Aware of my friend as she was in surgery, my eye was caught by the front of a beautiful book standing upright on my bookshelf. The words“Each time you judge yourself you break your own heart,” jumped out at me. The book,Meditation Art, Openings to Awareness, was created by my friend Etta B. Ehrlich. For years, we were in Sensory Awareness workshops together. Older than I, she passed away a few years ago. In the book, she pastes words of wisdom on interesting bottles, and Virginia Brown photographs them. The book, a treasure, is no longer available, but I found some photos from a gallery in which the bottles were displayed.
She quotes our teacher Charlotte Selver in the book. Here’s one quote.
“Pay attention to the breath as it is now. As your breathing is, so you are. Since breathing happens by itself, it teaches us to trust what is needed now and to allow it.This can be the foundation for a whole new perception of ourselves in all our functions. I agree that it is difficult to be so peaceful and undemanding that one would really be present in one’s breathing activity without influencing it.”
As I wait for news on my friend, I sit with intention to “notice precisely where inhalations and exhalations begin and end”.
Give kindness to ourselves!Each of us a teardrop!This brings me a smile!Great advice!Absolutely!
Today I read a wonderful suggestion. Choose Heather Cox Richardson to run for senator in Maine. Would she do it? Her husband is a lobsterman. She presents a sane voice. Why not?
To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the highest skill.
To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill.”
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War
When Light Shines ThroughLizard on a WalkStateliness!
Yesterday I was ready to post a fun post on my experience with my new friend Claude AI but then, the political news of the horror of Trump’s comments and actions at the NATO Summit brought me down. I’m reading a wonderful book by Tamim Amsary,The Invention of Yesterday,which widens historical perspective, but even that isn’t enough to help me weather all that Trump is doing and saying. How can we ignore that the man is dangerously ill and should not be president or even allowed out on the streets?
I don’t like or trust Vance but surely anything would be better than this.
My son and his family are currently in Spain enjoying a wonderful vacation, and Trump is even going after Spain.
As Paul Krugman writes:Cutting off trade with Spain is simply not going to happen. First of all, Trump does not have the authority to do any such thing. Second, the U.S. actually does a lot of business with Spain, and American businesses would not accept any such cuts. But even more, it is impossible because Spain is part of the European Union.
Krugman continues: What we should take from it is that the statement was “completely crazy.” “In any kind of normally functioning political system,” he said, “in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis. We cannot leave the fate of the United States or the world in the hands of somebody who is completely irrational, who is making demands and believing himself to have powers that he does not.”
Why isn’t something being done?Meanwhile I share photos one son sent from Ronda, Spain.
Dimensions of TimeLooking down into a gorge in Ronda, SpainBuilt on a cliff – Ronda, SpainBlending old and newDiscovery
When Trump intervened for the U.S. in the World Cup, the team was compromised. They had to lose because any win would never be seen as “clean”. The required motivation was lost. A winning team is about more than skill. It’s about unity, rules, and respect.
Thomas Friedman writes today on how Trump has fleeced the whole country, especially his own supporters. Trump takes the Woody Guthrie song, This Land Was Made for You and Me, and makes it: “This land is my land, this land is my land / From California to the New York island / From my cryptocurrency to the Qatari 747 / This land belongs to me and mine.”
He even took over the 250th anniversary celebration to make it about him. The weather didn’t agree.
Friedman ends his column with Obama’s speech at the opening ceremony of his Presidential center in Chicago. His favorite passage was this:
As algorithms keep feeding us a steady stream of distraction and outrage, as only the loudest, most extreme voices get attention, fanning our prejudices, appealing to our basest, most tribal instincts, it’s tempting to give in to cynicism and even despair, to stop trying. We start thinking that appeals to democracy and civic participation are corny and old-fashioned and boring and naïve, that the very idea of working on behalf of the common good is a sucker’s bet, and that in order for us to win, somebody else has got to lose. I get it. I am not immune to anger or doubt, but I do know this: When we lose faith in each other, when we stop believing that voting matters, that citizenship matters, that our collective voices matter, that how we treat each other no longer matters, and we give away our power to decide our own futures, we open the door to the most ruthless, or the most careless, or the most fearful among us, who see some groups and some people as more equal than others, and see government as nothing more than a way to divvy up the spoils and punish enemies and keep those who are different in their place.
Obama continued, “I do not believe that is the story of America that prevails in the end. … I remain convinced that the overwhelming majority of Americans … aren’t looking for perpetual anger and division. They are looking for fairness and common sense and mutual respect, that deep in our gut we want to find a way to turn toward each other again, not further away.”
Friedman ends his column with this: “So, Democrats, you have your assignment. It’s to not let Trump bait you into blind rage and extreme ideas. He feeds off that. Just focus on how much he has been fleecing all of us while tearing us apart. And how much Democrats intend to pull the whole country together.“
This morning I’m with the power of words. Though I was raised to think of a rib cage, I now view it as a basket, a beautifully woven and flexible container for my lungs and beating heart, always in motion, always playing, and being played with in the movement of air. Pure joy is there!
We celebrated the day with food and friends, and then walked up the hill to watch the fireworks which turned out to be an astonishing display. We were in awe as locals set off fireworks in the school below on one side of the hill, and other neighbors set off their own full display on the other side. Both equaled the professional displays we saw in the distance. Clapping with gratitude and awe, there were chants of USA. It was a celebration of what this country is and can be when not taunted by an administration determined to divide.
This morning my son installed Claude on my computer and explained why I should be using it.
I came home to read a fascinating article in the NY Times, The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors by Benjamin Wallace. I recommend it. Here are some excerpts.
Most of these thinkers appear to be digging into how A.I. will affect people. But a handful are focused primarily on the possibility of A.I. consciousness. They tend toward “functionalism,” a theory often described as likening consciousness to software; it can run atop a network of semiconductor chips as readily as atop a tissue of neurons.
Mr. Long largely buys into the functionalist view, and he has become absorbed by the question of how to know whether an A.I. is sentient. He and his colleagues are now looking in artificial minds for processes similar to those found in human and animal minds: preferences, introspection, metacognition (thinking about thinking) and so on.
Friday night, I watched the movie “Project Hail Mary” about how we might learn to communicate with an alien species. Communication is my focus for this second half of the year.
Sunset on July 4th at my son’s homeExplosion after ExplosionThe moon at 5:30 this morningThe hills are dry. View from my son’s home this morning.
Yesterday we drove down early to my son and his wife’s home and then journeyed to nearby New Almaden to the Almaden Quicksilver County Park because I’d recently learned that a book I love, Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, is partly set there, I wanted to see the area in person.
The New Almaden mines are the oldest mines in California and were one of the most productive mercury mines in the country. The indigenous Ohlone people utilized the area for its cinnabar, which they used in paint production. You can see photos on-line of their decorated faces. But then, others came in to mine the cinnabar, the most common source for refining elemental mercury.
The Bell Tower still stands!Important to know!Though the machinery is fenced, you can turn the crank to move what’s inside. A sanitized tasteThe landscape with miles of trails to hikeInvitation
I can’t step into the debacle that Trump created to celebrate this country. It seems Mother Nature agrees with me since so many of his plans aren’t working or are cancelled.
Today I watched pieces of the Obama Presidential Center Grand Opening Ceremony. I watched and listened to Jennifer Hudson sing The Star-Spangled Banner, and To Dream the Impossible Dream. I watched and listened to Christina Aguilera sing What a Wonderful World, and Bruce Springsteen Land of Hope and Dreams. Four former presidents gathered there with their wives, Barack Obama and Michelle, of course, and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Joe Biden. Unification. Celebration. Offering. Gifts.
Tomorrow I’ll celebrate the Fourth of July with one son, his wife and friends. We’ll walk to watch fireworks from all over the Bay area from a hill near their home, and it will be a gathering to honor, refresh, and inspire not tear down, steal, and destroy. It’s a weekend to feaston what’s been built, and what can be.
A feasting, buzzing bee.Deer feast contentedly in a friend’s yard.
Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast calls haiku “sacred sensuousness”. He says “The haiku is a scaffold of words; which is being constructed is a poem of silence; and when it is ready, the poet gives a little kick, as it were, to the scaffold. It tumbles and silence alone stands.”
I enjoy reading different translations of well-traveled poems. Basho’s haiku on the frog jumping into the pond plays with sound and silence. It leaves us panting, then resting in the pause of meaning.
Eliot Weinberger’s book 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei gives 19 ways of translating a four-line 1200 year old poem. Some I resonate to, and others not so much.
If, like me, you continue to look for ways to counteract the news of Trump’s daily corruption, I suggest reading, and even writing haiku and poetry as a spiritual practice, as a way to plop like a frog into a pond and ripple in what comes.
Yesterday I was by the bay at low tide, awaiting a medical appointment. I looked out and thought I saw a mother swan carrying babies on her back, but when I took the photo and magnified it, I saw it was sticks popping out of the mud. A visual haiku!Plop. I’m new!
What do you see, receive, believe?Do you see the crow, the trees, or the ridge beyond?
Because our weather here is out of alignment with the heat in so much of the world today, I’m reflecting back, drawn to files of the past. I come to a poem I wrote years ago about an evening on a month-long trek in the Everest region of Nepal. It was a day where I’d crawled, literally crawled to the altitude sickness clinic to have a doctor who comes from America as a volunteer lecture me on the insanity of what I was doing at altitude. He gave me a shot of antibiotics and sent me on my way. He said in one more day, I would have been carried down on the back of a yak.
Today I read an article on the wisdom people my age know, on what we’ve lived through, and how important it is to convey the transitions we’ve lived through to the young. I offer a time when I saw how simply one can live, and also the value of medical care, something not available, even now, all these years later, to all. This was the fall of 1993.
Khumbu: Everest Region of Nepal
We leave our tent to huddle inside a hut for warmth.
A child dances naked, the wash hung overhead.
The child has no age, no birthday, only grace.
Prayer flags wave, clothes washed in the stream,
A stream wheeled in prayer.
We tramp through their home like a park,
celebrate and denigrate our day of birth,
as we try to pack their religion
in the wood and dung smoked scarf
we wrap around our throats,
like a crown, slipping down to our knees
where prayer might be
as we kneel to cleanse
in the movement of air
circling mountains and clouds.
Jay, choosing a peanut over fallen plums in our yard today
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