations the ‘cyber-fog’ can be really dense sometimes. Either the members speak so much about the organisation - or other people speak about it - that it forms a communications ‘fog’ so thick that its possible the entire organisation - rather like a London bus - can be completely obscured. Only when up close can you really see what its like.

In the Srimad Bhagavatam, Srila Prabhupada comments that all the lies in the world - especially coming from lawyers, politicians and the like - who routinely speak what they know to be untrue simply for personal advantage - can travel as vibrations into the atmosphere and come down again as subtle pollutants.

Every human being therefore has a duty to speak in such a way as to help clean the atmosphere. And devotees of Krishna in this wonderful movement for Krishna consciousness have an extra duty to spend their time glorifying Krishna and the Vaishnavas. Particularly they must not waste time in employing electronic gadgetry in broadcasting their less than helpful comments on the lives of others. Otherwise the fog thus generated will tend to obscure our movement. People will see a distant, vague shape but be unable to see our movement for what it is. They will see the fog first - and may miss the bus completely. 

(I found this on an old backup disk, and unfortunately I failed to save the source.  If anyone knows, drop me a line so I can credit the author.)

It's not what it looks like.

 Craig's List has an image for no image:

Which reminded me of this:

Nothing Too Much

"Few people know how to take a walk. The qualities are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good silence, and nothing too much."  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson (via)

Lift Up Thine Eyes

 

(clicking imbiggens)

Christmas Blessing

 

The video above was posted by my late friend Nick Temple of Sometimes Saintly Nick many, many years ago.

Andy Warhol's "Nativity"

 

(clicking imbiggens)

Scout Oath

 

(Clicking Imbiggens)

This was my father's, and dates to the late 1930s/early 1940s.

Flame Fractals

 

 

Clicking the thumbnail imbiggens.

All were created by me with the free, open-source software program Apophysis, available HERE.

I Have No Home

"For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come."  ~Hebrews 13:14

Dorothy Day is said to have taken comfort in that quote when she got older and began to lose friends.

It reminded me of this song:

..

Full lyrics HERE.

Nothing Compares

Full lyrics HERE.

Walls

 

"When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt." ~Leviticus 19: 33-34

You have to do some fancy footwork to make that mean "Build a wall to keep those filthy drug-addicted disease-ridden foreigners out."

But I've seen pictures of Donald Trump holding a bible (albeit upside-down) and Joe Biden makes a point of going to mass every Sunday, so I guess there's a way. 

Ah!

"There are two types of people:  those who come into a room and say, 'Well, here I am!' and those who come in and say, 'Ah, there you are.'"  ~Frederick L. Collins

Jesus with his Kittens

 

Names and Addresses

 

(Clicking Imbiggens)

"The earth is not dying, it is being killed.  And the people who are killing it have names and addresses."  ~Utah Phillips

To Love Somebody

"To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.

"The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost.

"But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness."  ~ Heidi Priebe

And that reminded me of this:

 Full lyrics HERE.

Seeds

 Excerpted from Parables:  The Arrows of God by Megan McKenna, ©2014:

There was a woman who wanted peace in the world and peace in her heart and all sorts of good things, but she was very frustrated. The world seemed to be falling apart. She would read the newspapers and get depressed. One day she decided to go shopping, and she went into a mall and picked a store at random. She walked in and was surprised to see Jesus behind the counter. She knew it was Jesus because he looked just like the pictures she'd seen on holy cards and devotional pictures. She looked again and again at him, and finally she got up enough nerve and asked, "Excuse me, are you Jesus?"

"I am."

"Do you work here?"

"No," Jesus said, "I own the store."

"Oh, what do you sell in here?"

"Oh, just about anything!"

"Anything?"

"Yeah, anything you want. What do you want?"

She said, "I don't know."

Well," Jesus said, "Feel free, walk up and down the aisles, make a list, see what it is that you want, and then come back and we'll see what we can do for you."

She did just that, walked up and down the aisles. There was peace on earth, no more war, no hunger or poverty, peace in families, no more drugs, harmony, clean air, careful use of resources. She wrote furiously. By the time she got back to the counter, she had a long list. Jesus took the list, skimmed through it, looked up and smiled, "No problem." And then he bent down behind the counter and picked out all sorts of things, stood up, and laid out the packets.

She asked, "What are these?"

Jesus replied, "Seed packets. This is a catalogue store."

She said, "You mean I don't get the finished product?"

"No, this is a place of dreams. You come and see what it looks like, and I give you the seeds. You plant the seeds. You go home and nurture them and help them to grow and someone else reaps the benefits."

"Oh," she said. And she left the store without buying anything.

Refrigerator Cookies

 

(Clicking Imbiggens)

From my Mom's old cookbook, c. 1955.

Desire

The Paradox of Involvement vs. Non-Attachment
by Ram Dass

It says in the Tao, “Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.”

The way I hear this in psychology is: motivation affects perception. When I’m hungry I see what’s edible. If I’m horny, I see what’s makeable. If I’m tired, I see what’s soft, you know, my motivation selects out of the infinity of the universe what it is that fits in with my desires.

Since that’s the case, as long as you’re identified with your desires, you can’t help but manipulate the universe to try to bring about that gratification of your desires. If you carry that to it’s ultimate truth, you see that everybody around you is an object to be manipulated to give you that gratification.

So if it says, “Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing,” what does it mean to have an eye unclouded by longing? It’s the place in your being, in your awareness which is not totally identified with your desire system.

My sense is that to the extent you are not attached to your desire systems, you are able to hear other human beings and you do less of projecting into them what you need, and the result is that out of your action comes responses which are more compassionate to who they are than your need at the moment.

So this doesn’t mean you don’t have desires, but rather there is a paradox that’s hard to work with, which is this: “What does it mean to be fully involved in life and non-attached?”

•

And that made me think of this:

Full lyrics HERE.

Kindness

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

On Kindness

Excerpted from an article by Maria Popova in The Marginalian:

Of course, even the best-intentioned of us are not capable of perpetual kindness, not capable of being our most elevated selves all day with everybody. If you have not watched yourself, helpless and horrified, transform into an ill-tempered child with a loved one or the unsuspecting man blocking the produce aisle with his basket of bok choy, you have not lived. Discontinuous and self-contradictory even under the safest and sanest of circumstances, human beings are not wired for constancy of feeling, of conduct, of selfhood. When the world grows unsafe, when life charges at us with its stresses and its sorrows, our devotion to kindness can short-circuit with alarming ease. And yet, paradoxically, it is often in the laboratory of loss and uncertainty that we calibrate and supercharge our capacity for kindness. And it is always, as Kerouac intuited, a practice.

NEO

 

I love little Neo.

It's just a word processor, nothing more; zero distractions.  It has a small, functional LCD screen, and three AA batteries last about 150 hours.

Naturally, they don't make it anymore.  So when it wears out, that's all she wrote.

Dozen

 

(clickimg imbiggens)

If Barack Obama had prosecuted George W.'s torture teams, Ron DeSantis wouldn't be governor of Florida.

He'd be in jail right now.

But Obama didn't prosecute them. In fact, he ordered all the evidence destroyed so they could never be prosecuted.

Thanks, Obama.

Panpsychism

Excerpted from an article Discover by Avery Hurt:

Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness did not evolve to meet some survival need, nor did it emerge when brains became sufficiently complex. Instead it is inherent in matter — all matter.

In other words, everything has consciousness. Consciousness is not limited to humans and other animals. Plants have it, too. It doesn’t stop at living things, either. Stones and stars, electrons and photons, even quarks have consciousness. According to some versions of the theory, the universe itself is conscious. (This variety of panpsychism is known as cosmopsychism.)

You can read the full article HERE. 

I didn't know there was a word for it, but that's sort of what I've believed all my life.

Reach Out

 

And that led to this:

Full lyrics HERE.

Smile

Prayer

 

 

Andy Singer is on the web at (of course!) AndySinger.com.

Every

 

(clicking Imbiggens)

I Don't Give a Hoot

 

And that led to this:

Full lyrics HERE.

You May Ask Yourself

 

And that led to (of course!) this:

Full lyrics HERE.

Different

"My only hope is that even for a moment I helped you see the world a little bit different."  ~Anonymous

This is one of those quotes that's all over the internet attributed to various people, but I couldn't track down a primary source for it.  Sometimes I see it split it into four lines and formatted it as a poem.

But whoever said it, I like it.

The people who have been the most useful to me in my life have been the ones that gave me a new perspective.

Little Birds

 

 

And that odd little graphic reminded me of this wonderful little song:

Full lyrics HERE.

To Understand

 

And that goofy little image reminded me of this, one of the saddest songs I've ever heard:

Full lyrics HERE.

aka "Wakan Tanka's Prayer"

Red Nativity was an amazing Native American duo that managed to fuse their own culture with New Age and traditional American Christmast songs to create something unique and wonderful.

Don't Wait to Understand

 

Clicking Imbiggens

Mary Pondered

It's kind of interesting that Angels of the Lord™ decided to appear before a bunch of shepherds. 

I'm not really sure why.  It seems like it might have been more useful to appear before Ceaser or Pontius Pilate.

Oh well.  It wasn't my call.

Excerpted from Luke 2:

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
 

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.

It doesn't really say whether they took the sheep with them, or if they just waited until their shift was over.  Surely they didn't just abandon them.  Maybe the angels watched the sheep for them.

I wonder if it bothered them that the savior was in a barn?  A manger is an unusual place to find a baby.  Maybe instead of singing and dancing for a bunch of shepherds, the angels could have pooled their resources and sprung for a motel room.

There are a lot of little details to this story that are just lost to time.

I Do This

"I have this incredible dream that one day, one minute, the whole world, at the same time, will decide it's time for peace and love. So I just do my part. And I think that's all you can do. I'm not telling anyone else what to do. I do this, and that's the end of my story."  ~Ringo Starr

We may not notice, but

"Around us, life bursts with miracles—a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colours, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings. When we are tired and feel discouraged by life’s daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there."  ~Thich Nhat Hanh

And that reminded me of this (lyrics NSFW):

 Full lyrics HERE.