Through all of the roses
And all of the dead ends
In one back yard after another
You just didn’t care
Quite enough
Dying words
“If you leave me now we’re through.”
He would have hurt you anyway.
The Question of Distributing
Oh receiver of alms
Charity Receiving once toward home
home
justice
didn’t it symbolize home
I though clean
arrived with not a conflicted
abandoned
world
distributing a drop
a guise
the hand immaculately describes a path
something was on the left
Justice observed
alms point the circumstances
we kept down now
each perhaps disappeared
save This person
I was upset about
the question of distributing
I continued walking
An Introduction to Transcendental Meditation
Although I am not a trained TM practitioner, the technique is (from what I understand) similar to what I practice each day.
CEO of the David Lynch Foundation, Bob Roth, recently spoke about TM in an online video seminar for folks who are interested in learning it. The video doesn’t describe the step-by-step specifics of how to meditate, but is an excellent introduction to the philosophy and benefits of the practice.
Bob Roth Nov 10 Intro Talk from Maharishi University on Vimeo.
A Look In The Mirror
I turn away
Mirror, you misunderstand
You cast me in a bad light
Not I, this coarse beast
This ugliness is the fault of my
Children
My spouse
My circumstances
The wounds
The suffering
Are justified
I am not the one who needs to change
Election 2020 Post-Mortem
I don’t have a lot to say yet on the technical or political aspects of this year’s Presidential Election. I think that we will learn a lot once data on Hispanic voters can be parsed.
Like many, I am relieved that we will have someone in power who is more competent, better mannered, less buffoonish, and less overtly racist and sexist.
If someone is expecting a Biden Administration to be anything more than that, though, I am afraid that they may be disappointed.
On National Greatness
Perhaps it is just my own perception, but I’ve noticed that Veterans Day 2020 seems, at least for some, to be more an occasion to celebrate military might than anything else.
To the extent that America is, or ever has been, great, that greatness has derived from the strength of our ideals, not from our nation’s ability to destroy more things or kill more people more efficiently than other nations.
Among ideologies, nationalism seems to me to be among the most childish and ignorant of all. I am sad to witness so much of it.
Preface notwithstanding, here is a post from nine years ago that still expresses the gist of my own personal observance today.
I wish you peace,
The Language of the Birds
Guggenheim Fellow Anna Badkhen writes about zeitgeist in Philadelphia, collective spirit in the Global North, and what the birds foretell.
We may say we like to be surprised, astonished, but we like to be surprised in a particular way that is expected or suits our projected needs. This is why children like to hear the same stories. Their predictability is something to hold onto. This is why I am rereading the classics, which I first read as a very young child: it is like worrying a rosary or a wave-grooved seashell you keep in your pocket, something familiar for the fingers to run over and over. This is why we read projections for how long the pandemic will last, or who will win the election, or whether the global uprising against racism will prevail: we want to know when those of us who survive can go back to normal. We want to project that normal.
Source: The Paris Review – Blog Archive How to Read the Air – The Paris Review
George
I just finished watching Scorsese’s film about George Harrison. It left me even more in awe than I had been.
The Best Government Money Can Buy
Open Secrets reports that Biden is near to raising $1 Billion in the most expensive election in history.
The 2020 election is more than twice as expensive as the runner up, the 2016 election. In fact, this year’s election will see more spending than the previous two presidential election cycles combined. The massive numbers are headlined by unprecedented spending in the presidential contest, which is expected to see $6.6 billion in total spending alone. That’s up from around $2.4 billion in the 2016 race. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden will be the first candidate in history to raise $1 billion from donors. His campaign brought in a record-breaking $938 million through Oct. 14, riding Democrats’ enthusiasm to defeat Trump. President Donald Trump raised $596 million, which would be a strong fundraising effort if not for Biden’s immense haul.
Source: 2020 election to cost $14 billion, blowing away spending records • OpenSecrets
Mystery Democrat Theater 2020
Truth bomb from Leonard C. Goodman at The Chicago Reader. TLDR: Barrett is exactly the kind of judge corporate donors love.
The Democrats claimed to be united in their opposition to Barrett’s confirmation. Yet their resistance to having a justice rammed through at the 11th hour of a lame duck presidency feels like the resistance that the Washington Generals used to show against the Harlem Globetrotters. That is, pure theater in which the outcome is never in doubt. What this tells us is that the corporate donors who control the Democratic Party are happy with a Justice Barrett.
Source: The real reason Democrats didn’t stop the Barrett confirmation | Opinion | Chicago Reader