120318 11:00
    In the not too distant past--or so to say--’Once-Upon-A-Time’ . . . I was as closed as a chrome plated, high tinsel strength, trailer hitch; impenetrable. More like, than unalike, the metaphor describing my parents. Who then seemed lawn ornament gazing balls adoring the yards of my childhood, reflecting the world spherically and shedding my love as rain indifferent.
    Then too, escaping my unconscious projection, now apparent, the imagery is incomplete without the pedestal upon which they were elevated God like and omniscient to my vision/version of them.
    It is my nature to deconstruct relationships, events and psyches. What arrogance! A blind man groping experience attempting to describe the meaning of life. The oddest part is that the numinous doesn’t mind and responds with hints, suggestions and manifestations slaking my greed to be loved . . . and if by God’s will . . . be love for/to others.
    It is a process available to all people (nearly fell into the feminist trap of “Mankind”, in this context it would have been generic or vernacular for consciousness. Before God we are neutered souls . . . as Einstein fabulously said: “Equally foolish and wise.” Humor being the best antidote to “Divine Rights” self derived or subjugated by.
    The Shepard’s Crook is about to sweep me from life’s stage, as are my mentors, soon to slumber in apparent death. It is for me “The sound of one hand clapping.”
    I am moved from my silent integration of tectonic shifts ongoing from various sources in the ordinary of my life.     Today I discovered a reminder of the women who loved me in ways independent of pleasure. Who in moments of converse penetrated my distemper and malevolent self-disregard forged between the inconvenience of my birth and these latter days. The distance between pleasure and joy are measured in light years.

. . . 120325 discovered this date and placed in my ‘Quote Diary”:

 “On its outer surface time is vulnerable to transience. Regardless of its sadness or beauty, each day empties and vanishes. In its deeper heart, time is transfiguration. Time minds possibility and makes sure that nothing is lost or forgotten. That which seems to pass away on the surface of time is in fact transfigured and housed in the tabernacle of memory.”  ― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

 “Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night. In this way transience makes a ghost out of everything that happens to us.”
 ― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

 “When you look at some faces, you can see the turbulence of the infinite beginning to gather to the surface. This moment can open in a gaze from a stranger, or in a conversation with someone you know well. Suddenly, without their intending it or being conscious of it, their gaze lasts for only a second. In that slightest interim, something more than the person looks out.”  ― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

 “...to gaze into the face of another is to gaze into the depth and entirety of his life.”
 ― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

120222 04:50
    I have a premise, not unique, but specific in a broader application: You/I/We become what we consume . . . oddly reminding me of a physiological evaluation given to me individually in elementary school via word association: “Catacomb” Reply: “Entertainment”
    I was required to expand my response: to which I said I learned from a movie that people had to worship underground.
    Sixty or so years later I found another epiphany suggested via this article: I have immutable faith, belief and confidence in us -- ‘WE THE PEOPLE” -- by and within which I include all of us without boarders or boundaries, no exceptions allowed.

Acts of Love
By Chris Hedges

February 20, 2012 "TruthDig" --- Love, the deepest human commitment, the force that defies empirical examination and yet is the defining and most glorious element in human life, the love between two people, between children and parents, between friends, between partners, reminds us of why we have been created for our brief sojourns on the planet. Those who cannot love—and I have seen these deformed human beings in the wars and conflicts I covered—are spiritually and emotionally dead. They affirm themselves through destruction, first of others and then, finally, of themselves. Those incapable of love never live.

“Hell,” Dostoevsky wrote, “is the inability to love.”

And yet, so much is written and said about love that at once diminishes its grandeur and trivializes its meaning. Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, cautioned all of us about preaching on love, reminding us that any examination of love had to include, as Erich Fromm pointed out in “Selfishness and Self-Love,” the unmasking of pseudo-love.

God is a verb rather than a noun. God is a process rather than an entity. There is some biblical justification for this. God, after all, answered Moses’ request for revelation with the words, “I AM WHO I AM.” This phrase is probably more accurately translated “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” God seems to be saying to Moses that the reality of the divine is an experience. God comes to us in the profound flashes of insight that cut through the darkness, in the hope that permits human beings to cope with inevitable despair and suffering, in the healing solidarity of kindness, compassion and self-sacrifice, especially when this compassion allows us to reach out to others, and not only others like us, but those defined by our communities as strangers, as outcasts. “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” This reality, the reality of the eternal, must be grounded in that which we cannot touch, see or define, in mystery, in a kind of faith in the ultimate worth of compassion, even when the reality of the world around us seems to belittle compassion as futile.

“The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt,” wrote Paul Tillich.

Aristotle said that only two living entities are capable of solitude and complete separateness: God and beast. The most acute form of human suffering is loneliness. The isolated human individual can never be fully human. And for those cut off from others, for those alienated from the world around them, the false covenants of race, nationalism, the glorious cause, class and gender compete, with great seduction, against the covenant of love. These sham covenants—and we see them dangled before us daily—are based on exclusion and hatred rather than universality. These sham covenants do not call us to humility and compassion, to an acknowledgement of our own imperfections, but to a form of self-exaltation disguised as love. Those most able to defy these sham covenants are those who are grounded in love, those who find their meaning and worth in intimate relationships that cut through the loneliness and isolation of the human condition.

There are few sanctuaries in war. Couples in love provide one. And it was to such couples that I consistently retreated. These couples repeatedly acted to save those branded as the enemy—Muslims trapped in Serb enclaves in Bosnia or dissidents hunted by the death squads in El Salvador. These rescuers did not act as individuals. Nechama Tec documented this peculiar reality when she studied Polish rescuers of Jews during World War II. Tec did not find any particular character traits or histories that led people to risk their lives for others, often for people they did not know, but she did find they almost always acted because their relationship explained to them the world around them. Love kept them grounded. These couples were not able to halt the destruction and violence around them. They were powerless. They could and often did themselves become victims. But it was with them, seated in a concrete hovel in a refugee camp in Gaza or around a wood stove on a winter night in the hills outside Sarajevo, that I found sanity and peace, that I was reminded of what it means to be human. It seemed it was only in such homes that I ever truly slept during war.

Love, when it is deep and sustained by two individuals, includes self-giving—often tremendous self-sacrifice—as well as desire. For the covenant of love recognizes both the fragility and sanctity of all human beings. It recognizes itself in the other. And it alone can save us, especially from ourselves.

Sigmund Freud divided the forces in human nature between the Eros instinct, the impulse within us that propels us to become close to others, to preserve and conserve, and the Thanatos, or death instinct, the impulse that works toward the annihilation of all living things, including ourselves. For Freud these forces were in eternal conflict. All human history, he argued, is a tug of war between these two instincts.

“The meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us,” Freud wrote in “Civilization and Its Discontents.” “It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of.”

We are tempted, indeed in a consumer culture encouraged, to reduce life to a simple search for happiness. Happiness, however, withers if there is no meaning. The other temptation is to disavow the search for happiness in order to be faithful to that which provides meaning. But to live only for meaning—indifferent to all happiness—makes us fanatic, self-righteous and cold. It leaves us cut off from our own humanity and the humanity of others. We must hope for grace, for our lives to be sustained by moments of meaning and happiness, both equally worthy of human communion. And it is this grace, this love, which in our darkest moments allows us to endure.

Viktor Frankl in “Man’s Search for Meaning” grappled with Eros and Thanatos in the Auschwitz death camp. He recalled being on a work detail, freezing in the blast of the Polish winter, when he began to think about his wife, who had already been gassed by the Nazis although he did not know it at the time.

“A thought transfixed me,” he wrote, “for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set down by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart. The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

Love is an action, a difference we try to make in the world.

“We love our enemy when we love his or her ultimate meaning,” professor Adams told us. “We may have to struggle against what the enemy stands for; we may not feel a personal affinity or passion for him. Yet we are commanded for this person’s sake and for our own and for the sake of the destiny of creation, to love that which should unite us.”

To love that which should unite us requires us to believe there is something that connects us all, to know that at some level all of us love and want to be loved, to base all our actions on the sacred covenant of love, to know that love is an act of will, to refuse to exclude others because of personal difference or race or language or ethnicity or religion. It is easier to be indifferent. It is tempting to hate. Hate propels us to the lust for power, for control, to the Hobbesian nightmare of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Hate is what people do when they are distressed, as many Americans are now, by uncertainty and fear. If you hate others they will soon hate or fear you. They will reject you. Your behavior assures it. And through hate you become sucked into the sham covenants of the nation, the tribe, and you begin to speak in the language of violence, the language of death.

Love is not selflessness. It is the giving of one’s best self, giving one’s highest self unto the world. It is finding true selfhood. Selflessness is martyrdom, dying for a cause. Selfhood is living for a cause. It is choosing to create good in the world. To love another as one loves oneself is to love the universal self that unites us all. If our body dies, it is the love that we have lived that will remain—what the religious understand as the soul—as the irreducible essence of life. It is the small, inconspicuous things we do that reveal the pity and beauty and ultimate power and mystery of human existence.

Vasily Grossman wrote in his masterpiece “Life and Fate”:

    My faith has been tempered in Hell. My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious leaders, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And, when Thanatos is ascendant, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love, to see in them all the divinity, pity and pathos of the human. And to recognize love in the lives of others, even those with whom we are in conflict—love that is like our own. It does not mean we will avoid suffering or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive. But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has the power both to resist in our nature what we know we must resist and to affirm what we know we must affirm.

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

Copyright © 2011 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.

120214 05:02
    Great Love is not definitive save for the Friend who speaks to and through us.
    In this instance I am shy about using the word “God” since that three letter word is so often abused or denied. So too do we misunderstand or abnegate we have a soul unique and, dare I say, divine? Or imply “divinely given”? It is my nature--and if it be true of me it is equally so with you and all life--to love.

"The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along."
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
--Rumi

    It is my custom to arise before sunrise to greet every gifted day. And in these hours find myself strolling though the quotes of memorable others who remain. . . . It is not an addiction or dependency since I miss occasionally when impelled to write; without guilt or shame. In the burgeoning collection I have a few who seem more ‘stellar’ than others yet equal in voicing messages reaching across the years and express love for all of us who remain.
    Like the Friend, it matters not what we call this time of quiet: meditation, prayer or contemplation, the result is always that same, fearless days.

“Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.” 
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

120124 01:47
The dream from which I am arisen is a lovely poem of love for humanity. And equally my Swan/Phoenix song; no dirge. A prayerful hymn of thanksgiving for an unlived life, abandoned talent and sense of the genius of our collective will to love. The core of life’s psyche?

The trembling tear lingering at my eye is both sorrow and joy before I join the dust surrounding me of mountains made desert. . . . When did all ground, time and space become sacred? Where and when did fear flee from me?

Oh! Of course, my last conscious thought before slumber. An unconscious prayer about which I should have been more careful not to articulate: I love discovering talent and witnessing the nascent genius there . . . oblivious of longing to become the nurture for its growth.

Having witnessed, at hospice, the total of one family, in relationship to their dying mother, I ejaculated privately to her, ‘You made beautiful babies!’ Now sensing I should learn to curb my mouth as the street signs admonish in Manhattan regarding pets. . . . But she glowed so! But then again I now think I need a bag gag permanently affixed.

I am at times rude and express my urge to merge physically with a woman. And now find it not odd that the thought expressed to a very few, in later time my request obviously denied/declined, that I’d really rather merge with her soul for a moment to run my fingers through her psyche. Perhaps that is my true longing and lust to really know her. Instead of becoming the more common double backed beast for a brief time with both the creation of life or death implicit.

In recognition of my rogue consciousness. I recall taking my children, or was it child then? To the zoo and witnessing a bear lolled back masturbating in apparent boredom.

Another instance of masturbation: a pet dog where two Jesuits had hidden, with a Protest theologian, when sought for arrest for their acts of political protest. Masturbatory acts became common coin to me at the behest of a friend and teacher in high school. God Bless Jack O’Hara wherever you are. The last time we spoke, five or so years ago, he protested my choice of photography versus painting and I fell mute, my praise and gratitude killed. How could I tell him that the work we do creates the best part of ourselves. What would I now say? For most of us the vocation we sell our lives for is paltry and unworthy of our time, or life’s essence, slavery actually.

No one and nothing is for naught. To have been witness to genius is enough to know that what we call “God” is.

I now think God is within this alchemical retort we being rendered into something new. The metaphor expands and contracts in accord with the circumstance--no situational ethics or morality implied. I am torn between extrude and excrete. The hammer and anvil infinitely more apt than “between a rock and a hard place” . . . the pain . . . the process being a sword hammered into a plowshare. We who quiver as tears about to fall into the sea of oblivion know better that it is our drop of water we give. Our choice to die and give the wonder to the children who follow. Even the children of Darfur whose mothers die of rape and aids leaving them orphans.

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." --Anais Nin

PS At the moment I recall it is the birthday of a woman friend who shared her father’s sexual use of her beginning at age six. Ending when, at the age of twelve or so, she began to seek him out. He then abandoned her. At the time of her death from brain cancer, a daughter called in recognition that we were friends, ending her monolog with the opinion that her mother was mentally ill.

I gave no reply but share this because her mother was a wonderful person who cared deeply for others. Best of all, for me at least, she taught me in part, now nearing completion, that friendship was better; the ultimate goal of love . . . and this was after giving herself sexually to a series of “bad boys.” . . . this one excluded . . . solemnity be damned. . . . . image borrowed from Aaron Siskind

120120 23:25

A few thoughts based upon experience, in response to the proclamation that the Music Recording Industry and The Movie Industry are “Pro Free Speech.” Please read/see latest developments regarding Internet Censorship.

What follows is based upon remarks made by my father (a music publisher) and time spent transporting a Julliard teacher (Davis Schumann) to the inaugural opening of Yale’s Electronic Music Studio.

Both detailed corruption in the publication of intellectual property. Instead of the gory details: stolen copyrights, bribes, kickbacks and/or the egregious censorship enforced on the motion picture process. I will give you a thumbnail of my conversation with Mr. Schumann during our one hour trip from Stamford, CT to Yale University.

As a teacher at Julliard Schumann was enthusiastic about liberation from the recording industries strangle hold on the publication of music. In this case I refer to complex musical structures, think/hear, symphonies and large ensemble work. The potential he described became true for all arts and the quest for knowledge. The computer made it possible to write and record music synthetically. The Internet, introduced much later, made the genius of creative people instantly communicable.

An important, to me, point: Creative people generally begin with an idea and whip it into form. At which point, in order for it to be published, one had to beg, borrow or steal the attention of sponsors and orchestra directors . . . the list was seemingly endless and the cost to the artist in non creative time, was significant and difficult. Especially given the fear of rejection we all have.

I see, hear and read genius/talent everywhere I look. Yet wherever I see it I also see the lack of an audience, absence of acknowledgement and affirmation. In terms of creative democracy the Internet is it. Television once held a similar promise but become commercial to the extent that creatively was filtered through conglomerate owners or sponsors agenda’s having nothing to do with free speech. Especially when it, potentially, impinged upon profit. From my vantage point I consider commercial broadcast televised news irrelevant. Even more so since Rupert Murdock and the ‘powers that were or be’ allowed consolidation of venues to reside under one umbrella. One tyranny?

“To Serve & Protect” is a common motto for law enforcement organizations. I ask who are they serve and protect when they kill protesters, either in America or abroad. The motion picture decency board does virtually the same thing with censorship not with lethal force excluding the obscenity of violence and romance/love/attraction as the sale of products. (An afterthought: think about the film “Precious” as counterpoint to the soporific pap and swill making so much profit that the vested money makers will steal our right of access to everything other than their product.)

I see profit in truly free speech for all people. An opportunity to access an education above and beyond vocational training; learning to think and formulate participation, independently well informed. Manifest is an opportunity for diverse views and choice; informed consent, participation in the process of governance. The absence of which is becoming violently apparent.

Everything is process. The collapse and decay of what democracy promised is accelerated by what we have; a population and nation going to hell in a hand basket for the pleasure and desire of 1%. Not democracy but oligarchy and at that a political system ruled by wealth buying the votes of politicians whose sole intention is to get reelected.

This is not an argument we can boycott or walk away from, though the former is attractive and effective. We must participate in any and all measures to retain, if noting else, our right of descent. Behind the scenes legislation is being considered to accuse and confine anyone causing the establishment displeasure. Thinly disguised as subversion with the hot button issues currently in play. Is the cure not worse than the disease?

I have many questions with no specific answers. However I imagine a far greater possibility if and when we work together to take back our governance from political hacks. Why do they continue to award themselves with raises and lifetime security while stealing ours?

--Jean Giraudoux (1882 - 1944)
'The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made."

--Marshall McCluhan (1911 - 1980)
"Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be."
“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

120119 06:00

Random thoughts: Prayer is being a tuning fork in the apparent chaos of creation. Once struck it ripples outward and inward to the, as St. Ignatius would have it, God within and God beyond. Prayer and wisdom seem to go hand in glove. As I am and was: in childhood I had no idea of what I prayed for aside from “Now I lay me down to sleep .  . . and “The Our Father . . . “

Now chagrined I recognize and articulate a concept of expansion; ‘To grow large enough to receive the love of God’, as in God’s love for all of us, the living and the departed. Example: In childhood I seemed to be a source of anguish for my parents and in loving them more came to feel I was unworthy of life. I was drown in that.

Then came a person who later on would tell me her initial impressions of me before and intimately share her conclusions now, going on four or five years, afterwards. I am stunned. Our relationship is platonic, as in friends and I am, at times, alarmed by her insights and struggle for comprehension in several instances taking years to understand and incorporate the gist and truth of what she suggests; her resonance refracting mine.

. . . from dust we came and to dust we return

In our case planning ahead independently we choose the same: cremation, our ashes spread somewhere in the desert we love . . . this place where God is more obvious than any other. Dramatic isn't it. Yet for my part my Power of Attorney has been informed, though he is a Priest, that I would not object having my remains being placed in a dumpster.

Regarding the Bible, or any of the several books of wisdom, I do not cherry pick but attempt to integrate the entity whole and let the implications move about in tectonic fashion. How can I stand the soul quakes? I was enraged with God that my nightly prayers over the sleeping child, my beloved son, was not answered and he spared the death he met. . . . take me instead.

Random acts of kindness are also prayer. A gift freely given with no expectation of return or applause. No milk and cookies for being ‘good’.  Jesus said, “ . . . when you visited me in prison, gave me a cup of water . . . “, treat all as holy even those who assassinate or merely persecute you in veniality and cupidity. I don’t know what Christianity is. Though I am catholic & Catholic educated I can only assess my relationship to God and in that love I find wholeness & holiness in all. Latent or actual it’s there.

Beloved . . . who are you and where?

The resonance expands outward making me smaller each day. I write from a need to escape the tyranny of photography: “Be there and deal with the moment captured in a black excluding frame.” While writing I merge with infinity and find love there.

Or is it here?! As in “Be Here Now!” --Ram Dass.

I imply nothing noble, grand or holy in either the random gift of kindness or the choice of what to include or exclude in photography. Be naked in your kindness vulnerable to failure. You choose your vision/version of what life and love may become. Not even God does that for you. The spindle of grief upon which my life revolved has changed from cold steal to a shaft of light. My gratitude for this is limitless extending even to those who __________ you know who would/have stolen your shirt and life.

As for rote prayer, I do recite The Serenity Prayer, but now instead of petitioning the gift I acknowledge its receipt.

--Matsuo Basho
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought."

--Eric Hoffer
"Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or our worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear. Thus a feeling of utter worthlessness can be a source of courage."

--Earl G. Hunt, Jr. (Bishop--United Methodist)
“Prayer is a kind of calling home every day. And there can come to you a serenity, a feeling of at-homeness in God's universe, a peace that the world can neither give nor disturb, a fresh courage, a new insight, a holy boldness that you'll never, never get any other way.”

--Rainer Maria Rilke
“Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes. ... We must, strictly speaking, at every moment give each other up and let each other go and not hold each other back.”

120117 02:24

Wikipedia will black out globally its English Pages in protest of SOPA & PIPA.

When I had--before theft by politicians, bankers, stock brokers incorporated--money. I gave three hundred dollars to Wikipedia as an investment in our collective future. I do not regret this gesture despite now being dependent upon the charity of others to eat. Just yesterday I discovered a recipe using pinto beans in lieu of meat for hamburgers and meatloaf. I am not ashamed to be a member of The Third World. If anything my new citizenship has proven to be a blessing whose value is immeasurable revealing the nature and origin of addiction and greed.

As an adolescent I considered automobiles manufactured in Germany has being enshrouded in the flesh of dead Jews. Like the lamp shades the Nazis were so fond of.

Now, as I dodge SUVs driven by people speaking on cellular telephones, I think of them as being cloaked in the bleeding bodies of mutilated/dead combatants coupled with the 1.5 million or more civilian Iraqis slain by the previous administration--now seeking to recapture the White House.

Given the infantile posturing and playground rhetoric witness the current “Race to The White House.” I wonder if it is not time for a change; a clean sweep. A retroactive revocation of all rights and privileges secretly codified to and for, as Mark Twain called it; “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.”

Historically the number of “Leaders” worth the scratch required to bury their ashes can be counted on the fingers of one hand. My protest is not limited to Howdy Doody & Uncle Bob of “Shock & Awe”fame--I did donate fifty dollars to the current resident leader of The School for Terrorism.

No my concern is for the return of the Inquisition & Dark Ages.

Surely this cannot be the will of the people; to have our right to free speech gagged and uncensored access to an education taken away exclusively for the profit of the 1%. Between the electorate and politicians the disconnect is obscene.

120118 07:46

"There is no greater crime than to stand between a man and his development; to take any law or institution and put it around him like a collar, and fasten it there, so that as he grows and enlarges, he presses against it till he suffocates and dies." --Henry Ward Beecher

First discovered quote within my morning ritual of collecting them. Then as I plowed forward I discovered that the question I ask of myself: "To speak or remain silent?" was answered clearly. I am not nearly as learned as I would have myself be and I seek wisdom not knowledge. Where East meets West seems to be the boundary between the simple joy of creation as it is and will be or to act assertively to alter the course of history.

I am not suggesting anything by way a prophecy since my sense of that activity is more in line with biblical prophets than those who predict the end of the world. Which bye-the-bye is inevitable: organic or physics. If I must define what I'm about it is advocacy and intercession for all life.

My perception and thinking is largely a product of information available, in milliseconds, via the Internet. I am able to process the contrasts between ideologies with comparable speed intuitively. Intellectually I do love even those who would assassinate me, or us as the case may be. We are using the lesser parts, plus or minus a few points of 10% our abilities. Anything that would limit, censor, inhibit, our growth is inimical to healing, redemption or the unfolding of consciousness. My sense is that the most revered in history were in essence teachers. Their intention clearly that we become the best possible person we are able to be . . . in the gem of our being, soul, self, unique and glorious. Anything less seems to be criminal. Oddly I recall at this point the phrase, "The first shall be last and the last first."

In closing I remind you that beneath the exterior of all things is an essence beyond definition. What about the future and the children? Are we educating the world that graft, greed, dominance, power and force are good. Or are we educating the world to be the future as they would have it when we leave. The former will leave the earth barren, the latter, an incandescent blaze.