My old friend keeps swearing he’s going on a news fast. Me too. But somehow we never manage to slim down.
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Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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Yeah, can we just vote and get it over with?
I hear that!
But even after the election we still have 2 months remaining in this most awful year.
Turn off the TV.
This awful year actually started in Oct 2019, with the release of the virus from Wuhan. Between 6 October and 11 October 2019, a novel coronavirus was released, accidentally or maliciously, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Between 7 October and 24 October 2019, there was no cellphone activity around the location of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and it is believed that a hazardous event occurred there.
During that same time period, beginning on 6 October 2019, a three week long meeting between the Catholic Vatican hierarchy and a delegation of Catholics from the Amazon began, that is referred to as the “Amazon Synod.” During the synod, a number of ceremonies and Masses were conducted and wooden idols from the Amazon were included. These idols depicted a nude, pregnant female Mother Earth deity called the “Pachamama”. The idols were bowed down to, were brought into sacred Catholic places, and were temporarily housed in a Catholic church during the three weeks of the synod.
In the early hours of the morning of 21 October 2019, a young, faithful Austrian Catholic, entered the church in which the Pachamama idols had been placed, carefully removed five of them, walked to the bridge over the Tiber, and flung them into the river.
Unfortunately, the idols were recovered and were present at the closing Mass of the Amazonian Synod on 27 October 2019, on the Feast of Christ the King. A Pachamama bowl was also placed on the altar in violation of liturgical norms.
But there, in the midst of Wuhan flu, Pachamama idols, and war against invisible enemy ideologies, in a little country surrounded by the sea, shined a light on 6 October 2019. That same day. It is no accident. Sister Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa, who had previously experienced three Marian apparitions that took place in Akita, Japan between 6 July and 13 October 1973, received a message from The Blessed Virgin Mary for the first time since 1973. The message was, “Put on ashes and pray a repentant Rosary every day.”
I believe that at the end of October this awful year will come to an end.
Chris sed: “I believe that at the end of October this awful year will come to an end.”
=========
How?
Holy Mackerel! He’s not kidding!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synod_of_Bishops_for_the_Pan-Amazon_region
Whatta Pope! ….Amazon needs its own Church with “an Amazon face and also an indigenous face” rather than “a European Church transplanted in the Amazon”
That’s funny, I thought that Christianity was born in the Middle East and the “Apostolic and Universal Catholic Church” has successfully brought the word of God to every continent and race on Earth for thousands of years (with varying degrees of success) chiefly on the basic idea of one God and one Liturgy for every soul.
Any chance they can farm Francis out to the Protestants?
WOW!!!
I just stumbled onto this GREAT website after surfing for articles on Paradise, CA.
I, too, am a Camp Fire survivor, and BARELY survived escaping that horrible, demonic fire on November 8, 2018.
I had just purchased a home in Ohio just 10 DAYS before the fire hit, returned home to Paradise (I lived on Millwood Lane) to start packing and preparing to move.
A few days later, I had almost NOTHING left to move- my home, my shop, my truck Jeep and RV, my contracting and gunsmithing tools and equipment, and worst of all- my two beloved classic Harleys- a 1972 FLH and a 1969 XLCH that was one of the two “Then Came Bronson” bikes used on the TV show WERE ALL GONE.
The BRIGHT side? I got out ALIVE- just barely. I rescued most of my family photos, a few necessities, and 95% of my extensive firearms collection. I also saved a bit of money- as I suddenly needed a SMALLER moving truck!
Coming up on 2 years since the Camp Fire, I see that nothing in Commiefornia has changed, and almost FOUR MILLION acres have now been consumed by wildfires.
I will be reading this great website daily, as it’s now one of my favorites.
God bless America, Conservatives, and President Trump. MAGA!
(PS) The cost of living in NE Ohio is LESS than 1/3 of what it was in NorCal, and houses here cost 1/4 of what they would in NorCal.
Welcome aboard Pete. A gunner and ex-harley dood.
This is NOT an “awful year” and I can prove it to anyone who says it is.
My proof: Gerard still has the “Fire Sale” girl up on his sidebar, and I’m still in love with her. [Sorry, honey. I’ll get over her soon enough. Probably. ]
Francis is an antipope. Probably. And a socialist liberation theologist. Definitely. As a relatively new Catholic, this neither surprises me nor scandalizes me. But for the cradle Catholic, it is a vexing and never ending show of linguistic contortionism. Many just walk away, when they should read the words of simple shepherd children and nuns from hundreds of years in the past. Those prophecies are astounding with their specifically accurate timetables and events. And always, the messengers tell them the same thing: Repent! Do penance! Same as in the Old Testament. Just watch the slick and oily media hound Bishop Robert Barron describe the victory of the Nouvelle Théologie over the traditional and orthodox beliefs. Methinks he doth too soon gloat. It’s never wise to gloat in French.
So we are governed by heretics, apostates, cowards, and traitors. I’m still alive, still believing, and praying, and thankful to be among people like you all here who comment. Life is still amazing.