LOST my BALANCE

9.9.2020 Almost 10 p.m. I just struggled (again) to find out how to center text and change text font and color (to no avail). New Blogger has me frazzled and I know others feel the same. Meanwhile It's been a discouraging day. Don't know why. Perhaps weather, or just because. I walked in the graying evening to a local store for some sun-chips. That cloud seems friendly. But, Is it? Our friend Grace and Goats +++ were evacuated to a parking lot and I worry for them, though worry is of no real use. Another friend is headed back to the hospital for cancer treatment. Still, worry is wasted energy. (((sigh)))

Got depressed seeeing the bars full of masklessness and spilled out to the streets. I'm worried about the virus, the election, the planet and my worn knees. When the mail arrives, it's all about too many wonderful organizations I care for-needing money. Thousands of asylum seekers are evacuated from Lesbos and it's burning to the gtound. I'm so weary for no good reason. Chalk it up to lack of sleep.

I got some sanity from 6 to 7:30 p.m. meditation with my Zendo (Zoom). Then I watched the news. BIG MISTAKE since I already knew most of it from NPR earlier today. Fires and Ice melt, suffering from sea to sea and across the globe.

Politics is too political. Chess is easier, at least it's got rules. I'm back to 'Tomorrow is another day.'

CICADAS LAMENT

Arriving mid-August, they occupy the high places

their droning cacophony an energetic mating competition.

Like last-call at the bar, they hurry to consummate their one crucial moment.
(4 Minutes)

https://youtu.be/EWr8fzUz-Yw

Meanwhile

The Zen Wedding last Monday was Wonderful, but I posted the few photographs on Face book and have no other access since I then, foolishly, deleted them from the camera. However I did make two sets of hard copy and left them at the Zendo Wednesday while some of us stayed after meditation to accomplish a mailing for the Annual Gala, so might be able to rephotograph them.
This was read:

Kindness
Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

~*~

Fulfillment and Harvest
August is saturated by Joy and sadness, Injustice and the struggle for justice, Wild fires and floods. Some of it due to the horrendous decisions of the current Administration, the myriad tragedies of many nations, the horror of children ripped from desperate families and our nations brutal response to the needs of others. It is beyond painful to witness the systematic dismantling of all the progressive, human values decades in the making.

Hazy, hot and another storm gathering steam. I am overwhelmed by Trump news, Catholic news, World news and the chaos of unrelenting change.

Chaos has invaded my mind. I walk along the rivers East and West, watching every sunset and moon rise as though it were the last.

~*~

Yet life goes on in the new growth from a rescued Orchid.

A baby pigeon waits for mother on the tip of thls roof.

Rudbeckia  bloom profusely.

A Yogi friend sent her beautiful two disk Album of chants.

~*~

Horse

I've recently returned to another abandoned old drawing,

attaching images and adding marks.

 

 *

 A long time friend sent this card recently.

It is by Franz Marc (1880 to 1916)

Today

More marks to come and I'm writing a text I'll print in the open spaces. I seek this imagined companion-horse that first appeared in childhood, returned reincarnated as real events many times through adolescence and into my adult years to the present representing freedom.

I long to ride away


LINK
Here’s a link to amazon for the CDs. "Loves Door" ..also can be downloaded or streamed everywhere of course...

https://www.amazon.com/Loves-Door-Shyama-Chapin/dp/B07D35F2QK

~*~

JUST FIVE DAYS in MAY

BELTANE

https://youtu.be/UqVpXe5_GUQ
(See LINK below)
+
THE MAY TREE
Lore has it that it's very unlucky to cut the hawthorn tree at any time other than when it is in bloom; however, during this time it is cut and decorated as the May Bush.

Commonly called Hawthorn, Thorn-apple, May-tree, White-thorn,or Hawberry, it's a large genus of shrubs and trees in the family Rosaceae, native to temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere in Europe, Asia and North America.

​In Gaelic folklore it marks the entrance to the 'other-world' and Is strongly associated with the fairies.

https://youtu.be/nYnvfmiUqFE

ORTHODOX EASTER
Local Tragedy

Footage from the Serbian Orthodox cathedral in Manhattan shows huge flames and smoke billowing into the sky on Sunday. It took firefighters three hours to put out the flames which gutted the building and destroyed the interior and the roof.

The fire broke out just hours after worshipers celebrated Easter.
(See LINK below for video)

LABOR UNIONS
Peggy Seeger updates "Union Maid"

https://youtu.be/5CCOx1hqrKI
+
PROTESTS and PACIFISTS
Father Daniel Berrigan has died just short of his 95th birthday. He was a poet, pacifist, educator, social activist, playwright and lifelong resister to what he called "American military imperialism." Along with his late brother Phil, Dan Berrigan played an instrumental role in inspiring the antiwar and anti-draft movement during the late 1960s, as well as the movement against nuclear weapons. He was the first Catholic priest to land on the FBI’s most wanted list. In early 1968, he made international headlines when he traveled to North Vietnam with historian Howard Zinn to bring home three U.S. prisoners of war. Later that year he, his brother Phil and seven others took 378 draft files from the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland. Then, in the parking lot of the draft board office, they set the draft records on fire using homemade napalm to protest the Vietnam War. They became known as the Catonsville Nine and invigorated the antiwar movement by inspiring over 100 similar acts of protest. It also shook the foundation of the tradition-bound Catholic Church. Then, in 1980, the Berrigan brothers and six others began the Plowshares Movement when they broke into the General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, hammered nuclear warhead nose cones and poured blood onto documents and files. They were arrested and charged with over 10 different felony and misdemeanor counts, and became known as the Plowshares Eight.

https://youtu.be/MVfwPUhlVzE
(See LINK below for more History)

CURRENT POLITICS
What can I say?

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the Spring of hope, it was the Winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.  We were all going direct to heaven. we were all going the other way - In short, the period was so like the present period that some of it's noisiest authorities insisted on it's being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
-A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens-

The battle for the Presidency of these dis-United States rages on.

OUR WOUNDED WORLD

 
INNER PEACE

May you be at peace.
May your heart remain open.
May you awaken to the light of your own true nature.
May you be healed.
May you be a source of healing to all beings.
*
The Buddhas Last Instructions
by Mary Oliver

https://youtu.be/Gn4ngWs2Sz0

LINKS
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltane
http://www.archdaily.com/786681/new-yorks-1851-landmark-the-serbian-orthodox-cathedral-of-st-sava-burns-in-fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities
~*~

THIS TOO WILL PASS

Politics in America is a sad Circus Show,

Like the shadow world of Plato's Cave.

I'm on the bus just passing through.

~*~
Note
This does not apply to Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and
a few dozen other principled politicians on the current scene.
~*~
Plato
by Raphael

LINK