Disturbing

 

(clicking imbiggens)

☮

 

(clicking imbiggens)

Artist Liz Climo has a web page HERE.

The End and the Beginning

The End and the Beginning
by Wislawa Szymborska
from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, 1996
translation: Stanislaw Baranczak & Clare Cavanaugh

After every war
someone’s got to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone’s got to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Someone’s got to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

Someone’s got to lug the post
to prop the wall,
someone’s got to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirt sleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens nodding
his unshattered head.
But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who’ll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less
than nothing.

Someone’s got to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.

Be With You

 

Artist Shusaku Takaoka has a web page HERE.

What was the point?

In this excerpt from Pilgrims:  A Wobegon Romance by Garrison Keillor ©2009, Norbert Norlander speaks of his mother's communication with the ghost of her son Gussie, an Allied soldier who was killed in World War II:

She said, 'How was it, Gussie?' He said, 'Not like you think it was.  But it's all over, it doesn't matter,' he said.  And then he'd moan.  That made her cry and he'd say, 'Ma, they all died and it didn't matter.  Nobody cared.  It didn't change a single thing.  The world goes on.  They just went up the road and died in the mud and the filth and then life went on and it didn't matter.  The Germans didn't want Italy and neither did we.  It was all for show.  A big opera except they shot the orchestra.  What was the point of it?'

Maybe it's hitting harder because I just finished Catch-22. 

But it seems like maybe the Nazis really were that bad, but maybe we weren't all that good.

Peace / Yin Yang

 

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)

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

Fresh Air and Clean Water

"The tepee is much better to live in: always clean, warm in winter, cool in summer; easy to move… Indians and animals know better how to live than white man; nobody can be in good health if he does not have all the time: fresh air, sunshine, and good water."  ~Chief Flying Eagle of the Oglala Sioux

Daily Rituals

"Here’s the true secret of life: We mostly do everything over and over. In the morning, we let the dogs out, make coffee, read the paper, and help whoever is around get ready for the day. We do our work. In the afternoon, if we have any time left, we come home, put down our keys and satchels, let the dogs out, take off constrictive clothing, make a drink or put water on for tea, toast the leftover bit of scone. I love ritual and repetition. Without them, I would be a balloon with a slow leak.… Daily rituals, especially walks, even forced marches around the neighborhood, and schedules, whether work or meals with non-awful people, can be the knots you hold on to when you’ve run out of rope."  ~Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair ©2013

Active/Passive

 "Take for instance a man driven to incessant work by a sense of deep insecurity and loneliness; or another one driven by ambition, or greed for money. In all these cases the person is the slave of a passion, and his activity is in reality a “passivity” because he is driven; he is the sufferer, not the “actor.” On the other hand a man sitting quiet and contemplating, with no purpose or aim except that of experiencing himself and his oneness with the world, is considered to be “passive”, because he is not “doing” anything. In reality, this attitude of concentrated meditation is the highest activity there is, an activity of the soul, which is possible only under the condition of inner freedom and independence."  ~Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving ©1956

I Rise

Excerpted from an article by Leonard Peltier describing his experiences at the Wahpeton Indian School, which he was forced into at the age of nine:

I used to sit around with Dennis Banks and other men and talk about our days at Wahpeton. We could not find a single pleasant memory. Our memories from those vulnerable, formative years are harsh and violent. But we learned one thing from those awful places your people sent us to: We are survivors.

And we survived with our hearts intact.

You don’t treat people badly like that. I rise only when I help you rise. Despite all those beatings, I still believe it. It’s a law, like physics, and it’s true. You get nowhere being mean and disrespecting the feelings of others, especially the most vulnerable. I have seen both kinds of people and more than my share of evil ones, and I know I’m right. I rise only when I help you rise.

You can read the whole article at Native News Online, HERE.

It reminded me of the poem "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou:

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

You can read her whole poem HERE.

War and Peace

 

Clicking Imbiggns

Symbiotic

Transcribed from a video on Reddit, which you can watch HERE:

Q:  What sort of alternative society and culture…

A:  Oh, one that doesn't make guns and bombs.  One that's not at war with itself constantly.  One that doesn't poison the air, doesn't poison the land, doesn't poison the sea.  One that has enough respect for each other and the planet we live on, and all the other life-forms that share this planet that we live on.  When there is enough respect for all of that, to live in a way that's completely sustainable, that is beneficial to all life, so that mankind becomes a symbiotic life-form that's supporting the life of its host planet, instead of being a parasitic life-form that's devoiding its host planet with its ability to support life.

At the moment I'm sat on a train going to Auschwitz, and I know that there's gas ovens at the end of the line, and I can't think of anything that makes me happy on this journey.  There's nothing to celebrate.

If you want to be depressed, read the comments at the bottom of the post.  One third of the people make fun of him for having a long beard, the other two thirds derided him as unrealistic, saying the world he aspires to goes against "human nature."  The word "utopian" was banded about as a pejorative.

But they're wrong.

It's infantile to suggest that every dark impulse is "human nature" and must be indulged.  A pig may be content to wallow in filth, a human should aspire to more.

But more than that, I would argue that "human nature" is based on cooperation, not competition.  We didn't build cities and new technologies through avarice, sloth, and aggression.   We worked with each other and made amazing things.

It's nihilistic to presume a world based on our better instincts is not possible.

It absolutely is.

It Just Was

 Excerpted from A Boy and a Bear in a Boat by Dave Shelton, ©2012:

"You should get some sleep," said the bear.  "I'll keep going for a bit.  It's a nice night.  Thought I'd row for a while longer and take a look at the moon."

"Look at the moon?" said the boy.  "Why?  It's not going to do anything, is it?  I mean, the moon is just the moon."  But as he said it he looked up at the moon himself and, as there was nothing better to do, he kept looking at it for quite a while.  He'd been right, it didn't do anything, but it didn't have to, it was just beautiful.  It just was.  The boy gazed at the moon, longer and harder than he ever had before (because who would spend time looking at the moon when there was a telly to watch and video games to play and comics to read?) and felt, for a moment, calm and safe and sure.

"Coo!" he said, but very quietly.  And then the boy looked at the stars.  There were a lot of them, more, he thought, than usual.  He wondered where all the new ones had come from.  Maybe they were just all the usual ones but they'd all bunched together in the same bit of sky.  He twisted his neck looking up at different patches of sky, but they all seemed equally crowded.

"You can see more stars out here," said the bear, as if reading the boy's mind, "because it's properly dark."

The boy lowered his head and looked at the bear.

"It's funny, isn't it?"  the bear went on.  "With everything else you can't see as well in the dark, but with stars you can see them better.  In towns, with streetlights and suchlike, it's not dark enough to see some of them, but out here…"  He looked up and smiled and either forgot to continue or felt no need.  The boy looked up again too.  They sat there for a while, quiet and content, drinking in the beauty of the bejewelled night.

A Boy and a Bear in a Boat is one of my favorite books.  I have posted about it before, and you can read the old posts HERE.

Criminal

“War and the large military establishments are the greatest sources of violence in the world. Whether their purpose is defensive or offensive, these vast powerful organizations exist solely to kill human beings. We should think carefully about the reality of war. Most of us have been conditioned to regard military combat as exciting and glamorous-- an opportunity for men to prove their competence and courage. Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.” - The Dalai Lama

WE decide

 “We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.”  ~Howard Zinn

Winding Down

Joe Biden has made it clear that America will still drop bombs and assassinate people in Afghanistan, because if we don't bomb and assassinate people then terrorists might bomb and assassinate people-- and bombing and assassinating people is Wrong.

The logic is unassailable.

As we finally wind down the Bush Family Wars, we leave Afghanistan pretty much exactly the same as we found it, Iraq is much much worse, and the entire region is destabilized.  One of the first things Barack Obama did was stop releasing the civilian death toll, but the last figure given (roughly 16 years ago) totaled in excess of 1.1 million people.

We spent over two trillion dollars on this.

So it goes.

I don't think soldiers put a great deal of thought into what they're doing.  I find it hard to believe American soldiers really believed they were doing anything useful over there.  Expanding on that, I don't think Nazi soldiers were mindfully supporting genocide and oppression, or that Confederate soldiers were adamant about apartheid and slavery.

Someone said "Go here and do this," so they went there and did that.

That doesn't strike me as being particularly heroic. 

But that's what they did.

18th Century Hippy

Too lazy
Ryōkan Taigu
from The Zen Poems of Ryokan, translation ©2014

Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days’ worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.

An Unfortunate Homonym

From The Huffington Post:

Americans have an uncomfortable relationship with taking it easy: We’re overworked and burned out. We’re loath to take our vacation days. We have abysmal work-life boundaries and valorize being busy.

That’s exactly why we need a little niksen in our lives. Niksen is the Dutch term for carving out time to do absolutely nothing every so often. When you niks, you allow yourself to just be: no interrogating your thoughts, no worries about deadlines or bottom lines.

Read the rest HERE.