|
|
 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 >
|
|
|
|
 5 Jun 2007 @ 10:03
In a single cry
the pheasant has swallowed
the fields of spring.
---Yamei
The real miracle is not to walk on water or thin air but to walk on the earth!
---Thich Nhat Hanh
Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.
---Charlie Parker
The family that protests together...: Richard, Dana, Ilona demonstrating against a nuclear dump they want to build down the road apiece. (Photo by Loraine McCosker)
I went to my dentist for the semi-annual checkup yesterday, and noticed a new product in the little bag of stuff they give you afterwards. I wisecracked to the receptionist that Listerine must be sending my doctor and his family on a cruise somewhere. She was quick to reply he never takes anything from companies except the free samples. I was happy to hear that.
Whereupon I gave her an earful about my family doctor's office. I said I hadn't been in there even once in the past 2 years (and I go maybe 3 times a year---they want to get all they can out of my insurance company) when there wasn't a drug salesperson pushing pills. These people are particularly sickening, as they try to get from the reception window into the back area to unload their suitcases full of drugs and bribe the doctors. The payoffs are free dinners, trips, and various toys to be strewn all over the place with big long names of pills on them. Undoubtedly they hope some patients will steal the toys to take home and spread the word. Free advertising. The dinners are gigantic feasts, and receptionists are encouraged to have to doctor invite all their friends if they want to. This is done in brazen broad daylight in front of a room of patients, waiting hour after hour to get that prescription.
I was in there last week, for a sprained foot I wanted X-rayed, and the drug lady was suggesting perhaps the doctors would like a new restaurant this time. Maybe one in Columbus or Parkersburg, a finer one, a richer one. The receptionist said she'd ask. "And oh!" the pusher said, "did you notice my new outfit?" She did a little swirl in front of the window. "It's color coordinated with our featured capsule!" I couldn't believe my ears. "See? The same colors as (she named the drug). Even the waistband is the color of the little separating line." I felt nauseated, and nearly stood up and let her have it. This is our health system in action, and I'm about to go in an office for treatment that will pay for this woman's salary, costume, and a doctor's free vacation courtesy of pharmaceuticals.
Maybe 20 years ago or more doctors started giving us free samples of drugs they were prescribing. I appreciated that because sometimes I was sick with flu or something, and just felt like going back to bed rather than a drug store to get medication. But since then, the practice has become obscene. Is this the free market the people in power tell us is a new religion solving the world's problems? If so, I want out! I'll gather roots and herbs in the woods before I'll take any more of this horror show. Have a look at TruthOut's article on the mess from yesterday afternoon~~~ More >
|
|
|
|
 1 Jun 2007 @ 07:00
There is not a petal of a flower or a blade of grass that does not configure the Way.
---Bassui
Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth.
---Richard Whately
There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.
---Federico Fellini
Offering of Fruits to Moon Goddess, 1757
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo
(b. 1727, Venezia, d. 1804, Venezia)
I have to be very careful here. Here I am offering up an article about a (The?) feminine perspective, and all the quotations up there are by guys. Is it a (The?) male perspective to explain things and solve problems, as those gentlemen are attempting? Women often respond by telling me what's wrong with my thinking and ignoring my solutions.
And of course there is a thin line between reporting and advocacy. I've had a whole life of trouble through advocating things, albeit worthwhile. Civil rights, anti-nukes, peace, organics, education and citizenship, cleaning up fraud and corruption, anti-consumerism. But of all the movements I tried to support, the feminine one has been the trickiest around which to maintain objectivity.
So I'm going to try just to report something here that I think may be significant and of interest having to do with what some call a particularly feminine outlook. Actually Cathy Holt is going to report it, so I'm hoping to get pretty much off the hook. I've subscribed to Cathy's occasional newsletter almost from the first day I got onto the Internet. Originally she wrote about natural foods and the alternative lifestyle, but from the vantage point of someone still struggling in the mainstream. That appealed to me because I try to do that. But a couple years ago, she decided to involve herself in an experimental community of people in North Carolina, who want off the grid and out of the rat race. As far as I know, there she has stayed...and while she doesn't write much about the struggles of such attempts, it seems to be going OK.
This article is a bit different, as she reports on a workshop she attended. Since most of the people who read what I send out---or at least skim through the ones with intriguing titles (before hitting delete)---have an interest in what direction the species seems to be headed, I'm hoping Cathy's effort will be helpful and inspiring toward hope! More >
|
|
|
|
 22 May 2007 @ 10:08
Do not attempt to become Buddha.
---Dogen
Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself loses his misery.
---Matthew Arnold
The more deeply we are our true selves, the less self is in us.
---Meister Eckhart
Photo of Nigerian Anglican Gay activist Davis Mac-Iyalla in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, during the Anglican Primates' Meeting February 17, 2007. He was there to confront Peter Akinola, the Anglican Primate of All Nigeria, who has pressed for the world's most sweeping anti-Gay law. (The Rev. Scott Gunn)
The simple answer to the question is he has made his first visit to the United States from Togo, where he is in exile, to tell his story. It is the story of a young man born in the south of Nigeria (an important geographic distinction following civil war there some 40 years ago) who happened to get asked to run a church school and accepted. He did so with some fear because at age 14, he realized his sexual desires were for other males. In Nigeria you could go to jail if you acted on such impulses. His work at the school was so successful that it came to the attention of the Anglican bishop of the area at the time, who invited him into his administration. In 2003 Bishop Ugede died suddenly of tuberculosis. The new administration, appointed by Archbishop Peter Akinola, fired Davis and removed any priests who supported him. Within 2 years, Davis had become the center of a growing movement of gays and lesbians in Nigeria demanding rights for their way of life. Archbishop Akinola responded with support for legislation, currently pending, that will make it a crime for any citizen to associate in any way with someone identified as homosexual. The term of imprisonment will be 5 years.
That story is the simple answer. At the same time, the American branch of the Anglican Church, known as the Episcopal, consecrated a bishop in New Hampshire who is openly gay and has a partner. Within hours, Peter Akinola in Nigeria declared the overwhelming majority of archbishops and primates in the area known as the Global South would not recognize Gene Robinson as a bishop. He said the church now was in a "state of impaired communion" and declared he refused ever to be in the same room with a homosexual person. Conservative Episcopal churches in the United States have moved to support Akinola financially and even explore ways to join his diocese in Nigeria. It is possible the entire Anglican church, numbering millions of members worldwide, will divide over this issue. The Archbishop of Canterbury will make his first visit to the States since all this blew open at the end of the summer...around the time Davis will conclude his tour in California. Can this one man have any impact on the situation? More >
|
|
|
|
 17 May 2007 @ 09:45
That which man acquires by contemplation he should spend in love.
---Meister Eckhardt
All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.
---Kabir
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
---Mark Twain, August 27, 1897
Mark Twain's famous remark remained funny for about a hundred years. Then we began to wonder. With all our technology, why can't we change the weather in some places if we want to? But at the same time, gloomier forecasts were accumulating that in fact humanity, in that same hundred years of industrialization, was changing not only the weather but the very stability of the planet's current climate arrangement. We've had at least 10 years of raging argument about this, and still we have "scientists," mostly in the pay of corporations who can't find a profit motive yet, who tell us it all is too complicated for people to understand and it's better to do nothing. Most people, in the States anyway, seem to believe there's global warming or whatever we end up calling it, but feel it's too big for them to change any behavior about. I mean, what is one guy supposed to do?
On Tuesday, the government's NASA site called Earth Observatory put up the 2005 photo you see here with this comment:
"Perhaps the most visible sign that Earth’s climate is warming is the gradual shrinking of its glaciers. In North America, the most visited glacier is the Athabasca Glacier, one of six glaciers that spill down the Canadian Rockies from the Columbia Icefield in western Canada. Visitors who return to the glacier a few years after their first visit will notice the change wrought by warming temperatures. In the past 125 years, the Athabasca Glacier has lost half of its volume and receded more than 1.5 kilometers (0.93 miles), leaving hills of rock in its place. Its retreat is visible in this photo, where the glacier’s front edge looms several meters behind the tombstone-like marker that indicates the edge of the ice in 1992. The Athabasca Glacier is not alone in its retreat: Since 1960, glaciers around the world have lost an estimated 8,000 cubic kilometers (1,900 cubic miles) of ice. That is approximately enough ice to cover a two-kilometer-wide (1.2 mile-wide) swath of land between New York and Los Angeles with an ice sheet that is one kilometer (0.62 miles) tall.
"Melting glaciers, dwindling sea ice, rising global temperatures, and rising sea levels. Little by little the evidence is adding up to show that Earth is getting hotter, and scientists are almost certain that people are to blame. A number of activities from burning fossil fuels to farming pump heat-trapping gases—greenhouse gases—into the atmosphere. Once in the atmosphere, these gases stay there for thousands of years, absorbing the heat that comes from the Earth and re-radiating it back to the surface, enhancing Earth’s natural greenhouse effect. Between 1906 and 2006, the average surface temperature of the Earth rose 0.6 to 0.9 degrees Celsius (1.08 to 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit), while greenhouse gas concentrations reached their highest levels in at least the past 650,000 years. Most climate scientists believe that there is a connection and warn that if greenhouse gas emissions continue, temperatures are likely to go up 2 to 6 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 10.8 degrees F) by the end of the 21st century.
"While this might seem like a small change, it will probably lead to big changes in the environment. Warming temperatures will likely lead to more frequent heat waves, bigger storms, including more intense tropical cyclones (hurricanes), and more widespread drought. Since water expands as it heats, and melting glaciers and ice caps have dumped more fresh water into the world’s oceans, sea levels have already started to rise. Higher sea levels lead to more erosion and greater storm damage in coastal areas, many of which are densely populated. As much as 10 percent of the world’s population lives in vulnerable coastal regions that have an elevation less than 10 meters (32 feet) above sea level."
[link]
At that point, in a move not at all typical of this site---and I visit it everyday---the reader is referred to another page where begins a lengthy treatise on Global Warming. It is illustrated with many striking photos, maybe most of them taken from satellites circling the Earth. [link] Well, it's a dot gov site, so where's the policy? Must we wait for the dot coms to sell us stuff to solve it? How organized are all the dot orgs? Is the species finished? More >
|
|
<< Newer entries Page: 1 ... 12 13 14 15 16 ... 50 Older entries >> |
|
|
This is my News Log, actually the second manifestation of jazzoLOG. I moved the first edition to another site, where those articles still are archived and available for continued comment if you wish. Please copy and paste to access~~~ http://web.archive.org/web/20060315012857/http://www.upsaid.com/jazzolog/ |
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|
|
|
|
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
| 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
| 11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
| 18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
| 25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
|
PUBLIC NOTICE PLEASE
Comments made herein are available for view and appreciation to members and the general public. JazzoLOG also is open for comment contribution to all who are willing to identify themselves in the usual ways.
I don't know about you, but sometimes I work a long time, cumulatively for hours, on comments I make on these News Logs. I plan to edit this Log regularly and delete things. Before I do that, I want to assure you, I shall notify each commentator of such an amendment so you may have time to copy anything you wish to save and paste somewhere else. Create your own News Log in your profile. |
|
