Unedited, unrefined, rough draft ore

 

 

Poetry

Reliobs

Time the illusion, the deceiver,

or more accurately said, 

our perception of time.

Without contemplative prayer,

or prayer,

or meditation,

or something, whatever you want to call it,

something momentarily allowing respite from world

and worldly thoughts

and thoughts dictated by the world,

you have no hope of escaping 

fear,

loneliness,

hopelessness,

despair,

bitterness,

cynicism,

all the deceptions of temporal existence

that you can only hold at bay for so long.

 

It is all destined to end,

all the world,

all their lives,

all your corporeal life.

 

You know that,

though you dare not dwell on it.

You know that,

and that inescapable certainty

is ultimately the only certainty in your worldly life.

 

Little wonder madness grips humanity.

 

Time the illusion, the deceiver,

or more accurately said, 

our perception of time.

Without contemplative prayer,

or prayer,

or meditation,

or something, whatever you want to call it,

something momentarily allowing respite from world

and worldly thoughts

and thoughts dictated by the world,

you have no hope.

 

Claim a precious moment 

and accept long denied awareness

of yourself, your consciousness,

a greater Consciousness,

putting the insoluble momentary flicker of temporal existence into perspective,

ineffable certainty returning,

soul inviolate,

no longer alone.

 

Observation

Migration.  Look at the success of migrants to the United States.  Look how relatively quickly they moved on from the squalid conditions of the ghettos they initially inhabited.  

But of course!  Who could manage to make it to these shores?  Only the most intrepid, creative, resourceful, and determined.  Little wonder they became drivers of creativity and generators of wealth.  

The traits that overcame so much to cross oceans would not disappear after that first generation.  The trenchant values and priorities and ethics that against all odds got them here would serve well their children and grandchildren.

Fools will ascribe this success to some contrived racial predilection.  To the contrary, it was a temporal confluence of new transportation technologies, geographic convenience, and political upheaval that functioned as filtering process to bring the most adaptable and self-motivated from old shores to apply their traits in a new world of seemingly unlimited resources.  

 

Reliunif.lif

Ruler of this world.  Physics of consciousness.  The physical structure of this world leading to isolated elements of consciousness, with extremely limited capacity for shared experience of Unity.

I suspect Yeshu referred to the structure of this world when speaking of the ruler of this world.  

This is the world of souls who have chosen self over Unity.  All structure of this world supports that form of spiritually isolated existence.  

We need phrases like "ruler of this world" to explain this word's condition in terms we can understand, just as all societies have ascribed events to gods with human personalities.  Such titles nicely serve to deflect from ourselves responsibility for the sorry state of the world.  They also nicely serve as an escape clause to acquit the supposedly loving Creator for liability for the unfathomable horrors of this place.  

"Ruler of this world" was and is necessary for the Christian belief system to be palatable to this spiritual generation, even if we assiduously ignore the logical conundrums associated with it.  

But there is something to the appellation, probably far more than we are comfortable considering.  

Consider the possibility that instead of consciousness evolving out of the physics of a universe, universes instead coalesce around the values of a consciousness, an instantiation of that consciousness, creating a home for that consciousness.  This universe is the product of and serves to give existence to the aggregate human consciousness.  Laws of physics in any universe reflect and serve a consciousness, the two being not separate or cause and effect, but mutually interdependent.   We, our values and choice of way of being, perhaps made in another existence, perhaps made in the Garden, are "the ruler of this world".  

Events here do not unfold per the will of Yeshu's Father as they do in Heaven.  They unfold according to our self-focused nature, the collective consciousness of the ruler of this world.  

Yeshu was here to give us the Choice to escape, to escape to Heaven, to choose a different way of being, to transcend to that Kindom, that Universe, where all unfolds according to a loving collective consciousness, where all have chosen the mind, the way of being, the Love, of Christos.  

How can God's will not be done in this world God created?  The primary Creation was the freedom of the children of God, freedom even to choose this world of corporeal self.  But the loving Source never rescinds the original freedom, so the Choice of turning back, of repentance, is always provided, even here, even to us prodigals..  In that overarching sense, if not in the details of war and earthquakes, God's will is done even here.

For those who have chosen Love and Unity, or in different words, chosen to follow Christos, this world is a painful test of faith.  Heaven awaits, but for now the task is to facilitate God's will being done in some small degree even here.  

The ruler of this world will not be usurped until the foundational structure of this universe ruptures.  But all has been prepared for our individual redemptions.  We need not, and must not, wait for our liberation.  This universe reflecting an aggregate human consciousness choosing isolation into the self, and the associated horrors that entails, is a place to grow out of, to learn from, to do better than.  The loving Sustainer that let us choose to be this way, and gave us an evolving universe to house our ensuing lonely consciousness, also gives us every opportunity to come Home.

Reliunif.lif

 

This world.

Make no pretense of fitting in here.  

Don't waste time on that struggle.

You learned enough to see the hopelessness.  

You learned enough to profoundly know the One Hope.

You desperately want to share that One Hope,

for you have learned that is the reason and Purpose,

the ultimate objective of this world.

Give people a chance to turn and come Home.

There is much to do.  There is much from which to flee.

You remain trapped, but slavery has often served the Purpose.

Interstitially it works through the cracks of this world,

often invisible,

seldom obvious,

the ruler of this world helpless to stop it.

The Love works by different foundational laws than this world,

serving the higher Source.

Redemption has never made sense per the edicts of this world.

Yet the loving Source and Sustainer quietly endures,

seemingly almost passive,

the elected ruler of this world smiling in momentary triumph,

all the while knowing the inexorable and well hidden Purpose is being served.

 

 

Observation

At the behest of wannabe leaders (excess elite) humanity has consistently responded with irrational, unreasoned violence when leaders of societal systems have failed to deliver on promises.  When the rains quit and crops failed, revolution and civil war ensued, from Cahokia to Rome to Chaco. Of course the violence only made things worse, but it did accomplish the goals of the instigators, giving them opportunity to momentarily don the shiny baubles of prestige and power.  

Today it is media and technology and consumer corporations promising us happiness.  Sufficient “likes” and digital sex and gaudy entertainment and home renovations and scores by our team will finally satiate our unspoken hunger.  The girl on the screen really loves us.  The adulation from the stands is for us since we are wearing the same colored clothing as the athlete that just scored.  

But time expires on our pay per minute voyeurism.  The fourth quarter whistle blows…..and we are as lonely as ever….and incrementally more bitter. 

The ancient societal cycle renews, would-be despots smelling the opportunity provided by dissatisfied tribes and hungry populace, the modern hungers for relationship and meaning every bit as potent as the ancient hungers for meat and grains.  

Always unreasoning, necessarily irrational, the inciters of mobs, the cousin of the chieftain then, a third tier media personality now, play the maestro on our symphony of fears and willful ignorance.  The violence has begun.

 

Reliunif.lif

 

“Knowledge of good and evil”.

Maybe the good and evil were there all along.  It was the personal knowledge of it that we laid claim to in making our first Choice.

Maybe all those worlds that others had chosen were in place, waiting for us to enter.  Maybe the broad spectrum of Creation lay ready for our Choice.

One choosing power, personal power, knowledge with which to compete with the Creator.

The other choosing to follow, choosing perhaps out of Love and Unity, not wanting to be left behind.

We each have our reason for our Choice.  We each learn of the good and evil, not by book or lesson, but by immersion and experience, nothing academic about it, but personal and existential.

We each promptly don our leaves and skins, immediately realizing how threatened we are in the presence of others who made the same Choice, every one of us going into hiding, wishing our souls could be naked, but quickly learning how dangerous that is in a world where all have chosen the knowledge of good and evil.  

We were not responsible until learning of it.  But once having chosen to learn, our inescapable Choice continues.  What will we do about it?  Such is the price of chosen godhood.  

 

Observation

Poetry

The AI is coming!  The AI is coming!

What will we do about it?

A few of us will reap massive profits.

If things go as usual, most won’t reap massive profits.

Such inevitability, that something new will be used for profit and for weapons.

The greatest threat from AI is our training it on our conversations.  We are creating it in our image, our dangerous, cruel, destructive image,

and we are invoking it for profit.

We kniw, without question, many will suffer.

This greatest of recent creations,

this most powerful of tools,

will at our behest induce suffering.

We know that as surely as we know the sun will rise.

We most fear AI because it is most like us,

reflecting us,

projecting us,

amplifying us.  

It terrifies us.

Better to face gods or aliens,

plague or eruptions,

than to face something we have created in our own image.

Ourselves, but more powerful?!

 

Tremble indeed, you paltry humans.

You wanted godlike powers, and now you know those powers will turn on you.

Tremble, fear, panic,

and know that someone will use even that for profit.

Jobs may be eliminated?

Societies may be eliminated.

Not for the faint of heart

this unknowable future.

There is no turning back.

The genie is released.  

The smell of profit is in the air.

Machines amplifying our worst nature.

What could possibly go wrong?

Enjoy talking with your devices,

until the lights go off.

Enjoy your digitized sex

nicely recorded for all posterity.

Enjoy your fictional teams’ scores,

until that last bet doesn’t pay off

and you join the swelling ranks of the homeless.

“Unimaginable” we will cry,

as the mob seeks someone to blame.

Already it is starting,

no,

in fact

it started long ago.

The screens have been telling us what to believe, buy, and bow to for almost a century now.

They know us far better than vice versa.

AI is simply the big reveal, 

our humbling admission that we are not in control.

Tremble indeed,

bow before our own image,

let the profits flow,

as they carry us to a great unknown.

 

What could possibly go wrong?

 

 

Poetry

No, of course I don’t know.  

Of course no one knows,

and flee from any who say they do know.

There are few specifics in what passes for spiritual wisdom.

But there is light, 

a silver-white Light

if we must give it a description.

Or perhaps it has different chromatic characteristics for each who experience it.

Clumsy and ineffective our descriptions

cobbled in the midst of our waxing blindness.

But we know something,

something ineffable in our muted souls.

We know something,

something persistently escaping the clutches of this world’s deceiver 

who would pluck it from our trembling grasp.

Don’t deny the wonder of what you know.

You have learned something along the way.

And you have unlearned even more along the way.

And that has left you quite surprisingly alone.

That was never the plan, was it?

But plans have proven to be deceptive things,

deceptive constructs hiding what was inexorably unfolding in spite of our plans.

Take heart.

Every failure was necessary.

Every loss brought you closer to wisdom.

Don’t give up, neither try too hard.

Absorb life’s lessons like absorbing body-blows,

leaving you only with a sharpened awareness of what is deeply beautiful.

 

See how silly the words are?

Ineffable indeed, the life experience.

Don’t kid yourself that anyone will understand,

anymore than you can understand them.

Resort to small talk and social guidelines,

the walls that keep our souls from touching.

But still, we tap on those walls,

in hopes of letting someone know we are here.

 

 

Poetry

Reliunif.lif

Take heart?

Dare I tell anyone to take heart?

What shallow and callous advice that seems in this world.

Faith in the next life is easy.

Faith in this present life not so much.

Yet look at the spiritual nutrition that rises in the furrow plowed by world’s violence.

We notice the horror.

But unnoticed someone responds with wisdom.

Each injustice inflicted evokes a ripple of righteousness.

There remains hope as long as

each horror is at least recognized and decried as horror.

Grief and shock and sorrow are the great hopes.  

For though cruel injustice triumphs yet again,

 there abide souls that still can summon 

grief and shock and sorrow.

This world, the dark hearts of the people of this world,

will inflict their evil.

As long as someone recognizes it as evil,

as long as someone resists,

the Purpose is fulfilled,

spiritual seeds grow,

the few,

the scattered,

awaiting the Harvest

 

People interactions.   The last great remaining mystery.

 

A bee visits, summarizing the entire subject.

The bee is cute.  The breeze from its wings is pleasant against the skin of the back of my hand.  I’ve no idea why it’s visiting me and why it is so interested in my hand and forearm.

After some buzzing circles it lands on me.  I’ve no idea why.  Its colleagues are busy on the hummingbird feeder where for several days I’ve had close interactions with them as they cover it en masse and I remove it to refill it.  

The visitor bee crawls between my fingers.  The sensation is pleasant.  But I know the bee’s potential to sting.  I harbor a slight worry that a twitch on my part, or the bee getting in a tight spot between fingers, or some smell or taste, might trigger a completely unnecessary stinging reaction, painful for me and fatal for the bee.

In the meantime I hold my hand up, watch the lovely creature, enjoy the physical sensations, wonder at the motivation for this visit, and hope to not get stung.  As I said earlier, the experience summarizes the entire subject of human interactions.

I never quite know what prompts any interest in me.  I savor interaction and contact.  I would hope to be of interest and benefit for the other party.  I know that at any moment, for no discernable reason, I may get the bejeebers painfully stung out of me.

The little bee could not have chosen a more propitious time to visit.

The lovely bee finally flies off, as do all the human connections.  Though I enjoyed the visit and the sensations I am relieved at the departure, as with most human interactions.  

I type this in light of a recent “Like” for a blog posting.  The “Liker”’s site described their challenge to fit in, expressed hope for publishing material that would facilitate connection among people, invited others to join her.

I appreciated her “Like”.  Her initial self-description sounded like a kindred spirit.  Her objectives sounded akin to mine.  Will I contact her?  Heavens no!  I have been stung too often.  Further  inspection of her blog reveals a far too great a propensity to invoke the word “I”.  And even if it didn’t, I’ve learned I cannot judge character and potential for positive interaction when I have known someone in person for months, much less from a few appealing paragraphs typed in anonymity.  

From a larger perspective, we can summarize the human condition as follows.

All that matters, all of meaning, all worth pursuing, all we want, all we desire, all this arises from the hope for and potential for interpersonal human interaction.  We want to love and be loved.  We want acceptance.  We want the cheers of the crowd.  We want romantic relationship.  We want adulation and adoration.  We want acceptance, acceptance, acceptance.

To illustrate this look at the Olympic athlete.  Would any of them pursue their sport and strive for excellence in a vacuum of no one knowing of their accomplishments?  If no one had ever invented gymnastics, would these finally tuned athletes have on their own decided, knowing that no one would ever watch or see or listen, to dedicate their lives to developing and perfecting complex floor exercises or vaults or parallel bar routines?  Of course not.  

In the utter absence of predecessors, coaches, teammates, fans, viewers, judges, or at least friends and family, none of these athletes would have sacrificed almost everything to attain this level of skill if done alone in an isolated vacuum.  The sense of personal accomplishment is sincere and authentic.  That arises from within, not from others.  But the definition of the sport, the rules of the sport, and the extremes of accomplishment in the sport are impossible without others providing structure, precedent, encouragement, motivation, and reward.

So here we are, craving acceptance, contact, embrace, and success.  Here we are, relationships shallow, marriages shattered, friendships estranged.

Humans are not ready for what we want.  We are not ready for what we crave.

If, other than technological progress, we are to identify any human progress, as individuals, civilizations, and society, it has to be progress toward that which we most crave, our capacity for interpersonal Unity.  

Would we all like to feel comfortable and confident opening our souls to everyone, anticipating acceptance and understanding and support?  Of course.  Will we open our souls to everyone?  Not for long, before betrayal, abuse, rejection, misunderstanding, and downright cruelty convince us of our folly.

For millennia humans struggled for survival at the most basic level of food, shelter, and security.  God help them, for tens of millions that is still the case today.

But for some of us, technology has, for the moment at least, held at bay the threats of starvation, cold, and carnivore.  Consequently we can with abandon ignore working to grow our crops, because we can go to a grocery store.  We can without trepidation enter the mountains or canyon because in our car it will take ten minutes to traverse them.  We can go on vacations, immerse in entertainment, and profligately squander resources (for now), all impossible for most people two centuries ago.

For millennia our greatest desires were food, security, and comfort.  Technological progress to no small degree satisfied those needs.

Will progress, progress of the human soul, spiritual progress, ever allow us to with abandon pursue our great remaining hunger?  Will we, humanity, ever attain levels of tolerance, forgiveness, patience, and compassion to allow us to bare our souls knowing we will be welcomed - not rejected, express our feelings knowing we will be accepted - not misunderstood, reach out and seek touch knowing the response will be embrace - not a fist.

Any progress in this direction is incremental, halting, almost indiscernible.  For gosh sakes, don’t reveal your soul to that stranger on the internet yet! But a little tolerance here, a little forgiveness there, just generally cutting a little slack and getting a little less irritated…..maybe the effort will pay off…..no, restate that…...the effort will definitely pay off…..for some human if not yet for humanity…..and eventually, with enough examples, enough predecessors, enough encouragement, enough coaches, enough institutional support, maybe we will find the acceptance and belonging we crave.  Imagine a day when people will with abandon ignore trying to make an impression, can without trepidation enter the social milieu knowing compassionate acceptance awaits, can fully relax with anyone, immerse in the company of strangers, and profligately express to all the longings of our hearts knowing those longings will be fulfilled by mutual and universal Love. 

It is a dream, a silly and unrealistic dream.  But you don’t want to be the person keeping the dream from coming true.  

 

Reliobs

 A seemingly ridiculous date.  It can't possibly be.  Just as the smoke filling the sky from a burning nation cannot possibly be.

A buck lies on the hillside, major antlers rocking in rhythm to his bathing motion.

Invoking the Spirit of Peace, for this moment, this moment of sanctuary.

There will be ample other moments for immersion in the tension of the world.

The tension arises from the hopelessness, from the lack of a right answer.

There is no right answer that will avoid suffering and costs.

In the choices we are forced to face the grim nature of life.

(Another buck comes down, lies in the tall grass fifteen meters from me and looks at me.  Now he stands, still looking at me.  Now his colleague stands.  Such blessings!  Just ridiculous!  Big boy comes closer.  A third!  Biggest antlers yet!  What a show!  Earlier a little Bambi was trotting up the hill.  That's a buffed out boy at the oak grove.  My chair squeeks and everyone raises their head to look.  

It's important to realize, and more important to accept, there is no right answer.  Try radiation to prolong life?....let the Alzheimer's progress.  Apply contemplative discipline…..never accomplish what only immersion in the world can accomplish.

Make the choice, but all will die anyway.  Prolong life, prolong suffering.  The big decisions, the hard and agonizing decisions, reveal that none of it matters.  Oh it matters in terms of drastically differing paths and experiences, but not in terms of eliminating suffering.

The stress of big decisions arises in having to face the fact negative outcomes ultimately lie in both directions.  The stress comes from facing the nature of the world.

Relax.  Let go and let God, because ultimately that's how it's going to turn out anyway.  

Yes, there are free choices to make, but they are about the personal values we will invoke in our decisions.  

Contemplative discipline?  Intuitive immersion?  Serve individuals?  Work on publishing?  There is no right answer.  Miracles will be needed down any path.  Miracles will happen down any path.  Yes, God is in control.  Yes, there are manifold options.  The pressure is off.  The only right Choice is Love and faith.  You can trust.  See the options for what they are, not any be all and end all for which you are responsible.  Focus instead on the heart that will make the choices.  

Reliobs

Absolutely I now believe only disaster will prompt anyone to read what I publish.  Anyone busy, anyone successful, anyone with a fulfilling career, affectionate spouse, active kids, anyone would correctly prioritize these over reading some spiritual drivel.

Spiritual and religious lessons are for those with time on their hands.  That’s OK.  Children and school and jobs and family and health should and must take priority.  It is when we lose some or all of those that we are left asking, left searching for answers.

A divorce, a layoff, a surgery, those are the things that provide the luxury of time for spiritual contemplation.  One could almost pray that no one would ever become desperate enough to have to face the need for spiritual contemplation.  

There is a fine line between being too preoccupied with survival  and being too busy with success.  The displaced family in a warzone will find philosophy irrelevant as the shells fall.  The hungry mother with hungrier child has more to worry about than doxology.  The person getting the promotions and associated increasing responsibility has their success to celebrate and maintain.  The person cuddled with their loving partner every evening has their prayers answered.  

It is somewhere between desperation and delight, somewhere in the thin gap between despair and duty, that we have time, we have motivation, we have need to consider the spiritual.

In order to be motivated to read something spiritually new and challenging, it is perfectly natural that people will have to have lost a lot, will have to be desperate, will have to have time on their hands.  

I speak specifically of challenging spiritual material, new spiritual material.  People will pursue the rote religions they were raised with, On Friday or Saturday or Sunday morning.  But that is often ritual out of habit, devoid of critical thinking.  

 

Thoughts on beliefs.

Do times of stress promote fundamentalisms, not progress?  

Exposed to progressive beliefs, Muslim youth become radicalized, as opposed to giving up on their religion.  

The trials of the American frontier promoted Mormonism and the Great "Awakening".

Renaissance occurred among well fed and secure elites.  The tolerance innate in Christianity allowed the Renaissance.  

The philosophy of liberal democracy of the 1770's United States occurred among rich and educated landowners, not the stressed and hungry.  

Might the Reformation be seen as simplified fundamentalist movement in response to the black plague?

The lurch toward fundamentalism in the 1980's U.S. was in response to the destabilizing liberalism of the 1960"s.

In that light, was the adoption of Christianity after the fall of The Temple a liberal response encouraged by the destruction of the symbol of Jewish religion?....or was that conversion a conversion to another fundamentalist religion filling the void left by the destruction?  

Was the rise of Christianity in the fourth century a liberal triumph of compassion, or was it a fundamentalist response to the loss of stability and security in the Empire, an empire that in its previous tolerance of all religions could be seen as more liberal than the new state sponsored Christianity?

This question of how humanity's beliefs respond to security versus stress is critical in predicting how beliefs will evolve in the pending collapse of civilization.  Will the crumbling of society open up a potential for progressive and compassionate development of belief?  Or will it strike a violent blow for intolerant  fundamentalist predilections?

Did Yeshu's(Jesus') liberal message of Love and forgiveness initially spread because of a liberal Roman tolerance of cults and the Pax Romana that kept people fed, secure, and entertained?  Then did a subsequent simple-minded emphasis on intellectual belief as determinant of  eternal paradise versus damnation provide a fundamentalist hook that allowed an institutional religion to flourish in times of stress?

Religion

The obvious problem in trying to follow God's will for our lives is God's recalcitrance about unambiguously communicating that will.  Oh, we will promptly think we know what it is.  We will plan our lives accordingly.  Then when life unceremoniously tosses our holy plans into the dumpster we will stubbornly hold onto those plans because after all they are not our plans but God's plans.  

Our will and God's will quickly become convoluted because God is so danged secretive about whatever plan there is.  Our "willing" morphs into "willful" without our noticing.  

So for the umpteenth time it's back to the drawing board to resketch the priorities God seems to have given us, maybe, unless it's just our wishful thinking.

One is left to keep guessing, and adapt, and incorporate, and compromise.  Somewhere under all the practical considerations still resides that desire to do God's will, were it only clearly expressed.  Somewhere in the passing years, advancing age, and compounding shocks we of course may not "do" God's will, but we may live it.  Out of our control, unforeseen by our eyes, unanticipated by our plans, we somehow live God's will.  In that we can find some solace, some salve for our tattered faith.  

Commit your life to God's path, and promptly get abjectly lost, gloriously lost, in the dense fog of unfolding healing and redemption.

 

Observation

Human conflict is utterly inevitable.  We each live in our world of imagined values.  Individual imaginations are creative enough to always result in some conflicting opinion and perspective.  And we are too selfish to compromise and incorporate the other person's opinion.

So the Bolsheviks create a civil war amongst themselves, the Christians schism, Muslims wage war among competing caliphates, political parties splinter, Masons concoct different orders, spouses divorce, empires divide, and congregations split.  

In this newly minted age of digitally spawned social media our natural proclivity for conflict over arbitrary differences of belief and opinion has accelerated overnight from the equivalent of tossing sticks and stones to launching thermonuclear weapons.  This is an unforeseen and existential shock to civilization and society.  

Such shocks used to transpire over centuries or at least decades.  The eastern and western empires would eventually grow large enough that their borders would begin to irritate each other.  More localized conflicts might arise over only months as Trotsky and Stalin coalesced their followers, Shia and Sunni convinced adherents their esoteric analysis of inheritance was worth dying for, and Calvinists and Popes posted enough edicts that their version of God was worth killing for.  

But never have arbitrary differences of opinion over contrived topics had the power to spread worldwide in milliseconds.  Never have individuals been so utterly isolated and malleable  as their fears and ignorance are deftly manipulated by rants and screeds through their screens.  

Civilization faces the unprecedented stressor of three billion of its kind fleeing as refugees from coastal and arid locales rendered uninhabitable in the coming decades.  But this hammer-blow will strike a human society already fractured down to the local level by digital amplification of our innate tendency to elevate disagreements over imagined beliefs, elevate them to life and death causes.  

The contrived political and religious conflict that has always been so is now more so. 

This century will see desperately growing physical hunger.  Will it suffice to ameliorate our perennial hunger to prove ourselves right?

Reliunif.lif

Peace.  Let peace enter even here.  

It is all around of course.

And you laugh at that?

Of course.  Understandable.

But the peace is there, 

a bit beyond reach of course, but there.

Something to do with time and not quite being complete,

that's why peace seems so far away.

But bit by bit it will be revealed,

preposterous as that must seem now.

Sense what you can of it.

Keep looking for it.

And when least expected,

in glorious surprise,

all will become peace.

That is hardly what you were looking for.  But relax for a change.  This is just between us.  It's about time to have this conversation.

You see the beauty.  You see the shattering.  You arise in the peace.  Now the trick is to carry it with you.

It abounds in your heart.  You know it well.  You know it so well the shattering of this world is agonizing in its contrast.

Peace, peace,

it's time to carry it with you.

You want it to clarify your view, but your view is already clear.  The fog of the chaos is real.  There is no predicting the specific outcomes.  There is only predicting your outcome.  That is secure and certain.  All will unfold to ensure that.  And that unfolding, those ample degrees of freedom, therein lies the peace.

That's why the peace can reside in the midst of the chaos.  Your path, everyone's paths, can each unfold according to chosen destiny, all that matters for the soul's growth unfolding unimpeded in spite of the seeming chaos.  That is now clear.  See how clearly you see!  There is so much less to worry about!  Feel that peace?  Even in the midst of the chaos of world's illusion?

Wondrous, isn't it?  Wondrous and beautiful and yes, even peaceful.  Each tormented individual soul on its perfect path of opportunity for redemption.  All of the world will indeed be cast into the fire, thank God, all the necessary illusion and deception burned away, for it was all necessary to make room for all those free individual paths.  So of course it looks like chaos.  Of course it is unpredictable, a choking fog.  But each path is sacrosanct and inviolate.  

Peace, peace for a moment, a glimpse, glorious and reassuring.  Time makes the moment seem like utter chaos, that blindness limiting vision to "now".  But viewed from out of time, all the tangled threads of individual lives are neatly arrayed on their own loom, growing, all eternal necessities provided for.

So peace, surprising and calmly confident peace, the degrees of freedom enabling the potential for each individual redemption.  Wondrous and awe inspiring, the temporal miracles quite within the realm of foreseen possibility when seen from outside worldly time.  For each soul has its own "time", which is to say a potential for change, choice, and growth.  

Surprising.  Welcomed.  Deep and internal and enduring.  Peace, from this gift of new perspective.  

Conversation

A little insight this morning.  Insight into the tragic sheep-like nature of this generation.  Readily and willingly led, and ample numbers of cruel shepherds willing to lead them.

How to help, how to help.  How to wrest their attention from the deceivers.

Only miracles can let any Light into this world.

So readily people follow the false prophets, those peddling violence and hatred.  Such powerful and convenient tools those false prophets wield today.  So easily the worst of human nature is amplified.  

Who wants to see Light?  What rare and precious soul seeks wisdom?

Who is willing to expose their soul to the Source of Light, who willing to turn from the stampeding herd running to its destruction?

The false prophets spread their fear and hatred.  They have never had such powerful tools to deceive so many.

How to find the one of pure heart with strength to reject the hatred?

There is no worldly path to that pure heart.  There is no calculating or strategizing that search.  All this world is arrayed against such worldly methods.

There is only the path of miracle and faith.  Broadcast widely, with no practical hope.  The world will resist, as it always has.

And what of speaking of it?  Should opportunity appear.  

Conclusion?  Never.  Don't force it.  See clearly.  Recognize the hopelessness.  Feel the pull of your nature.  It has always worked out and always will.  Great disruption, massive earthquakes, open doors.  It has always been so.  

You are not asked to do what you cannot do.  Fulfill your God given nature.  

Poetry

So precious, so precious.

Warm, soft, fuzzy, miraculous gift of God, watching the screen in the dark as I type.

Intense, this awareness of touch.

Peace, calm peace,

before another day in the world.

A cord connecting that moment past,

A song connecting to that moment past,

All focused, all coalescing, in this moment.

Always surprising, the revelations of presence.

Never bidden, pure gift, a precursor to timelessness

when all will be gift, pure gift,

finally, finally aware that

nothing is of our own.

 

Rippling breath,

abiding touch,

touch of the angels,

when all will be touch,

enduring touch,

connecting the then 

to a timeless now,

connection 

across a no longer extant space,

separation no longer possible.

 

The briefest of eternal previews

enters even here,

even in this world,

in defiance of the illusion of time,

a deep and penetrating glimpse,

a gift, unbidden, unsought,

for you cannot seek 

what you cannot imagine.

Touch - warm, soft, all encompassing,

teaching its gentle lesson

of what will be and is,

when touch will no longer 

be localized and momentary,

but enduring, unending,

never again to seemingly end,

but always building, ever growing,

life finally come even to us.

 

There is no sharing of this experience,

no words can convey 

the meaning of touch

that fills and fulfills.

"Touch" seems 

so physical, so carnal, so temporal.

How can it possibly convey anything eternal?

Yet in that moment of warmth and softness,

in a tiny area of contact,

all meaning and Purpose abide,

for a moment,

the eternal moment.

 

Poetry

Reliobs

Oh blessed moment.  But knowledge of the horrors of the world is inescapable.  How can God bear it?  Imagine multiple universes full of such horrors and evil.  How could God bear to not put a summary end to it all, to take over, "thy will be done as it is in Heaven"?!

Oh the beauty in the midst of horror.  Presumably there is no other way to give birth to loving freewill children of God than for God to suffer for a time, for the illusion of time.

Sweep time away and perhaps its momentary disturbance in an eternity of God's will is rendered inconsequential.  At least so we will rationalize, for now.

Hope and despair embrace, while we pray for the former to win out and convert despair to the Light.  But the despair was always necessary for Hope to have a dance partner.  We long for that pair to rest, the dance over, the job done, all Creation having fulfilled its painful role, fear never to return, finally, finally, God's will, the loving will of the God we must for now doubt, revealed triumphant.  

Poetry?

Reliobs

Life is like being set down in the dark and being told to run, run for your life, though you know out in that darkness are cliffs and monsters and land-mines.

So you run.  What else can you do?  Depending on where and how you are raised you may be told that faith is your light, and if you don't see that light it's all your own fault.

So you run into things and break them.  You run into people and break them, or they break you.  If your faith is strong enough, at times you imagine you see some light, and you run toward it, until tripping and falling, again.

"Fear not" the admonition that rings hollow as it echoes among the unseen canyons and cliffs.  

Yet at least you can run.  At least there is something out there, even if hidden in the darkness.

All is not lost, even if you are.

Your faith is woefully inadequate to see, but it's enough to run a little further.

Your faith suffices to no longer have to imagine seeing things you want to see.  

Your faith differs from all those who claim to have great faith, those claiming they see the light.  For they are not running.  They sit in the same place.  They keep their eyes tightly closed that they must not see the surrounding darkness.  

Better to see the darkness, confess the darkness, curse the darkness, than to let imagination and wishful thinking deceive you into imagining light that is not there.

There was Light in this world, yes, even in this world.  There will be Light, in some world, maybe even this world.  In between, faith means not pretending to see light that still waits.  In between, faith means courageously moving through the darkness, reaching out in the darkness, perhaps even touching in the darkness, to share our warmth while waiting for the Light.  

 

 

Reliobs

How, how, might the Spirit and Purpose let the path be known?  The specifics of conversations, specific words, that is always lacking.  Those old prophet boys, how upon receiving specific instructions, did they not know they were just nuts, just imagining things, just engaging in wishful thinking?....like all the other utterly convinced and confident prophets prophesying something totally different, and of course, totally wrong.

It better be a heck of a sign to get a modern prophet to run with it.  

About the only criteria for evaluating any perceived holy instruction is the rightness of it, the goodness of it.  Here's the real test:  if you follow the angelic instructions, will something good come of it even if you are completely wrong about its holy inviolable origins?  If the prophecy passes that test, it might be worth something.  Which is why most holy instructions are not too specific.  Love is not big on the details.  "Is it loving?"  That's the simple test of any vision.  

Reliobs

In recent decades as society has careened through ever faster and more radical changes, people have fled toward fundamentalism, demanding that there be one thing in their lives that does not change because they won't allow it to change, the one thing in their life in their absolute control to prevent from changing, i.e. their beliefs.  Combine that with the introduction of powerful entertainment technology into church services.  Combine those with, ironically, a severing of bonds with and trust of traditional centralized church authority.  Combine that with a thermonuclear explosion of media technology best suited to manipulating malleable, unaware, simple minds.  Put all those factors in an economic and political system structured so as to the greatest degree possible empower psycho-marketing as the primary influencer of belief and action.  Season this wicked cauldron with innate human nature of greed and lust for power.

Of course fundamentalist mega-churches sprung up like poisonous mushrooms, all  bright and enticing!  Of course a Rupert Murdoch would seize the opportunity for profit in peddling fear, hatred, and inevitable violence.  Of course a Trump would arise out of the fetid moral wastelands of the obscenely rich.  

Too rapid change and progress do not open doors to enlightenment and renaissance.  They drive the frightened little minds back to the familiar comforts of  witch-doctors and evangelists.  It is instead the traumatic collapse of convenient faith, the sacking of temples and the spread of plagues, that finally reveal the impotence of those wearing the robes and the hollowness of the idols.  Then the scales are removed from the eyes of a few, then a few precious scattered seeds can sprout, and renaissance and enlightenment and revival can momentarily again flourish.

Reliobs

We demand specifics of out gods.  When we don't get specifics we make them up.  The charlatan best at making them up gets the most followers.  If really adept at peddling specifics, then a cult or congregation or denomination may momentarily coalesce.

Such is the world and the nature of humanity as created by the God that underlies all our graven and imagined images of gods.  A most curious state of affairs it is, this demanding of specific answers and our concomitant susceptibility to the ensuing contrived answers.  It could even pose the risk of convincing one that all the answers are wrong, so wrong - so contrived out of overactive imagination - that their shared premise of some Source - some underlying Foundation - is also wrong.  

But for most people such risk is rendered inconsequential by our innate certitude that our specific beliefs are of course true and even holy.  So the latest shaman-come-lately claims their share of the sheep, and more than their share of the tithes, and under the nom-de-jour religion continues.

Pray on, sacrifice on, worship on - the masses seek and usually find their reassurance in the specifics.  When to pray, how to pray, what to pray, to what to pray, we convince ourselves institutionalized specifics suffice to satisfy our craving. All the while, somewhere above the temple, somewhere behind the altar, somewhere between lines of scripture, somewhere deep within our heart, something unsettlingly incomprehensible calls and waits.  

31. Januar. 2022

Living room.  06:08.  Bodes in lap.  

Poetry

Blessed.  Blessed Deep Communion.

What fragments will survive, what remnant of touch.

Blessed, blessed,

immersion in Source and holiness,

those first safe moments of the day.

None can share, 

not yet,

blessed, blessed ritual,

not hollow ritual of things and mumbled words and smoke that promptly disappears,

but ritual of soul for the moment embraced.

The world, the world, 

terrible and terrifying,

potential unrealized.

But in the still of pre-dawn

the madness abates,

and blessed, blessed Communion

is enabled.

A touch,

reminding touch,

safe touch,

and the soul remembers

what was and

what will be.

Time finally slows.

The torrent of needs and hungers and demands is set aside.

Finally, finally,

miracle returns,

or better said,

eyes are opened to perceive the miracles always present.

None will wonder at such words.

They will prompt only momentary curiosity.

But surely there is more.

Surely those hints are of meaning.

Celebrate them,

though the soul longs to celebrate so much more.

While waiting for sunrise even a flickering candle is comfort in the cold and dark.

Yes, it is cold and dark.

Yes, those are beautiful candles, those imperfect children struggling to immerge from the spiritual womb of this carnal existence.  

Do not look to them for sunrise.  But in the midst of the isolation in the cold dark, do not miss the beauty of their tiny candle flames, though they cast even darker shadows.

Grim the moment, but bright the promise.

The sun will rise,

all will rise.

Do not pretend it is not dark and cold.

But do not miss the beauty of the candles,

do not miss the essential, though for now meager, light and warmth they cast.

See the Wholeness in all its darkness,

this birth of individual children of One loving Source.

Reliunif.lif

Last night watched the spectacular and heavily favored Mikella Shiffrin ski out and disqualify for the second race in a row.  In sho k she sat at the edge of the run for twenty-five minutes.

For the vast majority of us, plans and expectations are a momentary solace, an illusion of predictability, a delusion of our own empowerment.  Of course we hear of the Bezos's and Musks who plan, predict,  and control each detail of their obscenely successful lives.  That makes us feel either inadequate about our intelligence and discipline or bitter about our personal persecution by fate.  But the successful planners of their own lives did not raise their grandkids or have the stroke or get trapped in the car wreck or watch incoming artillery fire set their children ablaze.

Consequently sports rules, Masonic rituals, and religion belief are our desperate attempt to erect some momentary facade of predictability.  Of course fundamentalisms flourish in times of rampant change.  We are frantic for something, anything, to grab onto to stay afloat in the white-water chaos of perfectly normal life.  Political flags or convenient scripture will do as long as it resists personal or societal  changes out of our control.

Death of course is the penultimate insult to our plans.  We are ultimately revealed as powerless.  The future beyond that event is utterly unknowable.  So we avoid thinking about it.  But if we accepted that the maelstrom of unpredictability that is our daily lives was merely a preview of and practice for that ultimate waiting unpredictability so utterly out of our control, to what might we turn for consolation?  When no worldly plan or expectation is reliable, what still abides as real?  Whether experienced or only wished for, what was it that felt real and substantive once every plan and expectation was crushed to dust and burned to ashes? 

Look back, look forward, see the world that so resolutely refused to be predicted or controlled, and sense the one constant that was all you really wanted all along.  All the plans were illusory, deceptions by self and the world.  Only the one hunger, only one essence, one joy, remained constant, then and in this moment.  Accept the chaos and unpredictability and uncertainty.  Accept the one constant hunger.  Discover that through it all, Love was the lesson, Love was the constant, Love was the plan fulfilled through the dissolution, even the penultimate insult,  of our insistent plans.

Reliobs

We all long for peace.  But the slightest miscommunication and wars erupt, within the household or between nations.

The great conflicts and the domestic disputes coalesce out of the swirling storm of disconnection and distance.  Each of these inner worlds, each ensemble of beliefs and expectations and desires, i.e. each individual human being, churns within the prison cell of its worldly experience.  Words form feeble and distorted connections among the individual cells, but the almost universal aversion to really listening renders the words impotent and their affects unpredictable.  

So arguments ensue and wars erupt.  

It is tragedy unnecessary and horror avoidable, but our trenchant resistance to learning ensures the tragedies and horrors will compound.

Ludicrous sound admonitions to turn the other cheek and give away your coat as well as cloak.  Such progressive ideas were and are resoundingly ignored.  But imagine the world in their absence.  Indeed, look at parts of the world untouched by those impractical admonitions.  

Against all odds those words and their source have and do make a difference.  They at least sufficiently prick our conscience that we give lip-service to the premise that war and divorce are not to be celebrated.  

We may not turn the other cheek, but at least we ever so slightly uncomfortably squirm upon hearing the phrase.  Maybe our retributive blows are in turn ever so slightly tempered by some nagging sub-conscious awareness that some itinerant unrealistic progressive long ago pointed out a better way.  

Do not listen.  Do not learn.  Continue as always, pragmatic and patriotic, resolute and righteous.  Try to deny that irritating tiny grain of sand in your well shined marching shoes,.... "turn the other cheek…..turn…...turn and repent."

 

Can faith survive?

Run, run away!  Flee, flee from the horrors of the human world,

the willing cruelty, the chosen stupidity.

It is, all in all,

compared to the Source Garden and Destiny Home,

a horrible place.

Demons and devils have been loosed,

and they are in human form,

intent on inflicting suffering on the children of God,

intent on deceiving the children of God,

intent on convincing us we are not children of the non-existent God and we should and will succumb to the cold reality of this world and will become like them.

The demons and devils, the creatures of this world, have a most convincing argument.  Their taunts and cruelties are tangible and demanding, inescapable and tactile.  The call to faith in some hidden Light is nebulous and tremulous, lacking any convincing argument or rational justification.

Can any faith possibly survive?....real faith, sacrificial faith, questioning and doubting faith that is, as opposed to the blind, unquestioning,  and fundamentalist "faith" that serves the purposes of the worldly demons and devils.  

Simple fact: It has survived so far.  It has survived in the face of these very demons and devils.  It has survived times just as bad and worse.  If there is to be proof of miracles it is in the survival of this faith, this irrational and unprofitable kindness and compassion.

Demons and devils are loosed, evangelists and terrorists, marketers and politicians, media personalities and drug dealers, ayatollahs and sports heroes, all proclaiming the gospel of profits, entertainment, vengeance, consumption, and worldly victory.

Faith, real faith, compassionate faith, best give up, or at least hide.  But it doesn't.  It can't.  That indiscernible whisper still drowns out the amplified cacophony of the world and its loudly yelling demons.  That soft and subtle Light still overwhelms the flashing glare of the burning world.  

Faith abides, in sorrowing and grieving hearts, hearts waiting, hearts knowing.

 

Poetry

So precious, gifts of God.

So shocking, lessons of God.

So denied, those lessons.

Daily I marvel at how wrong I was.

How right have been shown my understandings of God.

How pathetically wrong my estimation of humanity.

It all compounds of course,

the mother's abuse,

well justified guilt,

overwhelming opportunities,

unbidden opportunities.

I await the sudden sunrise,

and hold close the darkening moment.

Poetry

War.

Horror.

Violence.

The human condition.  

It can't possibly be that bad.

Reluctant warriors doing what they must.  

Make no judgements about what you would do.

This is war, every day, a battle for survival.

How close the death, how desired,

escape, an end, nothing to lose,

the human condition,

none will hear,

the peace,

the quiet.

 

Money, egos, power,

Desperation.

Dreams, digitally transmitted dreams,

tools of the masters,

telling us what we want.

 

Peace, security, confidence,

in the crosshairs of this world.

Protect them. 

Cherish them.  

Rebuild them after the inevitable recurring blows.

 

Reliunif.lif

Of course eschatology longs for the end of this world, cries for an end to the horrors.  Surely this is the only world.  Surely a universe of such worlds immersed in suffering would be unbearable to Yeshu and the angels.  Surely this one world of blood and cruelty will end so the saints can finally celebrate in joy that it is over and God's children can finally get on with life.  How could there be any joy in Heaven if the saints and angels knew that somewhere in some universe some world was experiencing such suffering?  How can prayer and hymns and scripture reading be anything but a selfish escape from efforts to mitigate the suffering? 

Take heart.  This is the great test of faith.  Each soul will endure its moment of testing.  The suffering of each will fulfill its  needed growth.  Each must do all in its power to heal and love others.  But the world need not end as long as each soul's suffering ends.  There is a joyous ending of suffering for each soul.  

Yes, there is always more that can be done.  Yes, the suffering must be shared.  But each has their moment, their role, to care and help.  And each is limited in their ability to care and help.  

God bears all suffering, the horrors and nightmares.  Faith reveals it will end for each.  To care, to share the suffering, while holding the faith, that is the painful growth process.  They will all be rescued.  You will play a role for some to momentarily ease the suffering, as everyone should play a role in easing suffering.  Yes, there will always be horrors, perhaps on innumerable worlds.  But each soul will pass through.  Each can enter.  Sorrow at the tragedy.  But hold to hope.  Know each soul must bear only its dark moment before entering eternal Light.  The price is paid.  There is indeed a limit to the sharing of the suffering.  Their condition is indeed beyond help for many.  You have faith for the end of your own suffering and your destiny in joy.  Have that faith for others.  Have that faith for the world.  For only such faith can provide strength to keep helping and trying.  The worldly and individual situation is indeed hopeless.  Therein arises faith.  Deeply feel the suffering.  But let that feed faith that responds with action.  

Yes, faith in God's salvation for everyone, not just your own salvation, that is the next step in growth.  Look with sorrow.  But know it is only for the moment.  Look with confidence of faith.  The world can end or not, but each individual's world of suffering will end.

Strive for a loving way of being, not to save the world or even a life.  A loving way of being will save someone's world, and bring someone life.

Reliunif.lif

I"ve called time the Deceiver.  But it's not time per se.  Change is time, and change is life and growth.  There is nothing without time.  Further, the structure of time allows coordination and interaction among individual elements of consciousness.  

It is our blindness through time, that is what facilitates the Deceiver's deceptions.  We cannot see past the moment.  Resurrection may be a certainty, rendering death inconsequential, even irrelevant, but we cannot see that.

So what Light did Yeshu bring that allowed Him to see through time?...a statement seemingly irrational, but worthy of curious exploration.

Seeing through time would seem to invoke determinism, or even teleology.  And it would seem to put the end to any illusions of freewill.  Which would in turn delete any meaning from repentance.  And that does not begin to address the uncomfortable implications for the quantum nature of physical reality.  

Seeing through the time dimension would in fact seem to reduce time to just another physical dimension, one most of us cannot peer through, but just as rigid as any matrix of stone, outcomes rigidly cast, the future as immutable as the past.  The capacity to have a clear view of the future would reveal change, life, growth, and choice to be illusions induced by out temporal blindness.  Prophecy would ultimately conclude "don't bother, you can do nothing about anything anyway".  

But what of a view through time revealing not everything, not every rigidly cast detail, but revealing probabilities?  Our physical view is constrained by distance.  Imagine a view constrained by future probability, that view still oriented about yourself at the center, as is our physical view.

I.e., you might not see every bend in the river ahead of you, but you might be certain that the river will reach the sea.  If in the mountains, you could anticipate some water falls along the way.

Imagine a capacity to discern the future as probabilities, probabilities varying according to the path you choose, probabilities with uncertainty amplified by individual freewill and structural quantum mechanics.  Events in the next minutes might be clear, days ahead would be much more nebulous and dependent upon many other people's choices.  But with such vision, in the flow of inexorable social and political forces, might it be possible to see some general outcomes, such as crucifixion of a renegade prophet unwilling to placate the priests and powerful.  With such vision, would some people's behaviors be under some circumstances, become imminently predictable even with freewill still actively at play?  With such vision of probabilities, might specific nations and locations of events be impossible to see, but might eventual developments of rise and fall and conflict of social forces be inevitable, hence visible?

Might the destiny of souls, resurrection, and eternal life be so absolutely certain as to be clearly visible to one possessing vision of future possibilities?

The Deceiver is our necessary tormentor to facilitate our faith, faith in turn necessary for our grow as children of God.  But it is not time that is the deception.  Time is life and freewill.  It is our blindness to see the future that deceives us.  That future we cannot yet see is not cast in rigid crystalline detail, but is at the local level wildly dependent upon our freewill, while simultaneously at the multiverse level retaining the inexorable destiny of Home.

 

Reliobs

So for what are we responsible?  How far does our responsibility go?  We absolutely could do more.  Some of us are responsible for terrible suffering of others.  Some of us can never forget that.

We don't ask for responsibility for others.  We don't seek the entanglements.  Many do not recognize the entanglements.

How do we even continue?  How can we continue?  Between fear for ourselves and guilt for our responsibility, how do we go forward?....especially considering we are blind to the terrible future that awaits.

Lacking encouragement, with those closest vacillating between not caring and not understanding, how do we go forward?

It is not the cold of the world that freezes our actions, it is the terrible potential consequences, too terrible to comprehend.  Take those, take the ever-present potential for angry and bitter recrimination, take the terrible unpredictability of every step in the world, and going forward, taking the smallest step, becomes preposterous, ludicrous, an act of grandest foolishness.

Outcomes will be worse than you could imagine or comprehend, and the host of accusing judges will ensure you never forget that.

The fear of inaction is matched only by the fear of action.

"Fear not'' is the most laughably preposterous command in scripture.  Only the abjectly willfully ignorant can enjoy the luxury of fearing not.  

The conclusion?  It helps to have a realistic assessment of the source of fear and stress.  Oh yes, they are real, terribly real.  It helps to recognize the nobility of going forward in the face of them, blindly going forward, in the face of hopelessness.  

It is a noble madness that keeps us moving forward, "faith" and "noble madness" being synonymous.  

Caustically laugh in the face of that naive angel telling you to "fear not".  Then keep going forward.  

 

 

Dear God, "thy will be done on earth as in Heaven"….so we pray…..a prayer which on second glance unambiguously declares that in general Your will is not done on earth, otherwise the prayer would be meaningless.  

"Imsha Allah", "God's will", say my Muslim acquaintences.  But Your will does not magically unfold.  I daresay very little goes accordinv to Your will.  To think that Your will determines what happens in this world is to deny the implications of the Lord's prayer.  

We can and should pray for Your will.  But this ain't Heaven.  For people in Mariupol, for that man over the mangled remains of his mother, for that unconsolable mother holding that little bloody bundle, this world is at this moment distilled and concentrated hell.  

Thy will may be fully done somewhere.  We sure as hell hope so.  But it's not done here….not fully anyway…..but it's done sometimes, in some places, in some moments, by some people.  Let us pray to recognize and cherish those moments and people, that the horrors of this world so far removed from Your will may not permanently subsume our souls.

Religion

Most of the things for which we thank God involve some respite from the horrific nature of this world.

A cure, food, a healthy kitty, safety, eyes to see,.....all this prayerful gratitude indicts the routinely horrific nature of God's Creation…..implying that if miraculous blessings don't intervene, suffering is our natural lot.  

We better pray for our daily bread because it sure as heck is not guaranteed.

A realistic appraisal of our prayers could lead to a quite pessimistic conclusion about the world.  "Good", "joyous", "health", "security", these are not to be expected, and only special dispensation by an arguably stingy God may accrue them to our worldly experience.

As for our fellow children of that stingy God, they display if nothing else an admirable consistency in their proclivity for deceit and cruelty.  The story of the Flood is testimony to a most reasonable God of common sense and good judgment.  Clearly this species is committed to its irredeemable nature, and in need of a good wash and rinse.  The questionable judgment to let Noah and his incestuous family float above it all we repaid by betraying and crucifying God's best attempt to shine some Light into our stubborn darkness.  

It's not a pretty picture.  But remarkably we usually don't see this picture.  We do see blessings for which we are sincerely grateful.  We do see the potential in smiling babies.  We remember saints' testimonies, not their denials.  We keep on swimming, and God keeps us afloat on the raging flood.

Real faith grows because there is no worldly justification for it.  Ultimately it is our faith, imperfect and gloriously blind, that floats on the flood, this terrible worldly flood that lifts and liberates us from that world.  

 

Poetry

Touch.  Blessed touch.  Safe touch.  

Warm, mutually desired touch.  

Requested touch.

That modicum of exchange of souls,

overlapping their corporeal experience.  

 

Touch.

Contact.

Dangerous.

Approach with caution.

Human nature is dangerous.

Relationships,

individuals,

nations,

keep your guard up,

keep your armies large,

it's rough out there,

it's rough in here.

"Follow me"

said the fool who got Himself crucified.

"Follow me."

Not without a sharp sword and hypersonic missiles, thank you.

"Follow me."

Into vulnerability?

Intentionally looking for trouble?

Speaking truth to power

and to the spouse?

Are you crazy?!

Yes, as a matter of fact, by any clinical criteria,

crazy, out of touch with reality.

"Follow me."

What's that supposed to mean?

Where the hell did you go?

Into vulnerability, 

the last place any of us want to go.

"Follow me"

to certain disaster.

"Follow me" and "fear not" 

Without the option of selecting one or the other, though they are mutually exclusive.

But there they are,

the two insistent admonitions.

"Follow me".

See this human world for what it is.  

Then "follow" with no worldly hope.

It will not end well.

And then it will gloriously begin.

Religion

“Turn” is such an unambiguous term of free-will Choice!  Worldly being has set your course.  “Turning” is a radical act only initiated internally and, counter to how you have been to date.  

 

Yeshu kept moving because longer stays and exposures would just anger people.  The home town that knew Him best tried to kill Him.  Staying in Jerusalem too long did get Him killed.  He would not go along with worldly norms, routines, and expectations.  The world won’t accept that non-conformity.  Even His mother railed against Him for not staying Home and doing His family role.

“Follow me” meant leaving the routine bonds, demands, expectations, and roles in the world.  Yeshu avoided worldly entanglements and associated expectations.  Look how impossible the raising of Lazarus would have become had Yeshu been living in the town with Miriam and everyone demanding that He heal Lazarus before he died.

Years later, only itinerant Paul could deliver the radical message of liberation from traditional laws, Peter et al being too integral a part of traditional local society where they lived.  The Gospel spread by travel, never flourishing at home.  

The church preacher must be a part of the local world.  Nothing radical’s going to happen there.

Stick around with people and you will have to go along with their worldly demands and normal expectations or you will face their anger or ridicule or rejection.  

 

Matha’s meal:  what are the odds that was the last time she went all out fixing a meal for Yeshu, after his comment that Miriam was giving Him what he really needed.

 

Religion?

Reliobs?

Poetry?

Reliunif.lif?

There once, for a moment, was Light in the world.  Imagine, being able to see and hear Truth!  And of course no one understood it.

Light in the world.  We are so blind we don't even know how dark it is.

Light in the world.  We don't even know what it would look like.  We would probably run from it.

But imagine, imagine, Light in the world.  Dare we long for it?  Would the cold abate for a moment?  Would we remember what we saw?  Would we be any the wiser for having seen it?

But how would you tell anyone?  People who have existed only in darkness cannot believe that such a thing as "Light" exists.  The very concept of "Light" is at best  nonsensical to them, but usually not even comprehensible.

Light.  Who would believe it?  More importantly, who would want to believe it?  To those who know only darkness, would Light be more frightening than just enduring the darkness?

Light….in this dark world…..alien and startling…..yet some, perhaps remembering something, desire it, or desire something, knowing not exactly what.

Light…., unsettling…...nothing can be the same after once feeling the touch of the Light…..though to relate the experience it sounds like gibberish to most.

Light….some will desire it.  Some may have glimpsed it, even if not recognizing it.  There is no putting it back once it is loosed.  The world may exact a price for its release in the world, but there is no choice.  Once seen, once felt, there is no undoing the knowledge.  Light, even dimmed, changes lives.  Let it shine, this bright Light that cures blindness, let it shine, just in case, just in case, someone will see.

Reliunif.lif

Such a curious thing, temptation.  

So pressing in the moment.

Blinding one to outcomes.

So easy to be overwhelmed by how good it will taste or feel right now.  So hard to focus on how good resisting it could instead feel tomorrow morning or in a month.

Time, the great deceiver.  The healthy, fit, energetic body within reach for most of us, if we could reach for it for several months.  But the ice cream and beer  are within reach right now.  If we could feel both, feel health and strength and firm form, and feel the food or drink, and choose between them, we would choose that healthy, energetic form in the mirror.  But we cannot feel both.  But we can almost taste that cold liquid or extra taco.

Such an odd character we are given, capacity to recognize what to do for our long term wellbeing, but torments in the moment, right now, right before us, to make the long-term irrelevant.  It's all evolutionarily perfectly understandable.  Not explainable by evolution is our capacity to choose.  Yet given that capacity, we are not also imbued with a capacity to sufficiently feel the long-term consequences of our choice.  

Still odd, still curious, that we can know what is best and most desirable for us, yet have such powerful behavioral forces dictating contradictory behaviors.

It is at the core of what it is to be human…...or at least the process of being born into whatever it is to be human.  Great power is bequeathed to the children of God…..or will be….if we want it.  But our first step, our first choice in realizing our eternal potential, is inextricably enmeshed in the nature of temptation, our capacity to see what would be best, while at the same time our recognition that our nature allows tempting demons to control us.  Somewhere in all that recognition and awareness we may realize our evolutionary carnal nature and our revolutionary, if conflicting, capacity to discern something better, healthier, more empowered, more fulfilling.  Then, the next step is to acknowledge our abject limitations to attain that something better by our own means.  

The greater calls.  We fail.  That's all OK if we just recognize, admit, confess.  The temptations, the failures, the capacity to recognize our potential…..it's all teaching us, all revealing to us, once we choose to see.  

The greater calls.  Not as loudly as the temptations of this moment.  But it calls.  We are powerless to attain it.  But we are empowered to accept it.  

 

Reliobs

The hard belief is the belief in miracles in this world!  That is the harder faith.  It wasn’t belief in His Kingdom that tested Yeshu's faith, it was the outlandish prospect of resurrection and the more preposterous prospect that His words and message would in some form propagate in this world.  

Eternal life?  Piece of cake.  Any person seeking and understanding and valuing Truth?  Now that stretches credulity for even the most robust faith.

God's will can easily be done in Heaven.  But here?  With this generation?  That sounds like a bridge too far.  

When does faith become delusion?  When it expects too much in thjs world.  Heaven is easy.  Resurrections, in whatever guise, here and now?....that's a faith belief worthy of something, but is it angel's praise or worldly derision?  Probably both.  The two do tend to go together.

Sometimes faith and Love have no choice about pursuing something crazy in the world.  How will it turn out?  Only time will tell.  Only eternity will tell.

 

 

 

 

Reliobs

Brushing a kitty.  How this would be Hea en for that person in Ukraine carrying their kitty across a river as they escape their town of artillery craters and rotting pieces of corpses.  I pet a kitty and think of their hell.

My sun is rising, in a safe home, kitty in lap.  

Their sun is in the afternoon, they no longer have a home.

How will they let their kitty out of its carrier?  In terror it would run away, run away across a muddy field or cratered parking lot or crigid tent city.

Do they love and cherish their kitty as much as I my Bodes?  They are in hell, one of millions of hells right now.  My momentary "heaven" must not remain unscathed by their hell.  

My kitty safely and securely rests his sleeping head on his outstretched paws in turn resting on my left leg.  How will their kitty get food?  How long must it stay in a carrier?

I write of kitties, only because that already taxes the limits of the pain of compassion, but what of the parents of children and infants and newborns?  How readily horror could turn into hatred for the instigators of this war, hatred solving nothing, yet necessary.

Terrified kitties in carriers.  Blood soaked baby blankets.  Faces never to again smile without a flicker of pain behind the eyes.  

Dare to be touched by such scenes.  God help your soul if you flee from that touch.  But we can bear only so much.  The suffering can only be allowed to soak in so far or we are rendered helpless.

For a moment, for a little ways, help carry that kitty, that limp child, that cross that another must bear.  It may save your soul.  

Reliunif.lif

I read of Taino religion.

All this history of religion.  We are blind.  But we know there is more.  So we take our best stab at describing and explaining the something more, and trying to make it make sense with what we know of this world.

Then, individuals raised in any culture have little choice about going along with the contrived model of reality, but they each do have the Choice about the degree of love and compassion with which they implement that model.

We have the capacity for some transcendent awareness of the Greater, and capacity to nebulously sense some eternal Destiny, but pain and hunger and fear and lusts dominate our immediate conscious experience.  Only by choice and effort do we allow into consciousness awareness of the Greater.  This world's sensory and survival demands will utterly dominate our conscious experience unless by force of will we seek fleeting moments of transcendent awareness.

Such a perspective on the nature of our plight then, for a few at least, prompts the question "why?"  We cannot help but think our awareness of and blindness to some Greater must serve some purpose.  The whole tortuous experience must surely be getting each of us somewhere.  This existence cannot possibly be pointless.

And there we are all left.  But there are a few who are still left to wonder.  Which clarifies why the vast majority choose to not wonder.  It is largely a futile exercise.  The central ironic question in all the wondering is "why do we not get answers?"  

So the vast majority quite reasonably accept the contrived answers their particular society gives them.  It is an inarguably pragmatic approach to faith.  

If your nature is to not question, that's OK.  If your nature is to question, you can't help that.  Either way, you will face the Choice, the one Choice, within your rigid realm of certainty or your stormy realm of unanswered questions.  Will you listen to , accept, tolerate, care for, give to, exercise compassion and forgiveness for,.....love……, your fellow blind child of the unknowable Greater before you.

 

 

Poetry

Waves.

The aquamarine light shining through through the waves in that rising moment before breaking over….

There is no stopping it, that rising and breaking.  

Majestic.

Revealing underlying power set in motion in another part of the world.  

Waves.

Visible afar as the first hint of rising surface,

always the same speed,

appropriately inexorable,

rising,

rising,

absolutely nothing new here,

the most ancient nature-of-being playing out as it always has,

yet each wave born anew, 

each about to exert its own change upon the world,

each a portent, a suspense, a promise.

 

Observation

Reminder

Tell people what they want to hear and what they already believe if you want an audience.  Make them feel they are learning something, but don't challenge them, even if you tell them you are challenging them….if you want an audience.

Do your work as an extrapolation of existing disciplines, not a new perspective on reality.  But make it sound new.  

Radical is OK if it's trendy and easily understood.

Tread lightly in the genuinely new, or better yet, flee from it.  There are no endowed positions down that untrodden path.

But it is a beckoning path, for someone, some fool who doesn't know better.  It is an entrapping path, for once seeing in its light there is no more being satisfied with the drab grays of accepted dogma.

Take a glance, go a little further, though none will follow.  Walk alone the path of genuinely new exploration.  Call to others to follow, then accept that none will.   

Someone must explore it, though you know not why.

Leave a trail, leave hints and markers, though none follow….yet.

A time will come when in desperation, with nowhere else to go, some will tremulously follow not you, but your faint footsteps.  

 

 

Reliobs

In the waiting room a television broadcast a mindless game show aimed at people of minimal intellect.  Deal or No Deal.  It was a religious ritual in worship of money.  It employed twenty-six sleazy looking models in super short and low cut dresses.  Why have one when you can have twenty-six?  Why have a display board showing the grid of twenty-six choices when you can have fifty-two breasts?

During breaks the girls were shown fawning on each other to amp up the titillation.  

There was of course no skill or intelligence involved in playing the game.  There was of course a marionette audience applauding on cue.  

Bright colors and gaudy displays and gimmicks and illusions of chance were of course employed.

For most minds there is no defense against such an assault.  

Such programming, and in parallel the manipulation of social media, will destroy civilization.  The simmering anger and frustration evident in the grocery-store aisles testifies to the radical but unnoticed changes media is inflicting on society.  

Bright colors, gambling for money, and semi-naked girls:  what's not to love?....as long as the riots are on the next block, the shooter is at a different supermarket, and the nukes land downwind. 

We need not worry about God's wrath.  This demolition of civilization we will accomplish all by ourselves.  Perhaps in lieu of God's floods this time, someone will notice God's tears.

 

Observation

The nascent mass media-communication-transportation of the twentieth century facilitated the astonishing societal and technological progress of the United States.  From transistors to civil rights we applied shared education and information to revolutionize society.  That single data point of a few remarkable decades misled us into thinking more media-communication-transportation would be better.  Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley, Father Knows Best, Mayberry, a shared value of democracy, a shared goal of the moon, had created a flash moment of optimum Unity and the concomitant progress.  Then cable channels and FaceBook quickly returned us to individual madness.  Now we could watch what appealed to our worst nature, and profit dictated media must focus on and amplify our worst nature.  We could not just travel and visit people in strange places, we could now move to be with people sharing our views.   The growth of mass media-communication-transportation returned us to the normal baseline of our delusional, violent human condition, but now armed with technology that manipulated that condition and amplified the violence.

Observation

The appeal of fiction, sports, and religion: some rational sequence, even if just providing an objective perspective on others’ madness.  Such blessed escape from the normal, unpredictable, inexplicable madness of daily life!  The story line makes sense, even if describing a character’s mad behavior.  The winner is unambiguously decided by points.  Or the insane human behavior is destined to be punished by God or excused as the will of God.

How desperately we need these three escapes from the hammering unpredictability and irrationality of daily life.

 

Diary

Wrens!  A wren family!  I was on the front deck, thinking I should remove the supple maple branch I had tucked under the eve of the birdhouse mounted on the aspen stump. I thought the branch that I had tried to get out of the way as we walked the stairs would block the entrance hole of the birdhouse.  As was thinking that a tiny bird flitted onto that very branch, then darted into the hole!  So much for my understanding of the issue.

As I watch the tiny bird darts out and flits away.  Moments later it’s back, this time with lumber for nest building!  I race in and find Karen to tell her the exciting news.  We watch (Karen not really able to see because of her eye problem) and here comes the tiny bird again, then away again then back again, each arrival with building materials.  I worried it could not get the long pieces of straw through the maze of the leaves and the tiny hole, but again am proven naive.

We have a wren family!  Joy!  Right beside the flicker family!  

Thank You.  Thank You.  Thank You.  

As I type two spectacular tanagers alight on the back yard suet feeder.  What a show of red and yellow and black!  Now an oriole!....russet and black.  

The flickers we see little of, as they have quite a bit of time between visits.  The wrens are gone for seconds before returning with a load of material.

Diary

I can hear the flicker babies!  A bubbling sound when mom or dad arrives with a meal!  

Diary

Every time wren dad comes out of the house, he sings a little song!.....as if excited about his new home and family.  It is too sweet.  

He brings a 2x4!  It’s huge!  Wrestle and wrestles trying to get it through the door.  I don’t think s/he ever quite got it all the way in.  But it was good enough that he flits up to a branch and sings his little song of joy, so excited about the new home!

 

4. Juni. 2022

 

Diary

Wren home improvements continue.  2x4’s stick out the door, but they bring more.  

The wren and flicker are good neighbors!  They sit on the same branch while the wren sings the happy song.  

The flicker takes a break on the bench, then goes to feeding the young.  I never see her with food, so I suspect she and he must be regurgitating their meals for the babies.  Maybe that is why he sat on the branch a while this morning, waiting to get the baby formula cooked.  I’ve noticed other times they will wait quite a while outside the home before finally going in to feed.  

I can hear the babies, but still only faintly.  

Upon their departure I can see the parents are carrying out a big mouthful of poop, having changed the diapers.  

 

Diary

As I write about the flicker and wren families, I realize that were I to have a conversation with anyone about them, I would not so much be sharing excitement about it, as I would not expect anyone to share my excitement, but I would be straining to try to convey some of the beauty and excitement and preciousness, struggling to find words that might in some way communicate something of the experience, all the while expecting the effort to go unheard.

Diary

At the bedroom window, three goldfinches, three orioles, two tanagers!  What a show!  

 

 

Reliobs

I hear Saeed say our cultures are in trouble because we have not adhered to "our books".  I read in The Places in Between of the illiterate old man distraught  because a fire started by the Taliban damaged a corner of the book he worships, a book he cannot read, a magical idol for the old man.

These beliefs, all beliefs, cemented in place by a society and culture, cemented in place at an early age.  There is no changing, shaking, or tempering them.

The Truth doesn't stand a chance.

A Taliban soldier cuts off the toes of a villager for not having a beard, because some authority quoting a book the soldier cannot read says it should be so.  Astonishing, the capacity and eager willingness of humans to believe any irrational arbitrary contrivance, especially if it empowers them and makes them feel superior.  Love doesn't stand a chance.

It could become quite discouraging for anyone wishing to share the Truth of Love.

And why dare call it "Truth"?

We all know it.  The same Truth resides in the subsumed desires and dreams and discarded memories of every heart.  Denied but desired, even by the homicidal sociopath, ruthless blockchain magnate, and knife wielding Taliban acolyte.  Even if not believing it possible, even if unable to comprehend it, each and every would love to be loved, to be safely embraced, a longing that in perverted form underlies their violent seeking of attention, their quest for riches and power, their mindless service to an imaginary heartless god.

Too late, too late for most, society-culture having from infancy filled their hearts with tortured distortions of belief.  Belief fills the vacuum of absent Love.  Our greedy, self-absorbed, cruel natures then instantiate the beliefs.  We are left with the ashes and corpses of crusades and jihads, "liberations" and genocides.  

….but all the while our longing remains, the innumerable "one true faiths" abysmally failing to fill our hearts with anything but bitterness and retribution.  So we ferociously hold to our beliefs, terrified to glance inward at the Void of absent Love, Love we are all empowered to provide for each other, each empowered by the Source, the patient and sorrowing Source.

 

 

Observation

Beliefs are the most personal power anyone possesses, hence the most ferociously defended.  

 

Observation

 

The information system and network will collapse, but isolated silos will survive.   

This old note refers to anticipation of societal collapse, and the end of internet and cloud access.  But it is conceivable that isolated silos of data banks in a few relatively stable countries, or easily defended locations, might survive, just as some libraries might survive, just as some monasteries survived the dark ages.

These isolated digital repositories might someday be again accessible if some isolated repositories of technology can also be preserved.  The depth of collapse will determine this, but perhaps in a few locations the depth will not be all the way back to the stone age.  

There will be no networked cloud, but the data farms used for cloud storage may locally rescue human knowledge.  The buildings won’t have burnable material, so the mobs may not have much to pillage.  The banks of disk drives might get thrown out to make room to shelter people, but in lower population areas far from sea shores perhaps one or two facilities will survive.  

(In their worship of God and service to humanity, the two being synonymous, the monks of old saved the knowledge that allowed rebuilding.  Will anyone of modern technical knowledge demonstrate such faith?)

 

Reliunif.lif

Referring to major life decisions in recent decades.

In the blinding fog I thought I was entering a gently descending paved trail.  It turned out to be a treacherous, precipitous, avalanche prone cliff, revealed by blows and falls, as the route remains hidden in the icy fog.  

 

Each person is its own mountain, its own life-challenge.  

 

(The Unity for which we are destined and to which we are called is available in this life in only fleeting, superficial portions.  But the calling and destiny are no less valid, and in fact revealed to be more so by our worldly suffering from lack of Unity.)

 

5. Juni. 2022

Both mom and dad feed the baby flickers.  Today for the first time I see that jackhammer motion of feeding as mom just has to put her head in to feed the family.  Previously she went all the way in.  

We tied dryer lint to the deck railing hoping it would entice the wren bride to stay in this house her fiance has worked so hard on.  Most of the lint was gone this morning, but I saw none in the house.  The the guy is still bringing supplies and still singing.  

 

6. Juni. 2022

Sunroom.  05:08.  Bodes in window.  Bird concert in glorious stereo.

Diary

Reliunif.lif

Poetry

For a moment, a vision, a vision,

The universes, like fireworks, each bursting into existence, 

each igniting with life,

then fading, slowly fading,

to liberate that life.

Each universe isolated from all others,

each element of consciousness, in this instantiation,

isolated from all others.  

But then touch - blessed, blessed touch -

relieves the isolation,

revealing the potential of the end of this necessary isolation of birth.

 

Such a curious condition,

to get these tantalizing, tormenting insights,

compelled to share them,

constrained from sharing them.

 

Bodes is restless this morning, going window to window,

a little lap time, doing his job,

but then back to window patrol.

 

Precious, precious morning,

this feathered symphony substituting for the festival symphonies

that corona-19 make risky to attend.

 

Here is peace, 

here is strength of Spirit to provide nourishment for the day.

"A little longer, a little longer"

the interminably repeating admonition of the angels.

 

7. Juni. 2022

 

Reliobs

Look at those Old Testament prophets.  No one listened to them at the time.  The prophets were odd and unpopular ducks.  Today, three-thousand years later, some people religiously read those prophetic writings.  They can do that because after three-thousand years the described situations about which the prophet admonished the people or king are so preposterously alien to us that the admonitions now pose no threat to us.  We can conveniently manipulate them so we are the holy ones and whoever we don't like are the bad guys about to suffer God's wrath.

Meanwhile, the same congregants so enthusiastic about that wrath richly deserved by the sinners who ignored the three-thousand year old editorial, are often the first to deny today's prophecies about societal event horizons, violent political inflection points, and environmental cataclysm.  

Prophecy finally gets it due from those thinking it does not apply to them.  "How could those folks of old have been so foolish, so stiff necked, so rebellious" we ask while driving our super-sized SUV past the homeless camps on our way to the mall or enclosed stadium.  

Prophecy will be taken seriously, once it no longer directly challenges the people hearing it, people just as fervently denying the prophecies of their day.

 

Observation

 

  Pond. 06:34

All quiet.

The older baby geese have their white tail stripes.  The younger family is just now starting to show a hint of white tail stripe.

Unlike last year when the older family bullied the single mother and her goslings, these families get along, walking together, though always identifiably separate.

The baby stills cuddle in a fuzzy ball when napping.  Too sweet!

A honk!  Seven little fuzzy necks shoot straight up!  How the necks have grown!  As little yellow puff balls the babies had no necks at all.

 

 

Diary

I see the baby flicker for the first time!  Big eyes.  Peering up toward the sky.  Giant bill.  Mostly growdled up!  

 

 

11. Juni. 2022

Good view of flicker baby!

A little boy!  Obvious red cheeks.

Only see one baby at a time.  Though “baby” is not the right word.  They look very grown up.

I think I saw a little girl, as I could not see red cheeks, but maybe it was the boy and this time the head was not high enough for me to see the red.

S/he kind of forlornly rested its beak on the edge of the door, looking up at the sky.

 

Yes!  Two babies at once!  One with red cheeks!  

 

The joy of observing this arises from Unity, Unity with the individual elements of Wholeness of Creation, the joy of another’s life fully independent of mine.  

Reliobs

The viable degree of freedom, power, and opportunity is dependent upon the degree of intelligence, knowledge, and spiritual development.  This is true for a child, an adult, a species, a society, and humanity.  

 

12. Juni. 2022

Diary

Flickers.

(From the sunroom deck I see dad feed the family!  Not so little heads are high in the doorway.  I see only two, the brother and sister.

Their squawk is as loud and the same sound as an adult.  They are closer to fledging than I could have imagined.)

 

From 12. Juni. 2022

 

Observation

Flickers!

Suddenly it’s fledge watch time!

Maybe an ant or some insect passed the doorway.  I see a shockingly long pnk tongue flick out!

Agitated.  Restless.

Neck out!  Strettttching into the open air!

Shoulder in the doorway!

Brother and sister are almost fighting to shoulder their way into the doorway!

Dad arrives.

Feeds both.

Their heads are way out so I can see the feeding.  There are no visible bugs in dad’s mouth, so he must regurgitate breakfast.  His beak is shiny wet when he pulls it out.

Now fed, all goes quiet, 

10:15 Mom feeds.

10:22 Sisters heads are out, a squawk, looking in all directions.

Now in and out.  Breast out!  Up and down!  Her black bib is mottled.  Little down remains.  Chatters.  Looks down at the ground.

10:27 Too hot to be too energetic.

10:31 Still sticking way out of doorway, but not agitated.

The drive to fledge, to leave safety-security-relative comfort-for the complete unknown.

When I make a noise with my chair she flinches back into the apartment.

 

The drive to fledge must be tempered by patience, awaiting that just right time.

The drive to fledge, we know we must grow, but we don’t even know what that means.

How to know when and how….or should we just wait until it’s not even a choice?  

10:40  Brother wants window time.  Sis pushes him back.

We must fledge many times…..all preparing the the great fledging.

10:46  Brother again requests door time.  Sisters out far enough I can see half a wing.  Brother’s beak occasionally appears over her shoulder.

Squawks from the tree.  Mom or dad calls.

Dad feeds.  Mom feeds.  

Things settle down.

11:26  Sis is catching her own snacks with that long thread of a tongue!

13:42  Three!  I see a third face in the dark background!  The instant one drops out of sight another face replaces it.

I haven’t seen the parents remove poop today.

The heat may be driving the babies out.

Pecking and poking at each other to get their head out the door.

16:08  Mom or dad calling and calling!

A sister just beats up her brother!

A parent keeps calling.

Three faces keep squeezing out together.

A parent has begun the teaser routine, high in a tree and calling.  

In late sun sawdust clouds are evident drifting and glowing around the nest.  There must be a vent hole in the back.  

 

From 13 Juni. 2022

 

07:00 Flickers.  Lots of feeding this morning.  With cool morning air the siblings are less frantic.  They are congtent to share doorway space one at a time.

a sister’s head moves in rapid precise mechanized motion following a fly buzzing around the doorway.

09:00

The brother has one tiny mohawk feather sticking up from the top ofhis head.

Mom or dad call from the trees.  Siblings take turns learning way, way out, and returning the parent’s call.  The furthest out yet!  I thought she would fall out!

Are they excited and agitated, or just hungry and demanding?

Both parents arrive together.  Dad feeds first.  

Again, way out!  She looks very fuzzy when out so far, not feathry sleek and ready for flight.  

 

True adventure is like fledging, with no going bck, an advent into a new way of being, to take the chance - to accept, the opportunity, to never be the same.  

09:08  A steady parade of changing heads, one at a time, peer out the door….with the occasional impatient bill protruding next to a feathery shoulder.

09:13  Parent’s call, and an answer.  two heads out.  09:15  repeat...and again...again.  Heads repeatedly pop up like a jack-in-the-box.  When they quyit appearing the parent repeats the call.  09:18  Mom feeds the lucky one in the doorway, then immediately departs, motivating others to get in the door so they don’t miss their meal next time mom visits.  Mouths are starting to stay open as temperate rises.  

Brother is holding his own, muscling his way into the doorway.

09:54  Little girl bonces up and down, in and out.  

Mom feeding.

Fledge?!  After feeding?

I glanced at my page for the briefest moment, and when looking up I swear I saw someone flying out of the door!  Did I see a fledge?  Or when I glanced down did mom go in and I saw her come out?  Whatever flew out had a lot of red-orange feathers.  I can’t believe mom got in and out in the moment I glanced down.  Whoever I saw, it did seem they came out of the doorway and flew fast and level to the east.  

A remaining sibling got way out, but both then promptly retreated out of sight, where they stay.

10:08  Dad feeds, finally a sister appears in the door, then brother.  The post fledge quiet I’ve seen before, a shock of “what happened?!” taking hold of those staying behind.  

10:10  Distant flicker call.  Brother settles down, disappears.

In interior shadows I think I see three beaks.  As brother and sister stick heads out, brother seems the smaller one.

10:40 Dad’s a softy.  He feeds everybody deep in the nest.  Mom makes them stretch out, and teases from tree tops.

Sis bounces in and out.  Mom calls.  A couple of minutes of this before mom relents and delivers lunch.

11:07  Two sisters in the doorway, occasionally stretching way out.  I wonder if I misinterpreted what I saw earlier, and in fact no one has fledged.  

 

13:10

The  sisters are brutal to each other in their efforts to claim access to the doorway!  Whoever is inside mercilessly pecks on the back of the head of the one in the doorway, who cannot defend against the assault.  Finally they give up, leave the door, then the new victor promptly comes under the same assault until they switch gain, over and over.  

A parent calls from the distance.  That is the pattern for today, drawing the youngsters out.  Whoever claims the door answers back.  Now flicker calls come from two directions, behind me in the ponderosa, and ahead of me in Bill’s back yard.  The youngster keeps squawking in response.  And keeps squirming under the assault of the sister.  The poor brother is nowhere to be seen.

The attacker has a beak full of sister’s feathers!  By sitting on top of the first claimant, the second can also get her head out.  What a slug-fest!  Both retreat into the interior and the battle continues.  13:18.  No parent arrives with lunch.  Distant calls continue.  10:20  Finally, lunch delivered.  But apparently not much.  The demanding cries continue.

17:50

Four!  A fourth beak!  Three heads are sticking out, brother on top, but to the right is a fourth beak sticking up!  Oh my gosh!  

 

14. Juni. 2022

 

 

07:54

It’s the passing insects that get their interest and draw the baby flickers further out of their secure home.  One looks up and around, following every passing insect motion.

09:53

Hyper animated!  Up and down.  In and out.  Crying.  

 

At 11:15 dad was in nest!  Came out and then fed them!  

 

12:42

I think 3 remain.  Not sure.  Tussling over door.  But not as hot today so less desperate.  

Crying and crying.  

Distant calls.  

Little girl stretching way out.  But not agitated.

 

Pure blessing I saw the fledge I did.  Nothing had been happening.  I go about my business   i walk by the window.  There she is teetering on the edge!  Feet on the door frame!  Crouched!  Teetering, back and forth, fuzzy feathers, too far forward and almost tippled out, caught herself, you could see her trying to regain her balance, then out and flying!  Very little tail!  But flying straight out!

Thank You!

 

19:24

Crying and crying!  

I see only two, but the brother may still be inside.  Or is that him?

Still getting fed.  Still asking for more.  

Diary

More and more I wonder if the first flicker fledgling got kicked out.  Before flying it teetered and balanced and teetered and balanced, obviously catching itself before falling out.  From my dining-room window view I could not see if others were trying to squeeze past it.  But this morning from below I could see the same sorts of teetering, but this time I could see the siblings pushing and squeezing trying to get into the doorway.

 

Over and over I see the babies seem to snap at their parents after feeding, a stab at the chest that sends the parent flying.  

 

Reliobs

Surely this torturous fledging process illustrates an evolutionary system structured to birth freewill.  Why not an unambiguous programmed instruction for time to fledge, a system devoid of fear and intimidation and hunger?  Why the misery of lice and hunger and heat to drive out the baby birds?  

Just as molecular structures and statistical chance xrive evolution of forms of physical life, ingrained into the system are evolutionary dictates that lead to forms of increasing capacity for choice and decision.  It is all foundational to eventually spawning, or begetting, children of God.  

One can debate the freewill capacity of the baby birds.  But evident in their behavior is that the exact moment to fledge is hardly precise and rigidly programmed.  In their struggles to not teeter out, to get their head out to cooler air, to escape the maddening insect bites, to get food, they continually weigh, even if not consciously, their situation and condition.

Fledging will happen.  They will not live o8t their days in the nest.  But they, albeit under duress, choose that advent moment of no return.  

We see a system creating beings that are forced to make decisions.  Choice is built into the evolutionary system.  Freewill is inevitable.

Is that Choice about whether to fledge?....or only when?  For the baby flickers it is only "when".

Are we likewise destined for an advent moment, free to postpone it, but ultimately as inescapable as these birds.

Like the birds we cannot see that moment of personal advent coming, we cannot plan it, cannot understand it, cannot control it, cannot comprehend it.  But it patiently awaits our Choice, a freewill Choice.  Some hunger we do not understand, some discomfort we understand less, drives us to commit, to take an irreversible step, not into anything so banal as death, but into life, life freed from its worldly nest of lusts and hungers.  We sense something is out there, something grand, awaiting our step of faith, our acceptance of evolutionary destiny for these fledging children of God.ately destined to accept it.

 

16. Juni. 2022

Diary

Observation

Flicker family is absolutely crazed, all three remaining siblings ferociously jostling for door time, over and over looking like the one in the door will get kicked out by the two behind it.  They are not pleasant to each other, nor to their hard working parents, making quite obnoxious noises, screeches, squawks, sounding like birds in some horror movie.

Mid-morning each day is their crazed time, when it looks like even if accidentally their animated antics will produce a fledge.

 

10:09

Sis stretching way out!  Way out!  Squawking.  Mom or dad answering with the rise;fall notes call.  

Now mom comes to feed.  Again, sis pecks at mom.  This looks lake dangerous parenting!  I gues the baby is stretching out in hopes of more food.

Calls continue after feeding.  

These little birds …..fly!  She flies out!  No warning!  No in and out!  Mom left.  The baby sits in the door.  And launches!  What a surprise!  Flew straight and strong, slightly climbing.

No one is in the door.  Did the other two already fledge?  I’m shocked to not see the remaining two, who may not be remaining.

What a moment!  Thank You!  Thank You!  Thank You!

Just minutes before they just looked hot, like they were settling into the mid-day heat malaise.

Now brother appears at the door!  Doesn’t look too nonplussed by the disappearance of his noisy sister.  

He’s totally chill.  Not stretching out.  

She flew!  What a flash!  Seems to have a shorter tail than the parents.

Well, well well.  All this sitting on the sunroom deck paid off.  

But these little guys are hard to predict.

Now brother squawks.  He’s always been the most reserved of the family.  

I got to see two fledge!  He stretches out.  But in receeeeent days that was just to ask for food.  ..or demand food.

They are used to me here.  I can stand and sneeze and not bother them.  Movement in the dining room window though imediately sends them inside.  They are not used to that.

Man, I dare not leave now.  

Im surprised fledging occurred after feeding.  I expected just a lazy siesta time after feeding, as usually happens.

Well, this is hugely exciting.

As I was starting to type, if we buy a car these little birds will be largelyt responsible forit.  I’ve done all my research while sitting here watching them.  I seriously doubt I would have gotten so deeply into it to the oiunt of building momentum for a purchase had I not had all this time sitting here.  I would instead have been working on yard projects and other things.  

So if we buy a car and it saves our lives by its Driver Assist Technology it will be because of these little bids.

Now sis peers out.  So there are still two left.

Fledging after eating!  Who would have thought.

Now all quiet.  No one ever in the door.  Remaining brother and sister are enjoying taking over their departed sister’s bedroom.  

10:33

Remaining sister squawks and sticks her head out.  bounces up and down, head in and out.     Squawks and squawks.

It’s far more than “seeing” it.  You can see it in videos.  To share the moment of life, dramatic, exuberant, dangerous, righ there, that is the experiencing of the moment, will all the unknown and uncertainties.

Now brother appears.  Now both siblings together.  

But neither stretches as far out as older sister did.  Both just stick their heads out, not their bodies.  Who knows, maybe this will take days more before they fledge.

A squawking magpie overhead sends the family inside, but only for a moment.

 

Now quiet.  10:38.  

Has the mid-morning magic time passed?  They are so unpredictable in behavior I hesitate to leave.

I hesitate to take my eyes off the nest.  Brother is a little agitated.  Though nothing like his older sister.  She was really animated, for days.  Brother bounces in and out but not to an extreme.  This looks like the “demanding lunch” behavior.  

Brother almost gets pushed out by his sister.  

He pecks at her, then relinquishes his spot.

 

 

13:46

Little girl sits in the doorway, crying a little, but mainly just forlornly chattering to herself.  She has no sisters to talk to anymore.  The excitement of getting her own bedroom now wears off as she has no one to talk to.  

She’s not nearly as animated as her departed sisters.  And her head does not look as large.  I’ve never seen one of them just sit out and chatter so continuously.  I would hear the chatter from inside the nest, but when they were extending outside the nest the other two made only the squawk crying noise.  

 

20:01

These little flicker stinks keep me up late, and keep their parents up late.  Any self-respecting bird baby should be asleep by now.  But little brother wants dinner and is letting the neighborhood know it.  He’s quite agitated, though nothing to compare to his sisters’ behavior.

 

Diary

 

17. Juni. 2022

Diary

Flickers

08:12

Little brother is very excited this morning, more so than ever, by far.  And inside the home I can see him stretching his wings!  His older sisters never had a chance to do that.

He’s more filled out, more buffed.  He’s stretching far out of the doorway.  He’s snacking on passing bugs.

He’s getting as much doorway time as his sister, a marked change.

Mom’s fed them twice this morning.

Things go from wild excitement to complete calm, back and forth.  It may be a month before these guys leave.

it’s just nuts watching this. 

There is very little calling from the parents this morning.  Only once I heard a very distant call, and consequently the babies are not nearly as excited.  Maybe they’ll be here two months from now.

Little brother looks perfectly content to just watch the scenery.  Little sister seems content to nap inside.  

It seems warmer today.  Will that lower their energy level and make it less likely to fledge?  Maybe they’ll be here three more months.

Usually the babies seem to know when a parent is around, though I do not hear the parent.  (I accidentally bump some button that turns on Farsi or Pashto script, a reminder that in a few days I must return to the thick of the Afghan/Naz craziness.)

Brother cries.  Is a parent around?  Last time a parent arrived his sister starting muscling him out of the doorway.  He’s not stretching out    much.  Now he gets a little more frantic.  Always a need to scratch intercedes.  Now he stretches out more.  But then prudence brings him back into the secure home from where he can safely squawk.

 

Brother flies!  He got excited, kept stretching out further and further, there was not any audible parent call I could hear, but he kept crying, stretching, finally almost his whole body, more and more, looking in all directions, finally launching!  But launching to the right, toward the house, turning right toward the door, doing a 270 degree bank, swooping under the eave, and into the ash tree at the corner of the house!

Now where is little sister?  

 

08: 30, he fledges.

I can follow him to the ash tree.  What an opportunity.

Has his red tail feathers.  Looks all dressed for being a grown up flicker.

Obviously smaller than an adult, but I say that only because I’ve been watching adults and babies together for so long.  Otherwise I would not recognize him as a fledgling, other than the floppy behavior.  

He’s in shock.  Hardly moving.  

“Where am I?  What just happened?”

08:38,

Slow motion rollover!  Can’t hold on!  He tucks his red tail to balance against a trunk that’s not there, and his grip is too weak to hold the branch, so inexorably he rolls backwards.

In slow motion he flops completely over!

Hangs upside down!  Has no idea what to do, but “I know this can’t be right”.

Flapples around…..flapples over to the trunk, 

Finally gets vertical, holding on as woodpeckers do, and more akin to what he must have done in the deep nest...and how deep it must have been to hold four birds this size and have room for them to disappear.

“Whew, OK, this is better.”

Works up a little way to where the large branch broke off in the giant snow storm a few weeks ago.  

Perfect!  

Can use tail for balance.

Lot of broken soft wood.

Pecks and pecks.  Finds breakfast.  

How tired are his little wings after a first flight?

Lots of pruning and fluffing of wings that can stretch for the first time.  

Maybe this little spot at the broken limb will be his new home forever.  

But no.  After about twenty-five minutes he finally works up higher in tree.

But enough of exploring.  He cries, that familiar cry.  “This was fun, and I’m a big boy now, but it’s time for mom and dad to bring me breakfast.”

Over and over, floppling, flappling, can’t balance, flailing around in the midst of the leaves.  What if he has a fear of heights? 

No stable.  Now looking, looking, looking, all around at the amazing new world.  The same sort of excited looking just a little while ago he did from the nest, but now in a different universe,

09:08

flies!  Strong and normal and adult-like, a big boy now, to trees in Bill’s yard, and out of my life.  Has that white bottom spot.

How did he pick that direction?  Was it just for the joy of flying?

How important are the random drives and choices in our lives, random choices that shape our lives and the world.

Thank You.  Thank You.  Thank You.

What an amazing opportunity, to watch his behavior immediately after fledging.

I would have figured sister would fly first.

She’s still in the nest, little head occasionally poking up, but not out.  With her brother gone she really has no driving reason to leave.  She disappears for an extended period.

If I listen carefully I expect to hear the sounds of renovation projects from inside the now spacious home, and if watching carefully I expect to see one of those little dump slides used in demolition projects to extend from the door with older sisters’ and brother’s stuff sliding down the chute.

What I do actually hear is a soft little chatter, littlest sister talking to herself, perhaps trying to talk herself into doing what she has to do sooner or later.  It would surely help if a sibling would come back to tell her what it’s like out there!  

13:33

Littlest sister sits in the door, looking around, hopping a little bit.  For hot afternoon this is extra active.  She cried quite a bit, but got no lunch.  She did get an answer, from parent or sibling?  It sounded like sibling.

Hard to imagine anything happening now in this heat.  Had the others not fledged I would not wait and watch.  But she’s a little wtitchy, and things happen fst with them.

She just won’t relax and take a nap.  But it’s probably just heat keeping her in the door.  I would love to see this last baby fledge.  Now crying again.  Little squawks and unease persist.  Her breast in the doorway.  This is not typical hot afternoon behavior.  She knows things have changed.  She’s looking all around.  A large fly makes her retreat inside for a moment when it buzzes right toward her.

Looking.  Looking.  Looking more than crying.  That’s what her brother did.  It feels like it would not take much to send her flying.  I type that as she retreats inside.  But even now she’s restless, chattering in a quiet voice, active in the shadows of the soon to be empty home.  Now back in the doorway.  

No parents, which is typical for heat of afternoon.  

she just can’t quite full relax.

All three fledglings launched mid-morning.  Will she wait to repeat the pattern tomorrow?

Looking at the world, sizing it up.  The first two flew in a directin they had seen.  Little brother swerved behind the tree, into things he had never seen before.  

She squawks, cries, over and over.  To no avail.

13:44

Maybe having the house to herself is not all it was cracked up to be.  She said “I knew I could wait them out and clim the whole place”, but now has second thoughts about that plan.  

Cries and cries.  

Not much feeding today at all.  Maybe that’s part of the strategy to lure the babies out.  

She’s not nearly as animated and not stretching out nearly as far as the othes.  Though now a little further.  She acts like a parent is near.  Ihear nothing.  Now, there’s the call, maybe from the ponderosa.  She’s excited.  Leaning out.  Really stretching out.  Cryng.  Body fills the doorway.  Insistent crying.  

I hear flapping behind me.  Baby chatters loudly.  Is a parent behind me?  13:47.

Now!  Mom to the rescue!  Lunch!  Oh boy!  And she has it all to herself1  Now this is the life.  This is why she stuck around and waited out the others.

Mom leaves, cries continue.  She’s still leaning out.  

The doorway is now shaded.  That may up her energy.

Squeeks and squawks.  In and out.   Again.  But not too far out.  In and out.  She’s just not as “stretchy” as her siblings.  But she’s really cbouncing.  She’s really thinking about this.  They seem to get into this agitated state, and the decision can tip eithr way.

She’s quiet.  Grabs a snack.  There will be no surviving bugs on that side of the tree trunk.  

Now settling into her previous warm day routine.  Agitation subsided.  Long tongue grabbing as passing snacks.  

That lunch must have not been satisfying.

Not stretching out at all.  

Now out of sight.

 

16:46

Crying for dinner.  Talking to herself.  

 

18:27

A new sound from littlest sister!  That quick staccato trilling sound that adults make!  Then it’s back to screeching for dinner.  

 

19:31

Crying heart out. Utterly alone.  No parent meals for ages.  No siblings.  Crying, crying.  Just frantic.  She's added immensely to her vocabulary.  All kinds of flicker sounds I’venot heard from a baby.

19:37

She gets fed!  Mom to the rescue!  

Still unsettled though.  Hopping in and out.  It’s way to late to fledge, but she’s so overwrought.  Her body fills the doorway.  That dinner must have been anothr less than satisfactory meal.

She’s not letting up at all.  She keeps stretching out further.  In and out.  In and out.  But it’s too late!  Surely this will be a false alarm.  

but in and out.  In and out.

So loud!  

So alone.

 

18.    Juni. 2022

07:38

Little stink did not wake up until 06:15.  First squawk at 06:21.  What a teenager!

Mom fed her once this morning.

When begging for food the little stink puffs her feathers to look more like a helpless baby.  As soon as she’s done begging, she’s back to her sleek, adult appearance.  What a teenager.

She’s just not as animated as her siblings.  She is more talkative though.

A jay has been cruising by, hopefully not a bad portent.  

Squawks for breakfast start again.

Bodes comes to the screen door, hoping to finally get out.  He’s been kept off the front decks for weeks now in our efforts to not frighten the little family.  If he came out now I think the little teenager stink would go back in and never fledge.

She’s stretching out a little more.  Sometimes she stretches her tongue way out into mid-air.  I don’t know what that’s about.  It’s kind of grotesque looking.

She’s much shyer about my movements now.  When I make a motion while standing she retreats inside.  None of the others siblings did that.  

I hear an answering cry.  Back and forth they talk, sister, answer, sister, answer.  It’s almost like an echo it’s so consistent.  

But that’s not enticing her out.  

There’s a little stretch.  Like her brother, she’s stretching toward the house.  And then she relaxes.

This is prime time, 07:46,  approaching fledge time of her siblings.  Will she follow the same pattern?  

Now quiet.  

Tht puff behavior is fascinating.  That’s why her brother often looked so much smaller, when the sisters were puffed to look like they were downy babies and the brother was not.

You would think she would leave this morning, but she really does seem uninterested.  But of course I’m just projecting.

She seemed so lonely this morning when she appeared alone in the doorway.  But I’m just projecting.

Some clouds today.  If it gets rainy she’ll never leave.  

It’s been fascinating and exciting to watch them, but it’s time to bring this show to a close and move on.

Learning out again.  Crying again.  07:50.  I’m sure she’ll surprise me, one way or another.  

She’s puffed, hoping for breakfast.  

It would be fun to have seen all four fledgings.

The jay swoops over again, and that gets littlest sister’s attention.  Now a magpie in the top of the tree.  Now it squawks, and others squawk.  Not a good time to fledge.  She had retreated, but now she looks out, in spite of the nearby magpies.

Leaning toward the house.  More magpies.  She looks up at them flying over, curious but not too bright.  Now squawking for breakfast….  I would think she should lay low in the presence of magpies.  

Maybe she’s beg enough she doesn’t have to worry.  

Squawks from her, squawks from magpies.  

Life in bird world.

Magpies closer.  A hollow in a tree is a great bunker compared to nests built of twigs out in the open.

07:56.  Squawks and looking around.  A little agitation.  A little more.  Is this the regular pattern before fledging?  Or is she just getting  comfortable.

Agitation passes.  Back to just begging.

She has never looked around as much as her siblings, who would crane their necks to look in all directions.  

If she’s at the door, she’s begging for food.  She’s not as active in snagging passing bugs either.  Now in and out, in and out.  In and out, in and out.  But not very far out.  But she keeps up that in and out.  And then stops.

08:01.  All quiet.  Cloudier.  

She chatters.  Now moves to a different angle, stretching out a little sideways.  Back to squawking for breakfast. C’mon girl!  

It so easy to  project judgment onto her.  She’s not ready.  She’s a lazy teenager.  She’s not intellectually curious.  All accurately reflecting my imagination, and saying nothing about the truth of her nature.  

 

How many people in our world get this opportunity?...a miraculous opportunity of location, situation, Nature, the luxury of time.  How many people would want this opportunity.?  

A crow caws as it passes, drawing littlest sister’s attention skyward.  

The percentage of people with such opportunity to observe is probably far less today than in centuries past.  You won’t see this bird show in the big city.

 

Agaiiiiin, she retreats from a flying insect approaching the door.

 

a bit agitated.  A bit of in and out.  It is prime time after all.

 

After the collapse of civilization will people be more interested in such natural events?

 

She’s stretching more!  Most of her body out!  The nost yet.  Kind of like last night.

Pretty exciting!...such a tease.

now back in and out of sight!  

Still a little agitated.  Still chattering.  Lordy, what a chatter box.  Now back in.

 

Now just sitting in the doorway.  But head is energetic.  Looking around, quick motions.  And asking for breakfast.

A mob of magpies grows closer.

After the collapse of civilization will people have interest only in what will feed and protect them?....which will put us pretty much at the level of littlest sister.  

What rare confluence of circumstance allows the luxury of being fascinated by nature?

 

Mom or dad calls?  But no response from littlest sister.  Now a trilling call.  Still no response.  

In all times, have there been a few entranced by Nature?....and why?

 

09:18

A slight change in the observing.  When I enter the deck little sister disappears.  I can sit here and type without bothering her, but entering either from the door or up the stairs sends her into hiding.  This time she came back out within a few seconds though.  

She’s crying.  Asking for breakfast.  No parent visits since early this morning.  

She’s not too agitated.  Just sitting in the door occasionally crying.  

09:32

Stretching out.  Crying.  But not stretching out too far.  She’s so shy!  Her hiding when I appear is new.  Now she hops out a little further.  Is she spooked by spending her first night alone?  Of course she doesn’t want to leave!  Still no answers.

Stretching toward the house.  Agitated.  The tie is right.  But I’ve seen her do this before.  A little further.  Right and left.  Well out.  Crying.  Crying.  

Back in.  

A call back!  The trilling call.  

Oh such a torment!  Another trilling response.  And more.  Ongoing.  Encouraging her.  

And back in.

Such a short time ago they all sounded like barely audible little bubblers.  Now so loud!  So piercing!  

And she calms down.

10:45

She flew!  Oh my gosh!  That was the most emotional launch of all.  She was absolutely tortured by the prospect.

She cried and cried, and fluffed and fluffed.

Bless her heart, she had such a shy personality.

I can’t convey the emotions of this moment.  She flew!

She called and cried, and there have been no answers for a long time.  She seemed so terribly alone.  Nothing was working.  Here agitation had ceased.  She seemed utterly destitute and hopeless.  

She just looked pitiful.  This was not how she wanted it to be.  It really did seem like desperation that finally got her out.

Finally, finally, (me watching from the dining room window so as not to scare her back in) she got quiet, a different quiet.  Then she got her feet on the edge of the doorway, the first time I had seen her feet in all this time.  (Her siblings often sat with feet gripping the edge.)  She sat on the edge, out there, like a kid on the edge of a diving board, her body out much further than ever before, committed.  She just sat, long enough that I could call Karen to come watch, which she did. ( Karen finally got to see a fledging!)  

She didn’t do the in-out thing.  She did look around, obviously nervous, looking all around in quick head turns, but stable and committed out there on the edge of the rest of her life.  

That moment, that commitment, that pure courage, sitting on the edge,...it was so much more aware, more premeditated, than the in and out unplanned “instinct that takes over” fledgings of her siblings.  

I think she’s my favorite.  She didn’t want to leave her siblings.  She was distraught after a night alone.  She was aware of what a huge leap departure would be.  Then she demonstrated such resolute courage.  It went from “I don’t think this will ever happen” to “oh my gosh, she’s going to do it” in a moment of decision.  The others’ decision seemed automatic, instinctive, out of their control.  Littlest sister though seemed to make the decision consciously, went from putting all effort into sustaining the life of home she knew to resignation and resolve to move on to what had to come next.  

She flew!  Straight and level!  Direct toward the street like her sisters.  

I raced across, not expecting to see her, but too connected to not try.

 

I can’t believe that little secure nest cavity is empty now!  What an intense nexus of life it was!  I will look at it for a long, long time with deep feelings.

I hear calls!  It’s probably her, calling from across the street.  Still alone.  Still trying.  

 

I am shocked at the emotions I feel.  I thought I would just feel glad that I could get back to what passes for normal life.  I had already seen three fledgings from this family, and I was anxious for her to get on with it, and frustrated that she hadn’t yet.

But these last moments, these few hours this morning, so clearly captured the stress and fear and uncertainty and unknown of fledging, much more than the previous three.

That little girl.  

Thank You, thank You, thank You.

And thank Karen for her amazing patience and support.  She says she’s so glad I got to see all four fledge and it was a good investment of time.  No one else would say that.  

What a surprisingly wonderful and profound experience.

How quiet it is in the “treehouse” without that little family!  All four gone.  They had become a ridiculously significant part of my life.  

How strongly the emotions still run!  She was the best.  What a grand conclusion to an odd little interlude of life that so vanishingly few would understand.

Time to let the Bodes out on the deck.  

She flew!  

 

Reminder

Universal facts:

The structure of this world and the resulting nature of this generation means there will always be struggle and suffering.  

The miracles of the Christos and Purpose sustain the miraculous survival of Life in the face of worldly entropy and human evil.

Under all circumstances humanity will always seek - and if necessary contrive -  meaning and explanation.  If there is a vacuum of meaning and understanding, it will be filled by something, not necessarily something good.  This is a law of human nature.

If momentarily empowered with material security this generation will turn to themselves and their own power for their salvation, blinded to the spiritual.  

Occasionally, rare and brief episodes of social stability and broad communication allow miraculous, momentary propagation of information and ideas.

The message of Unity and Choice is unique, a unique perspective, a needed perspective on eternal truths.  That unique, needed message and this miraculous and momentary opportunity are not to be denied.  

That real message, as always, will have to furtively whisper in the catacombs until a miracle wraps it in some worldly marketable guise to render it marketable on large scale.  That miracle is not seeable, not inevitable, and not necessary that at least some individuals be uplifted and encouraged by the words.  The effort is worthwhile, if even a few are reached.  

This is a moment of clarity to discern the situation.  The world provides only discouragement. This is not a project for worldly success.  Such message has never been a project for worldly success. 

 

Reliobs

Worldly needs.  Worldly power.  Worldly accomplishments.  Worldly popularity.  Worldly acceptance.  Worldly security.

The adjective "worldly" means each of those is an imperative, dictating our behavior.  The adjective "worldly" renders each an illusion, a mirage, a teasing wraithe.

We will chase each, for we have no choice.

We will pretend we don't crave each of them, we will distract ourselves with meditations and liturgies, we will add transcendence to our cravings, and then we will return to our real worldly hungers.  

Such is our nature and our fate.  We will drop transcendence and enlightenment in a heartbeat if the world makes us a better offer.  Though we will still trot out our transcendent experiences if they serve to make us popular and accepted.  

Worldly needs.  Worldly power.  Worldly accomplishments.  Worldly popularity.  Worldly acceptance.  Worldly security.  Give up the quest for them?  Maybe some do.  Most of us relinquish the hunt only when we have failed enough times that we finally give up.  

Blessed failure.  Once bereft of worldly options, then we'll finally give transcendence and enlightenment a try.  

Blessed failure, stripping away the opportunity for worldly illusions, silencing the tempting wraiths.  

The mystics that would teach us of spiritual realms were probably not particularly good at any worldly vocation.  The mystic career is one of last resort.  Reading scripture and cashing unemployment checks go hand in hand.  

That doesn't negate the mystic's wisdom.  Truth learned through transcendence is of inestimable value, as are carpentry skills and successful child rearing (however one defines "success" in that impossibly stressful undertaking.)

Most people would do well to invest more time in contemplative endeavors.  But most people should not give up their day-jobs in order to pursue transcendence.

 

Worldly needs.  Worldly power.  Worldly accomplishments.  Worldly popularity.  Worldly acceptance.  Worldly security.

Spiritual wisdom does not make the desire for them disappear.  Wisdom just leaves one feeling inadequate and silly for still being tempted by them after seeing how ephemeral they are.  

Accept your worldly nature, then don't succumb to it.  Accept it as a wrestling partner, never to be vanquished, but hopefully making the soul stronger in the struggle.

(Carpentry and contemplative prayer, both, and all tasks, provide opportunity for Unity, Unity will Creation in its diverse forms.)

 

Reliobs

Great planet show continued this morning.  Finally got up early enough to see them in all their glory against a dark sky.

Yesterday I tried to clean out a folder of old warranties and instructions.  I found myself paging through my entire adult life.  The binoculars Wayne gave me.  The Ted Williams sleeping bag.  (What did Ted Williams know about sleeping bags?  That was an early unrecognized example of meaningless marketing manipulations.  But the bag still works well!)  My gosh, I had no idea how much that Pentax camera cost!  And the Phoenix stereo system.  Man, what a seductive appeal, that black casing, the performance specs, the elegant display lighting.  I was utterly seduced by the technology.  

I thought I had escaped such seductions.  But this month's affair with car research rudely revealed I can be as seduced as ever by technology.  Such fulfillment of wishes it offers!  And so much more manageable, under our control, obeying our wishes, compared to people.

Oh yes, black metal, discreet display diode lights, an armada of firmware to execute our wishes……so much more appealing than unpredictable, cruel, stupid people!  

Anything safely material is more appealing than dangerous people.  

Oh, the seduction of the purchase.  Oh, the risks of the people interactions.

Little wonder it is so hard for the rich to enter the Kindom.  It is just too easy to buy that sweet anodized metal wonder in its gorgeous oak cabinet than to wrestle with the emotionally wrenching vicissitudes of relationships.  Yet only in interactions and relationships is anything eternal to grow.  

Oh the appeal of possessions!....exactly what we think we want and need.  But our destiny lies elsewhere, eternity lies elsewhere, Home lies elsewhere.

Buy what you must, while you can, for a brief moment.  You probably can't resist it.  But sooner or later it will rust or break or be wrecked.  Pray that sooner or later you will be a little less blinded by shiny objects.  Then perhaps you will be better able to catch through the material glare, a glimpse of Home, something eternal, your Destiny liberated from material possessors.   

 

Observation

Ending years.

The ending of years.

Age taking the years, the age that gave the years.

Don't expect too much when approaching the end.

Maybe it will be anticlimactic.

The one thing we all share we will generally not talk about.

In those coming post-collapse years will anyone live long enough to talk of aging?

At what point in history did people en-masse share the experience of aging?....as opposed to just a tiny fraction of the population making it to old age.

It seems there is no point writing for old people.  Their minds are set.  Their beliefs are cast in concrete.  They don't have enough time to do anything with whatever they might learn.  

No, writing and teaching are always aimed at young people - open minded, learning, facing their first disasters - young people.

Old people learning something radically new?  Hard to envision that.  

But in fact it's hard to envision younger people learning anything radically new.  Might the tiny fraction of old people willing to learn be the same fraction that was willing to learn when younger?  

It's hard to imagine the people who wanted to learn losing that passion.  

Might old people have as much potential for learning radical new perspectives as young people?  Might some old people have learned just how untrustworthy most of what we were taught is?  Might old people, a tiny fraction of course, be cynical and burned out on traditional wisdom?  

Age probably makes no difference in the willingness to learn.  Desire to learn is a choice.  The people who chose it when young will likely keep choosing it when old.  

Learning is a form of Unity.  Hence accessing it is an expression of the Choice.  As such it is available to all regardless of age. 

Do not withhold wisdom from the foolish young or fading old.  The vanishing fraction making the Choice to learn is independent of age.  

Poetry?

Something rustles in the brush.  What surprise of this world will intrude?  

While waiting for sunrise I felt a tug on my pants leg.  A little mausl!  Such a blessed little entry into my reverie!  

Moist air this morning, thickly alive.

What might it be?

those sounds in the bushes.

What revelation or shock or wonder or terror awaits?

Appear or not, 

imagination will paint the image.

Wait, wait,

let Reality reveal itself.  

Let imagination reveal your powers of Creation.

But let imagination create within the grand symphony.

Dangerous?

Of course.

But what is safety, after all?

Security a momentary illusion,

soon enough to be dispelled.

Look directly at the illusion of security,

discern its deceptive material legerdemain, 

and see past it to genuine security,

soul's security,

enduring and embracing.

Saints and martyr's spoke of it.

Ingrained fear would deny it.

But you have known it,

under the wreckage,

in the terror,

when the mind could not comprehend it,

but it was there,

giving courage,

holding, holding.

Fear and pain are automatic.

They accompany entry into this world.

But the spiritual security does not leave,

even if driven from consciousness.

Always holding,

always sustaining,

always, always.

You know it,

here above,

even in confusion.

It is only world's confusion.

It will pass.

You know the foundation, 

you know it well.

Hold it, as it always holds you.

Poetry

Above den

Coyote puppies are back!

Too precious!

Thank You!  Thank You!  Thank You!

What a gift!

Running - running - running

Maybe six?  Big family.

Pretty grown up.  I can't believe I've missed them all these weeks.

 

Playing - playing - playing

Down challenge - hop up on the culvert - wrestle - rolly over

Tossing - tossing - some treasure - tossing into the air - chase when it rolls 

More tossing than I've seen with previous families

Finally settling down -

But one is adventurous - 

Heads north -

Further, further,

Another treasure! - tossing! Tossing! Then digging after it in soft dirt - toss again!  Chase again - toss straight up and dig again - dig and dig - till sitting in a hole of her own making.

 

A cough of a passing walker grabs attention.

Siblings watch the adventurous one until it becomes too tempting and they must see what treasures are being discovered.

North they go, 

Boldly, hopefully not too far.

 

A gift, such a gift this sight,

but the world wants me to do so much,

all awaiting, impatient deadlines awaiting.

 

So quickly the fuzzy distractions have disappeared,

still somewhere down there,

now hidden from my view,

the thought of schedules and obligations not dissipating the gift,

but blinding me to it.

 

Reliobs

 

On the deck in pre-dawn dark.  He asked to go out.

Alate!  In the dark I felt it land on me, looked, and it was a winged ant!

I look, surprised to find dense coverage of ants on the concrete!

Winged messengers are hopping like popcorn at the end of the carport!  The pavement is alive with motion!

They are launching!....in the dark!

With the right angle the flashing wings were a dense cloud in the headlamp beam.

 

In the dark on recent morning, matrimonial flight from the colony at the edge of the carport!

 

Unless I held my headlamp at just the right angle, I could not see them, but could feel them, in large number, flying into the back of my hand!

There was a bright swarm of alates around the carport light!

But the lights are confusing and distracting them!  I go inside so the motion sensor lights will go out.

They, following natural instincts, are distracted from their potential and fulfillment, just as we are distracted by material possessors, entertainment, and destructive relationships.

They can’t help it.

Can we?

 

 

 

Observation

Above coyote den

 

Sunrise,

Salmon orange furnace below

Bands of molten silver in dark racks above

 

Furnace glow inexorably pursues rising silver, glowing ever brighter.

Pups are waking.

 

First runs of the morning ensue.  But it's warm, and run-chase quickly slows.

 

They alertly, even majestically, stand on the den to see source of sounds.  

 

One runs right over its sibling to steal a treasure!

 

The treasure has a ringed tail!  A Waschbaer!

 

It's fairly big.  A lot to carry for a puppy.

 

The little masked Waschbaer face flops lifelessly as its body provides nutrition for the family.

 

The lack of competition and urgency about the Waschbaer says the family is well fed.

 

Lazy summer morning.  Five all lie before the den entrance.

 

For amazingly long stretches the momentary possessor of the recently deceased Waschbaer  will stand perfectly still gnawing at one point on the Waschbaer carcass.  "Red" I dub this pup, with its slightly ruddier coat.

Its sibling contents itself playing with a crumpled plastic water bottle.

Eventually Red shares.  But in the process for the first time I hear a yip from the family.  

 

Passing joggers above send some pups racing for the safety of the den, while others remain unfazed.  

Gray is a worrier, alertly standing on the den to spy the source of every sound before diving into the safety of the den.  Red is oblivious, intent on his gnawing.  

 

07:34.

All have disappeared.  Only the plastic water bottle play-toy remains visible outside the den.  

 

12. Juli. 2022

Coyote overview.

05:55

The teenagers must have had a late night.  Only one has briefly come out of the den before a jogger with dog sent it back in.  With binoculars I scan the valley to no avail.

Red rocks glow orange in low angle sunlight casting a sharp north-south line, for this moment on this date the earth's shadow aligning along the bases of the vertical sandstone bases as far north and south as I can see.

Curious, the lack of coyotes this morning.  (06:03)

The natural rhythm of sunrise heals my soul.  But teenage coyotes have their own schedules.  

The faintest air motion, too slight to warrant the title "breeze", delivers shadowed chill, soon enough to be dissipated by direct sun.

Still I scan to no avail.  Was yesterday my last chance to see the family play?  

Surely I should make better use of this time.  But surely I cannot leave quite yet.  

As earlier, little loner comes out and sits at the entrance.  Did brothers and sisters go their own ways last night, leaving just this one in the den?  

Such a still scene compared to yesterday!  

Now loner has disappeared.

The day had to come, but I never like it.  It is a natural rhythm, but natural rhythms include death.

The chewdeled water bottle toy lies deserted ten meters from the den.

If the pups have moved on, that is a life thing, a natural thing, a good thing.  But selfishly for me a crummy thing, and for the moment I don't feel like pretending otherwise.  

Two bucks enter the scene from the north, grazing the green valley floor.  I am immensely blessed and grateful to be able to immerse in such scenes available to so few people.  But I miss the coyote pups!  In their absence yesterday's doubts about spending time to watch their play are rendered mute.  

06:29.  Still I wait.  Yesterday they displayed none of the distant roaming that families of previous years have in the days before disappearing.  Yesterday they remained close to the den, everyone, even red, repeatedly scurrying to the shelter of the den if joggers got too intrusive.  It doesn't fit that the family would have scattered without transition days of ever wider roaming.

The bucks are now 300 meters from the den.  Sun-line 30 meters.  

I'm grateful to have seen the one this morning.  

Such moments, watching coyote pups, are vanishingly rare in our modern world, gems, treasures not to be squandered.  

06:42.  Sun hits the den entrance.  

I should use the time to check email.  I dread checking email.  

The bucks wandered off west.  A doe prances up the opposite ridge.  The water-bottle toy glints in the freshly arrived sun.  

A broken brown juniper branch gets me to look with binoculars just in case.  

Sunlight has reached the bottom of the valley.  The world's demands grow more insistent in my head.  The frequency of passing joggers behind me increases.  

I will draw to a close my inexplicable and indefensible life-watch, until the next inexorable blessing munificently halts my worldly productivity.  

 

13. Juli. 2022

Led!

05:55

Above den

No one.  Wait.

06:05

No one.  Wait.

06:20

No one.  Too much to do today.  Got to go.

But can't just leave.

Walk a few meters. Look.  Use binoculars.

Walk a few meters.  Look.  Use binoculars.

Repeat.

One last time.

06:35

There!  A flash!  In the east side grove!  Just a flash.  Not repeated.  But clear and unambiguous.

Watch a little.  Then walk a little.  Look a little.  Scan with binoculars a little.  Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

There!  Clear!  Right below me!  Loping!  Loping!  Gorgeous!

Turns!  Looks directly at me!  40 meters?

Barks at me!  Keeps barking, looking right at me!  Then howls!  My long, long wish of seeing a coyote while it yips and howls, and it's happening!  As I watch with binoculars, the coyote filling my view.  It continues the aria, looking directly at me, when jot raising its nose.  Thank You!  Thank You!  Thank You!  

Bit this direct interaction is a potential disaster.  I retreat out of sight, for the coyote's awareness of me could chase it from this safe spot.  

Oh blessed calling, Spirit, instinct, what a gift!  But I won't sit and observe from this ridge again this month.  The  coyotes are too aware now, my presence potentially too disturbing.

They have left the den.  No more family group play times.  But what a goodbye!  Thank You.  Thank You.  Thank You.

 

14. Juli. 2022

Diary

Obs

Ranch.  06:48

One of the geese parents flew away!

I came by on my sunrise walk and everyone was here.  Both families were doing their morning walkabout, this time toward the blacksmith shop.

I assessed they would do a first flight in five days.  They were so far doing none of the pre-flight flapping of previous families, and the youngsters were still visibly smaller than parents.

Back at home while putting up my gear I swore I heard geese flying!  Loud and clear, I could not imagine geese at the ranch would sound so loud.  There are no migrating geese at this late date.  I grab gear and shoes and scoot back to the ranch.  

Only one parent of the younger family remains!  Both families are quickly walking around Orchard House, and talking a lot, seemingly agitated.  

What happened?!  Will the parent return?  

07:06

The family seems upset, walking quickly past the pond and to the blacksmith shop.  They are fully separated from the older family, which I've not seen except for once when the older family went walk about when the younger family was too young.

The family is spread out more than ever, little ones all over the field, one in particular making odd sounds and far away.

And there's the missing parent!  At the far edge of the field!  All quickly rejoin, now again a tight group.  For the first time since the parent left I see the babies eating again.  

 

15. Juli. 2022

05:44

Diary

Obs

Pre-sunrise.  Walking south along ridge.  Reach the sunrise gap.  A gruff, low bark!  The same pseudo-bark as day before yesterday!  I know that bark!  Does it mean a coyote on the west side of the gap sees me?  I get behind the rock face so as to not disturb the guy.  After a minute I carefully peer around the edge of the shale slab.  I hear the slight little subtle bark again, but it comes from behind me.  That must mean it's just a neighborhood dog.  I turn to go on and there looking up at me from the lower social trail is the coyote!  Glorious!  He looks for a moment, then trots on south……with a buck in pursuit!....maintaining the same pace!.....antlers down!

Though fascinated, I do not follow.  Coyote has enough stress in his life.

Fascinating how abruptly the family went from tight family group to scattered and individual.  What triggers that?  It is strikingly like bird fledging.  It is strikingly like our entering this world from the Garden.

Upon their departure a bunny hops toward me on my trail.

Minutes later a doe with two bouncing spotted Bambi's enters the scene, joining two majestic bucks.

Such blessings.  Such blessings.

Thank You.  Thank You.  Thank You.

 

Obs

The older goose family is gone!  One of the parents of the remaining family cries and cries, but gets no response. 

 

16. Juli. 2022

06:00

Diary

Observation

Thank You!  Thank You!  Thank You!

Now north of the corral the younger goose family grazes.  A huge walkabout!  

I had been heading up the hill when I heard honking!  I turned around and raced to the ranch, wondering if someone in our family was flying.

No sight of the family!

Then in the distance I spy them on the  lawn!  As I approach they start running and honking and flapping and en masse lift off the ground!....skimming the surface!.... heading to the north corner of the corral.  What a gift!  Thank You for that distant honking that called me here.  I got to see little family fly!  How I wanted to see that moment.  I am so greedy about such joyous life moments.  

They've now marched along the north fence and back.  

They can fly! 

I have to leave.  But at least I got to see them fly!  What a gift and moment of joy.  

Blessedly quiet this morning

 

 

The geese are climbing the hay stack beside the corral.  Even in the face of all the help people desperately need, I so long to stay and savor this moment and await the family's glorious flight.  Such moments of triumphant life are a balm for the soul in this harsh world.  

Such a thrill to see little family fly.  Such a blessing.  Thank You.

 

I had a moment to pick up two eye-catching books.  One went on and on about how we have no souls and we are just an assemblage of molecules.  The other hammered on the theme of fundamentalist Christians taking over the U.S. military.  I write of a perspective that is an antidote to both poisons.  But those books will sell.  No one would have interest in mine.  

What am I doing?  Futile madness.  The message is so needed, but I am so inept at making it enticing and palatable to a people with no interest in it.

17. Juli. 2022

Diary

Obs

05:35I hurry to the ranch.  I hear geese!  They are still here!  I follow the sound, hoping to find them before they leave for good

I watch a moment.  Occasionally one or another flaps, creating a whooshing sound of air.

Then dad starts marching….faster……gives a little call…..faster….all call in response…..flapping…running…in the air!....disappearing north…higher than yesterday….I follow the sound…..they are circling around…away from the ranch…east….I follow.  There in the construction area they have landed.  Hardly a pleasant locale, but new wings were able to make it this far.  They settle into exploring, heads up, not eating, learning the universe is larger than their little pond.

06:31

Back to marching.  In and out of the retention basin they march, up and down and around.  I had hoped to spend the morning in the ranch.  Instead standing in the midst of demolished Nature is uncomfortable.  It seems this could go on forever.  

The earlier decision to fly had little warning, but it seemed intentional.  It was not a spontaneous burst but more an "it's time to go" announcement by dad.  

As kids graze dad takes the high ground and keeps watch.  Now family joins him.  They saunter toward me.  

I'm aware I've given up trying to make this narrative interesting as I accept my inability to hold the attention of anyone about anything.

07:03

Finally the family climbs to the new road-bed, marches along it, and in the distance slowly marches out of sight at the base of the east side of the valley.  It seems a bit anticlimactic, hardly the grand and majestic takeoff I had hoped to witness.  Considering the frequent routinely unforeseeable developments of life anymore, it seems peculiarly appropriate to have such a departure.  

But dog-walkers are over there.  They disturb the family.  They take off!  Flying this way.  Over the ranch.  

Really flying!  Not just a point A to point B practice.  Circling, around, soaring, over the west ridge, higher, finally descending to familiar hay piles by the corral!  Glorious!  

Settled in for breakfast, from the south come honks from a different source!  The older family of four young ones is returning!  The first time I've seen them in days!  The young family calls up, the older family lands, they march toward each other making odd little sounds, reunion!  

More than I could have hoped for.  

The morning warms.  Everyone settles in.  Thank You.  Thank You.  Thank You.

14:20  90F

Both families on the lawn.  Close to each other but  not too close.  Wonderful to have both families back!  

18. Juni. 2022

Thank You!  Thank You!  Thank You!

At 05:37 I got to see the geese launch!  I came around the east end of the pond just in time to see both families in the corral field,  marching together in that fast paced direct march they do before launching, a little faster - a little faster - a quiet word from dad - and launch!  Both families together! - will they clear the tall trees along the creek?!  Yes!  Glorious!  In formation!  Fulfillment!  What a moment!  Thank You.  Thank You.  Thank You.  So joyous to see the families fly together.

I barely arrived in time.  It was still long till dawn.  Oh such a blessing, that uplifting moment I was blessed with exactly the right moment on a 63F morning with salmon streaks of clouds to see that launch.

05:57

I hear honking to the south. Here they come!

Gracefully landing in the  park.  They fly as they walk, two groups slightly separated but obviously together.  

Thank You.  Thank You.  Thank You.

 

19. Juli. 2022

Diary

Obs

06:08.  Pond.

Just the Marx brothers and me this morning.

We're left here.

No geese yesterday evening.  None this morning.  Very quiet.  No cries.

A couple of meters from me the Marx brothers preen and flap their wings, so tiny and stubby compared to the majestic goose wings.

We are left here.  It's a lovely place, one of the best.  

 

A quiet respite.

Pleasantly but disturbingly warm.

Walkers and joggers give pleasant greetings.

Low angle light plays on roofs and tree-tops.

All back to normal.

Such an exciting joy the geese brought!

And such poignant loss when unseasonal heavy snow killed the third family.

Only short weeks ago that snow, and now almost 80F before sunrise the morning after the other two families leave.

The geese will struggle in this new weather world.  We will all struggle.

 

Reliunif.lif

The pack of surly bucks dissuaded me from going up the ridge.

No geese here.  They flew!  This place gave them life and launched them into the distant world!  Astounding!  Miraculous!

Such a blessing to see their launch.

Already the goose poop begins to disappear from the sidewalks.  

What a life interlude!  

Oh to have the skills to convey the joy, wonder, and majesty of such life moments to someone.

Where are those two goose families now?  Will they find food and water?  Will they stick together?  Will they return next year?  

My hearing is attuned to listen for their calls.  A distant bark or bird or beep draws my attention, just in case.

But the fields remain empty.

Their launch from this place is akin to our launch from this world.  They could not stay here.  We cannot stay here.  The beauty of these empty fields is in their wondrous capacity to launch life into the world.  The beauty of this planet is in its ability to launch souls into eternity.

The sweet doggy walking couple says a robust "good morning".

 

An unusually large group marches in.  They stick together as the geese stuck together, a naturally programmed behavior.  They chatter amongst themselves as the geese continuously honk while in flight, maintaining connection.

Where are the goose families waking up this morning?  Do the elders in the group know the route and waypoints?  Will bulldozers have eliminated their rest stops and food sources since the last traverse of the vast distances?  

They can fly!  Astounding.  Inspirational.  Prophetic.

 

 

Hope, shiny hope,

Glistening,

            Sparkling, lying,

            Crushing, cruel

Hope.

            We grab it.

We grab its maddening, teasing, taunting visage,

Unable to restrain ourselves, 

for we know it exists, 

it is real,

 even if not in this life.  

 

 

Observation

Matrimonial flight.

At the back upper steps, outside gate.  I watch because I need to see someone succeed.  I need that reassurance, in the midst of all the patently hopeless struggle.  

There, that one alate, at the very miniscule tip of the thinnest, tallest sliver of grass, towering above the colony far below, having climbed in absolute faith commitment….then gone, to an unknown fate, but that momentous climb at least making possible, if not ensuring,  the fulfillment of potential and purpose.

A moment later a winged messenger alights on my sunglasses, reassuring me some will indeed take flight.

From ridge above give bucks descend, energetic, running in joyous bursts of speed, sporting impressive racks for this early in the season, one with the biggest rack changing course to run wild-eyed straight at me, prompting my hasty retreat inside the gate…..then in the next flash they are gone….large, majestic, snorting, and now utterly invisible to me.

Unfazed by my momentary mini-drama alates continue to launch.

This colony does a slow-motion, one at  time, late morning (07:00) protracted lunch.  The front colony did a massive pre-dawn swarming launch.

There!  One more successful individual launch to get me through my day!

 

Reliunif.lif

 

Sooner or later we have to admit that, by whatever words we might choose, what underlies almost everything we do and feel is a frantic hunger to love and be loved.

 

Sooner or later we have to admit, whether consciously or not, that we and people in general are too imperfect, obnoxious, untrustworthy, unstable, dangerous, selfish, and too mortal to fully satisfy this need to love and be loved.

 

Sooner or later, maybe much later, although we are fragile physical forms that evolved out of genetic chance,  we have to admit at least a suspicion that there may be something more, something more to us and others and the Universe in which we reside, something more to this nagging need to love and be loved than just biological imperative..

 

This is an exploration of the something more.

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine feeling loved, supported, encouraged, understood, affirmed, cherished, and accepted! 

Really, really picture that situation, that feeling, that relationship! 

 

 

 

 

 

Observation

 

Labor saving devices left us lazy and unfit for physical labor.  Likewise, entertainment and social media provide welcome respite from dangerous and frustrating, and tedious tasks of directly interacting with people.  Likewise, we are left lazy and unfit for social labor. 

 

Reliobs

This world is a spiritual Death Valley.  Almost nothing spiritual can grow, but oh, when it does grow, how beautiful it is.

 

Society is an entrapping spiritual ghetto.  Trevor Noah, in his book Born a Crime to which we listened on our drive out, describes how trapping life in the ghetto is.  Just the necessary actions to survive lead down paths that will keep you in the ghetto.  Escape is almost impossible.

 

Likewise, survival in our society entails actions required to survive that preclude the way of life necessary for spiritual growth beyond what the world offers. 

Poetry

Well listen damn it!

There are miracles afoot, like it or not.

We are doomed,

society is doomed,

civilization is doomed,

you and I are doomed,

and it all fits a glorious Purpose,

so deal with it.

 

This world is mad,

you’ve missed the point all along,

though it’s not entirely your fault.

 

Buy the crap they sell,

eat the pretty baubles of marketing,

swallow them whole,

hurry, hurry,

before the next poor bastard gets a chance.

 

Buy and eat as much as you can before the end,

hurry the arrival of the end,

accelerate the demise,

be a part of what the historians will wonder at,

be a part of what that future generation will curse.

 

Buy and eat,

spend and consume,

don’t think about it,

lest your emaciated soul notice it's gnawing hunger.

Reliobs

 

So, who are these “salt of the earth” people?

We could use a hell of a lot more of them.

Do they really have any positive influence?

Does any militia member not wield the blade because of some “salt of the earth” influence?

Dear God, if this is the world we get with the influence of the “salt of the earth” what lower depth of hell would it be without those grains?

 

It is extremely difficult to imagine anyone listening to that “salt of the earth”.  “The salt of the earth” must be quiet, don’t you think?  “Salt of the earth” isn’t going to blow its own horn.  People won’t even listen to the claxons and sirens screaming about the self-induced demolition of our lives, society, country, and world, they're sure as heck not going to listen to some reserved ‘salt of the earth” imploring us with reason. 

 

Rare stuff, this salt of the earth, and not in demand in spite of its scarcity.

 

Where is it when we need it, when our leaders act the fool and the masses sink further into madness?

 

“Salt of the earth”, necessary for survival, even if not recognized.  How does it exert its influence when not seen or recognized, when not heard or read? 

 

Should we aspire to be the salt?  Is it not more compelling to be the entree, the one seen and recognized and desired?  This societal  “salt” role is pretty unfulfilling, hidden and subtle and taken for granted. 

 

Yet it is everywhere, in the tears and the blood and sweat, coursing through the veins of society and regulating the heartbeat of what passes for civilization.  A word here, a smile there, a sentence of wisdom excerpted from a volume, a gentle restraint, a promise kept…….the salt is there, ameliorating the harshness, preserving some compassion, facilitating the reconciliation.

 

Never in the headlines, devoid of honors and titles, but permeating every cell of the human condition, invisibly dissolved into society through a generous deed, a timely scripture, a tolerant attitude. 

 

This cold, harsh, violent world is a little less cold, harsh, and violent because of the individual, unrecognized, dissolved and interstitial “salt of the earth”.  Can we aspire to any higher calling? 

 

We all have a little of it in us, this life-giving and life-saving spiritual salt.  We will look in vain for it, in the world, in others, in ourselves.  But it abides, invisibly keeping the bright blood flowing, unheralded and unbidden the crystalline grains of Spirit providing the taste to our tears and enabling us to shed them. 

 

 

Reliobs

 

God help the masses trapped in boxes,

seduced away from Nature,

feigning satisfaction in the midst of our things.

 

There are darned good reasons we erect walls between us,

separating into apartments and houses and bedrooms.

The structural architecture of our villages and towns and cities speaks prophetic volumes about our spiritual nature.  We do not build one giant secure building with only four external walls to protect us from the weather.  Right from the beginning we built our separate chambers, we sought protection and privacy from even family members.  Nobody wants a beaded curtain on the bathroom door. 

 

Clothes and walls and doors and locks attest to our souls’ mistrust of stranger, neighbor, friend, and family member.  We dare not bare our bodies to each other, much less our souls. 

 

Any objective alien or future intelligence taking a first glance at the abodes we have always erected would say this is a spiritual generation that feels threatened and insecure in the presence of others, dividing walls the physical manifestation of divided souls.

 

As soon as we can we go from cave to hut to house to mansion to castle in our drive to erect protective walls around ourselves and our activities.  We don’t build bigger exterior structures in order to accommodate more people together in an open interior, with the exception of stadiums and auditoriums where shared entertainment, worship, or sports momentarily provide a contrived, simplified focus for an illusory unity. 

 

Look at the walls and rooms and chambers and then grieve for our condition, each interior wall reinforcing our souls’ isolation and loneliness. 

 

Don’t pretend you can tear down the walls, or survive without them.  But perhaps we can at least chisel some small openings in them, if not allowing souls and hearts to merge, at least allowing them to touch.

 

 

 

 

 

Communion

 

Prepare, prepare,

this reality will soon enough change

like all the preceding realities gave way to what must be.

 

Prepare, prepare,

the only thing you can, your soul, your heart.

 

The momentary worldly reality is only a reflection of the needs of the soul,

providing opportunity for the Choice.

 

Take heart.  That your soul may endure the temporal world that will not endure. 

 

Trust not the charades of the prisoners.  Trust only the Light that slips in through the cracks in time.

 

22. April. 2019

 

Diary

 

Sunrise.  Low wet cotton-ball tufts drift south, warming to apricot glow as they approach alignment with the still over-the-horizon sun.  Then, as they pass the direct line to the sun, each cloud tuft glows in rainbows!   Blue-green and pink dramatically streak the apricot pallette!

 

 

 

Reliunif.lif

Take no love lightly.

Imperfect and fleeting though it is, cherish it, even if you have to keep it at a distance.

 

We enter this solitary confinement of our souls for a reason.  From our birth we are obligated to seek those ways to love that will best connect beyond the walls of our isolated individual consciousness. 

 

That is why we are here, each in our own peculiar history and circumstance, each postponing our liberation from these incarcerating bodies as long as possible. 

 

We must love.  There is no other reason for this training exercise.  We are here to change our souls.  Love via interior decorating or cuddling or missionary work or employing people or politics or dancing or healing or mowing lawns, but love.  Don’t waste this time. 

 

God and Yeshu will help and motivate, though don’t expect a heck of a lot of overt guidance.  Save someone or serve someone, give your life or give money, take someone’s hand or take them a casserole, but love them, love everyone, love everything, and make the best of your brief life sentence in this corporeal cell. 

 

Poetry

Reliobs

Oh the green of spring!

 

Look deeply into it.  Feel the miracle of returning life fill the air and let it also fill your soul.

 

The birds sing for darned good reason.  Drink deeply of this draught.  You have survived to another spring.  Don’t you dare take this for granted.

 

The living world is awakening around you!  Refuse to call it a miracle if that makes you feel better, but don’t let this moment, this precious gem of a moment, slip past without tasting it's exquisite breath on your tongue.  You owe it to yourself and to its Creator, whether you acknowledge any Creator or not. 

 

Reliobs

 

We live out our days in our prisons,

occasionally stepping out but always to lock the gate behind us when we soon enough return.

 

We can only pray some unforeseeable good will come of it all.

 

Most people are blessed to not think in such terms.  They are blessed to live out their days so deep in their prison.  They know no alternative.  The sweet taste of cool breeze has not tormented their soul.  The tormenting question ‘why” has not yet burrowed into their awareness.

 

Most people are blessed to simply automatically react to the vicissitudes of life with reflexive anger and frustration.

 

It is all inexplicable anyway, so why bother asking the questions?  Surely we should be able to quench our curiosity and resign ourselves to our fate. 

 

Why curse the darkness unless you stub your toe?  There is no better answer to that than the question “why?”  But some can no more help themselves than they could quit breathing.  The quest without resolution beckons and drives.  The tantalizing clues tempt to yet more searching for the treasure of Purpose. 

 

Was that flicker of Light imagined or is there really something over there?  When no one else saw the flicker of Light it is darned hard to explain your frantic rushing through the darkness. 

 

Soon enough the bumping and tripping and stumbling over unforeseen obstacles leaves no sense of direction regarding where that flicker arose.

 

But it was so beautiful, that possible Light in this darkness.  Upon once sensing that glimpse, that brushing touch, that momentary sensation, real or imagined, it is never possible to quit looking.

 

 

Later

Reliobs

Can any life not do good?

Can any life not do harm?

Are the two not part and parcel of the core nature of life?

 

“Do no harm” is a laudable aspiration, but utterly unattainable.

 

“Do good” seems counter intuitive when applied to the despot and the malaria parasite, but even they can at least indirectly motivate something noble in response. 

 

The God of Life is a confusing sort, were we honest about it.  “Do no harm” was not evidently an overriding concern in setting in motion a world of pestilence and famine.  Yet somewhere in the churning maelstrom of plague and warfare the potential for good is realized. 

 

God - the Creation - everyone - all life,

the good and the harm embodies in and arises from all of them, from all of us.

 

That being the case, perhaps we should best cut God and each other a little slack when things don’t go our way, knowing we too will, with and without intent, with and without awareness, add our share of harm to the churning maelstrom of this world from which holiness, eternal Love, and Resurrection in all its forms arises. 

 

 

 

A hills of grass and yucca with a breeze blowing across it under a sky of blue and puffy white.  I suppose you have to be retired and not raising kids to enjoy such an experience.  Yet so many people I know who are not raising kids and do not have to work still cannot enjoy such an experience.

 

It is of course an experience.  Grassy hillsides and breezes are not a sight or a site or something to see.  They should be an experience, an immersion, an integration of the soul into the sensory spectrum that allows all that living Wholeness to penetrate your consciousness and bring some healing wholeness to your soul.

 

For those willing and able to deeply experience the living grassy hillside for extended time it is not at all evident how to share that experience, for it means speaking of things of the soul that take far too much time to explain in these busy times.  Besides, this is experience, not activity or observation, and experiences of the soul do not lend themselves to explanation. 

 

Just a green hillside and some fresh spring chokecherry leaves softly brushing against the face at behest of breeze.  There is no objective here, no goal, and no profit.  There is no story to be told about it, no score, accomplishment, or controversy.  Surely that can be of no interest to anyone.  So you might as well enjoy the experience, that green tickling of your soul lasting a little longer.

 

Reliobs

 

The orphaned children of God, still wondering about that lost parent, maybe not quite yet accepting the loss, and certainly, in spite of a lifetime of effort, not finding a replacement. 

 

The orphaned children of God, lost though not wont to admit it. 

 

The orphaned children of God, simply another twist on the prodigal children of God.  Who dumped whom?  Does it matter now?  Didn’t that inevitable estrangement occur so long ago as to be rendered irrelevant?

 

There has been enough finger pointing in this (non)relationship.  Maybe it’s time for all sides to grow up and get back on track toward the common objective.  Maybe the long lost parent will show up at the door, or the long prodigal child will show up at the door, but either way the one on the other side of the door has to decide whether to invite them in. 

 

It’s cold out there, and it’s cold in here without them.  Surely it won’t hurt to listen to their story.  Maybe it was all just a big misunderstanding.  What’s to lose when you’ve already lost it all?

  

Reliunif.lif

 

Everything lost upon death?  That’s certainly what it looks like.

I listen to tales of going through Dick’s stuff, a lifetime of collecting, every item something he could not part with, almost every item of no interest to any survivor.  Everything lost, all that mattered to him, even his body.

But that of course is silly.  Just this week physicists discussed how the band of light around a black hole could contain all information in the black hole.  To the universe, nothing is lost.  It is all momentary deception, as illusory as the rigidity of space-time and the straightness of a path of light.  

It seems all is lost in each moment, so we hold on to our memorabilia, we wax our cars, we take our photos, we post our lives online.  But in some way we cannot now comprehend, all is not lost.  Perhaps nothing is lost.  Perhaps only the illusions, like death and time, are lost.  

 

For the generous, kind, empathetic, selfless person in the world:

Interacting with people, with God's hopeless children:  

don't expect much.  

Be wary of trying to bend them to your will in a well intentioned effort to help.  

Try to apply your real gifts and talents, not the gifts and talents you wish you had.

Be realistic about when it is time to give up.

Try to understand where they are coming from.

Remain calm.

Know that trying to help people will be the most humbling and frustrating and rewarding thing you will ever do.

Pray for the presence and guidance of the Spirit.

Know it is easy to get in over your head.

Pray for deliverance.

 

You will be up against the nature of this generation.  You will be fulfilling your purpose to grow in Love as a child of God.  That is not an easy combination, nor is it supposed to be.  Such is the nature of the Choice.

 

Poetry

There is nothing profound in the tiny minutiae of everyday life.

All that is profound are the tiny minutiae of everyday life.

In a moment when the struggle momentarily abates, marvel at the minutiae.  

The major, life changing events we notice.  But they are just a distraction from the minutiae that matter.

Wonder and marvel at a smile, a touch, a welcome home called from a high window.

Has a hummingbird ever flown that it was not a marvel?  

Has food ever appeared from the ground that it was not a wonder?

Moments and minutiae, we all have them, while only a few have the grand victories and tragedies worthy of conversation.

A roof in the rain, a vaccination, a day without shelling…..

Moments and minutiae, 

not a single moment not filled in,

not one single second dropped,

in each of those moments 

a world below, a sky somewhere above,

one more breath,

one more moment of blessed routine,

yet another breath,

marvels and wonders,

one breath 

after another,

 

Poetry

Reminder?

Two coyotes trot silently down the path!  Silhouettes, a shadow flash of the first, a quick view of the second.  Thank You.  Thank You.  Thank You.

Oh the blessings of faith open to the moment.

Such a blessing!  No one else out on this misty morning.

 

Coyote, a big boy, astonishingly quiet,

Overtly bold.

I'll keep looking for a long time,

though they are long gone.

That happens when we experience miracles and wonders,

we keep looking for another glimpse.

But miracles and wonders are quite specific,

 quite necessary to the momentary need.

No need to keep looking.

But I do, I always do,

just in case, just in case.

 

Silent they were,

early in the dark,

only minutes ahead of walkers and joggers, 

avoiding this world,

knowing too well the dangers of this world,

having learned, having learned.

 

But in faith, a glimpse,

a thrilling, exciting, energizing glimpse.

 

Cold, dark, wet,

glorious,

a season for miracles and wonders,

if open,

if curious,

if lost.

 

…..

How to feel peace in the midst of world's unambiguous reality declaring the abject hopelessness?

How to trust pure calling?

Is it faith to ignore reality?

Or is it just excuse.

So many could have been healed!

All ended in crucifixion!

No one understood.  

The popularity had nothing to do with the message, then or now.

Yes, miracle,

to the chagrin of accusing mother and cunning traitor.

None understood.  But they remembered.

The message, the speaker, was too pure,

too different from this world.

Miracles allowed a few years of sufficient popularity, enough years.

As happens over and over.  

Though message be not understood.

Pure miracle?  Trust in pure miracle?

Let nothing worldly intrude and sully?

That's how it worked.   

There was no plan or scheme in worldly terms.  It all unfolded because of the miracles.  There was no compromise.  Though the message was hardly what people wanted to hear, the miracles carried it on.  

Miracles, timing, and circumstance carried the message, pure and simple.  That's always been the case in your experience also.  There was no planning or foresight or strategy in any of those successes

But the words are unintelligible to them.

As they always were!  That is unambiguously clear.  The words were unintelligible, not heard, misconstrued.  Had they been understood they would not have been desired.  Yet here they are.  Still ignored.  Still avoided.  But making a difference.  

Nothing pure can long survive by worldly plans.  That's how Truth decays into religion.  

Not making worldly sense is OK.  That's why there is hope.  If produced through worldly means it is doomed to decay or corruption.  Worldly means are like a bacteria in the milk.  Sooner or later the milk will spoil.  

 

Poetry

Alert!  What is it?  

Watching.  

Something out there.

Cat senses know.

Watch closely.

Something may enter

the glow of the street-light.

Imagination?

Maybe.

But sometimes, sometimes,

it's not imagination.

 

Reliobs

 

There is one source of peace and security.  That Source must be our bedrock when the world falls apart.

As soon as we invoke that source in our efforts to manipulate the world to our will, we lose that peace and security.

Beware leaders invoking God for political purposes.  Beware leaders, period.  Occasionally authentic leaders serving the interests of people come along.  But they never rant and rage.  They never stoke violence or encourage hatred.  They never use fear as motivation.

But until they prove they will lead with compassion and humility, beware leaders.  Follow no one.  Never go along.  Do first what is right.  If that happens to be consistent with where a leader is leading, if it happens to be what others are doing, fine.  In such rare occurrences it will be easy to do what is right.  

But most of the time you will be alone in doing what is right.  You will be contradicting the demands of leaders and opposing the mob.  Then you will be relying not on worldly approval for temporal security, but on the Source of eternal security.  

 

Reliobs

1.    Unity, the great underlying principle.  What stories can possibly convey Unity?

2.    The Choice, before each of us in every moment.  What stories do not inevitably convey that?

3.    True worship being how we treat the living forms before us……has any story ever touched on that?

4.    An underlying structure of Love embodied in the Christos…..who would ever believe such a story?

These are the four principles.  How many stories would it take to convey them?  Or has the one story, that one story, not already been told?  

Parables and stories, trying to hold our attention long enough to let some crumb of Truth penetrate our consciousness.  Oh the contortions and sacrifices of Creation and Creator to try to reach us!  

"Stiffnecked" we were called by the ancient prophets, looking only in our direction, unheeding of calls to turn and see a greater Truth.  So the stories are crafted by Source and messengers in hopes of entertaining us into awareness.  

Poetry

Reliobs

Reminder

The mountains grow taller with the years, as patience grows tired and time shorter.

Eventually you accept there is no escape, all the serial escapes of ancestral years have led only to more and diverse dead ends.  Eventually there is too little time remaining to bother with one last escape, the time having come 

to turn 

And face

 the reality of the moment,  

Hope deferred for eternity.  

 

This time face the situation, do not leave.

In person, be true.

 

 

Observation

Dings, dents, scars, and scratches are medals of having lived.  Such is the nature of this world.  There is no meaningful interaction with it without getting scratched and scarred.

 

 

Reliobs

Missionaries.  Bringing the Good News to people.  Such a beautiful thing.  Don't try to tell me otherwise.  

Benighted savages in darkest Africa being saved by missionaries.  Don't you dare tell me that's not a beautiful thing.  

Missionaries, risking their lives, eschewing modern medical care, changing lives and the direction of a continent, one soul at a time.  Damn right it's a beautiful thing.

Get that Good News to minds open and ready for it.

But what of minds already filled?  What of minds busy in the modern world?  What of modern minds over-filled and over-busy?  How to get any Good News into them?

When that day inevitably comes, when collapse of company or economy or health or civilization brings a jarring end to the busyness, will those once busy minds have access to any Good News when they most need it?

Rendered jaded and cynical by wealth and emptiness, will those minds be capable of opening to Good News in any form?  

Perhaps the recently saved in Africa will come to their rescue. 

 

Reliunif.lif

So many horrors in the world, continuous reminders, casting blessings into sharp contrast.

 

Give thanks to Source for blessings, while not cursing Source for the horrors?

That would seem to make no sense.

What rationale or delusional faith can justify such behavior?

The blessings are eternal, views of eternal blessings.

The suffering is momentary, part of our necessary birth, and ultimately something to also be grateful for, even if that is beyond my spiritual strength now.  Though to tell the truth, already I've enough temporal distance and perspective to see the blessing in some of the painful horrors of my life.  

Give thanks even for the capacity to see the blessings.  Many are tragically  blind to the blessings in their life.

Meanwhile there is no hurry in being grateful for the suffering.  Though faith that suffering will pass and serve the Purpose certainly helps to get through it.

It is not exactly the individual blessings for which I give thanks.  It is the glimpse they provide of eternal Love and destiny and Purpose of which they are examples.  

Gratitude and joy are almost synonymous.  

Gratitude is also an awareness of Unity, awareness of the self as entity and of the Greater as entity with Unity the bonding element.  The blessings are gifts and bonds, illuminating the greatest blessing:  you are not alone.

Reliunif.lif

I’ve never felt so strongly that bison and coyote are my spirit animals.  I never really understood spirit animals until this trip.  The bison lives and suffers in resigned acceptance of its role in service to the humanity that kills it.

The coyote is aware and curious, exploring and trying.  The coyote is not majestic or popular, or powerful like the wolf.

As part, in wholeness with God’s Creation, God’s unfolding Purpose can make use of animals, putting them in the right place at the right time to teach, heal, and inspire.

While true for any animals, these two have traits that can particularly touch my heart.

The coyotes making me smile through the night before my climb of Devil’s Tower.  The coyote cheering me through the hardest pitch.

The look in the eye of the bison who walked with us as we drove, the same look that transfixed me in Yellowstone.

I've been thrilled, inspired, healed, and uplifted by hawks and bears, snakes and sharks.  But I do not identify with them

It is bison and coyote with whom I share some part of me.  This I learned in this pilgrimage to northern plains.

I ascribe no magic, no power, no overwrought expectations to this kinship.  I just marvel at it and give thanks for it and for the clear revealing of it these past two weeks.

The spirit of bison, representing our Creator, stands before us in suffering sacrifice to nourish and warm our bodies and spirits.

The spirit of coyote, conveying Spirit’s Word, runs before us, darting in and out of our perception, coaxing and teasing, testing and challenging us to grow as children of our common Source.

Look into the deep mournful eye of bison, follow the irresistible yet inscrutable call of coyote, accept their gifts, accept Life delivered through spirits, in whatever form you discern them.  

 

Reliobs

It's all perfectly normal, the possessing of our soul by fears and lusts and wants.  

Of course our thoughts are filled with worries about war and cancer and finances.  Of course we try to distract ourselves with shiny baubles and investments and political or interpersonal power.

It's all perfectly normal in a world harsh and threatening with only one certainty, death.

How can one be expected to dwell on high level spiritual thoughts when in the midst of war or famine or plague?  How can one be expected to dwell on high level spiritual thoughts when blessed with material security and momentary opportunities to enjoy life?

We're too busy surviving to ponder the profound…..or we're too busy celebrating opportunities for pleasure, or at least distraction from the suffering, to indulge in the profound.

Give us time, God, give us time to come around.  In some sweet spot between suffering and satiety we will make room for You.  

Poetry

Reliunif.lif

Imagine not having to breathe.

Imagine integral wholeness with universal rhythms, 

like breathing, but not as clumsy,

not as far removed from expression of Source,

no longer mere symbolic rhythm and cycle 

expressed through physical world far removed from Source,

no longer a breathing as only indirect expression of eternal and universal rhythms.

Imagine not having to breath,

but feeling your rhythms in harmony with those of all and Universe.

For now breathe,

now aware of the wondrous living beauty of which that breathing rhythm is expression.

For now breathe,

establish momentary rhythms that will evolve into eternal rhythms of identity.

Dwell for a moment in this place of safety.

Know the meaning of "God breathing the breath of Life into them".

Yes, it is rhythms that phrase describes, 

the great enduring resonance of the Universe.

Feel the great underlying rippling of the rhythms of Creation,

still invisible for now,

but speaking of the inheritance of the children of the Creator.

Breathe.  And sense the rhythms of which breath is a part.

Sense and then know.

Breathe deeply, and know of rhythms and resonances far beyond the fleeting physical.

Clumsy, crude, and unreliable this physical breathing,

but it is a beginning, an introduction, a glimpse,

of the great underlying resonant foundations of the universe that await.

Imagine not having to breathe.

It is a silly concept.

For once liberated from the necessity of physical absorption of oxygen,

then you will really breath, 

in a symphony of rhythms resonant with the Universe.

For now, breathe.  Celebrate each breath.

Savor the rhythm and cycle, 

breathed into you by Source,

knowing it is only a beginning,

a birth,

the first out-of-tune plucking of the instrument of your soul

in anticipation of its symphonic destiny.

 

Poetry

Deliverance.

So many times delivered.

So many temptations.

So many times succumbing.

Clueless.  

Always clueless.

Disciplined.

Always disciplined.

Except when not.

All leading to here and now,

the abjectly mysterious here and now.

 

  

Reliunif.lif

There are good reasons, holy reasons, for the barriers in our lives.  There are good reasons, tragic reasons, for the barriers between us.

Someone must open the barriers, in some seemingly inconsequential manner, creating but a tiny opening, yet as influential as deflecting an asteroid before it strikes the earth.

That is the point of the barriers, to get us to feel sorry, to get us to feel sorrow, so that something may escape, that some soul may be touched by Unity.

Do the right things within your reach.  Set events in motion.  Set people in motion.  

Much has been accomplished by such influence.  Lives and worlds have been spared and changed by such influence.

Do not test your God by demanding gifts you clearly see you do not have.  Look at what happens when instead you follow an irresistible calling from the Spirit.  Don't force actions to which you are not called, and from which in fact you have been rescued.

 

Reliobs

Poetry?

Peace, finally peace.

It takes time to immerse in contemplation and accept the gift of peace.

Oh, how the world's panic will consume us!

It is inescapable.

Our brains and minds are structured to survive, so we will dwell on problems and threats.

But peace awaits, if we can carve out the time.

Few have such opportunity.  Fewer still take the opportunity.

But the time of contemplative peace can become the jewel of the day, the moment of touch, most holy touch.

Few will understand.  Few will be desperate enough to understand.

But peace awaits.

The world will always be there.  The world will always demand and take and shock.

The world will over and over prove unreliable and surprisingly irrational.

Only the peace of holy touch is reliable.

It is hard to describe to anyone, and impossible to convince anyone, because such contemplative peace has no analogue in the world.  You cannot say "it is like….".

But some discover it.  The Spirit reaches some.

There are no lessons about contemplative prayer.  There is no recipe or equation.

There is no language in which to speak of it.

Peace.  Timelessness.

That does not even appeal to most people.  There is no "doing" in it, no accomplishment, nothing one can tell others about.

It is just you and the Greater, and that very fact many find terrifying.

It is a voyage with no destination, no captain, no sextant or compass.  It is even a voyage through darkness….but oh the stars in that darkness!....and the soft lapping waves of the supporting water….The darkness one discovers is our busy, desperate lives.  The time given to contemplative prayer reveals the stars in that darkness, makes one aware of the gentle support of the boundless sea, and reassures of waiting landfall.  In the darkness, with the blinding glare of modern life banished for a few moments, the soul can discern the distant horizon glow of sunrise, still dim, so dim one wonders if imagination and wishful thinking are creating the hope, yet the glow growing, undeniably growing, imparting just enough warmth to carry one through another day in the storms of the world.

 

Religion

 

The story of the servants investing money is really a story of taking risks.  You obtain higher returns on an investment by taking higher risks.  "Risk" implies putting your spiritual wealth into the world, a gamble of faith….faith (that gift of God in the first place) that God can work miracles even in this world.

 

Poetry

Thank God I didn't know.

Thank God it is too late.

Oh the illusions that lead us.

Better to not know, to not see through them,

lest we never get out of bed.

With time and age comes the dissolution of illusion.

But nothing replaces them.

You see they were contrived out of necessity to fill a terrible void.

Most of us do not get what we wanted or expected.

We are the lucky ones.

Some are drowned in success,

granted seeming control over their lives.

Their illusions persevere,

fate postponing their shattering.

 

We will all look back,

look back and cry and laugh at our fallacies,

all that seemingly mattered so desperately much, revealed as illusion.

We will cry, we will laugh,

looking back at what we took so seriously.

Then we will forgive ourselves., as we are already forgiven.

We will with relief finally see Light undistorted.

And we will see it was all necessary,

all the illusions.

We will marvel at our foolish blindness,

but recognize its necessity;

for in each silly value we took so seriously,

we were growing,

we were becoming and revealing ourselves.

 

Illusions indeed,

our careers and purchases and teams and promotions and religions.

Illusions to finally dissipate in the Light.   

Illusions that occupied our attention as time evaporated.

Illusions that need not forever chain us to temporal constraints.

Illusions to be taken oh so seriously for now,

the life and death of child's play,

wielding its eternal consequences.

Unity

Such an odd and rare perspective, the perspective of Unity and Deep Communion.  The most cursory glance at this world should reveal how odd and rare is this spiritual perspective.  

It would seem a worthless perspective, since none can understand it.  Yet that fact also reveals how desperately needed is such perspective.

It is not remotely practical, which is why almost no one pursues, or can pursue, it.  Which makes it all the more precious.  Its understanding could change a life, a life with no opportunity to engage in contemplative prayer.  Someone must be the pioneer, must tell others that there is a way, that something worth discovering lies down that way.

Exquisitely rare indeed, and desperately needed.  Let a kitty in the lap teach its profound and desperately needed lessons, lessons that could change a life, lessons that could break the shackles of the perfectly natural demands of the world.  Look at how much of worldly suffering could be eliminated by Unity.  Let a little influence go a long way.  Let others be adept at the world.  There are ample numbers skilled in the ways of the world, and that will never heal  the world.  

Exquisitely rare, and desperately needed, the perspective of Unity and Deep Communion

 

Reliobs

The overwhelming lesson of these strange times is that people can and will believe anything.  The advent of fractured news media in the late 1980's and the culturally violent explosion of social media in the 2000's meant that random, arbitrary, and immutable beliefs would now be formed not cohesively within monolithic societies, but as disparate, contradictory, and conflicting shards cutting apart the fabric of society.

Today in every nation republican/fascist manipulators of beliefs wield their media bludgeons to mold malleable minds into unthinking subservience to political ends.  Powers of manipulation once reserved for charismatic "prophets" and holders of dynastic titles are now wielded by anyone with sufficient greed and media savvy.

Which stands in contrast to one particular cult figure of millenia past.

Considering the proclivity of humans to believe in the face of self-evident fact, you would expect that Yeshu, like Mohammed, Joseph Smith, et al, would have unambiguously and with repetition decreed what followers should believe about Him.  Yet from Yeshu we find a dearth of specific claims and self-declarations, instead finding ambiguous hints, teasing questions, and obtuse parables.  In particular the topic of resurrection is assiduously kept obscure.  

The disciples entered the last days with Yeshu not with an oft repeated prophecy cementing their expectation of resurrection, but abjectly clueless about the terrible and incomprehensible events they would soon witness.  

People can and will believe anything.  Despots and wannabe despots have effectively put this to use through the ages, and today have seized technology tools to amplify this power to unparalleled levels.

But one person of greatest influence eschewed telling even His followers what to believe about Him.  Undeniable personal experience of those followers would form something more than mere belief, would form unshakeable certainty.

Theirs was testimony - not recitation, shocking experience - not imagined fulfillment of preconceived expectation.  

 

Reliobs

Over decades my discernment of Truth became far less detailed and specific, and far more reliable.  Love and touch and compassion were revealed as Truth.  Beliefs of most sort were revealed as wishful thinking.  Faith in Christ became relationship with Christos, that Spirit of Love and interpersonal redemption that a (Son of) Man named Yeshu tried to tell us about before we executed Him and buried His teachings under our rigid dogmas of our own creation.

Today humanity faces a storm of belief.  Our easily manipulated minds once placidly accepted whatever belief the high priest proclaimed.  For a few centuries we would sacrifice our virgins and then wait for rain and victory in battle.  Eventually we would not get victory in battle and we would have to change our beliefs to accommodate a new high priest and a new statue demanding virgins or calves or something.  Stone and golden gods always demand something, you know.

But soon enough, beliefs would settle down again and all our neighbors would believe the same things we did.  The beliefs must be true, for after all, the priest wore colorful robes and stood way up there on the pyramid or altar or pulpit.  We could live secure in our beliefs until once again it quit raining or a bigger army showed up.

But today technology allows any priest, politician, pundit, or retired general direct access into our minds.  Phantasmagorical beliefs are planted into our brains with invocation of words that frighten and anger, with colors chosen by marketing psychologists, with repetition and timing and placement.

Conflict of profoundly held, albeit baseless beliefs, used to occur when the migrating tribe arrived in our valley.  Now conflict of beliefs occurs among neighbors and family members.

A society, perhaps even civilization itself, cannot survive this storm of beliefs.  Will some set of beliefs come to dominate, as historically happened when cultures clashed?  Or will today's historically unique interstitial clash of beliefs  result in such trauma that belief itself, unquestioning acceptance of unproven and unjustifiable "truths" on the basis of wishful thinking and paranoia, will finally be recognized as dangerous and destructive?

Will the wrenching traumas of the 21st century violently force humanity to grudgingly accept reason and rational discourse as a preferable means to determine reality?  Might the agonies of politico/religious warfare reveal the pointlessness of rigid dogma, removing the scales from our eyes to reveal the inarguable certainty of our universally shared hunger for love and compassion, the hunger addressed by forgotten words of a son of man two thousand years ago.

Reliobs

I learn of ancient Amazonian civilizations that experienced the world as relationships, relationships with everything, each plant and animal and object  sentient and communicating.  I was immediately struck with the similarity to my experience of the world.  I live in helpless deep affection with everything.  Everything is an element embodying the loving Source of All.  

For me such a way of experiencing existence is exquisitely joyous and painful.  Did the ancient Amazonians experience such joy and pain?

Yesterday, as most mornings, I visited the little pigs, watched and listened to them breathe as they slept cuddled together in the fresh deep hay.

Then as I walked away a truck arrived with a dead skinned  pig bouncing in the back, stiff red legs grotesquely pointing to the sky.

The jolting contrast in scenes was amplified by the sickening knowledge that if I went home and walked in to the smell of bacon I would eat that bacon.

How can these conflicting feelings exist in me?  How can demands of physical reality so perversely conflict with the soaring heights of spiritual reality?

Spiritual euphoria and eviscerating sorrow, knotted and tangled together in this hapless soul, rendered helpless in an incomprehensible world of irreconcilable paradox.

 

Poetry

Reliobs

So fleeting the most cherished relationships when compared to eternity.

Vanishingly fleeting.

All that truly matters, love and affection,

disappearing in a moment at the behest of death.

That must surely be why love and affection matter so little to so many people.

Crave power and enjoy guns and war.

Crave the little power you can accrue for the brief moment you can,

before death reminds how powerless you are.

Collect your firearm symbols of personal power and death,

enlist in the war effort, any war effort,

for what could be more natural than facilitating inevitable death and suffering?

 

A flash, only an instantaneous flash, 

the hug, embrace, love, affection,

before one of you dies for all eternity.

Through all the existence of the universe that love did not exist,

then a flash,

then forever and ever and ever, 

endless and enduring,

that love will never again exist.

The daughter, the kitty, the spouse, every friend,

gone forever.

Such are the inarguable facts of this carnal life.

Such is the depth of darkness of infinite time,

such is emptiness taken to unfathomable degrees.

Little wonder eternity terrifies us.

Little wonder we dare not look at infinity.

With good reason we recoil from what the world would tell us of reality:

"All that matters doesn't matter."

 

Do not pretend the world is otherwise.

though we pretend the world is all.

The world being all,

there being nothing beyond the physical world,

such a new and radical and perverse perspective.

This material reductionism is a latecomer to humanity's pantheon of religions.  

Somewhere deep in the souls we deny, we still know better, though our material religion won't allow us to admit it..  We always knew better.

We always knew, we still know now if for a moment we set aside our struggle to be faithful to the physical,

that there is more.

We outgrew our childish infatuation with astrology, witchcraft, and magic.  Then in our haste to exorcise such indefensible silliness we got carried away and threw out our faith in anything greater than us.  We were willing to admit our spells and talismans did not empower us afterall, and then we promptly grabbed science to empower us in their stead.  The science worked, in this world.  Now we had demonstrable power, in every light switch and accelerator pedal.  

….while eternity and infinity close in on our withering souls.

 

Do not pretend our world is otherwise.

But know you must no longer pretend our world is all.

 

Poetry

Dare to trust?  Don't be a fool!  

Dare to touch?  Don't be a fool!

Dare to admit to yourself that you long for trust and touch?

Don't deny it,

these longings that underlie our irrational behavior.

 

You would think we would run to God for trust and touch,

But we run to gods carved in our own image,

gods as dangerous and untrustworthy

as ourselves.

 

Trust?  Touch?

Only fools deny the hunger, pretending they are immune.

So we join teams and armies, clubs and cliques,

our pretend experience of Unity.

We march and drill in close formation,

we serve and gossip in the committee and klatsch.

Then we go home to the demands and arguments

of this human condition,

always waiting,

always hoping,

fool enough to again try just one more time,

to trust, to touch.

 

 

Reliobs

Look at how people flock to routine and ritual!

Shakers in a community, monks in the monastery.

Catholics in mass and Muslims at prayer.  

Routine provides blessed respite from the inherent chaos of the world.

Ritual provides blessed respite from the inherent chaos of our minds.

Routine liberates us from the stress of choice and decision.

Ritual liberates us from the stress of personal responsibility.

 

The writings I produce provide neither source of respite.  The reader, if by miracle there ever is such an unusual soul, is left thinking and adrift, adrift in the inscrutable dark chaos of this storm-tossed world.  These writings pose the antithesis of the solace of repetitive ritual.  

My writing's unpopular approach to reality is quintessentially discouraging as to any misplaced hope for its popularity.  Yet last night's Shaker documentary provided one curious source of encouragement.

While the path to worldly success for Mohammed and Joseph Smith made use of the ever popular, conveniently marketable principle that men could have multiple young wives, the Shakers taught absolute sexual abstinence.  In spite of this, for a time, the sect grew, though because of this only two Shakers remain in this world as of this writing.  

If a religion can even momentarily flourish in the face of such an impractical and unmarketable teaching, surely anything is possible, even a miracle of such magnitude as to allow words encouraging free thought and eschewing ritual to reach and reassure some most unusual soul.  

 

Poetry

Touch.

Blessed soft, warm touch.

Oh the gifts of God,

to get us through.

 

Fear and mystery,

we are left with fear and mystery,

once that Kingdom is no longer at hand.

Yes, we need some reassurance,

reassurance that feels right,

reassurance that must

be right.

 

The formulas of life.

Not understanding anything of life

I cling to the formulae,

schedules and routines,

all of my own contrivance of course,

the formulae providing the illusion

of purpose and predictability,

the necessary deception 

that something

is in my

control

 

Poetry

Reliobs

What written words can reach the illiterate, no matter how true the words?

What spoken words can reach those not listening?

Who will remember what is not understood?

Who will grow to care or feel if they do not now care or feel?

Who can discern in the midst of violent noise?

Who can be comforted when loathe to be touched?

Who will see through tightly closed eyes?

Who can be healed from unrelenting self-destruction?

Who will turn?

How the Meschioch wept over their self-inflicted fate.

Who will turn?  Who will open their eyes, who will listen, 

and freely choose

to accept liberation from world's chains?

They must have something to turn to.

Hopelessness can only be healed with Hope.

The lost need more than to be told they are lost.  

They need a path, a direction, simple and clear.

Weep for what must transpire.  

Too far down this path they are,

this path to lonely misery.

It is quickly coming to its cataclysmic conclusion.

From its dark and terrible collapse Light can again penetrate.

Who will be healed?  Who will be comforted?

 

They will be stars, stars ignited in this world's darkness.

By miracle, as it always has, the Light will endure,

even here,

the stars shining forth, brilliant jewels in the darkness,

persevering,

awaiting the dawn of Sonrise.

 

Observation

Lost and doomed, this spiritual generation, and these worldly generations.

Raised by machines, lied to by the marketers,

they shuffle with soulless stares,

eyes blank with disconnection,

blinded to life.

 

Sports relentlessly fill some screens,

threats and propaganda fills others, 

greed underlies all,

while minds are filled with trivia and fear.

 

There is no hope here.

It will all collapse.

The human mind is not capable of resisting such media manipulation.

 

So trenchantly they hold their manufactured beliefs,

with such vitriol they defend what they were programmed to believe.

 

Reliobs

People live in continuous denial of the self-evident reality before them.  They concoct "beliefs" to fill the gap between undeniable reality and what they want to be true.

They do this on grand scales of religions and cosmology, and they do it on the deeply personal scale of rationalizing their own lives.

The resulting societies and psychoses simultaneously embody tragic farce and inspirational faith.  

Meanwhile the voice of God remains resolutely silent....or trenchantly unheard by everyone else, depending on one's perspective from the personally erected scaffolding of beliefs.

The tragedy is unbearable to watch, much less experience.  So we hire priests and preachers, life-coaches and psychologists, to help us don our own blinders to everyone else's blindness.  

Do not take the human condition too seriously, for it will render you helpless in despair.  "It cannot be" is our only viable recourse upon glimpsing the condition of this world.

"It cannot be."  Something innate within us knows that, knows that with a certainty we unsuccessfully try to deny.

"It cannot be", at least not without extenuating explanation.  It surely must be illusion; some Deceiver must be responsible for everyone else's madness.

It cannot be this bad.  There must be beauty and Hope waiting just around the corner.  

Indeed, there is profound lesson in the very existence of belief and faith.  Though all differ, though contradiction and conflict set them in opposition, the very existence of belief and faith says something profound, something more than that a peculiar species has an evolutionarily indefensible propensity to deny reality.  

"It cannot be."  "Something more must be."  And so sets sail our illusions, delusions, self-deceptions, and religions…..all that proves far more consequential and influential in our personal and societal trajectories than mere fleeting physical reality.   

 

Indeed, we get few overt, universally experienced, unambiguous statements from God.  Indeed, even in this dearth of evidence, beliefs and loyalties and faith and chosen priorities dominate our lives more than hard-surfaced physical reality.

The objective surface of physical reality is the blank canvas upon which we cast our chosen faith.  The biggest influence on our lives and the enduring Reality lies in our choices and the beliefs we take seriously.  The ambiguous answers and lack of answers to our big questions of purpose and life reveal the expansive extent to which we are empowered to create our own natures as children of the prime Source, whatever incomprehensible and ineffable essence that may be.  

Of course specific answers and incontrovertible proof are few and far between.  That's the whole point.  That's the only way this could work.  

Accept that state of being, and accept your potential and freedom.  Perhaps if raised in a fundamentalist society it is too late to choose your beliefs.  But in any and every belief system you remain free to choose the verses of compassion or the verses of retribution.

Reliobs

Over and over we are given some hint of Truth, sufficiently distorted so we will accept it.

A profound lesson of the Bible is found in the tabernacle.  

God gave up.  We steadfastly refused to be impressed with columns of smoke and fire.  We wanted something made by our hands.  So Yahweh acquiesced and gave us the tent and idol we demanded, upgraded just enough from the usual. graven figures to marginally prod our faith forward by an incremental step.

We demanded a temple to keep with the neighboring tribes, we got a temple.

We wanted a political Meschioch (Messiah), so Yeshu (Jesus) got the lousy job.  

As part of that job, we got the promise of a prompt return of our crucified Meschioch.  

Over and over we see revelation getting sufficiently dumbed down so that we were willing to accept it.

Inevitably our preferred, dumbed down version had to crumble to make room for some nominal modicum of Light to enter in spite of our stiff-necked obstinance.

The gold of the ark of the covenant wound up in the ear rings of a centurion's girl friend.

The Temple got recycled into paving stones.

The Meschioch got humiliatingly executed….Peter, Paul, and James got killed before that Meschioch made a return appearance…..the Temple got recycled again….and we're still waiting for sundered heavens and cosmic trumpets to announce return of the Meschioch become Christos (Christ) become Jedi.

Truth is a hard sell, so historically it gets packaged with a more marketable wrapper.  Being crafted to our specifications, not God's, that wrapper inevitably falls apart.  That doesn't impugn the veracity of Truth.  It reveals our reluctance to accept Truth.  

With each pillaged tabernacle, crumbled temple, and missing-in-action Meschioch, we drop back, punt our old misplaced faith, and craft a new game plan to accommodate the inconvenient insistence of Reality. 

Yet in the tatters of purple cloth, the cracks in the bare foundation stones, and the gaping void of interminable absence, there remains the inextinguishable flicker of the Truth we hungered for all along.   We will again distort it with dogma and hide it behind institutions.  But the aching loneliness of our souls does not allow us to quit looking.  And the abiding Love of Source does not allow it to quit reaching.  

 

 

Religion

Images.  Crumbling dry sedimentary layers by a desert pool.

Something happening, something important,

but out of sight.

"Kingdom at hand" echoes across desiccated dust, its meaning evaporating in its journey across the desert.

 

Beware what you take seriously.  All is not as it seems.

How serious were those claims of "Kingdom"?

How delusional and misled?

Did God mislead even the only begotten in the process of delivering salvation?

Don't look away, uncomfortable as it is.

How much did He know?  How much did He discover along the way?

He was absolutely committed to the Father and the Purpose.  Of that there is no doubt.

But what a crooked path of discovery!

All to accommodate our stiff-necked obstinacy.

It was of course all necessary.

How much did He know, and when?

At what point did the mission turn into a suicide mission?

Was there ever any other wishful different expectation?

Does it matter?

Would the ending and eternal beginning be any different if insight and understanding came late in the game?

It was still a suicide mission at the end.

It was still all fully committed to the Father's Purpose.

And it was absolutely passive and peaceful and sacrificial.

At no point was it anything but passive, peaceful, and sacrificial.

That is the key, inarguable point, absolutely consistent.

This was a movement relying on God, not armies.

That was true of John also.

There was never a call to arms.

Did John and Yeshu expect intercessional revolution?

The timing they initially expected doesn't matter.  It is the boldly passive submission that matters.

"The Kingdom is at hand."  They meant it.  And they didn't lift a finger to do anything about it.  No rebellion.  No fortification.  No weapons.  

And here we are, two-thousand years later, still talking about them.

 

Religion

“Thy will be done” usually refers to something horrible we would avoid if possible.  It is a statement of submission to greater Purpose, a statement of sacrificial faith, but also a statement of confident faith, that letting the horrors play out will allow glorious new possibilities to unfold.

 

 

Poetry

Look near,

the blade of grass,

rippling in wind.

Look far,

beyond visibility,

the Source of wind

Reliunif.lif

What of the confluence of circumstance that lead to each individual life?

Would any one precious life not exist if a single cell had taken a left instead of right turn?  Would that soul on which the Love of all Creation focuses have never existed had perfect temperature and opportunity not presented themselves some years ago?....Or would that same soul have appeared anyway, at another place and time?  But then would it really be the same soul?  

Would all that universal Love have never had that soul to love if an interruption or indigestion had kept the corporeal residence of that soul from ever coming into existence?

The question seems so important as to be silly….like the answer should be self-evident.  Surely we should not fret about it.  Surely we are merely deceived, perhaps by the illusion of time and mortality.

Is the prospect of having never existed more distressing than the prospect of death?  Is there any difference?  Having existed as sentient consciousness, we feel a certain disquiet at the prospect of termination of that consciousness.  Is it the same disquiet we feel upon consideration of the prospect of having never existed?....the infinitely complex confluence of the entire history of the Universe having never quite entangled so as to produce exactly us?

Does the disquiet arise out of some sense of the impossibility of it all, not the evident impossibility of existing in the first place, but an unrealized recognition of the impossibility of having not existed?  Are we bothered by the possibility of our non-existence because we sense such non-existence is not possible?.....do we know we are asking a question that flies in the face of immutable reality?  

Dare we conclude "it all had to be"...."we had to be"?  And if indeed we had to be, each element of individual consciousness as necessary as every quark and lepton that inexorably condensed out of the primordial energy fields to fill the space of an expanding Universe,....if indeed we inexorably had to be…..then what?  The ensuing cascade of questions pop into existence as readily as those quarks and leptons in the fempto-seconds after the Big Bang.  

Cultivate and celebrate our capacity for asking those questions…..for we will find precious few answers to celebrate.  The questions themselves are something to hold onto, providing their own reassurance about our existence, their own enlightenment about our nature, their very existence a promise of answers, the questions themselves confirming our suspicions that indeed, there is something more.

 

Reliobs

In present times most people reside in fantasy worlds of media inputs.  In comparison, actual life is unrelentingly boring and frustrating.

But don't we need mental escape and respite from real life?

The problem:  in ancient times our wandering fantasies exercised our imagination.  In present times our daydreams and mental fictional scenarios are controlled by marketers and executives.

That invaluable part of the brain that operates in some independence from corporeal reality, that part of the mind inventive - creative - questioning, is now possessed by media.  The resulting unrealistic fantasies lead to frustration and anger when reality does not acquiesce to our wishes.  

We grow ever less satisfied with reality.  Reality takes up ever less of our day's thoughts.  

And we wonder at the pervasive anger and dissatisfaction in modern society?  

We can't be bothered with mundane reality.  But it will not be so generous about denying us.  

Poetry

Reliunif.lif

 

Radical.changes are intruding on the world though.  Emergent traits are appearing in Artificial Intelligence systems and society is not taking notice.  A great event horizon is being crossed, and we pay no heed.

 

The changes, radical and unforeseen, are coming too fast for a foundationless society to survive.  The reactions are too extreme.  The technology has unleashed the worst of heartless greed.  

Yet good hearts abound, selfless deeds proliferate, at the individual level.

It has always been so.  

Hope always resides in hopeless situations.

 

Always unpredictable, the outcomes.  The empire can't possibly fall.  But then it does.

The amendment will bring moral triumph.  Crime and defiance ensue.  Ukraine cannot stand against Russia.  It stands.

 

The storms of unforeseeable change have always raged, 

only time scales varying.

The change, radical and disruptive, 

is the point, facilitating the Purpose,

in our lives and in the world.

In the storms' chaos, plans stripped away,

disoriented and in shock,

souls are revealed,

directions chosen,

destinies determined.

New religions arise.

Humanity reluctantly takes its stumbling steps,

sometimes forward.

 

Emergence, never noticed from within,

profoundly unpredictable,

emergence ignites

as sufficient numbers over sufficient scales

are inadvertently reached.

Do not be so foolhardy as to say "fear not".

Do not be so frightened as to say "go not"

down that inexorable path.

Inviolate in the midst of inconceivable change 

your soul will abide,

the eternal Choice will abide,

Sustainer's Love will abide,

only the world changing,

the momentary world.

Take heart,

seek and once again find

refuge and solace 

in foundations eternal.

 

Emergence.

Happening now.

Once again.

Everything changing,

nothing reliable,

societal foundations rendered to vapor in an instant,

freeing us to once again rediscover

The Foundation.

 

Reliunif.lif

John 14 and many other "quotes" of Yeshu are obviously patently false…..in the understanding of the temporal human world.  Look up exact quotes for the following.

We can always consider that the quotes are not literal word for word quotes, and that 2000 years later we are not privy to full context.  But still, we have to gloss over that much of what Yeshu said seems to make no literal sense at all.  So we ignore it.  We'll do a quick read if called for in the lectionary, but we would not dare speak what we inevitably briefly think, "that doesn't happen and never did happen".

"The Kingdom is at hand".  Anyone in that place and time would have understood that to mean the Meschioch taking over and leading a triumphant Nation of Israel.  Obviously that did not come close to happening.  Yet today Christians see Yeshu as the Meschioch and perceive His physical presence in the world 2000 years ago as the Kingdom being near at hand.  

"I am the only way".  Christian liberals twist in knots over this one, its implicit eternal condemnation of billions on a legal technicality indicting and imbuing God with supreme arbitrary cruelty.  But our understanding of this may be as off the mark as people's understanding of Kingdom at hand"  two-thousand years ago.  Consider the person who in their heart lives in connection with greater Source (by whatever name), selflessly loves, sacrificially gives their life to whatever they call Source and to all people, forgives as many times as necessary, is courageous in acknowledging eternal Source/God…..but they have never heard of Yeshu?  Are they not in deep faith following Yeshu, the real essence of Yeshu's life and nature?  Are they not more committed and illustrating greater faith than many who call themselves Christian?  

Keep in mind the late-modern name we invoke, "Jesus", would be unrecognizable to Yeshu's mother, yet we say that believing in that grossly distorted name gets us to Heaven while the faithful servant who never heard that, or the correct name, goes to hell?  

Yeshu meant it when He said He was the only way, but He meant His essence, His Spirit, His nature of being and way of being, even if someone were following Him without knowing His name, hopefully even if grossly distorting His name.

"You know where to go".  No we don't, and neither did the disciples.  Every day poses its choices of "what shall I do?"  Why would Yeshu say such a preposterous thing?  

Maybe we do know the way to go, and the specifics of career choice or to what to donate or which person to rescue in the crisis are worldly irrelevance.  The way, the one and narrow  right way to follow Yeshu,  is the loving way, the selfless way, the compassionate way.  Then in the temporal world we are given manifold opportunities and choices down which we can pursue that one way.  Maybe he was right.  We do know the way.  We know the way though faced with manifold options and demands in this broken world.  We know the way though we get no flaming letters on the world giving specific instructions about what to do.  We simply have to choose any of the loving opportunities and be open to God's Purpose.  God will work out the details whichever path of Love we choose.

"If asked in my name, they will do miracles greater than these."  "I will give you everything you ask in my name."   Yet again, worldly reality for most of us would say Yeshu was delusional or lying when and if He said this.  But like those "Kingdom at hand" comments, what if we just need a more eternal perspective to perceive its meaning?  

We get a hint of Yeshu's eternal perspective when He supposedly said "In a little while I will leave you, then in a little while I will return".  For the disciples that was frustratingly ambiguous and confusing.  Yet from an eternal perspective it is quite accurate, exact numbers of days losing relevance.

In the perspective of eternal Destiny, as opposed to temporal moment, all we desire that is aligned with the loving Purpose can indeed be given us.  Of course, we are not patient enough to like that answer.  But look at the eternal, big picture perspective from which Yeshu gave His other perplexing and seemingly misleading comments.  Now even granting all we request in His name makes sense.  Of course "in His name" (or His nature, Purpose, and essence considering we don't know how to pronounce His name) is the critical qualifier.  All the healing, salvation, rescue, and love will be delivered, in an eternal sense.  The loved one will suffer and die, our prayer seemingly ignored, the promise of Yeshu seemingly false….but only for a moment, a moment that will dissolve into eternal life and reunion with that loved one, prayers answered forever, Yeshu's promises indeed fulfilled.

 

Reliobs

Ready?  Useable?

Prodigal Destiny

Prodigal?  Of course.

Somewhere along the way we chose a prodigal path or we wouldn't be here.

It is in the savoring of this world, the immersion in the temporal, that we receive the opportunity to choose redemption.

Better to have never been prodigal?  Maybe.  Ours is not to judge.  But oh what celebration by God upon the turning of the prodigal!

The redeemed prodigal will never return to the world.  That prodigal time was an exploration of God's Creation.  Prodigality was almost an act of faith, almost like trusting that God would not place before us anything bad for us.

And maybe it was not bad for us.  Maybe the learning was necessary in the process of becoming a child of God.

Ours is not to judge.  Ours is to learn, to look honestly at the world and ourselves, then to choose.  

Having been prodigal in the world, we will never forget the lessons.  

For we in this world it is too late to avoid its temptations, whether carnal or institutional.  When we tire of our worldly dreams, God will be waiting, waiting for the prodigals in the bars, the killing fields, the office suites, and the unforgiving houses of worship.  Maybe in each of them we are just looking for Home, looking for the Love of Home.  We will find it, all we prodigals, find it at the end of our ropes, in our dead end paths, in the rubble of our constructs.  

Reliunif.lif

 

Thoughts two days later:

 

Of course we sin and make mistakes.  We must be pushed to our failure point.  We must continually be given the Choice, continuously strengthened, continuously growing.  If we only dealt with the knowable, only with what we could reasonably be expected to correctly decide, if we could correctly discern the answers,  our souls would wither from lack of growth, we would be stuck here, the Source Love that bequeathed us freedom never fulfilled.  

 

Poetry  Ready

Timeless,

momentarily timeless.

Perfect cool breeze from a boundless distance.

Quiet absorbing the impacts from the city….

Balance, fragile balance,

finally timeless.

long forgotten,

lost in the melee of life,

such quiet moments of presence.

 

We cannot long stay in such moments,

but we must remember they are possible.

 

Let not the cold of this generation

penetrate too deeply.

Miracles compound upon miracles until they seem the norm,

unnoticed in their passive profusion.

 

Though the sounds of war grow closer,

hold the moment a little longer.

The rumble of machines of war will never be far away,

and moments such as this are fleeting,

though eternal.

The jets will pass,

time will invert,

moments once whispering of eternity will blossom to fill all time,

seemingly endless times of fear will shrink till disappearing,

leaving only their lessons learned and opportunities seized.

 

Hold fast this moment of peace

as for now the machines of war recede into the distance.

 

Poetry

Each gift in its time.

Each modicum of learning in its time.

There is no hurrying or forcing spiritual growth,

no managing or engineering the mystical experience.

 

Be open, accept, give thanks,

such is the manner of Wholeness.

It is not a peaceful path,

though obscured peace abides  at its center.

 

Do not think yourself wise or knowing.

You know only what you know,

a distorted flicker of the infinite Light of endless Universe.

 

Allow the touch of Spirit,

but do not demand it.

Wax not bitter in its absence.

Even the darkness of this world

serves the Purpose,

facilitating the blind choices of necessity

from which you construct your soul,

a soul loved and cherished by the Source

that gave it freedom.

 Obs

It becomes clear that the world is splitting into fundamentalist camps, atheist and religious, no meaningful difference in their implementation, both bitter and angry, as they must be for their leaders to hold on to power.

A quote from a book struck me.  Paraphrasing:  there is no need for spirituality if following rules gets you to Heaven.

Spirituality is hard work, is painful, is internally complex.  Of course small minds eschew it.

Of course Yeshu appealed to the fundamentalists with His "Kingdom at hand" message.  That was the only way to propagate the real message, to deliver a double meaning, one literal meaning appealing to the vast majority.

 

We want pat and simplistic answers.  

To write Truth is to write for no one.

To write in the abstract, the spiritual, the complex, the Reality of humanity in the world, is to write for no one.

This generation loves its simple rules, its unambiguous black and white, good and bad, us and them, and most destructive to the soul, right and wrong.

Think not, lest you bear responsibility for your Choices.  Follow the leader, lest guilt rest on your shoulders.  Obey the rules, lest compassion disturb your certainty.  

 

Observation

 

The demise of civilization, the collapse of moral and environmental foundations, is in no small part due to our economic system.  

Any economic system by design or accident, promotes and inhibits certain business activities.  

The gold based system of Europe played a driving role in the enslavement of native Americans by the Spanish and the displacement and genocide of native Americans in North America.  The interactions and results and rate of invasion and nature of interactions would have been radically different had the invading Europeans been only looking for trading partners and agricultural land. 

Today our economy is driven by debt and interest payments.  Central banks feed money into the system, private loan the money out at a profit.  Here’s the rub.  The money takes on a life of its own, an amoral life devoid of social value.  The lenders must simply recoup their loans with interest.  How the money was obtained to pay the interest is irrelevant.  Before making the loan the only investigation by the lender is to ensure that the debtor has a plan or capability to repay the money.  

This is the system foreseen by Moses when he banned interest.  

We live in a society in which for many decades business has been conducted not for the good of society but for the making of money….;period.  The ethos permeates all business and society.  The harm inflicted on individuals, society, nation, or world is irrelevant.  

You loan money.  You get interest back.  What happened in between is irrelevant.

So what to do instead?

Governments do indeed need to pump money into economies.  But this could be done directly by funding beneficial projects, projects that would directly facilitate economic growth.  In other words, the same system as today, but skewed toward societal benefits.  Imagine the infrastructure system, the education system, the medical system, if the money pumped into banks for investment in candy and social media porn businesses instead went to projects with defined paybacks.   

This would also put money directly into the hands of business owners and employees, instead of financialists who contribute nothing to society.  

Stock ownership systems are the other major contributing factor to demise of civilization.  All ownership responsibility has been removed from stock ownership.  If you are a sole proprietor, you are responsible for damage your company causes.  Stocks should represent a specific percentage of ownership of a company, with associated responsibility.  That’s it.  Period.  No different types of stock.  No shares printed willy-nilly.  You would not own shares, but would own 0.000000017% of the company.  Now the means by which the company earns profit becomes relevant.

Furthermore, stock purchases would be for a minimum amount of time.  You would buy stock because of long term value of the company, not as a micro-second trade to ride an algorithm curve.  Stock and business values would make sense again.  

Reliobs

I watch the political circus.  I read In the Shadow of the Prophet.  It all seems so hopeless, the human condition.  Fundamentalism holds such power on these weak and tiny human minds.  "Fundamentalism" is largely all the same, whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Zionist,  or Communist.  

How we love to believe we have the right answers and everyone else is wrong.  I suspect the "everyone else" is important in the formula.  Fundamentalism would have far less appeal without someone to hate.  

Naturally I want to believe Christian fundamentalism is a little less evil, a little less prone to violence, that it's reference scripture makes it slightly more difficult to ignore admonitions to love and compassion.  But that is a matter of degrees.  Once specific rules and conformity replace compassion and tolerance, pretty much all hope is lost.

In high school I thought that surely Boys' State represented a local aberration, with its arbitrary division of the attendees into separate identity groups and the promptly ensuing violence between them.  How naive I was.  I now recognize the profound lessons of the perverse structure of Boys' State, the universal readiness of the submissive human mind to follow authority to pit one arbitrarily contrived group against another with no purpose other than conflict that cements the power of those already holding power.  

It is pathetic and hopeless, the basis of war, lynchings, and crucifixions.  

Throughout history it is unstoppable.  Yet throughout history it is tempered, eventually restrained, and after recurring cyclic paroxysms again defeated, seemingly by miracle, always only by miracle.  For in this world of survival of the cruelest, is not any love, forgiveness, and compassion a miracle?  

 

 

Observation

Look at the madness of the present world and the madness of past worlds is not remarkable at all.  Humanity gets only the one answer, an answer that it steadfastly ignores.  It receives not the specific answers it demands, so we are perennially dissatisfied  The result is pyramids and shopping malls, equally mad, useless, and destructive to any society.

We marvel at pyramids and temples as if they were impressive and beneficial.  They drained resources and used the masses to serve the manipulative few while deluding and deceiving and keeping people from Truth.

All the pyramids and temples are monuments to contrived, delusional madness.  It is only a question of whether to laugh at ludicrousness or cry in sorrow at their waste and delusion.

The soul always knew it needed love.  The technological resources were always needed for food and shelter and infrastructure.  But we let massive egos delude us into building their pyramids and penthouse towers. 

Pyramids and eponymous penthouse towers are testimonies to our gullibility.  Marvel not at them but at our foolishness.  Learn their lessons, not mystical and secretive, but condemning and mortifying, and see that nothing has changed.  

 

Religion

 

Look at the religions through the ages.

Were they all wrong?

Were they all right?

Did each support individual souls at their particular place on their eternal spiritual journey?

Why do the religions go through such similar phases, mounds, pyramids, sacrifice, pantheons, finally one God liberated to step outside the temple/prison?

Dare we try to make sense of it, to rationalize it to excuse our mute God?

Were all the extinct religions our fault, symbols of our ignoring some divine revelation?  How could we have been so wrong?!....and now be so right?

Was it lack of revelation that led us in spiritually infantile desperation to pile stones into pyramidal stacks?

Even though we now of course have all the answers, for most of history most of humanity did not.  Was that their fault?  Were they supposed to figure it out on their own?  What determines when it is time for a prophet or savior to finally intercede?

Don’t expect answers any more than the young girl walking up the pyramid steps to be sacrificed got an answer.  At least not yet.

But feel commended that you entertain the questions.  Had a few more people been willing to ask questions along the way, maybe we would have been ready for those prophets a little sooner, and maybe that young girl would not have had to walk up those pyramid steps.

All religion arises from asking questions.  Daring to ask questions is in itself rare enough, but then the answers have to suit our preferences and expectations if we’re going to be willing to incorporate them into our religion.

We think we get frustrated about the  dearth of universally broadcast, unambiguous answers and directions from God.  Imagine how frustrated God must get with our unwillingness to heed the wisdom that is provided.

Yes, evolutionary religions on parallel paths through the ages, telling us of our innate suspicion that there is something more, demonstrating that “something more” better prove useful to whoever holds power.  Evolutionary religions, over enough ages, once we finally grow bored or disillusioned with the religious status quo, providing the answers we are willing to accept.

It is unforced revelation, revealed at our pace, incremental progress unfolding when we are ready, incremental progress when we confess we need it.  

 

Religion

"You will do greater things than these".

As usual, Yeshu speaking from an eternal perspective.

Amazing, wondrous things will indeed unfold over the ages, and all members of the body of Christos will contribute their role, their dab of mortar, to that unfolding destiny.

No, He didn't mean we would heal more people than He did, or move bigger mountains.  But we would be a part of bigger things, world changing things, universe changing things.

Always from that eternal perspective, the momentary details of worldly events seem almost inconsequential in Yeshu's commentary.  How differently we can interpret His words if we take that eternal perspective, if we relinquish our personal little view of place and time.  How much more sense the Word makes.  What bright promises the words invoke.  

Time is after all the great deceiver and blinder, with its insistence on the reality of death and decay.  Time brings fear.  The eternal obviates need for fear.  Of course Yeshu was short on details of worldly events.  Of course we misinterpret scripture when we force its interpretation into the deception of our perspective of mortal time.  

The prophecies and promises are eternal, worldly time scales evaporating, "day" and "days" and "a little while" becoming direction indicators not location markers.

"You will do greater things than these."  Dare we declare these words false?  Or need we only open our eyes to see far enough, to the wondrous Destiny Home that awaits.

 

 

 

Reliunif.lif

All the setbacks are tests of faith

This spiritual system is like a rocky stream.  It is inevitable the water will flow to its Destiny.  But innumerable barriers and level areas and end moraines will have to be overcome in the process.  

Have faith.  Understand the eternal picture.  

The barriers and tests are necessary for growth of the soul into its potential as a child of God.  The barriers will never be high enough to permanently stop you from reaching your Destiny.  You will be detoured and delayed.  From the perspective in the bottom of a sealed valley it will appear all flow has stopped.  But the pull of eternity does not stop.  That is all part of the great loving Purpose, part of sculpting eternity and Destiny.

Hold fast to what you know deep in your soul, that weakest of forces, like gravity pulling the water, Love pulling toward eternal Destiny.  

 

Corollary

Our individual decisions that we fret about are critical in the sense of whether we are seeking selfless Unity with loving Source.  But our individual decisions we fret about are irrelevant regarding the eternal fulfillment of Purpose and Destiny.  That is why God routinely gives no specific answers.  Each major life decision places before us the Choice of Unity and Love as our foundational motivation.  Once we have made that Choice, which in any terminology is equivalent to choosing to follow Christos, worldly life may still place before us more than one option over which we anguish about which fits God's will.  Don't anguish too much.  God may not provide a clear answer.  If you are seeking to follow the loving Purpose, you have already made the important Choice.  This job or that, this career or that, this place or that, this marriage or that life, which life to save, even the agonizing choices made in the absence of holy directions written in flaming letters on the wall, even these agonizing choices can be handled by the unfolding Creation to fulfill eternal loving Destiny and Purpose, whichever path we choose.  In the face of no specific directions or guidance, go forward in faith that God can work it out.  You can't stop the water from reaching the sea, but at worst only momentarily divert it.  

Reliunif.lif

 

God's will.

The topic provides compelling arguments for atheism.

 

God's will on earth….if God is in control, God is responsible for the carnage and cruelty, hardly an appealing marketing strategy for any God wanting to be adored (as opposed to feared.)

Or, God's not responsible, but created a hands off operating machine that leaves us to our own devices, hence the horrific mess.  In this case prayer seems like a waste of time.

Or, much of the time God lets things freewheel on their own, but occasionally, if we do enough tricks for him, will tweak the knobs a little to facilitate a rescue or healing or victory, like giving a treat to a puppy in training.

Only seeing inexorable Purpose, God's will in the flow of events toward Destiny, can we see Hope.

Only in seeing the roiling cauldron of this world as a birthplace of the children of God, inheritors of I Will Be What I Will Be, free to choose and choose wrongly, prodigals not yet accepting proffered redemption, only then does God's will become clear, not in the horrifying details of daily events, but in our nascent awareness of our freedom to choose to amplify or mitigate the horrors, to choose our eternal destiny and fulfill God's momentarily well hidden but loving will.

Poetry Ready

Shelter,

Shelter,

the touch of Heaven,

healing, soothing,

balm of eternity,

precious in any form,

holy in any form.

 

Touch of Unity,

so long sought,

so long missed,

surviving on stones,

cold stones

 that pass for spiritual nutrition

 in this world.

 

Accept what cannot be,

not here, 

not now.

Yet it was,

for a moment

the touch of Heaven entered,

leaving behind a memory

that carries and lifts

these many years later.

 

Touch of Heaven,

precious in any form,

no longer sought,

for it is not to be found,

so say the painful lessons.

But it will be,

not found, not captured,

but given,

as it once was,

as it still is,

in whatever form.

 

Poetry

Reliunif.lif  Ready

Casualties?

Oh, there will be casualties.

Everyone will be a casualty.

Every last one will be lost.

Every last one will suffer.

Not one will escape.

Such is the uncompromising genocide of God.

All those high school classmates will die.

All the poor people will die.

All the people in the hurricane will die.

No quarter given, every man, woman, child, kitten, and puppy will die.

We will spend our lives in denial of that.

We will spend our lives pretending it is not so.

We will spend our lives trying to avoid and delay it.

But the absolute obliteration of the Great Flood continues unabated to this day,

in slow motion,

none,

not one,

surviving,

not even an occasional Noah with an ark.

God's unrepentant, unflinching, uncompromising genocide of every living thing human and otherwise continues unabated to this day.

ALL will be casualties,

every last person and pet that you love.

Look at it!

Don't turn from it.

Don't pretend you comprehend the awfulness of it.

Then let it slowly begin to dawn that this cannot be,

cannot be all of the story.

It is indeed part of the story, and we should not pretend otherwise,

we should not skip over that part.

But there is more,

all that happens before the dying,

between the birth and death,

between the first cry and the final rattle.

That is our time,

our empowered time between the inevitable,

when in every interaction we can choose something defiantly eternal,

something escaping God's liberating universal genocide,

something of touch,

something of Love.

 

 

Poetry  Ready

Waiting.

Hiding.

No humor in this.

No marketability in this.

Only survival in this.

 

Seek not answers,

lest you succumb to the temptation

to create answers.

Know what you are unquestionably given,

and no more.

 

It takes longer for morning sun to reach these deep places.

That's because these are places of deep faith.

Wait a little longer,

though it seems forever longer.

 

Your Source/Creator/Father/Mother/Progenitor knows,

and loves.

You know that.

You need no intellectual constructs for that knowledge of the soul.

That essence abides when the world would distract and deceive with theology and eschatology.

 

All the images of gods of war were our creations.

Every last one of them has crumbled to dust.

All the gods and spirits we summoned were charlatans and imposters,

enslaving our gullible imaginations.

 

Sense the approaching glow of the One,

the One you know even in this deep valley,

One nameless,

not constrained to form,

One who gave all for us,

Gave all for you.

Sense your longings,

not your fear,

longings that reflect the One,

the Source,

the nameless Source,

who in Paschal Mystery gave all,

and longs to welcome you Home.

Reliobs

 

Most disheartening, this universality of the human condition.

Ancestral Puebloans butchered, literally, those of different beliefs.

Balkanites butcher those of differing beliefs.  Nothing has changed.  No progress has been made. Other than that, some in far removed, safe places decry the slaughters.

Bombs, rockets, and munitions make the slaughter more convenient and less politically risky.  But the victims are just as dead.

Yet the personal nature of the slaughters of Puebloans in the 13th century and Kosovars in 1998 somehow evokes a deeper pathos than the pressing of a launch button.  There is something about looking in the eyes of the victim as you happily kill them that takes human depravity to the deepest of depths.

The perpetrators do not see the victims as humans.  Thereby the perpetrators abdicate their own humanity.  It is likely the perpetrators do not know what “human” means.

All this slaughter, occurring in the name of religion, and religious identity.

All this slaughter, usually denied and hidden by the perpetrators, which speaks to something they know.  Why hide the dead in order to hide the deed?  Yet that is the usual course of action.  Hiding surely is a form of confession that indeed the act was barbaric and shameful.  Yet if so, why did that awareness not preclude the action in the first place?   If one feels so righteous about inflicting carnage should one not brag about and publicize it?

 

Observation

 

Separate people, give them different identities, no matter how specious and unfounded,  put them adjacent to each other so interaction is inevitable….

And watch the violence erupt.

 

Boys’ State

Ancestral Puebloans

The Balkans

The social media divided United States

The same universal effect is seen in all three, and countless other examples.

 

The ancestral Puebloans began slaughtering each other once sufficiently collected into localized population centers.  

For me, this, when added to the other three examples, testified to how universal this trend is.

 

With even a little separation, the human imagination will concoct variants on religion and social beliefs.  This is absolutely inevitable.  

Religion and social beliefs will always lead to conflict.  

So, the genocides and slaughters are inevitable, barring an unusual situation, such as the U.S. in the 1960’s, far enough from competing countries to not have to kill them, everyone watching the same news, and black people providing a convenient outlet on whom to inflict violence.  

 

Reliobs

 

From notes after Utah/Nevada trip.

 

Puebloan art right after 1300 makes the renaissance leap from invocation of symbolic magical cartoons to more detailed and realistic representations of people and people-like figures….Humanity taking nascent steps toward awareness and empowerment.

The old religions of magic had led to the disaster of the 12th century, jolting a progressive step forward, as plague had jolted Europe into Reformation and Renaissance, old institutions having failed to save people.  

Old forms and beliefs do not disappear, but evolve and open, rendered flexible by disaster.

 

 

Poetry

What might it mean?....

The quiet that no one

            dares hear.

“Listen not”

            bitterly advises the

            cynical prophet

“Lest you hear what

Isn’t there.”

 

Keep it simple,

multi-layered parables

for this infant generation.

 

Catch someone unaware,

unwittingly thinking,

before the world

sinks its steely grip

into their

defenseless mind.  

You cannot know these people.

Truth is too much work.

The “someday” seems

            Illusional, or

            more likely,

            delusional.

But the feeling of yesterday,*

when resolving to doggedly try directly in the face of discouragement,

God, what a feeling!*

Remember it,

make it a lifestyle,

let faith defiantly feed on the discouragement.

It is a profound internal change, 

a profound shedding of reason and irrefutable fact.  It is too late in my life to do anything else.  

Savor the defiance.

Let this be as defiant as resurrection.

Don’t even bother looking for hope.

Feel the purity of motive unshackled from hope of worldly success.  

 

Poetry Ready

Advice?

Give none.  Take none.

            Such is the only safe course.  

But do share,

            just in case,

            in case someone listens,

and listen yourself

            with all your being.

 

Poetry Ready

Celebrate past accomplishments

            that make possible

            this sublime moment.

The challenges that forced

the accomplishments of your

life were unbidden

and unwelcome.

But here you are

because of

those challenges,

structures of life

erected by demand

or necessity

now sheltering

and protecting.

 

Observation Ready

What silly, selfish lives we lead, when not fighting for survival.  But upon closer inspection, most of us are fighting for survival most of the time.  Even if it is in a silly job, or getting the kids to school, or placating the spouse, we are fighting for survival.

Even when going along with the guys or girls, we are fighting for social survival.  Even when volunteering or giving or helping, we are fighting for our soul's survival.

In the endless chatter and prattle we are hoping someone hearing us will ensure our eternal survival.  

It all seems silly, our games of survival, when compared to people dodging munitions or hiding from the paramilitary mob….but we take our survival seriously, whether social, spiritual, financial, reputational, or physical.

 

Survival…..of something…..something of us…..survival first of body of course…..but then reputation, popularity, personality, accomplishment.

Survival, a momentary casting of something about our identity into the maelstrom of time, time the eternal enemy, time dictating the continuity of endings that we so continuously fight against.

Survival, defined by time, threatened by time, enabled by time.

Survival, not possible or necessary in an eternal state of being.

Survival, an illusion?....merely a deception by the vale of time hiding the immutable eternity of every moment of existence?

Perhaps the best we can hope is a momentary respite from the struggle for survival, before the phone rings or the text arrives or the air-raid sirens go off or the watchman screams.  Survival, merely temporal illusion in an eternal state of being…..but a darned demanding illusion we dare not ignore.

 

 

Religion

We mistakenly apply linear time to the Bible.

We should instead see the eternal continuity of the stories.

Genesis is ongoing.

The Fall is ongoing

Even Revelations is ongoing.

There are always deceiving leaders claiming the role of Christos.  Forces of good and evil continually clash.

The lessons are not about past and future, but here and now, not about tribes and nations, but our individual lives.  

 

Reliunif.lif  Ready

Eventually we succumb.

Eventually the corporeal world squeezes our consciousness out of the world.  

We are given an odd few years, our consciousness enters, or maybe it sprouts anew, we abide for an interminably brief moment, then unceremoniously, whether abruptly or via prolonged agony, our consciousness is squeezed out.

Our presence as an individual element of the One Consciousness is once again excluded from active influence in this temporal world.  

We are left in disoriented shock wondering "what was that all about?!" as we look back on our worldly lives.  Then we dust off our souls and get on with eternal life, probably hoping to never again have to repeat the corporeal exercise.  

Perhaps all the traumas that mattered so much will promptly fade to irrelevance, like the uncomfortable flight once you have arrived at the vacation destination.  Those now completed temporal lives will surely seem odd and quaint when viewed from eternity liberated from the deception of time.

But they will be important in their odd and quaint way, like that interminable flight, necessary to get us to our destination.

 Diary

The goose babies in the two older families now lead the parents instead of staying between them.  In the third family the two babies remain between the parents.  

The two older families wander as far as the barn.  The youngest family sticks close to the pond and naps more often.  

Little feet still clumsily trip and tumble if landing on an oversized pebble.

 

Sunday morning blessedly quiet, few people here, no traffic.  Crisp air, but not biting.  I spend far too much time here.  

I feel like the anti-Hemmingway, banished from understanding of affairs of people, exiled to an awareness of sublime beauty.

 

Approaching dogs always evoke warning sounds from dad, until the obese dog walker of metallic pink hair briskly passes, baby geese unnoticed, even by her companion with the telephoto lens.

Other than brief naps the families are always on the move, never long in one place.  A little too long viewing my screen and I Iook up to see they are gone.

These families seem to get along, unlike the rude treatment of the single mother family last year.

Poetry

Golden rest for the moment.

Warming sun on the rise.

This is no time to be productive.

This is a moment to be alive.

 

Stubby wings, so tiny, outstretched as babies run.  

 

Reliunif.lif

Bodhi kitty dreams and twitches, and I ignore what the dream might be about.  There is very little a kitty would dream about that would not entail something at risk of death, chasing or being chased.  How unnatural it must be in this carnal world for a kitty to have any dreams not involving killing or being killed.  How curious, the presumably violent nature of the dreams of our fuzzy, cuddly pets.  What else might their twitching dreams be,  other than being hunter or prey?  Might they ever dream of the pure joy of running?

Do fuzzy, cuddly kitty dreams always focus on the uncompromisingly bloody nature of this world?  Would we call them nightmares?  Or do kitties and puppies also dream of cuddles and pettings and chasing balls and hopping into welcoming laps?

The kitty and the puppy will provide the same answer as the rest of the world….no answer at all, only the self-evident nature of the reality.  The blood and brutality are undeniable and integral to it all, though we may prefer to pull a fuzzy, cuddly curtain over them.  But the potential and possibility for dreams of something more, something welcoming, embracing, and caring, that potential and possibility is just as undeniable.  It is up to our dreams, our freely chosen dreams, whether we allow that potential and possibility to be instantiated.  Such is our empowerment as children of the I Will Be What I Will Be, to create what otherwise could never be.

 

07:27  pond

Diary

I got to rescue a gosling!  I got to rescue a gosling!  Thank You!  Thank You!  Thank You!

I did my morning head-count.  The newest family of three, that had the bubbly baby eaten by the turtle, was down to one!  Oh, that's horrible!  The parents were clearly distressed, talking and talking at the edge of the pond, the one remaining baby nodding off between them.  But the parents were not honking loudly, as when defending.  

What tragedy had befallen them?  I kept hearing a peepsing sound.  Could it be the missing baby?  But goslings usually make no sound,  certainly nothing this loud (though still very quiet).  

Parents distressed calls, some bird somewhere sounding small and distressed, …..I had to look around.

I was thinking about the lady here several days ago who told me about rescuing a gosling from a muskrat hole.  There was a small hole near the parents   I check.  There's the missing baby!  Sitting in a dark puddle of water, crying and crying!

What to do?!  Now it's trying to hop out, but that's clearly a futile effort.  My proximity now has dad hissing at me.  I don't want to cause more stress.  Mom, dad, and baby three get in the water.  It's now or never!  The hole is barely big enough for my hand.  can I get baby out without hurting it?  I can't see in the hole.  I cup my hand.  I feel soft fuzziness in my palm, bring it up, baby hops out!....runs to mom and dad, tiny stubby wings flapping!....mom and dad nuzzle and nose it in greeting!  A moment later, everyone is eating breakfast.

I got to rescue a gosling!  Thank You!  Thank You!  Thank You!

Without the lady's mention of her rescuing a gosling from a muskrat hole I might never have thought to look way down into that tiny opening.  Everything came together, multiple chance confluence of timings.  Oh the joy of allowing that to happen throughout my life and to rescue some soul from some dark place.

 

Later:

I collected some likely rocks and went to the pond.  The first one I pulled out of my pack fit the hole as if an Inca mason had prepared it!  

It feels great to know I’ve removed a hazard for the little guys.  

 

Diary

 

Goose dramas and traumas.

Recent days have been stressful, though highlighted by being able to rescue one little gosling.

The first family, with four, remains intact.

The second family, with three, has all three, but one of the parents, I think the mom, has absconded for two days.  With the cold, hard rain of the past fifteen hours, that could be a problem if the babies don’t have mom’s wings to shelter under.  I doubt dad is programmed to provide shelter, since he’s always on the lookout.

The third family of two is down to one.  The other morning dad was honking and agitated.  Something got one of the twins.

The fourth family of three lost one.  The first morning out for the babies I noticed one that was paddling backwards, and often had his head in the water.  I thought he was precocious, getting an early start on bottom-feeding, as he would work backwards with his head below the surface.  

The next day the family only had two babies.  But the parents were not honking, not looking around, not calling.  

Now I wonder if the gosling had a defect.  I’ve never seen the babies feeding off the bottom.  

I went to do steps exercise, and while doing it thought that baby, if it had a defect, might not be able to follow the family around on walkabouts, but it might still be in the pond.  After steps I returned to look for it in the pond.  I found its body floating back up near the reeds on the west end of the main pond.  But it jerked!....and again!.....how could I reach it to rescue it?!......but I soon realized it was indeed dead.  The pond turtle was jerking on the gosling, eating it head-first.  

Did the turtle capture the baby in the first place?....or did the turtle find the baby already dead.  Such a natural demise could explain the parents’ lack of defensive posturing the morning the baby was missing.  

 

Reliobs

 

Yeshu said if someone asks for your cloak, give them your coat as well.  But in light of some people I know, I have to ask, what if they throw the garments in the mud, or tear them up, or burn them for heat, or keep losing them?

It seems one should find a way to give something that really helps, addressing the real source of the recurring need.  Maybe it’s sometimes better to not give what they ask for, but give them what they need.  

 

Observation

 

I read about Ancestral Puebloan regalia.  Being as I am, I am averse to all regalia.  I prefer the honest, true, simple appearance of people as God made us.  Coats and ties are an aberration as far as I’m concerned.

So I read about native regalia from this perspective, unable to keep myself from thinking how sad it is to kill majestic animals like eagles and pumas for the sake of trying to impress people by looking like something you are not.

Then later in the day I watch the coronation of King Edward III.  Lest we think empty regalia and ritual is relegated to primitive tribes, let us observe how millions of people via satellite data connections watch in rapt attention as old men dress in adornments from dead animals, perform odd little rituals, and parade in, yes, regalia, regalia exotic and derived from work of subjugated people around the world and the needless deaths of majestic animals.  

 

 

I dub the little guy I rescued my god-gosling!

 

Poetry

All the geese families were OK this morning. 

 

 

Who might it be, 

the someone who can understand.

Who can reach across the ages?

Who wants knowledge, 

and knows the bounds of wisdom?

 

Who sees through the accepted  fallacies 

and has moved beyond silly precepts?

 

Oh, to learn in time.

 

But in this life we always learn a little too late.

Painful the lessons,

shocking the lessons,

unbidden the lessons,

while we pretended to plan.

 

Look at the young faces.

Make your old impression.

Crack the social barriers.

Pray you could warn them before it is too late.

But it is too late.

It was too late when they were born.

Look at the intelligence that at best will not be appreciated,

and more likely will be crushed.

Look who is in absolute complete control,

and he doesn't have a clue.

You can see him being swallowed by the world right before your eyes.

 

Observation

There are no birds.  There have been no birds.  All the neighbors talk about it.  People returning to the neighborhood talk about it.  The bird feeders remain full.  

I stop, listen, and look around 360 degrees, and see and hear no birds.

The world is ending.  It is fascinating watching the end of a civilization and society.

One would think I should be doing something different than sitting here in this point of perfection, surrounded by fresh, spring green, feeling the cool breeze.

Perfection…..except there are no birds flitting in and out of the juniper.

Oh such trivial things, yet so important to me…..while the nation burns.

There is no describing this perfection.  (Finally I hear to or three birds.)

The geese families are all OK.

The spring and creek are still running.  

How I savor the blessings, not taking them for granted, feeling I should do more with them.

Such horrors unfold in the nation, the decivilizing nation.

Watching the world end.

Watching people become less and less civilized.

School board meetings become violent and riddled with tirades.

Shopping malls get shot up.

Schools get shot up.

Madness grips half the people.

Texas bans investment banks that consider environmental, social, or governmental considerations in their investing.  

The majority of people look like crap, slovenly in appearance and demeanor.  

An Oklahoma town government discusses the need for lynching black people and how to assassinate the local investigative journalist.

The third largest employer in the country is a security firm, one of many giant and rapidly growing security firms, as only the rich can afford to be safe.

Untrained guards with assault rifles guard gasoline stations.

The preceding is just a few of the incidents I have read and heard about in the last twenty-four hours.  None of them were imaginable thirty years ago.

Will enough information survive to tell future generations what happened to us?  Or will our demise be like the evacuation of the ancestral Puebloans and the disappearance of the Fremont people, a silent mystery, an unsolvable puzzle, a warning unheard.  

The rapidity of the collapse will be a striking but misleading clue, leading to conclusions about natural disaster.  No, these disasters we brought on ourselves.  

We will be gone.  Our society and nation and culture will be gone.  Like a hole in the ocean, it will promptly and naturally be filled with new religions, new economies, new government or feudal structures, new priorities and values.  

Will reason rule?  Will civilization sprout anew?  

Should we even hope for that?  Might humanity be better off returning to hunting and gathering, limiting organizational scope to clan and tribe?

Or should we hope for even more technology, for the machines to takeover and rule to keep us from destroying ourselves again?

Will we forgive Nature?....or will we blame it.

The decivilizing of our nation has unfolded even before the collapse of Nature began to drive the disasters.  The violent conflict at school board meetings, the assault rifles at the gas station and the shopping mall, have little to do with drought and storm.  The ever presence of violence and implied violence is entirely our own doing.

Will future generations be able to decipher the rubble we leave in our wake?  

The digital records will probably vanish.  The paper will probably vanish.  All the unburied bodies will probably vanish.

Future archeologists will invoke climate and famine and religious conflict for our demise, the standard litany of oversimplification.

But they won’t see how people dress now.  They won’t hear the school board meeting.  They won’t see our social media….anymore than we can hear the 13th century shift in rhythms of the Fremont drums.  

A bird, one lone bird, enters the tree, its lonely call emphasizing the absence that serves as harbinger of our presently arriving fate.  

 

Reliobs

"Who touched me?!" said Yeshu.   What a lesson!...But what is it?  In the jostling crowd, everyone demanding and wanting, He sensed whom He could really help.  Everyone wanted His attention.  He could have healed and fed everyone.  But He knew it would make a difference for that one lady with the issue of blood.

Notice she did not even verbally request help!  There was no demand or "woe is me" or begging or pleading.  Just a touch.  

Her act of faith made no worldly sense!  Even if you believe someone can heal you, you have to get their attention and submit your request.  You have to take worldly action, rational action, to act on your faith.  The lady did not even do that.  Her faith needed only touch. 

Pick and choose how we distribute our efforts?  Sense what really will make a difference?  What's the lesson?  Or lacking Yeshu's Spirit, is the lesson irrelevant for us?  How to know how to best help in a world needing so much?  But what a blessing to be tormented by the question as opposed to not caring!  Such a wealth of opportunities lies before the person who cares!  

One lesson might be that we should not necessarily expend our limited resources to help in helping those who make the loudest demands.  Maybe it's OK to disappoint many, including in Yeshu's case mother and family, in order to bring some form of healing to someone in quiet need. 

Reasoning with most people seems to be impossible.  So what changes the course of human behavior? Each of us mad and delusional to greater or lesser degrees, unable and unwilling to listen or learn, how do the masses get directed by social tides?  What wrought civilization?  What holds their attention long enough to influence behavior?

You need some flash and color, ritual and pomp, liturgy and anthems, flags are helpful, leaders need to be audacious and extreme and willing to wear regalia or at least suits…..or something sexy. Any message needs to be simple and invoke fear and/or anger or desire.  

Then this generation, if convinced it is in their best interests, will happily kill, die, and buy….buy anything, absolutely anything.

Grim, hopeless, and depressing, this spiritual generation.  The Great Flood may have been one of God's better ideas.  Wipe the slate clean, get a clean start, better luck next time.

But here we are, still.  God didn't quite wipe us out.  Brutish and stupid, we continue to refuse to listen and abjure reason.  

Apparently in spite of our trenchant determination to not learn, once in a while, against all odds, someone takes a step forward.  Civilizations do momentarily flicker.  Someone somewhere forgives, or extends a hand, or smiles through the pain.  

Don't hold high hopes for these humans, but don't give up all hope.  Defiantly try to learn and teach.  While most advise to go down fighting, instead go down helping.  Someone will take a step forward.  Eventually, all will take a step forward, in some spiritually glacial time scale.  In helping this obstinate humanity,  try to move a grain of sand, that someday the majesty of the Grand Canyon will be exposed.

 

Reliunif.lif

Scalps the Hopi collected.  You could only be in the elite warrior society if you brought in a scalp.  Then they decorated the kiva with them.

How important for me to read about the ancestral Puebloan war gods!  Such a different impression I have of those people, and what went on in those kivas.

Secret societies!  Dear God, as primitive as Masons and Elks!  

Again, the more I learn of humanity, the more appalling it seems.

Yet God puts up with us?!

Warrior societies with a fresh scalp trophy initiation?!

It seems universal, the madness.

I have been listening to the Lucy Worsely series on British royalty.  My God, talk about silliness!....utterly contrived royal silliness!....that shapes nations and countless lives.

One would think all the intermarriage among European families would have ensured peace.  But no, related monarchs would send thousands to kill and die at the drop of a hat.  Often the title of a nations chosen religion would suffice as reason to go rape and slaughter.

Facing the evidence of such unrelenting madness, from scalp societies to  church wars,  one could be excused for asking what deluding spirits accost the human mind.  What demons dwell here below to instigate such festive carnage?  Has Satan or Masau actually been unleashed on earth to get us to inflict suffering on each other?

And there's the catch.  Demons, devils, or spirits, none have power except through us.  Deceivers?  Maybe.  Incarnate?  Not likely.  Real?  As real as our minds let them be….and want them to be.

In cases in which we commit the acts of cruelty, demons and devils provide convenient excuse, even if in our cruelty and callousness we claim to be fighting against the devils, or The Devil.  

It is just too easy to blame the condition of the world on a demonic force, absolving us of responsibility.

Evil in the world?....dear God, yes.  Evil spirits?  That's irrelevant.  The concept alone suffices to provide excuse for our fear and cruelty, 

There are terrifying spirits walking the world's surface, and the ones we need most worry about share the appellation homo sapiens.  What ever other ghosts or goblins may slip through some interdimensional warps is inconsequential compared to the horrors and terrors we inflict with relish upon each other.

Did some humans fall from grace?.....or from Heaven?.....or some other path on the way here?  

Did some souls come here specifically to unleash horrors?  Did others arrive from some sequence of corporeal lives intent on bringing Light and wisdom to this dark place?  It is all irrelevant, and an unhelpful distraction.  Whether we begin our eternal journey here or have traversed scores of universes before sequestration in these bodies, is utterly irrelevant.

Here we all make the same Choice.  No past lives, demonic forces, or witch's spells enslave us here…..though brain chemistry and childhood traumas may impose significant influence.  But to the degree inherited brain chemistry, physical damage, and emotional traumas allow, it is we, not demonic forces or our own demonic background, who in each moment make our Choice to take the scalp or share our our meager rations.  

 

Reliunif.lif

This life really is about redemption, rescue, Choice.  

This is a world of beliefs carved in our image, hence images of wrathful gods, ogres, and witches.  If we happen to be too scientific for that, we substitute executives, politicians, and preachers.  

Then on occasion God in God's mercy sends a message of redemption to give some individuals a way out of the madness.  

Crosses replace katsinas.  Parliaments replace royalty.  Enlightenment replaces witch-hunts.  For a while.  While the wars continue, wars "in the name of…" with a political or economic title replacing last year's manufactured grudge against a tribe or monarch.  But our nature, the nature of this generation, as Yeshu called us, remains bloodily on display.

Redemption, rescue, salvation, healing, will once again be delivered into the world, delivered by rational miracles, and again resoundingly rejected……except by someone, some lost coin, some lost sheep, some prodigal son or daughter, the holy seed choosing to go Home, waiting to go home, longing to go Home, 

 

 

Diary

10:33.  Outside fence.

Approaching pond heard a terrible sound from its direction, terrible geese commotion though not like I had ever heard from them.  I hurry.  I see a coyote running with a gosling in its mouth.

Horror.

The families of three and four goslings remain intact.  But now one couple has none.  One couple has one.  Two lost.

I don't know if the losses both came from my god-gosling family or one from them and one from the single gosling family.

So now there are families of four, three (single parent), one, and none.  

Devastating.  

Fine, it's natural.  Fine, no one would understand.  Fine, the scene is duplicated innumerable times every day.  Fine.

But how Creation suffers to redeem us from the choices of our souls.  

 

12:31. 

All quiet, except for cleaners.  Two goose couples without babies graze in front of the house.  A crazy guy walks by gesturing in thin air.  

I'll never know if the single baby in one family is a god-gosling or the original single baby.  It seems quite small and weak, frequently sitting.  The god-gosling was the youngest, so that could be it.  

The childless couples show no distress.  

Little does the day betray the horrors of the dark.

I have to think that having discovered this opportunity the coyotes and bobcat will return.  

 

Creek still bubbling.

Smoke shrouds the mountains.

Warm, warmest day of the year so far.

 

There is a condition of the soul,

a condition of caring,

that will lead to entanglements and life invested.

It is a right way to be.

It is, in this world, a painful way to be.

Accept deliverance from circumstance,

for there is no deliverance

from the nature of the soul.

Choose to not contribute to the harshness,

but know you will be all the more

immersed in the harshness.

Answers to the paradox of life

will come mainly by perseverance and faith.

"Might it be true?" you will ask.

Some things you will know.

Some will evoke only discouragement.

Eternal outcomes will be rock solid certain.

It's the worldly outcomes that remain in doubt.

All the world's inputs will always prove discouraging.

If this path is to succeed, like all paths of faith,

it must be pursued in the face of discouragement.

There will be no confirmation.

There will be no flaming words.

Probably.  At least you cannot count on them.

This is faith, and not for the faint of heart.

Guidance is never so explicit.  

But in this case, the rescues are not to be ignored,

more than one of them.

Going for it all,

that is this path of faith.

There is no wrong choice among loving choices.

But there are choices.

 

Creek.

Still running.

Was Yeshu tempted to go to Jerusalem with His taunting brothers?

With those closest to Him deriding Him as crazy, was He discouraged?  

Was He tempted to succumb to family and maternal pressure and stay Home?

How did He know He was right?  Did He have any doubts?  

Did He wonder if He was crazy?....especially when no one understood?

Even if He did, did He find Himself unable to escape the potential?  What if what He sensed was right?  

Did He see path and outcomes clearly from the get-go?  Or did He have to learn and discover by faith?  

 

 

Observation

Be a part?

Contribute?

Play a role?

Oh, the pressures of societal survival!

What was that leader like in grade school?  What environment made them so adept at social interaction?  What about that voice and hair and face and height, all so commanding in the meeting, bequeaths them the right to dominate the conversation?

Make no mistake, it is usually not wisdom that speaks up in the meeting.  Confidence, ego, insecurity, need for attention, desire to control, many factors underlie the dominant voices in the meeting, but seldom is wisdom one of them.  

Seek wisdom from the quiet corners.  Help it come out into the open.  Uncover its light.  Give it time.  In the meeting-room and in the world, wisdom remains quiet for it knows it is unwelcome.  But it is there, waiting, and needed, always needed, if not welcome.

 

Observation

Observing the goose couple that lost all their babies.

One calls and calls, at a distance from the second.

The first flies back and forth across the field.

The second plaintively talks, softly, not loudly.

The first shows the second how to fly.

They have waited days since their babies were killed.

Now the first leads a little further away.

The first is talking, always looking back to see if the second is following.

The three families that still have goslings follow across the north field, walking in tight formation, as if to say goodbye.

The second cannot leave.

Oh the sad conversation!

Again, the first makes that low flight across the field, 

The second walks to join the first.  

There is no urgency, no panic, it is not like when yung geese get ready to fly.  There is just chattering, ongoing low level talk between the two.

The first takes another low flight.

The second walks to follow, but refuses to fly.

The families with babies turn and walk back  to the garden.

The second cannot stand it, and walks fast to join the families with babies.

The first reluctantly follows..

The second looks and looks at the families with babies, and follows again.

Dear God, this terrible dance of grief!

The couple goes together into the pond.

They are calling, calling now, looking around, paddling across, now out of the pond, calling, calling, as they did on the day of loss, unable to accept the loss, one last time, maybe this time, maybe this time the little one will answer.  Low moans replace calls.  Grief incarnate paddle back and forth, the low conversation continuous, restless hopelessness paddling, now out of the pond, now the first flies again!...away!....around a large circle, calling, calling, but the second will not fly.  Calls are loud, frantic, continuous, the first circles and lands in the smaller pond.  The second returns to the main pond.  This is where the horror happened.  The second knows.

The first pleads and pleads, it is time to go.  Both glisten in low morning sun, talking, talking, endless conversation, anguished conversation.  The first walks in the field where this all started, but the second remains to walk along the bank of the pond.

The first begs, knows there is no hope.  But the second returns to the water, drawn to the babies in the other families.  The first gives up.  The couple rejoins the families, tortured by unacceptable loss, staring at the babies not theirs, pure distilled sorrow holds them.

Again, the first takes a large circle flight, then returns to the crying second in the field.  

Always the low talking.

In years past I have spent excess time here unable to resist the temptation of potential joy of first flight of young geese families.  Now I am unable to leave a scene of torment over first flights to never be.

Restless, knowing all is wrong, the couple goes from field to pond to a different field, then back to pond, to yet a different field.

Finally they eat, having eaten nothing all this time.

Finally quiet.  The couple is alone, away from the families, away from the others’

 babies.  

Now to yet a different field.  The first tries again…flies…out of sight!  But the parent can still be heard, still loudly calling….and finally returns.

The second has gone to the pond.

The first lands in the corral, calling, calling, desperate for the second to join.  The second does not even answer.

They are separated now, probably for the first time since pairing, perhaps seasons before. 

Here comes the second!  Walking the long distance.  The first is trying to get the second to fly, the first staying on the north side of the fence, knowing the second needs to fly, needs to take the step away from tragedy.

The second approaches the fence, while softly talking.  The first walks a little away, the second stands at the fence, ….

….then turns back toward the pond…..

…..then back to the fence.  The first calls and walks a little away.

The second finds a hole under the fence, slips through, still not forced to fly….then runs as fast as possible to the first.

This corral is far from where the couple ever brought their babies.  Will drawing the second here help break the bond of visual reminders and facilitate flight away?  The first flies to the top of the horse shed, talking all the while.

The second walks back to the fence, but not through.  The first calls from the roof.  The second keeps looking toward the pond.  Loud calls, anguished calls, from both of them.

The second cannot find the hole……now finds it.  Back toward the pond.  The first stays on the roof.  Loud calls and answers, like an argument.

The second walks alone, further, further, toward the remaining babies.  

The first flies, swooping at low level right by my face, 

to join the second.

Next day:

Same routine.

1 does a low flight.  06:25.  Calls and calls.  2 turns back to join the other families…and back to the pond.

The families of four and three goslings have grown wonderfully intermingled, forming a group of seven.

My god-gosling inadvertently wanders to the childless parents, then panics upon realizing its mistake, frantically peepsing and paddling.  Its parents chase the couple away from their baby.

God-gosling family feeds right at my feet.

All parents remain always quiet except the couple.  They maintain a continuous low conversation.

Both flap!  The first time 2 has flapped!  A run more than a flight, for ten meters.

Four crows lurk about the garden this morning, keeping their role a mystery.

The couple is quiet, twenty-five meters between them.  But 2 shakes head, more animated than yesterday.

06:46  Calls.  All families head to pond.  That indicates a dog walker approaching.

Damp, low clouds, sky of uniform gray, may mean this is not a flight day.

07:08  Always 1 goes far into fields, 2 lingers by families, always making the low groaning sound.

Holes open in the cloud cover, symbolic of grief allowing entry of first light.

07:28  1 does a circle flight over the horse shed.  

07:40  1 flies to corral.  Calls and calls.  2 sleeps.  1 finally flies back.

07:50.  

 

From 28. Mai. 2023

Pond.  Sunrise status quo.  In recent nights the families stay in uncomfortable reeds for safety.  The couple remains, 2 at the pond, 1 in a field.  

I go north to the creek.

06:30  While I stand there, a lone goose flies over, level, straight, fast, determined, low.  I know what it probably means.

The flyer banks left toward the rocks, but does not complete a circle to turn back toward the pond.  I return to the pond to see if my suspicions are confirmed.

The seven goslings of the combined families excitedly peeps as the parents give permission to scramble out of the reeds.

The 2 of the couple remains, calling, walking, looking, moaning, even doing tedious laps with outstretched neck through the entangling reeds in search of the missing partner.

Quickly walking, this way across the field, that way, head up and turning, not accepting this second grievous loss.

So we all wait.  

07:04

The three families march back toward the pond.  2 marches in parallel at a respectful distance, but trying to stay as close to the babies as possible.  

 

16:42

1 is back!  They are far from babies.  Maybe this will ween 2 away.  2 still groans a little but a little less.  

The couple returns to the pond

Poetry

Goose couple still here.  All babies still here.

The spring is really flowing!  Glorious!

How I wish I could write so as to share this beauty with someone.  

The spring is deep enough it flows silently now, slipping past at my feet.

Downstream it still gurgles over the rocks.

The goose couple is settled down this morning, the first (wife) seemingly having given up on convincing the partner to leave.  

 

 

Imagine to be a poet,

crafting marks on a page to touch people's souls.

Imagine knowing how to do that.

Imagine knowing what goes on in other people's minds,

what matters,

what would get their attention.

Imagine caring enough to care about that.

 

A silent flow of spring water 

arises from the earth.

Here is gift and miracle,

life source and sustainer,

simple and pure,

clean, clear,

appearing by miracle,

disappearing by inexorable pull of the world.

 

The spring, all flowing life,

seemingly appearing by miracle,

then disappearing per perfectly predictable and natural worldly forces.

The latter we fully understand, though we wish not to believe it.

The former is beyond our comprehension, though we long to believe it.

From where does it come?

How can corporeal material come together so as to ignite life?

Why can it not then endure?

The great asymmetry this is.  

One point a joy, one a sorrow,

One a wonder, one inevitable.  

And in between, 

in between,

we're not quite sure what to make of it.

It keeps us busy enough we don't have to think about it too much.

Inscrutable miracle,

confounding busyness,

inevitable ending,

we ride the flow of the spring of life,

with or without pretense of understanding.

We know little, perhaps nothing, truth be told.

But we can and should still marvel at the miracle,

savor what beauty we can along the way,

and look up, look up,

at source of water, Source of Life, 

recognizing the incomprehensible miracle beginning 

and temporal downward flow

not as ends of a line,

but points on a spiral.

 

 

So many helpless people.

So many people utterly incompetent at dealing with modern society.

So many people lacking the mental, emotional, and judgement tools to survive in this modern world.

Every last one of us is abjectly incompetent at surviving in some situation.  We who survive happen to be in circumstances conveniently agreeable with our abilities.

Put the flourishing executive in the jungle, desert, or Serengeti and they would be dead within days if not hours.

But there are certain basic tools of interaction, awareness, and analysis that are required for survival in any situation.  Some subset of humanity fails in those prerequisites.  

Those people will in some form not survive.  Whether homeless, jailed, or dead, they will not be functioning human beings in some societies.

Any society needs to admit this.  There will be people who will need ongoing care and assistance.  They won't be able to learn or correct their ways.  

The moral level of a society is made readily visible in whether and how it handles this universal fact.  

For some, a helping hand, a new start,  and teaching them to fish will not suffice.  Eventually they will employ their abysmal judgment or skewed analytical properties or lack of impulse restraint and they will lose another job or apartment or safety net.

What institutional system will support them for the nineteenth time?  

Do we write them off as casualties?

There is no ready answer.  But the gift they bring to us is the question itself, the pricking of our conscience, the forced and unwelcome self-assessment of our own individual moral level of compassion, in whatever society our soul finds itself this time.  

 

Reliobs

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) became estranged of God, with good reason I might add.  Samuel's assessments and conclusions were imminently reasoned and rational, which renders them no less tragic.  

I write for Samuel Clemens, for those intelligent people that see the world as it is, who have the capacity to experience love and bonds, who have the sensitivity to feel the writhing pain of losing that love and those bonds.

Those rare gifts need not exclude awareness of, and even relationship with, the something Greater.  It won't be the convenient god proffered by the society of the moment.  It may even be necessary to jettison that conformist spiritual baggage before experiencing the ineffable Greater.  But whether going through, assiduously avoiding, or fleeing in revulsion from the hermetically packaged and marketed god of one's cultural upbringing, the Greater awaits discovery.  Its discovery and incorporation into one's life will not bequeath immunity to the suffering, sorrow, and grief experienced by Samuel Clemens.  It may in fact render one more acutely sensitive to the pain of tragedy and loss.  But now the dark shadows,  as dark as ever, are seen to be cast by Light, unquenchable Light that surrounds, the shadows themselves serving as revelation of that Light.

 

Reliobs

Well do something!  Do something for this wretched human species that needs so much.

Teach?  Can anyone learn?

Direct?  Will anyone listen?

Embrace?  Will anyone accept?

Usually it's hopeless.  

But that's no excuse to not try.

For all the goofy madness the human race engages in,

by accident they may inadvertently occasionally try something good for them,

at least until realizing it is good for them.

As hopeless as they are, imagine how much worse off they would be if no one ever tried to teach them.

Picture them left entirely to their own devices!....then shudder and reel in horror.

No, for all God's intent to let the children be free, the occasional intervention is still necessary.  Be open to ways to inadvertently play a role.  

Acknowledge the abject rational hopelessness, for yourself and everyone.  Then marvel at the Hope that miraculously abides.

 

Reliobs

It's all a waste!

All the projects, yard work, hobbies, power tools, and pesticides, my God, it's all a waste!  Can you not see that?

No, of course not.

Are we blind by choice?  Of course.

It is clear as a bell, would we but dare to see it.

Much is hidden from us.  We are empowered to discern what we need to discern for this particular moment of our soul.  But for the most part we don't even take advantage of that myopic view.

Of course there are realms and dimensions and beings and influences we are not given to see.  We need not worry about them.  

But what of those subtle whisperings of the soul, that unreliable guidance of Spirit.  How much can we trust it?  Of what is its source?  

How completely we misinterpret it.  How often expectations proved so wrong.  Yet we still trust it….at least I do.  I just don't trust myself.

Discernment, perception, seeing, hearing,

always wanting to see more, always seeking more.

 

Sometimes the holy path seems so absolutely certain.  Then you remember it felt that way the other times you were so wrong.

You can know the Truth that matters.  It's just what to do that cannot be seen.  Do this or do that?  Is watching the hummingbird a temptation away from holy work?

You can't give your cloak to everyone if you have only one cloak.  Give all you have, as much as you can, but don't give to everyone because you can't.

Give and give is Yeshu's admonition.  But you will still have to pick and choose among the recipients.  

What do you have to give most of?  What is the most precious gift you have to give?  Don't let the clamoring mob dissuade you from that.  Don't let them pick your bones clean and keep you from fulfilling your highest purpose.

You crave that highest purpose.  You always have.  This is a fascinating time of choices, huh?

 

The machines are relentless, the noise and their demands never stopping, first from this direction, then that.

None of it matters, all for waste.  The hummingbird battles matter, but you can barely hear them through the unrelenting modern noise of waste.  

 Observation

Poetry

Creek.  Loud!  Really flowing!  Water high enough there is no place for my feet on the other side of the log!  Never thought I would experience this again!

Water!  Clear and pure, flowing out of the ground!  

Will this be the last time?  Will pending heat and drought quiet it forever?  

But for the moment it freely flows!...a robust and solid flow, alive and joyous and welcoming!

Yes, ample worries abound.  Yes, all is hopeless.

Yet here life still flows, still laughs, 

cool and soothing,

"Fear not" almost rings true in places and moments like this.

Angels dance and laugh here,

promising this is not the last time.

The human evils will pass,

once again,

the miracle of healing will be resurrected, once again,

life clear and clean and lovingly laughing

will flow again, 

this time

never to cease.

 

Reliunif.lif

 

 

Worldly events follow their course to inevitable conclusion, often disastrous.  It is hard to see God's plan at work in worldly outcomes.

Yet the disasters make room for miracles.  Crucifixions lead to resurrections.  

The worldly plans made in God's name look as senseless and hopeless as they are…..building arks…..wandering into wilderness…..upsetting political powers and getting crucified.  

In each case, predictable worldly disaster leads to miraculous spiritual outcomes.  

Many people, even politicians, claim they are on a mission from God.  Many people believe they have been put in a particular place and time for a purpose.  Yet almost all of them are not going to see the outcome they want or expect.  Almost all misunderstand their calling.

Yet we are all, everyone of us, in our particular place and time with the potential for playing a role, a critical and unique role.  None of us are placed in a singular, singular as if it is the only one, pivotal role by God.  Yet in whatever situation, we are all in a pivotal role.  There are no exceptions to this.  The role may not be the purpose we expect, but it is a role in The Purpose grander than our comprehension.

These roles will seldom entail grandiose worldly success.  In fact, if we are really living in committed faith, the odds are much better we will experience worldly disaster, our own small version of crucifixion.  

If living in committed faith, the results of our lives do not end with whether we reached the Promised Land or overthrew the Roman occupiers and their tetrarch.  The result of a life of committed faith are seen in souls uplifted and eternal Purpose unfolding.  

All may appear hopeless because it really is hopeless.  The worldly outcome may be irredeemably doomed.  If you feel you are put in a place and time in order to succeed as part of God's plan, you have a lot of company.  Be careful to not forget the Biblical cast  of abject worldly failures, including Moses who wandered lost and never reached the promised land, John the Baptist who lost his head, Yeshu (Jesus) who got Himself crucified, and Paul who got himself imprisoned and executed.  

In each case, the disastrous worldly outcome released the potential for subsequent miraculous unfolding of the Purpose.  

Know you are indeed placed by God in a special role, for all roles and situations are special.  Know the closer to God's will you are, the more likely your efforts will lead to worldly failure and crucifixion.  Know that in following that path you are following the One who said "follow me".  

 

Religion

Of course Moses could not enter the promised land.  Entering involved mass genocide, slaughtering in the most grisly sense of the word infants and pregnant women.  Moses could not do that.  What a different image of Moses we would have, had he led the Isrealites into the promised land.  He would be seen as the military conquerer, more akin to Mohammed, than instead the man who led by faith and miracles.  The entire religion would be different.  

Even as it turned out, under the tutelage of Joshuah,  the Judeo religion sank far into the routine, typical religious business as usual of "our god can kick your god".  Left at that, no human spiritual progress would have been made at all.  

But Moses, preaching monotheism coupled with laws enshrining compassion and distributive justice, and relying on miracles…..now there is a foundation on which humanity could take some tentative steps toward nascent spiritual progress.  Moses wielding a sword to smite the unfortunate long term residents of the Promised Land?....that would change everything, and not for the better.  

No, Moses could not enter.  He was too holy, too high an example, and maybe he was just too nice, too gentle, too spiritually advanced for the bloody work of entering a worldly promised land using worldly methods.  

 

Reliunif.lif

At the Summer Music Festival

What drives music?  (real music, not computer and marketing generated crap so prevalent today).

·         Ontological aesthetics.

o    Music can invoke the underlying Purpose of existence, i.e., Unity.  Harmony and rhythm express the desired goal of the Universe.  Beauty can be ontological, expressing the most profound structure and destiny of existence.  This is much deeper than merely “sounding good”.  

·         Desperation to communicate.

o    We all have more to communicate than we can with words.  We are called to Unity, but in this corporeal existence we lack the tools to accomplish it.

·         Future memory.  

o    Our souls know what Destiny Home awaits, a place where conscious elements will not be constrained to clumsy words for communication and Unity.  This longing is ingrained in our souls.  We know to what we are called and destined.  In the Destiny Home, physics we do not yet know will allow sharing of the conscious experience, not just expressing it.  

These three in varying proportions underlie any real musical piece and are the reason for existence of music.  

 

I write this while listening to Gemini Variations by Benjamin Britten.

 

Reliobs

The pond's south spring is running!  Glorious!  It used to be the most reliable spring.  It was a shocking harbinger when it finally dried up some years ago.  What a welcome joy to see it again flow!

It is so hard to not write.  To try and get something of worth done I planned to try to write only every other day, but this morning I succumb to temptation.

 

I read of major, famous Southern Baptist churches getting kicked out of the Convention because they dared to give the title "pastors" to women.

Such a curious thing, "beliefs".  How fervently we hold them and convince ourselves of our spiritual experience.  The Puebloan warrior genuinely felt they were channeling the War Twins.  The sweet night shift hotel clerk in Santa Fe genuinely believed he could feel energy in the Hindu objects.  The Baptist bureaucrat genuinely believes the genitals between someone's legs determine whether God wants them to be called "pastor".  Of course those genitals have to be the same type as the bureaucrat's.

I feel the Holy Spirit of Life and Creation and Christos in this place of bubbling spring and glowing green, and I know that same Spirit is available in the prison cell and emergency room, though not as overtly and blissfully evident.

We can convince ourselves we are experiencing darned near anything, and we are particularly adept at convincing ourselves the other person is wrong.

For most of human history we believed what family, clan, and tribe told us to believe.  Aztecs didn't have to choose between belief in Quetzalcoatl or Thor.  But in the relentless evolution of spiritual awareness, for a few brief recent centuries, we have the unsettling experience of exposure to a panoply of beliefs.  Of course the belief system we were first exposed to via family or society gets first dibs on claiming our personal life-long belief.  But if life delivers enough traumas, abuse, losses, or education, there exists a remote possibility that original belief might get rattled.  "The Conquistadors won, so maybe I wasn’t really channeling the War Twins."  

Many today respond to exposure to multiple beliefs, and the apparent inefficacy of any of them, by choosing to believe nothing spiritual.  Such a state of willing disbelief is a radically new condition for humans.  We have always believed some structured spiritual model until our Pueblo or empire got trounced by those heathens-gentiles- infidels of differing beliefs.  Then we conveniently determined maybe the sacrilegious conquerors were not so wrong after all.  It's hard to argue while sitting in the ashes and rubble of your temple.  But we always kept believing something, even if with a different name and visage.

But now for the first time a significant percentage of people believing nothing.  That is profoundly unnatural to the historic human mind, hence acutely uncomfortable, which is why most people avoid disbelief, and why so many have fled back to fundamentalist beliefs….and why Southern Baptists now require genital examinations before ordaining pastors.

The lesson?...who knows.  Wait a few more centuries and we'll see how it shakes out.

But in the meantime, you have to decide if and what to believe.  The "if" is not optional.  You are going to believe something, even if that means believing there is nothing to believe in, or that there's no way to know what to believe.  Which brings up a curious point.  We cannot avoid the great questions of why and how.  We may mostly ignore them as we go about obtaining our daily bread.  We may not dwell on them.  We may deny them.  But the unbidden question "why" will at some point, in some guise, someday intrude into our doggedly pragmatic thoughts.  Which in turn begs the question, why should we be so?

We will hastily respond "it just is", which itself is another way to confess we cannot escape the questions.

Humans know there is something more.  We don't just wish or suspect it, in the core of our conscious experience we know it.  We have spent our history cobbling together silly explanations about the "something more", and of late for some people, vehemently protesting they have no interest in "something more".  

In the inexorable spiritual evolution of the human species, we have reached a radical new point.  We can choose from among a smorgasbord of beliefs.  We have to choose from a smorgasbord of beliefs, "non-belief" being one of the entrees.  Believing whatever we were raised with is a common default.  Claiming to not believe is a common default.  Defaulting to specific words in a specific scripture is always convenient.  But these are all just ways to escape personal responsibility for the Choice that shapes our soul.  Let parents, priest, or paragraphs tell us what we believe, but it only postpones an inevitable reckoning.  Life will wrench you from complacency, will send its conquistadors into your familiar temples, will wrest your convenient beliefs out of your heart, hold their bloodied forms before your eyes, and demand an answer of what of the very essence of your being are you willing to commit to whatever remains of your no longer so secure beliefs.   

Yes, you have to, and do, believe.  Choose carefully.  Put some thought into it.  If you dare, put some prayer into it.  Then listen, not to parents, priest, pastor, and partners, but to your heart.

Go forth, into the great unknown that is life, go forth not with certainty about the details of the "something more", but that you are inviolate part of the something more, ready to explore, willing to learn, with a belief not closed but open, open to growth, so open it might even be called faith.

 

Observation

 

Watching the critique of the cellist after the concerto reading, I see no small amount of contrivance to squeeze some meaning out of the musical art.

The cellist was outstanding.  The teacher had to say something though, so he expounded on using the body to get in the music instead of around the music.  It all made no sense at all, but it was the sort of expressive hodge podge I’ve heard before when a music teacher had nothing substantively productive to say.  

The “lesson” had all the feeling of a religious scripture or a Masonic ritual.  And indeed, I have the impression from many of this year’s performances that the long-time professional musicians place a value in their art that far exceeds merely producing inspirational sounds.  There is the satisfaction of performing difficult pieces, regardless of the piece’s value to the listener.  The worship of production of technical sound for the sake of technical sound takes on a life and value of its own.  The impact on listener, which after all is the reason for music in the first place, gets lost.  

The Quartet for the End of Time by Messiaen serves as prime example.  Esoteric, painful, obscure, disturbing, unpleasant, even with the composer’s explanations and program notes, I seriously doubt anyone in the audience experienced the emotions Messiaen intended, other than what they convinced themself to feel by intellectual exercise.  This was technical sound to be appreciated for its difficulty and uniqueness, not remotely resembling anything most people would call music.  

The performers at this high level have entered a realm akin to the highest levels of Masonry, or the representatives at a conclave of Bible scholars or philosophers, technologists seeking heights of ritual or philosophy, but in doing so, at risk of losing the innate meaning and beauty of their craft.  In other words, the self-absorbed focus of the elite fraternity strives for levels of nuance that simply do not really matter, a self-referencing exercise in attaining arbitrarily defined subjective perfection.

 

Diary

Spring creek still loudly bubbling along!  

Even Indian spring was running yesterday.

The red granite in the central flow channel of spring creek is so clean and clear after these many days of fast running!  

 

Geese all remain, even the childless couple.  The families of three and seven are always intermixed, with my god-gosling family always close by.

All are pruning, pruning, pruning In anticipation of using new flight feathers!

From a distance each morning I see little pigs running - running - running, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth across the length of their pen.  They are taking seriously the admonitions to stay fit and trim and avoid the fate of their predecessors!

 

This spiritual generation is irrational, stupid, unwilling to listen, unable to communicate, and prone to stochastic violent anger.  They also occasionally demonstrate the crystal bright potential of holiness.  

Each individual is in their personal evolutionary process, which is the entire point of Creation, providing opportunity for these prodigals to one by one attain their potential as children of the loving Source.  Dealing with them, dealing with each other, dealing with ourselves at this phase, is a miserable, frustrating, depressing, hopeless, dangerous experience.  It is that very experience that provides the endless opportunities for compassion and forgiveness that define our growth into our destiny.

 

Observation

What will they talk about?  What will the climbers talk about when survival replaces recreational climbing?  What will the musicians talk about when music is confined to a few homemade instruments played in a blacked-out shelter when marauders are not too close?  What will sports fans talk about when the last season has been canceled because of the wars?  

When home improvements mean a new piece of corrugated tin to keep the radioactive snow out, when 'water feature" refers to an uncontaminated water source, when "home theater" has been converted to reinforced protection from projectiles, what will homeowners talk about?

When "latest hit" refers to a crater proximity, "fine dining" is any source of protein, and "fashion statement" is a choice of most effective camouflage pattern, what will people talk about?

Will banal finally be banished?  Will material possessions no longer be material?  Or will new distortions of reality replace the old.  

When it all crumbles, what will we talk about?  Will mere survival prove interesting enough?  Will short lives make meaning of life more meaningful?  

 

Observation

Exquisite.  A Weihenstephaner Helles in the juniper sanctuary.  That sweet taste and arching green overhead brightly illumined by sun takes me back to many a happy Biergarten time.  

So long ago that was.  So much has happened since.  

It's hard to imagine that was me, happy and enjoying friends' or colleagues' or neighbors' company.

So much more jovial I was!  So much more jovial the world was.  

Here in a safe moment, that perfect elixir entering my mouth in tiny sips, immersed in living green, I can feel how it was.  

Silly, those times?.....naively ignorant of the harsh reality of life and humanity?...not silly at all.  Crucially important were those times.  Ignorant innocence facilitates awareness of beauty.  Awareness of the evils and manifold failings would prove overwhelming without memories of beauty and jovial times.  

One cannot be open to learning of the horrors without being open to learning of the beauty.  Open is open.  One cannot be selective about it.  

Sweet the taste of the Helles, sweet the taste of life, on occasion.  

What awareness made me so treasure those Biergarten moments?  Certainly Nature and outdoors played a role.  Food and drink played a role.  Friends played a role.

After all that has happened in the ensuing years I could still enjoy a Biergarten.  But I would be cautious regarding with whom I shared the experience.  

So calloused my soul has grown in the ensuing decades.  Calloused, but not withered.  The grievous losses have not dimmed the green glow through the leaves, muted their rustling sound, or embittered the art of a 983 year old brewery.  

The fact I now only drink alcohol-free beer except for rare gifts such as this one only amplifies my appreciation.  

So much time wasted in those Biergartens.  So much life treasure and wisdom of what matters accumulated in those Biergartens.

I would never have the courage to leave again.  I have learned, experienced, and lost far too much.  That leaving, like all of them, was destined and compelled.  Thank God I didn't know what awaited.

But for a blessed safe moment I am back.  Bodhikens kitty replaces the precious Bruter-Baer dog.  A single chair in my tree fortified sanctuary replaces the long Biergarten table with friends and amiable strangers.  A single half liter Bier replaces two Mass.  

This was the treasure, the green, the sun, the liquid art, the time devoted to life focused on not doing anything productive.  

The giant change?....peaceful smile has replaced the robust laughter.  

I nurse the little Bier, postponing its end.  I marvel that I was foolish enough to leave such environment that so fit my soul.  Yet here I am, sun, green, Helles, breeze, I've not entirely left such things, and I treasure them more than ever.  

I need not wonder what would have happened there.  The only real question is would my soul have grown more or less.

The last sip….as life will deliver a seeming last sip….but as this moment of green, sun, breeze, and Helles testifies, there are no forever last sips, only momentary interruptions interspersed along the endless thread connecting each moment of Life.

 

Reliobs

The ants.  None seen today.  Many days since realizing they were in the soffit.  How prolifically they produced sawdust!

I poisoned them.

For days I watched them exit in stumbling confusion, then fall from the facia board.  It was horrible.  Such hideous suffering.

Would it have been right to let them keep tunneling into the house?  Would it have been right to tear out the soffit boards, and likely the roof and insulation, in idealistic hope of removing their nest to some place up the hill?  

Do either of the latter two options sound anything but insane?

With all the horrors and suffering in the world, could I justify such exhaustive, expensive, and destructive courses of action to save carpenter ants?

Instead I ordered a spray specific for them with a nozzle to get inside their homes.

I was at Pine Hill the day the shipment arrived.  I got home too late to initiate the spraying project. 

 This was a blessing as that evening we saw their nuptial launch.  Giant female alates!  I read they mate in mid-air!

Such a marvel of life!  How I would thrill to such a sight under other circumstances!  

How I agonized over what to do.  

I waited a couple of days as each evening a few more alate flyers continued the fading nuptial launch.  Once it seemed completed, I implemented the nightmarish poison.

Then for days I watched them come out, struggling to fulfill their life purpose, life itself in its most communal form embodied in their poisoned, dying bodies, desperately struggling to complete one more task of protection or food retrieval or mating.

The alates could not even get their wings to work. They could only frantically run up the boards until eventually falling off.  It was just horrible to watch, yet I couldn't keep myself from watching.  I was responsible.  

One subsequent morning a dead mouse was on the patio, uninjured, quite possibly dead from eating poisoned ants.  I was responsible.

I had seen only one rational, reasonable course of action.  And it entailed doing the exact opposite of my nature and values.  

Such is this world.  But I suppose it is better to take necessary actions and feel the agonizing pain of the consequences than to not care.  

Oddly I found myself comparing the situation to Uddin, the disabled refugee of impeccably poor judgment combined with unrestrained impulse.  The carpenter ants would have destroyed the house had I allowed compassion and empathy to stay my hand.  Uddin would destroy the life of any one person trying to resolve all his manifold problems.

Such are the terrible choices this world places before us.  This may be the most painful aspect of compassion, not the sacrifices to help, not the helpless feeling of not being able to help, but the inescapable choices when in principle one can do something to help, but the integrated considerations of the entire life situation dictate that you instead follow a course that actually facilitates suffering.  Sometimes the call must not be answered, the poison must be applied, perhaps even the trigger must be pulled.  Then pray you will not take it lightly, nor conversely, sink into calloused bitterness.  

 

Reliunif.lif

A glorious gift of discovery!  Oh what symbol of Sustaining Spirit.

At the north end of the ranch the creek was not flowing, not a drop

Four days ago the creek flowed strongly.  Three days ago it had not a drop of water

This morning I returned and felt grief and sorrow begin to well up at the sight of the dying creek bed.  But as I walked along it, I heard the sound, living water, a lightly sparkling sound.  Could it be?  

Unable to see the creek at this point I returned upstream, entered the dry bed, and began walking down it.  After a time puddles appeared, then more, with hints of motion.  Eventually I reached the source of sparkling sound, upwelling water from the banks creating enough flow to babble over rocks, where it was joined by a side flow from the homestead spring that likewise had disappeared under the surface only to reappear.

What a place of living joy!  What a symbol of underlying Sustaining Source and Spirit, hidden by this world's evil of human self-absorption, but only hidden, always present, still nurturing and nourishing, awaiting opportunity to eventually reappear in our lives should we desire and seek it.  

What a contrast in my emotions, switching from dejection to celebration.  The realistic awareness of the condition of this world should not be shirked, painful as it is.  The life-giving water in its many forms will be hidden and mis-appropriated by the powers of this world.

But we must never forget, that water of life underlies all existence and sustains all life, whether visible or not.  And on occasion, in its season, when most needed, it will again, for a time, be made visible, even in this world, reassuring and reminding, even the Deceiver of this world unable to keep it hidden..

 

 

Poetry

Park concert.

 

So different.

It was safe then,

as long as we didn't go home.

But home catches up with ya',

no escapin' it,

damage done never undone.

But there was a time,

a moment,

when it seemed possible,

getting away,

a new welcome,

a new touch,

before it led back home.

 

Poetry

 

 

 

Finally the storms have come, 

held in abatement these many days,

but no more, no more,

the energy of the ages finally unleashed,

testing our work, our plans, our mortal preparations.

 

Dear God, the humbling majesty of the storm.  

How odd,  we few who savor them.

 

Let storms shake us, cleanse us, renew us,

while we fervently pray for ways to help those who lose everything.

We stand helpless before the storms,

only our planning and preparations

providing the illusion of momentary protection…..

those and the miracles.

 

Give yourself to the storm.

Accept its harsh caress.

Wonder and tremble at the outcome.

 

Mad advice, you say?

Then prepare, 

know well your shelters,

secure what really matters,

and pray you know what that really is.

Diary

The two oldest geese families can fly!  What a surprise!  

For the first time they were separate from the single gosling family and the childless couple, who were together at the pond as usual.  I found the two oldest families on the Mist pile by the corral.

I walked on, but soon heard a little honk, turned, and everyone was flying toward the pond!  

Unlike last year, these families had not done extended walkabouts to get in shape, and had not gone through days of flapping and honking and hopping.  I had no indication they were near flying!  

 

Pond.  07:33

Only one of the childless couple remains.  Will the partner return as yesterday?  The one here does not seem distressed.  

I wait hoping to see the partner return.

God-gosling preens between doting parents.  

Donald sleeps late, but stretches and takes first morning steps as I type….then goes back to sleep.  It is Sunday after all.

Creek is totally dry. 

Spring creek does not even flow to the first bridge, and has too little flow to make any babbling noise at the writing log.

Reliunif.lif

It is a field, this place, this world, growing souls for the harvest.

Yeshu kept trying to tell us.

With the garden analogy, all makes sense.

This is a wild field, tangled and overgrown.  Its circumstances provide the raw materials for souls, conscious sentient beings, consciousness arising from sufficient complexity of information integration stored in nervous systems.

It is the consciousness this universe is exquisitely balanced to produce.  

There was a Garden.  Maybe there still is.  Maybe we all made our inevitable Choice to eat the forbidden fruit.  It was not the fruit that mattered.  There was nothing magical or cursed about it.  It was our Choice to not heed the warning, to not trust, to insist on learning for ourselves.

So when the world, the field, was ready, we enter its violence and chaos.  Then we are ready for our next Choice.

The whole point is to produce a harvest of souls for Home.

Yeshu as the vine?  Of course, the vine of the vineyard, producing the freewill souls for Home.  From this new seed of Christos' Good News  arises those who freely choose Love and compassion.  

All was easy in the Garden.  We had to do nothing.  Here we learn to be gods, but for now our realm of directly exerting our conscious will is crudely and imperfectly limited to the universe of our bodies.  To accomplish anything beyond our personal universe we must exert influence through constraints of physical reality.  This trains us for Home, where we will live not alone, but in Unity with others who made the Choice.

This planet and its fields and gardens symbolically show us the structure of Creation.  The field will be weeded, weeded of choices of hate and violence.  We cannot see the transition mechanisms that bring conscious elements from Garden to here to Home.  But One Consciousness underlies all.  This physical existence is the thinnest ephemeral film on a bubble of froth in a sea of conscious Reality.  

Our souls in the Garden were in a world of neat rows, beautiful flowers, all according to plan and desire of Source.  We were immersed in gentle beauty.  But we wanted more.  We were given the opportunity for more.  We chose the prodigal path of independence to becoming children of the Source.

Now, each in our peculiar circumstance,  in fields of worldly weeds, in jungle entanglements, in desert barrenness, we are given our opportunity to choose to be a part of the harvest.  We know too much to return to our innocence in the Garden.  We have tasted the power of individual gods.  So now we choose, whether to remain in world of cruelty and combat, or whether to let the Message and Spirit of Christos be planted in our lives, that we may become fruit for the harvest for the waiting Home, fulfilling the Purpose of all existence,  freewill conscious individuals choosing Unity and wholeness, joyfully welcomed Home as children of God.  

 

About 06:00 I hear a goose flying!  There are no migrating geese this time of year.  My god-gosling is not grown enough to fly.  Did the big families return?

I go to the ranch.  One of the god-goslings parents is gone!

The other is quiet, but looking and looking 

Finally the parent and baby go into the orchard field.

I wait.

The parent perplexedly honks, calling.  The baby honks.  They want the missing parent back!  

It comes!  Joy!  The baby honks and runs and flaps!....right toward me!    What a great motivator the parent's flight was!  

What a relief that the missing parent returned.  After all the dedication of past weeks it was unimaginable that it would leave. 

It starts honking.  It flies!  The baby runs! …..runs!.....flies!.....off the ground!.....first flight!.....splooshing into the pond, the parents following.  

Such a joy!.....such a life moment.

My god-gosling I once rescued can fly!

The parent is faithful and dedicated.

What a moment.  Thank You.  Thank You.  Thank You. 

Reliobs

Reading of Puebloan war and sacrifice, I consider how radical was Yeshu’s message of “don’t worry, God knows your needs”.  

All religions invoked sacrifice, usually bloody and violent, as a negotiating tool with god(s), to give us what we need, often at the expense of those other people.  Now here came a guy bucking 10,000 years of human “wisdom”!

It had to sound utterly mad!...as well as being infuriatingly sacrilegious, as well as threatening survival of the nation if too many people upset God(s) by believing such heretical madness.

Such a noteworthy miracle that such a radical teaching contradicting millennia of rational religious accounting practices should survive and propagate.  

 

Observation

Find something living green and sit with it.  Watch the sun penetrate the living green.

Marvel at the mundane.

Meditate for a minute on the miracle before you.

It’s quite easy.

It costs only a minute, and it just may change the rest of your life.

Let it.  

 

Reliunif.lif

We are programmed to believe, communicate, connect, be loved, create, and accomplish.  All will be prevented, and perverted by our choices, our spiritual infancy, and the nature of this world.

Our attempts will mostly end in pain and frustration.  Yet some small modicum of progress and accomplishment and growth will unfold, reassuring that we were on the right path, and painful path, and beautiful path, all along, a path of failure, futility, fear, frustration, and faith for eternity.

 

—-------------------

 

Reliunif.lif

What a system.

Blinded to the future.

But responsible for planning and preparing for it.

And you will suffer the consequences and take the blame if you guess wrong.  

 

Our conscious experience resides in an existence of inexorable entropy, inevitable death, blindness to an indeterminate future, and incomprehension of inscrutable influences beyond the microscopic validity of our calculations and myopic scale of our senses.  We are ultimately left with only one aspect we can understand and control:  how we treat each other and relate to the living forms around us.

We would do well to take less seriously our inevitably doomed efforts to predict and control worldly outcomes, and take more seriously the living forms before us with whom we share in common our blindness and ultimate fate.  

 

One parent of my god-gosling is missing!  The remaining parent is very worried, calling, looking.  (The missing parent returned.  

 

From 30. Juli. 2023

The childless goose couple is gone!  What an emotional saga these weeks.  (See earlier notes about one in the couple wanting to leave weeks ago.)

They finally left, but with the two big families with lots of surviving goslings.  

What an end to the saga.  So perfect that they would finally feel this is the right time to leave.  

So poignant and tragic, their time here.

They left the one remaining couple with my god-gosling as the only remaining geese.  

 

Such a relief, immense relief, that they left together.  It would be heart breaking if after all this time they separated.  

 

Reliobs

Do not underestimate the blessing of the sound of flowing water.

Even see it as alive if you must, if that enables you to see the One Life that fills all.

However you discern it, let the presence of Life penetrate your soul, let it heal you, let it nourish your spirit.

You can pretend you don't need it.  That is the great tragedy of humanity, denial of our individual spiritual need.  

But once away from classroom, battlefield, conference room, factory, or stadium, when safe to let down the armor, listen for the stream, let it flow through you, drink deeply of what you must deny.

 

Poetry

Spring creek running!  How can I resist this temptation?  No place for my feet!  High water!  

How I love the living water.

How it entices me.

Such a soothing little trickling sound it makes below my perch on this broken log.

Downstream it grows more raucous, a jubilant exuberance of flowing life freed from bounds of earth.

So fast it flows!

…..calling, calling, 

just a moment longer.

Demands and obligations exert their pressure of time,

yet this crystal flow declares time to be illusion.

So much water passing,

so much life passing,

to be savored and cherished,

ponds and pools and ripples,

living flow in infinite forms.

Pause, linger in the living flow,

let it teach its gentle lesson,

as it dissolves the earth from which it sprang.

 

Poetry

Reliunif.lif

Time for God.

Time for questions.  

Time for doubts.

Time for faith.

 

Some gifts cannot be passed up.

Some temptations are not from the devil after all…

…and some definitely are.

Don't pretend you can tell the difference.

Poetry

Fast, clear, cool the blessed life-giving water.  

Soothingly noisome.  

Bright green plants wave below the surface, 

the flow of life begetting life.

 

 

Reliunif.lif

Will Uddin get out of the hospital today?  That I ask indicates how assiduously I have avoided involvement in that ongoing life disaster.  

I have developed a spiritually pathological aversion to interactions involving conflicting realities with other youniverses.

Each element of consciousness resides in its own youniverse.  The whole point of physical/temporal existence is to provide an objectively shared common reality among those youniverses of conscious experience.  Communication and exchange facilitate that establishment of shared overlap among individual youniverses.  That is the holy structure of Creation.

The clash of youniverses when elements of consciousness choose to not seek the objective shared Reality but instead insist on forcing their subjective reality onto others is evil and the source of greatest suffering.

I could not find motivation to address the shirtless crazy guy shuffling down our street yesterday as I spoke with Jenson.  I had no idea how to penetrate his delusional reality.

Uddin insists on his own reality to the exclusion of any external input, leaving him with an amputated toe.

Regularly I experience conversations in which the other party is so intent on their subjective reality they assume I know it.  Hence they make no effort to explain or clarify, and become upset when in the absence of their communicating I fail to understand their reality that is so clear in their imagination.

I dread interactions with Wil as he steadfastly clings to a fantasy reality imposed on his defenseless mind by profiteering media, leaving no room for mutual exploration to discover a reliable shared objective Reality.

I am clueless how to productively interact with youniverses that have sealed themselves into an isolated subjective personal reality.  No evident benefit to anyone can come from such interactions, and the attempt that might pose threat to their constructed reality usually results in anger and even greater isolation between us.

Clear, two-way interaction/communication/exchange is the great holiness that serves the loving Purpose.  Its absence, or even opposite, the steadfast fortification of subjective reality and application of emotional violence to conversationally impose that reality on others, is antithetical to the Purpose, and thereby an instantiation of evil.  

That is the Fall, the Fall from Grace, that which led to our eviction from the Garden and sustains our prodigal isolation from Destiny Home….our insistence that the Universe accommodate our youniverse, our determination to be god.  In great irony, it is that determination, that collapse into self, that precludes our inheritance as children of God/Source/Creator.

Listen, and grow in wisdom.  Learn, and grow in power.  Surrender, and grow in strength.  Let others into your youniverse, and grow in security and identity as an individual.

 

Reliunif.lif

Animals are completely in touch with Reality.

People, with their inherited capacity as children of God - the capacity to participate in Creation - spend most of their conscious mental activity on fabricated illusions with no connection to corporeal reality.  Our fads, entertainment, politics, religions, sports, economics and home improvements are expressions of our capacity to concoct fervently held  mental states independent of the physical Reality of food supplies and shelter over our head.  

The human condition can only be understood when each sentient element of consciousness is perceived as a universe, these universes incapable of directly sharing conscious physical sensations and experience, but capable of some nominal sharing of ideas and beliefs.

The present collapse of civilization is due to the shattering of commonly shared perceptions of our fabricated realities, thereby inducing conflict.

For millennia, physical Reality served the role of arbiter of individual subjective realities.  Corporeal Reality left little room for disagreement about where water and herds were to be found.  Necessities of physical survival combined with mutually inarguable foundations of physical Reality provided the unifying force to bring individual elements of consciousness, these human universes, into shared experience.  We could then proceed to kill each other over disputes of who had access to the water and ownership of the grazing land, but in instances of sufficient availability of both, conflict was rationally obviated.

But these individual universes were free to craft their own internal subjective realities, which led to far more savage conflicts over tribal affiliations and names of gods than ever did water rights.

 As long as clan identity, preferred colors of feathers and flags, and forms of gods could be kept homogeneous in the valley or across the steppe, contrived irrational clash of subjective realities was avoided….until the nomadic strangers arrived with their different conscious universes, and we had to  start killing each other, regardless of excess supplies of water and game.  

For centuries this pattern was maintained.  Priests or prophets would ensure a shared contrived reality across their holy land.  Even under stress of drought and flood, the society would function as a unit, elements of consciousness bonded together by physical Reality and artificial, but functional, subjective realities.

Population growth, nomadism, or curiosity would eventually bring the subjective, contrived group realities into contact with those of the next valley or continent.  In their inevitable course, mass slaughter and enslavement would ensue, then everyone would be forced to accept the contrived subjective realities of the winners and things would settle down.  

Until today.  Social media has ignited a conflagration of subjective, contrived personal realities that need not heed geographical or rational boundaries.  A morbidly obese citizenry has evolved utterly detached from any awareness of the physical Reality of crops and herds that once united disparate conscious universes.  

The children of God are unleashed, now empowered to create their own metaverses, the priests are powerless, the political leaders frantically scramble to claim the moral low ground in order to attract the largest digital mobs.  

The children of God were not ready for this empowerment.  The essential, necessary Love and compassion and forgiveness they were incrementally learning through societal evolution have not taken sufficient root.  

We see what these fallen children will create when empowered with unbounded virtual realities, virtual realities that inevitably come into conflict, then, as conflicts of contrived subjective realities always have, lead to conflict in the unforgiving mutually shared world of physical Reality.

Personalized virtual realities, playgrounds for the children of God, illusory digital media realms erected in the name of profit and power…..yet like the temples and altars of old, still erected of physical material, silicon instead of stone, copper instead of wood, but still physical, still subject to being toppled.  How long will cooling fans run in the presence of conflict, how long will the screens display the images as the combat rages, how long will the electricity flow as we remain sequestered in our media bunkers?  

How long before the well hidden and long ignored foundations of physical Reality reassert their insistence that we again find ways to mutually share the personal realities of these conscious universes if we are going to survive.  

 

Observation

Heartbreakingly poignant.

Donald has a visiting duck couple.

Donald always aggressively chased any visiting ducks.  But now, alone these months after years of always being in the close formation company of the Marx brothers ducks, Donald follows around the visiting couple, as close as possible, a few moments holding loneliness in abeyance.  

They get out.  Donald gets out.  They clean.  Donald cleans.  They paddle side by side.  Donald paddles in their wake.  They stop, closely paired.  Donald stops, a wing's length away.

 

Spring creek.  07:03

Quiet, but still running, a lovely, brisk trickle.

 

Donald still has the visiting couple, this morning in the corner pond.  He stays as close as possible.  He does whatever they do.  They eat, Donald eats.  They clean, he cleans.  How sad it will be when they leave!

 

 

Diary

Pond

Donald still has the two visitors.  Still together.  One was following him around!  Still sleeping, eating, and cleaning occur in unison.

 

Poetry

These universes,

universes of consciousness,

in this corporeal world at the mercy of the Deceiver.

Seeking some common ground of connection,

denying the common ground of connection,

words the blunt and clumsy tools at our disposal,

hastily chosen, promptly ignored.

 

Poetry

A moment safe,

immersed in green,

doing nothing, bless-ed nothing.

Air thick with a heady aroma of wood and duff,

sound of flittering towhee wings

 leaving an audible brush-stroke across the dome of this holy scene.

 

Warm, safe,

a moment's escape from the inscrutable madness.

Blessed expression,

safely unheard,

save by whatever saints and Spirit hover nearby.

Time to get going, no doubt.

But surely God will not begrudge a peaceful moment of Communion.

Surely such moments are an (in)act(tion) of faith, requiring as much faith as all the goal oriented busyness.

 

 

  

Reliobs

A vine grows through the world!  What a perfect image Yeshu used!  A vine is not apart from, not above, but in and through, intertwined with the world.

.

Observation

Cahokia and Chacoans offer lessons of inevitable collapse.

They lived in marginal environments that leaders, for political reasons, claimed to be able to control.  (What better way to claim leadership than claiming you can control crop production and food supplies?)  That worked fine as long as they had a string of good luck.  But submission to dictates is also not natural to the human spirit, so as soon as the crops failed, someone was going to claim they could do a better job of bringing rains, and conflict would arise.  

Additionally, being together in such population density was not natural.  Once the religious/societal reasons for being together were no longer working, the natural arguments with neighbors and between clans would start to fray the society.

 

In contrast, the Egyptians had nowhere else to go, plus, the Nile was a pretty reliable source of crop production.  Cahokai residents could scatter, the field over the next hill offering the same agriculture and hunting prospects as the fields near the temple mounds.  .

Technology eventually allowed gathering large populations in cities within an empire that could obtain resources from extended areas.  A drought here or there didn’t have to lead a hungry polity.

Today’s political/corporate/financialist powers promise happiness, the food and shelter needs being for the moment satisfied by technology.  But the promise is not working.  The political/corporate/financialist powers try to placate the masses with stuff, possessions, entertainment, gaudiness, sparkle, beer, speed, phones, and with our reality saturated with material things and entertainment, now they resort to virtual reality and the metaverse to placate the restless masses.  But those masses grow less and less happy by the day, their emaciated souls in stark counterpoint to their overfed bodies.  All the possessions and entertainment leave less and less bandwidth for seeking meaning and fulfillment, and though unrecognized, this is what underlies the great waxing undercurrent of dissatisfaction in the developed world.  

The populace, undoubtedly at the behest of a wannabe elites, turned on the leaders when the promised rain and crops failed.  Today’s populace, at the behest of manipulators seeking their own power, will likewise turn on the corporate and financial powers that promised happiness but delivered only consuming possessions and facile entertainment.  

 Observation

Poetry

Horrible scenes on our bike ride yesterday.  Post-apocalyptic, dystopian scenes out of science-fiction.  Homeless people shuffling en masse in dark underpasses.  I was shocked beyond words.  Wretched individuals, children of God unable to function in modern society.  Along the path, south of the grim underpasses, a skin and bones lady with a low energy shuffle.  As we passed I saw she was pregnant.  Dear God, dear God.

Now I sit here listening to some guy emphatically ranting some unintelligible manipulatory screed on the neighbor's TeleVision.  

Coyotes!  A family!  Concert!  Yipping, howling, excitement!  Life!  And perhaps death for something.  So long since I've heard coyotes.  

Screeds on TeleVision and a malnourished shuffling pregnant girl….they are oddly connected….in the unfathomable way the black holes across the universe are connected.  

And the coyotes?.....always the Trickster surprises….

whether for our good or detriment, our suffering or our growth, we cannot know.

What will become of those people in the dark recesses of the underpasses?

…..of the alone, so terribly alone, skin and bones pregnant girl…..

…..in the United States of America.

What will become of me, of my soul…..

me who peddles by, praying to not get a flat tire,

praying to not be accosted,

praying a mind destroyed by genetics, abuse, or drugs

does not reach out to me

as I peddle a little faster.

 

Poetry

Reliunif.lif

All these untouchable lives.

All these tragedies.

I read of schizophrenics dying in Phoenix heat.

I experience ongoing examples of those incapable of reasoned, rational discourse.

I watch those isolated and alone sink further into media induced depression and anxiety.

And I retreat to blessed Deep Communion with sustaining Spirit, a concept I could not explain to anyone.

How high Venus has climbed since I sat here in ecstasis and sorrow, time irretrievable, time wasted,

time invested in laying spiritual foundations on which to build the impossible.

 

I will interact with Mark and those averse to reason.

I will feel it is a waste of time.

I will cast some books onto dark waters,

and my worldly reason will condemn that as a waste of time.

But in some light sanctuary of the soul

I will indefensibly feel something was right,

something spiritually defiant in the inarguable face of hopelessness.

 

Each soul, "soul" itself being a term of ridicule in rational realms,

is as inscrutable as any black hole,

its inner workings profoundly and ontologically unknowable,

yet its presence and effect and influence inarguable.  

 

Beset by demons of chemical imbalances, curses of degrading synapses, and self inflicted isolation, the soul and its wetware interface to the world writhes in agony, alone beyond comprehension, clamoring for any contact, yet loathe to listen to any message that might actually touch it.

Such is this worldly universe of elements of consciousness, a universe of black holes, unable to know each other, desperately missing something they have never known, the resulting anger and fear begetting violence and ever deeper isolation.

It needs a miracle, we need miracles, only a Savior will suffice, an irrational illogical Savior, in any form that can finally touch us in spite of our rejection, heal us from our selfish injuries, redeem us from ourselves.

 

Reliobs

Yesterday we watched a program on an old truck driver in Afghanistan driving the strip to China.  Those villagers, that way of life, seems at first glance to be so utterly unrelated to our western lives.  Yet aren't the worries and joys the same?

 

Each in our own context, throughout the world, throughout history, we share the same needs and hungers.  The specific form of our wishes may vary wildly among us, but they are all centered on the same needs and hungers…..aren't they?  Don't we wish those tribes-people in Afghanistan share our needs and wants?  Wouldn't that somehow validate our self-focused priorities?

Wouldn't it be disconcerting to discover that our investments of most of our fretting and anxiety would be laughable to the Afghan or New Guinean?  

In fact, I have seen in those who have come to "developed" lands from less materially developed locales, a ready penchant to wholeheartedly adopt our superficial materialistic ways.  Comfort, appearance, and entertainment are seductive in any language.  Growing up in harsh deprivation does not immunize one from hedonistic materialism after all.  

Knowing the dearth of wisdom in our "modern" society perhaps we hope some wisdom still survives in the isolated, technologically primitive recesses of the world.  Perhaps they, or ancient wisdoms preserved in petroglyphs or astrally oriented stones, can save us.

But no such luck.  Modern or ancient, complex or simple, technologically advanced or primitive, wisdom is to be sought by each individually.  We each, in our hut or high-rise, must face the universal Choice of direction, of whether to turn, of whether to repent.  

 

Physics

 

Thoughts:

Quantum states are just oscillations.  That corresponds to the sine wave nature of the probability function.  When we take a measurement, we are simply seeing at what point in the oscillation we catch the system.  The key factor though:  while the system is in oscillation, it is oscillating without the constraint of time.  It is timeless, from our perspective.  

Maybe they are oscillating in a time dimension orthogonal to ours.

Entangled states are simply a wave function of a single entity, albeit with individual elements projected across spatial distance.  Upon measurement you catch the single entity at some point in its time-free oscillation.

In my dissertation I wrote about the collapse of the wave-function and condensation of reality into interaction reality.  That remains a true description, but “collapse of wave function” is misleading.  You are simply catching the system at a point in its oscillation and incorporating its specific information into crystallized reality.

 

I’ve written that life is integrated information, including integration of a long history of ambient conditions.  That information integration entails a level of entropy, which in turn is associated with a degree of unpredictability.  The greater the degree of locally integrated information, eventually attaining consciousness, the greater the degree of unpredictability.  

 

Might the brain be an entangled system?  

 

Poetry

Social storms grip our souls,

Portents of the fate that awaits.

What matter sanity,

when sitting in isolation.

 

Grieve, sorrow, and feel sorry,

for suffering abounds,

profligate suffering,

the poor and needy called home to Heaven.

 

None can be reached,

no one can be reached,

self-immolation the practice of the day.

Meaning, hope, and purpose

elude our busy lives,

while compassion eludes our hearts.

None seek to capture it,

sisters forgiveness and patience

having also taken their leave 

in discouragement at our lack of interest.

 

Flood waters rise,

the spectators applaud,

as mud-brick cities wash toward the ocean.

Derna, oh Derna,

already your name is forgotten.

 

Don't feign caring,

it is not a flattering look.

Grip your jaw in steely determination,

you have invested too much in this vacation

to let hell or high water

distract you.

 

Modern times, these,

always some disaster in the unwatched news,

always someone pleading for mercy,

always a schedule and deadline

providing needed excuse.

 

Are the flood victims really worse off

than the Alzheimer's victim down the street?

We knew none of them.

We didn't know her.

A past friendly word will have to suffice.

It is too late, it is much too late, for anything more.

 

Social storms grip our souls,

our impatient fate no longer content with sending the portents we only ignore.

 

Observation

Take seriously these disconnected times,

these lessons never taught.

 

Something as simple as a neighbor driving to work in the morning,

a neighbor you do not know.

In the tens of millennia of human experience, can you fathom how radically unnatural this is?

A neighbor, living right there, within hearing and sight,

and you do not know them!....you know nothing about them!

That would be unimaginable, incomprehensible, unbelievable,

in the pueblo, the village, the walled city.

Humanity has never lived like this,

and we wonder why crime is high and irrational political movements thrive?

 

For a hundred years, suburbanization and transportation technology and communication technology provided more and more opportunity for us to get away from daily exchange with neighbors and community.  But through clubs and leagues and churches, out of habit we still maintained an occasional tenuous connection to at least those cheering the same sports team, or sharing the same interest in cars or crochet, or comfortable with the same liturgy and ritual.  

Then came Coronavirus 19, and we discovered we could get along without those messy inconvenient interhuman interactions after all.  The same universal exasperating nature of people that makes us want our own bedroom, own apartment, own house, own castle, made quarantine isolation with our social media and Amazon deliveries pretty appealing.  The last, frayed, hundred-millennia-year-old threads of traditional, in-person, interhuman connection were severed, replaced by digital mirages of "like" based followers and a religion of material possession.

So flash-mobs rob stores and media created personalities lead their pliant grimacing followers to political lynchings.

It was a perfect storm, the advent of social media - streaming entertainment - online shopping - and pandemic shutdowns, combining like fragmentation grenades to shatter society into defensive digital villages.

The storm has cast humanity on a new course, a course we cannot discern from the middle of the storm.  Like all disruptions, it will be traumatic.  As after all catastrophes, humanity will rebuild.  It is in these times seeds will be planted for that rebuilding, seeds of values and priorities, new seeds that can take root in the violently disrupted soil of society.

All hope is lost, that a new and brighter hope can grow.  

 

 Reliobs

As your own life’s physical and mental activities become constrained by degraded physical and mental capacities, you are left with whatever was in your life external to yourself.  If other people, Nature, the human condition, spiritual exercise, something beyond self-focus, were not already of significant meaning to you prior to suffering significantly limited physical and mental abilities, you will now be left with nothing, just blank space and empty void, left only with yourself as you lie in a little room.  

 

Observation

Sooner or later, except the lucky few getting hit by meteors or blowing out aneurysms, old age will inflict horrific, nightmarish suffering.  It would seem prudent to plan how one will prepare for that.  Of course one can avoid it by suicide, but the rub is knowing when to commit suicide.  No use jumping the gun here, so to speak.  But once the stroke leaves you paralyzed, or recovery from the routine hip surgery goes sideways, it's too late to salvage a suicide plan when you can't even wipe your own backside  Plus, you still have obligations and people or cats depending on you and you have some meaningful things to do with your life.  So the temptation of suicide is not spiritually an option.  Plus, there's the chance you just might still be able to recover to a semi-functional level, and it seems cowardly to not  at least try.

So, you find yourself stuck in a sterile bed in a little room.  

At this point it's too late to get your mental disciplines or philosophy of life together.  You'll probably only have half a brain left, and it will be preoccupied with pain and therapy routines, remaining conscious awareness mostly subsumed under anxiety and addled by drugs.

Going into this medical-condition hell you better already have a long, habitual practice of prayer, or contemplative prayer, or meditation, or something.  That will be your only escape from that little room, and the practice will need to be automatic, not requiring the mental capacity you left back in pre-op.

You also better have a realistic acceptance of how old age ends.  Now is not the time to realize you may never again be the same athlete you were in high school, or may never even wipe your own backside again.  Odds are your visitors won't tell you this, saccharin platitudes being so much easier to deliver.

Will you fully recover?  Be realistic about it.  Know that someday, if not this time, you won't.  Know that that's OK.  Don't panic or whine as if this is a big surprise or it doesn't happen to people like you.

In the nursing home is not the time to get your spiritual foundation in order.  You're gonna need a heck of a foundation and clear understanding of your attitude toward and relationship with whatever you accept as Greater, before being relegated to the world of sterile sheets and those little cups of pills.  

So there ya' go.  Look at your probable future, which is easy to do if you know even a few old people.  Don't kid yourself that insurance, prayer, family, or luck will allow you to dodge those last few nasty years.  

Then consider what you want to take into that little room with you, whether it's the last little room or the  beginning of a long string of them.  Consider what you want to take from this corporeal life and its alternating shades of light and dark, consider how the inevitable seemingly dark transition can be used as a portal to instead allow entry of Light…even bring Light into your suffering…even at this late stage bring Light into others’ lives…..even reveal the Source of Light.  

 

Reliunif.lif

A residual sadness of a dream, those feelings hard to shake upon awaking.  

It is a sadness of seeing our condition, my condition, for how desperately estranged it is from our potential.  That is a true and justified sadness.

Yet only to turn reveals that prodigal condition is necessary prelude to glorious fulfillment, a lost wandering on our way to glorious Home.

Absorb the deep sadness, deny not the failings

.  Look at the miracle.  Judge not as to right and wrong.  Simply learn from the experience.

Judge not.  Learn.  That is all that is asked of the prodigal on his/her way Home.  It is the learning that is holy, for learning is openness to God.

Better to be open, make mistakes, and learn, than to not trust the Spirit.

Yes, they were mistakes, mistakes of spiritual infancy.  All the while you were learning and growing.  No more is asked of faith.

Clearly see the tragedy of the human condition in the moment.  It is truly worthy of sorrow and grief.  But then look up, turn and look around, see the necessity of wandering lost in faith, see the already brightening Light of Destiny Home.  

 

Reliunif.lif

Emergent freewill Unity requires it be experienced and chosen, not learned by rote or programming.

In this world, for all but the most spiritually wise, that entails the prodigal explorations of following the Trickster, the Tester, the learning process being a holy path and calling as long as it leads to the ongoing Choice of true, not false, Unity.

So the Trickster/Tester aspect of this corporeal world offers its sex and drugs and football and armies, all seeming to promise the Unity for which we unknowingly hunger.  We pass through each, each leaving us lonelier, disappointed, potentially bitter, eventually cynical.  Such is the deceptive nature of this world and the fallen nature (meaning fallen from our potential) of humanity.  

Enduring Unity is not to be found through this shattered world nor we spiritual infants.  But even worldly experience may offer momentary hints of what we really seek.  Such is the miracle of this redemptive world, even the sex and football and armies providing a distorted brush with Unity, that from the experience we may, should we so choose, grow beyond it into more enduring Unity, deeper than uniforms and group identity and shared pleasure, now seeking Unity with the Greater, now adding compassion and forgiveness to our hunger for Destiny Home.

 

Poetry

Be blessed.

Immerse in quiet green.

Or immerse in human chaos.

Immerse in healing

or acceptance of what can never be healed.

Be blessed.

A cricket blesses.

Sounds of normalcy bless.

Channeling Spirit blesses.

People you would never have expected to bless you

may change your life with blessing.

Be blessed and feel the healing.  

You too well know blessings may long seem absent.

So do not pass up the moment to

be blessed.

 

Poetry

Imagine safe affection.

Imagine feeling utterly, confidently safe with another,

mutually reaching out and affectionately touching,

safe love in every contact,

souls intertwining through the surface of physical skin.

 

Imagine no fear of pain,

for knowing you would not face it alone.

Imagine no last words,

but clearly seeing the illusion of parting and age and death 

as mere momentary pause in the ever ongoing conversation.

 

Imagine no serious consequences from any decision,

each choice merely selecting a momentary path to yet another glorious destination.

 

Imagine no guilt or recrimination.

Imagine your potential in ongoing fulfillment.

 

Imagine the touch,

precious touch,

never alone,

the rescues done,

the lost retrieved, rescued, saved, redeemed.

 

Imagine what is possible.

See past momentary necessity,

passing through the wrenching loneliness,

crushing blindness lifted.

Imagine Hope,

then penetrate the illusory veil

to see you need not imagine,

for Hope is ever present.

 

Marvel, wonder, and know,

even here, even in this world,

you do know Hope,

and beyond Hope,

Destiny certain.

 

Imagine the touch,

the precious touch.

Remember touch,

for were it not real,

were it not waiting in the past and in Destiny Home,

you could not imagine it.

 

Reliunif.lif

You are not here to save the world.  You are here to save yourself.  In the process you may find that involves trying to save someone else or maybe even the world.

You are here not to overcome worldly challenges.  You are here to accept that you alone cannot overcome them.  You are here to accept your dire worldly limitations, and from that acceptance to begin growing into your unbounded spiritual potential.

You are here to escape your worldly self, and to lovingly accept your worldly self, for only therein can you accept others, that acceptance being the whole point of it all.

You are here.  You cannot change that, at least not constructively and without simply starting the process all over again.

Sooner or later terrible things will happen.  But they will pass.  You will grow, at least if you so choose.  

Eventually you will succumb to entropy's cruel assault on your body.  Don't make a big deal of it.  That seeming worldly end has absolutely nothing to do with your real Life.  

You are here to grow, to accept, to love and to accept Love from the Source, even if this world offers no real Love.  

All the wonderful things you experience will be only teasing hints of what awaits.  The painful torments and tortures that will surely for a time overwhelm and consume your senses, you will pass through, leaving you inescapably scarred, and by your Choice, either bitter or liberated.

Your role in letting some Light into the world will be surprisingly and surreptitiously placed before you, unrecognized until you accept its gift of opportunity.

You are not here to escape your grim circumstances.  You are here to lighten someone else's circumstances.  Everyone you pass on the trail or street, every last one of them, everyone entering your room, everyone momentarily crossing your path, is an element of God, even if a testing - tempting - tormenting element.  In every interaction you will choose whether to summon a courageous smile, whether to give them a chance, whether to give yourself a chance.  

 

Reliunif.lif

Poetry

For several nights we've watched Nova: Ancient Earth about the rise of life.  So much the show describes was unknown when I was young.  Absolutely fascinating. 

Such a confluence of compounded miracles to get prokaryotes, then eukaryotes, then plants in water, then giant 20 foot fungi on land, then plants in symbiosis with fungi on land.  And something, a meteorite?...kicked off plate tectonics!....else we would have no dry land.  

 

So long and so quickly it all transpired, and will come to a slow ending without end.

We grapple with the enormity of it all, the enormity of this tiny speck in the infinite cosmos,

all of it providing blessed distraction from our own individual, personal acute mystery of undetermined meaning and inexorable fate.

"It just is" we mumble in consolation, not believing that for a second.

Moments of inescapable Reality intrude upon our musings, yet so briefly and so little comprehended that we soon enough relegate them to memory and return to our conjectural distractions, whether religious or scientific.

But the Realities, a touch, however brief, keeps naggingly whispering to our soul, the soul that we would deny, whispering that the whole point of the evolution and the catechisms was all along

 that touch.

 

Reliunif.lif

How can God and Yeshu bear the sorrow of the horror, evil, and suffering of any world?

Can Heaven exist only if all universes enabling terror have ended?  Will the great birth process of new souls come to a finite conclusion, so that saints won't have to sorrow over the suffering in other universes?  Will Bodhisattvas ever have rest because there is no more to do in any universe?

But would God really say "that's all folks", putting an end to the production of freewill souls?  

Will Heaven not really be fully joyous because we will know of the agony and cruelty still extant in other universes?  Or will that agony and cruelty continue, but in Heaven we will be given amnesia and will be sequestered from other universes?  

I sit in this sunroom watching sunrise with Bodhi curled in my lap.  It is Heaven.  But I sorrow for the horrors in Gaza at this very moment.  Will that same mix of joy and grief be our lot in eternal Heaven?  Will we ever be able to relax and say "job done"?  Can God ever relax and not suffer?  Is that what Judgement Day is all about, when God just cannot bear any more?  Really?  A finite Creation process?  

Or is this nightmare world really just a fleeting anomaly in an otherwise perfect Creation?  

We rely on happy ending to make it all worthwhile.  It will turn out OK.  But really, can we ever not be bothered by the horrors of Haiti?  Or do we really want to submit to some memory erasure?  Does suffering anywhere not actually produce suffering everywhere?  Is evil just a phase we all have to pass through?  

Does eternal Heaven render momentary suffering and evil irrelevant by comparison?

Does everyone eventually make it out, or at least everyone always have the Choice to get out?  Is our opportunity to help finite?  Can we know that we are not personally responsible for saving everyone and that the Universe will provide opportunities for everyone to choose salvation?  Will we someday not feel compelled to cry over Jerusalem?  

All will have their chance.  All can heal.  All can arrive.  We can know they can grow through the world.  It is indeed all momentary.  We are placed in intimate proximity to a given world that we may make our own Choice.  We must feel the urgency of their suffering, must sense the evil.  

But we are not eternally responsible.  All will be taken care of.  The intensity of the suffering we feel can be attenuated not by not caring, but by certainty that a loving Sustainer will give all the suffering masses opportunity to choose healing.

Marvel at the universal redeeming power.  Fear not.  No one need be left forever behind.

You will always care about their suffering, but the surety of redemption for all, the certainty of your own role and completion of that role in the flow of the river of time, will indeed allow full joyous immersion in eternal Heaven, eternally growing Heaven.

You will know of their suffering.  It will always matter.  But outside of time you will see the potential for their joyous destiny.

Only the blindness of time and the horror of this spiritual birth process leave you with these natural questions.  That is also part of the Choice, part of your birth.  

You suffer because of your opportunity in this moment to help someone.  You need not always sorrow or grieve.  It is only a necessary suffering in this fleeting moment, a part of learning, of growing, of Choice.  

 

Observation

In this world there are infinite needs, opportunities, demands, requirements, and interruptions.

In today's hyper-connected world that truth has been multiplied by orders of magnitude.

I have lived my life following opportunities.  That has served me well.  I understood so little of the world I could never have effectively chosen a valid set of priorities to serve the Creator's Purpose.

Generally people resolutely setting their life-course do so in denial or rejection of God's potential for them.  I have always been loath to rigorously define goals and objectives for fear of not being open to guidance of the Spirit.

But situations change.  Demands increase.  Distractions multiply.  Remaining time evaporates.  I have steadily turned away from more and more opportunities, as the experience they offered evolved from its initial newness and enlightening to repetition of lessons.  Concerts, parties,  hiking groups, climbing,  general social connection, church committees, all went this way.  

There is an infinity to learn, and infinite news to follow.  

There are infinite demands and opportunities.  

 

Observation

Watching the Gaza war.

Cannot turn away.

Astonishing, that we can see this.  Astonishing, that so few people will see this.

Absolutely massive bombardment.  I am watching a slaughter.

The Al Jazeera reporter seems exhausted as he reports under the buzz of Israeli drones.

Not quite mentally absorbed, that were I to mention any of my observations to anyone I know, I would be branded enemy.

On and on the explosions go, massive, a malignant orange against the night horizon, fires silhouetting columns of smoke.

I am watching innocent people die.  It would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

It is the old west, the slaughter of the Native Americans, but now televised, this time known by the world, and still in this day and age the world stands by and watches.  

 

All is in the dark.  Governments release calculated information.

There is no substitute for watching this live.  I recognized the massive nature of the bombardment before announcers commented on it.  I saw the fear in the reporter’s exhausted face as he was the first to report all internet communication being severed.

Headlines do not, cannot, capture, the drama and horror of the moment. 

Sand Creek Massacre, the Haitian rebellion and its mix with European wars, the U.S. invasion of French territory to start the War of 1812, endless unjustified atrocities have their inhumanity repeated in the scenes before my eyes.  

The desperate pleas in the U.N. are heartfelt, rational, and absurd.  

Atrocities unfold at this moment.  

Now we can read the backgrounds and political intricacies of the War of 1812.  Perhaps a century from now people will read detailed assessments of the events of this day.  

There was no hope for Native Americans.  There is no hope for Palestinians.  

Watching these webcam images from Gaza is abjectly unproductive.  Yet it feels obligatory.  

The split screen images are jolting.  The Palestinian ambassador to the U.N. speaks on the right.  On the left, Gaza literally burns, the orange glow being the only light.

Screams of rockets and bombs we hear.  We cannot hear  the screams of the children and mothers.  

The U.N. General Assembly passed the cease fire resolution.  But none will raise a finger to do anything about it.

Nor will I.

Most of the screen is blank, all power long ago being cut off from Gaza.  The horror, in the dark, unable to get help, the sound of drones and missiles and bombs and jets, no information or communication….it is far too horrific to even try to grasp.  

Turks protest.  But their government is as helpless as any.

Will anything in the world actually blow up because of this?  It never does in these recurring instances over the years.  Nothing indicates this will be different.  But you never know, never know.

The reporting is amazing because the reporters cannot escape.  Any combat reporter would be long gone by now if possible.  But these reporters have nowhere to go.  Their homes and families are often destroyed already anyway.  

This is like watching Deutsch cities during the saturation bombing.  Almost continual explosions.  

How will the world react when the Israelis bomb the largest hospital as they have promised?  Will a death toll of ten-thousand in one location finally evoke some meaningful response?  

This is real.  When will such scenes unfold in the U.S. if Trump and Johnson start a war here if they lose the election?

Israeli spokesman has said they are not fighting humans, but monsters.

Israel is shaping the battlefield.  

New tonight the webcam sound is included.  

Always another flash of orange, those hideous orange flashes.  

Al Jazeera just holds the webcam image on the screen.  

People have no way to call ambulances.

Listen to the jets.  Listen to the distant thumps.  I have a slight awareness of what they really sound like.

 

Historically Gaza Health Ministry death and injury numbers have perfectly matched U.N. numbers.  They can be trusted.

 

Gazans are putting identity bracelets on their children.  And writing their names on appendages and limbs.  And spreading the children out among multiple sites so they won’t all be killed at once.

The horror is unimaginable.  It is Sand Creek all over.  

Families count their fatalities in dozens.

70% of fatalities are women and children.

Cities are gone.  

Surviving children have watched their families die.  

Half of all housing is damaged.  

I at least can see that organizations to which I donate are in the middle, UNICEF, OxFam, Medicins sans Frontiers.  But many of their workers have been killed.

A child of 8 would have lived through four major bombardments.  

Worse than most cases of such trauma, Gazans know they are alone, that no one cares about their dying, no one will stop the slaughter, though they know the world is watching.

Someone on a panel finally states the obvious, that these children cannot forget or forgive.  They will be scarred forever.  They will remember which family members died.  Those emotions will not die.  They will exact a price, and Israel will not be immune as the decades pass.

No one could emotionally survive this unscarred.  

I sit here and literally know more about what is happening in Gaza than do the isolated people of Gaza.  

It’s a full moon tonight.  That would be a blessed help, if it’s clear there.  

 

Poetry

Reliunif.lif

 

Temptations I can now call them, clear as a bell.  But what other miseries would have befallen had I not succumbed?  Had I taken that different path, would I be kicking myself for having shirked the great opportunity?  Would cold years in some string of hideous jobs have left me feeling I should have tried the courageous path?

Had I not succumbed to more recent temptations, what subsequent temptations would have fooled me?  

 

Temptations forsworn,

leaving the question,

What if?

Would any chosen path in this world really have felt right?

Would we ever say "I'm glad I made that choice?"

Don't we always wish we had chosen so as to avoid the suffering,

theirs and ours?

Would that other choice have really avoided all suffering?

Would dissatisfaction and disappointment

truly have never intruded?

Down that path would we really not now be second guessing?

The mistakes and foolishness are so evident in the cruel glare of hindsight.

But in that same glare on that other path would nothing appear foolish?

We learned down this painful path, and would not choose it again.

Down that path not chosen would we really complement ourselves on our wise choice?...

….would we realize how much suffering we avoided?....

….or would we have discovered different mistakes…

…this world offering condemnation and recrimination whatever choice we make.

Better to regret opportunities foolishly taken or wisely eschewed?

Better to accept the lessons, whatever the choice, 

better to learn, better to grow,

on whatever foolish path chosen,

for soul's growth and learning,

therein is one's  Purpose and Destiny fulfilled,

prodded by worldly circumstance,

facilitated by foolish choice.  

 

Observation

The absolute enormity of the unpredictability of life.  

Apocalypse in Gaza.  These are astonishing sights   Many light bombs descending, many.  Israel saying it will bomb Al Quds Hospital and its 14,000 people.

The flare bombs are around the hospital.  The bombing gets closer and closer to the hospital.  Dim red glows mark distant scenes of hell.

Ongoing explosions.  Tanks move in deeper.  Dante could not imagine the scene 

An Israeli flag flies over the Gaza beach.

The war cabinet is at each others' throats.  

 

Yesterday starving and thirsty people broke into an aid warehouse.  

Israel has created hell.

Absolutely titanic explosions.  

Israel tells the Red Crescent  Al Quds Hospital will be destroyed.  500 patients   14,000 civilians.  A doctor describes his presence throughout the hospital and watching its construction, confirming there are no Hamas facilities.

 

More orange flashes.  

 

Observation

As for weeks, orange flashes fill the Gazan skyline.  

Hezbollah and Israel continue to exchange artillery fire.  Israelis have burned 10,000 olive trees.  

Antiwar demonstrators chant at the capital, to no avail.  Only Israeli lives count.

 

Mali allies with Russia, kicking out U.N. and French peacekeepers.  Taureg and ISIS fighters move north.

It's abject madness, this human condition.

A dark pall settles over humanity.

This is particularly wrenching considering how few decades ago there was such hope for democracy and economic progress.

Gaza is hell.  Mali is hell.  Kenya was hell when the Brits took over.

We inflict hell on each other, the hell inflicted by disease and natural disaster proving insufficient for our tastes.  Meanwhile we empower AI to amplify our greed.

Yet some still protest.  Exhausted doctors still try to heal others in the midst of hell.  

The conditions of hell still induce revulsion and sympathy and courage among a few.  

And there is the Light, dim but persistent, unextinguished.

There is the Purpose.  There is the Choice.

The wars and horrors will continue.  As long as someone is appalled, as long as someone does not cheer, as long as someone tries to help, this old world's Purpose maintains, and weeping angels welcome the enduring souls refusing to surrender to the normalcy of retribution.  

 

Observation

The horrors of ongoing slaughter of Palestinians by Israelis continue at an accelerating pace.  The events are horrifically evil, but the world simply watching and implicitly condoning is a comparable evil.  Day after day, now week after week,  we watch live on TeleVision as children and a culture are exterminated right before our eyes.  Worse, most people do not watch, do not care enough to watch.

Oh yes, this is a historic moment, one to be recorded for the ages.  In the 18th and 19th centuries European households could not watch the slaughter and eviction of Native Americans.  In the 1950's the slaughter of Korean villagers could not be watched live.  Even in southeast Asia we could not watch live 24/7 the flashes of Kissinger's and Nixon's bombs and the lines of children's body bags.  But today we can.  One more excuse to not care has been obviated.  One more claim to ignorance is unceremoniously knocked aside.  

Why are people not running to neighbors' doors, spreading in shock and horror the news that as we speak a slaughter of children is underway and you can watch it happening live and our tax money is paying for it?

Every Palestinian child's body on an unwatched screen indicts our souls, the more so because with such vehemence we proclaim outrage at the death of the Israeli child, the more so because of our pious recriminations about the sanctity of unborn life.  To pick and choose which child's life counts is to claim godhood.  That will not wear well down through history.  It will not serve us well in eternity.

  

Poetry

Grief does not lend itself to words or descriptions.

There is no rationale to grief.  We all know everyone will die.  There is no surprise in this most recent death or any death, just the inconvenience of the surprising timing.

Grief…….why grief?....why wrenching, despairing, uncontrollable grief?

 

Our soul speaks to us of things we dare not know.

Our spirit cries to us of things we dare not see.

Grief we deny and banish,

but its weight hanging around our heart will not be denied,

no matter how many names and distractions we give it.

Poetry

Influence,

person to person,

subtle,

oft unseen.

 

Influence,

a blue sky,

subtle,

seen in behaviors around the world. 

 

Values and priorities and words and actions weave their influence.

Setting sun and darkening sky blankets its influence.

 

 

Do not pretend you have no role.

Do not pretend every word does not matter.

 

The speeches and grandiose proclamations may not matter,

for they are of the world, for the world, in the world.

 

A word, a gesture, an attitude, an expression,

the countless ways that your soul is nakedly revealed,

there is the influence.

 

Persona and policies are transient and ephemeral.

The touch cold or warm,

the word cruel or caring,

there your life loudly echoes through eternity.

 

Your influence,

seen in a small child’s eyes

made brighter or dimmer

in the wake of your passing.

 

Modified version for posting

Posted 16. Dezember. 2016

Influence,

person to person,

subtle,

oft unseen.

 

Do not pretend you have no role.

Do not pretend every word does not matter.

 

The speeches and grandiose proclamations may not matter,

for they are of the world, for the world, in the world.

 

But a word, a gesture, an attitude, an expression,

the countless ways that your soul is nakedly revealed,

there is the influence.

 

Persona and policies are transient and ephemeral.

But the touch cold or warm,

the word cruel or caring,

there your life loudly echoes through eternity.

 

Your influence,

seen in a little child’s eyes

made brighter or dimmer

in the wake of your passing.

Reliobs

Some people just always bless.

Some people are just always a blessing.

They do not do it by material largess.

They do not bless by simply going along.

They bless by being authentic and accepting.

People who always bless are never barking out orders or making suggestions.

People who always bless are asking, asking out of genuine concern and care and kindness and generosity.

 

People who always bless listen.

People who always bless seldom criticize.

People who always bless seldom prattle on about themselves.

People who always bless will usually not share the same interests.  They will instead listen to your interests.

 

There are blessings that flow through certain people,

And they are blessings of Source and Sustainer and Creator.

Some people are simply conduits for the Spirit,

Unobtrusive, unpretentious, unassuming,

Blessing by being and by letting others be who they are.

Reliobs

We are routinely left without any rational hope.

We are routinely left with the opportunity to explore our deepest desires.

In the dark moments when we can see no way, we are empowered to know what way we want to see.

In the absence of hope we come to know for what we really hope.

 

In the darkness we discover ourselves.

In the darkness we know with certainty our dearest hopes and deepest hungers.

 

Unconstrained by success, pleasure, or comfort, in the darkness we clearly see ourselves.

Unconstrained by a path or instructions or guidance, we are liberated to offer to God our essence.

 

Given hope we will run toward it.

Given success we will build on it.

Give thanks for both, but pray that hope and success will not starve your faith.

Faith grows strongest in the dark. 

Reliobs

Service, selfless service.

How are we to know our calling?  How are we to compete with the saints?

Should we feel guilty at each example of a selfless person doing the icky work we would not touch with a ten foot pole?

How hard should we push to explore the bounds of the service we are willing to give others?  Must we grow into the higher forms of selfless service?

How valid are our arguments that “others are better equipped for that job”?

How much responsibility can we duck?

Maybe it’s just a matter of when the opportunities to serve arrive in our lives. 

Maybe we each better serve in the capacity that fits us best at the time.

Oh but what a convenient way to avoid personal spiritual growth!

We should feel challenged by the example of the selfless saint giving up so much to serve others.  That does not mean we should follow them.  The nurse in the Ebola clinic, the person living as a volunteer in the house for disabled folks, the person changing diapers of helpless accident victims…..danged straight we should feel humbled and bothered when we hear their stories!

We absolutely should ask if we should follow them!  And then we must accept the answer.

Perhaps we will follow when the time is right.  Perhaps we will follow a different path. 

But the saintly examples, the selfless examples, should prod and bother us, for then we are unsettled enough to ask what path we should follow, a path purely ours.

On evening of Newtown school shooting.

Our faith

like the candle flame,

flickers in the terror filled storms of world’s dark night.

Our faith,

like the candle flame,

endures to set the world alight.

Poetry

Let the Christmas music play,

Let it encourage,

Let it speak of hope in the midst of hopelessness.

Hopes and fears abide, unquenchable.

What ridiculous faith would dare to face them?

It is only momentary, only momentary, only temporal,

There is our faith, faith that this worldly perversion of potential,

This temporal prison and dungeon,

This carnal madness,

Will soon enough go the way of all that is carnal and temporal and worldly.

There is our faith.

This will end.  Light shines on the other side.

We can fight the madness, can wrestle the hopelessness,

can then awaken in the same world,

madness abiding.

 

Madness abides,

but the heart knows of something more,

even if hidden for now.

Christmas did come.

Christmas will come.

Christmas is present,

even if hidden for now.

 

poetry

God, the blessing of fuzzy kitties.

Be present,

Hear the purring of miracles,

Gifts of God doing what they can.

On and on, the moment stretches into eternity,

Warm, safe,

So connected,

 Kitty pawsage,

A gift of God having entered,

Allowed entry,

Given freely.

Observation

Oh for some reassurance!  But we only count it as reassurance if it comes through the world.  Because we want to positively and lovingly impact the world.

Because we give up so much for that quest.  Yet the world is ephemeral and misleading.  Yet the world is all we have.

Such a gamble, this commitment of faith! 

Shouldn’t there be a foundation, independent of world’s circumstance and vicissitudes?  Of course there is such a foundation.  But it does not work well for determining if one’s life is on the right track.

There should be consistency!....independent of politics and disaster! 

There should be foundation and consistency!  There is after all only one Reality and only one Purpose.

The blindness only convinces us otherwise.

 

Foundation….consistency…..certainty……confidence……resolve……

Surely the saints and saviors possessed all these, lucky schmucks.

Surely they did not wake some mornings and wonder what to do.

Surely they did not wake some mornings and wonder if they had wasted their entire life.

Surely they did not go to bed thinking maybe it was time to just quit.

Shouldn’t steadfast faith serve to obviate all doubt?

            What is it about this temporal world that empowers it so shake our confidence?

What is it about our souls that insists on doubting?

Doubt and reassurance,

Why the former, why the need for the latter?

There are faith foundations unshakeable, faith in certainty of eternity.

Does the moment and the temporal not succumb to such faith because the moment and the temporal are mere illusions?

How can faith in eternal outcomes be so certain and assuring, yet not lead to faith in temporal, worldly outcomes?

Why is the eternal so much clearer and certain than the immediate and temporal?

That is a curious conundrum.

Is the worldly and temporal genuinely uncertain?

Is our blindness to the temporal future a way of establishing our eternal faith?

Is the temporal so ephemeral and transitory, is it such a vaporous gauze, that in trying to see worldly outcomes we see right through the illusions?

Can we not see the worldly future because it is so meaningless and unreal?

Did Yeshu’s vision of His horrific and glorious fate arise not from peering into the worldly future, but from a crystal vision of the eternal?

Are we blinded to the future because we are to not worry about it?

The eternal is clear and certain.

The worldly is obscured and always doubtful.

Doesn’t that motivate us to more securely grab the eternal?

The madness of the temporal should be taken as seriously as any madness.

The solidity of eternity can be taken as seriously as any certainty.

What do you see when allowing the embrace of the eternal?  What is the vision?  Is that not more reliable than any worldly calculation?

What does the certainty of the eternal project into this temporal existence?

Is that not surely the most reliable and trustworthy source for expectations?

Do not judge yourself, or you will cripple your efforts.  Do not judge.

Accept and know yourself.  That is the way to the path through the temporal storm.

Trust the eternal, the clear and consistent and certain eternal. 

The worldly and temporal is a storm and chaos, even the past proving unreliable, much less the future.

Touch the eternal, allow it entry, follow that calling, and do not judge yourself in light of others who are following their path.  Their path is not yours. 

Allow time for the eternal.  Walk through that portal.

Do not try to build on the passing smoke that is this temporal world.

Build on the eternal that is certain.

Open to it, see it so clearly right there just beyond the distorting lens of the temporal. 

Do what you can that fits the eternal.  Let the world winds blow, for you can do nothing about them and cannot predict them.

The path through the eternal is well lit and evident.  Follow it while the dust and deluge of the temporal world blindingly swirl about.

Judge not!  See the smoke as smoke.  See the haste with which the vapors of this world pass.  Judge not yourself in their terms.  See the path you cast through the smoke, a path determined not by the momentary patterns in the swirling fog, but a path rooted in eternal foundations.

There, there in that crystalline foundation is certainty and reassurance, there in a foundation built of Light, for it is Light and only Light that is eternal.

All of the world passes, and quickly so, except for the Light that projects into eternity.

Stand securely on the eternal.  Confidently and securely tread that solid path. 

Let the temporal world blow and swirl around you, for there is nothing else you can do about it anyway.  Watch the temporal world’s winds and storms without trying to guess where they will blow next.

Others have their paths, beautiful and inspirational and holy.  You have your path.  Judge not yourself.  Feel eternity in the place and moment, secure from the blasting winds.

Rest in the pools and meadows along the path.  Take nourishment from the angels and clouds and visions and living gifts of God that mark the way. 

Judge not.  Judge not. 

Do not set course per the ephemeral fog of the passing world.

Feel the solid footing of the eternal, hidden below the mist surrounding your feet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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