Interstices

Stage Island isn't an island at all. It's an earth-finger poking out into Plum Island Sound on the western side of the southern tip of the Parker River Wildlife Refuge. Fresh water plants like trees and scrubby shrubs grow right up to bluffs cut out by the tides' patient tooling. They live out their days in an interstitial and precarious place - right on the edge of where they shouldn't be at all. Erosion from storms and tides moves the land and bends the trunks as the trees struggle to keep from laying down in the brackish tidal flats that surround them. Of course, it's a losing battle, as any resistance to change ends up being in the end.. Despite that - there is a feeling that one is witnessing a slow, quiet, kind of heroism as they cling to their lives, bending and growing extra root systems pointed away from the seawater - all to keep themselves upright...

~

Only

 

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

~ Octavia Butler ~

The Book of the Living

~

No means no..

~

Bumper

State Fish Pier, Gloucester MA

~

Simply Irresistible

The last of the Winter Cohort were set

on the main altar to receive their blessing.

Although they were admonished to stay

still and be quiet during the 

ceremony, several individuals could

not resist the temptation of peeking around

the hammered metal orchid planter in order

to get a glimpse of the glowing

golden Shakyamuni 

Buddha. 

The Buddha, deep in samadhi,

was undeterred by their

rambunctious antics.

~

Here we are -

"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.” ~ Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents ~ Wisdom and forethought... Well - aren't those two traits sorely lacking in the Empire? And so - here we are - hand-forging the iron links of our own oppression... The lot of us - poor, deluded pack of pussy grabbing, red-hat-wearing, grinning jackanapes.

~

Sunday at MunSu Sa

~

Don't Think It Won't Happen Just Because It Hasn't Happened Yet

Plum Island Flood 03/03/2018

~

Because that's where life is..

 

Got stuck up on Plum Island on Saturday while the Sea Queen caressed once-dry land with the hem of blue-green gown.  She flooded the causeway and nobody got on or off the island until she got good and ready to let them. People have asked me why I went there in the very first place, if I knew there was going to be a flood.. It's simple. That's where the juice was. It's called being alive. How many times do you get to witness the Sea casually reclaim territory or see waves break over two story houses, or people trying to ride bicycles in two feet of water?

~

Never Forget This Simple Fact

He Wants It All

~

Cooking With Bishop Cruz

His Eminence, Bishop Ted Cruz

First Church of Guns & Ammunition

No one presides over a

Second Amendment Martyrdom Liturgy

with as much sanctimony

as Bishop Cruz does.

As of this writing though,

none of Bishop Cruz's heartfelt

thoughts and prayers have

persuaded the Creator

to resurrect one

single,

solitary,

dead child.

~

Just

Just when I think I've uncovered the secret to peace and tranquility that lonely sinking feeling creeps up on me ~ The Cowboy Junkies ~

 

~

Or your gun is free...

The junior high school boy running the Empire recently proposed that some teachers carry guns in order to protect children. Like so many of his childish musings, this idea was only meant to sate the misguided voters who still back him. There is no actual way that more guns in the hands of teachers will stop the ongoing Second Amendment Martyrdom Liturgy that is sponsored by the First Church of Guns & Ammunition. Recently in the blog Crooked Timber, there was a post to see how low Conservative ideas could go to make the Second Amendment Martyrdom Liturgy a thing of the past.. The ideas are at least as good as the one horked up by the child playing president: "Conservatives have two policy levers: tax cuts for the rich and the solution to too many guns is more guns. I don’t see how pulling the first one will help. So let’s keep cranking the second. Suppose we just fill all public schools, waist deep, with guns. Every school will be like those ball pits in IKEA, only instead of balls, the kids will be wallowing in thousands and thousands of guns. The guns will all have the safety on. (We aren’t crazy. Gun safety is important.) And (this is the clever part) only 1 in 10 will be loaded. So any would-be shooter has to contend with this. First, it’s hard to get anywhere, because you are wading in guns. Second, no would-be shooter would just pick up one of these guns and start firing. Because there’s only a 1-in-10 chance it’s loaded.....  ..... Alternatively, we can allow Amazon to deliver guns via drone, to any school address, in 15 minutes of less or your gun is free. Third idea: Uber, but for guns."

~

Sunday at Mun Su Sa

 

Left to right:

Ji Guang Kun Sunim

Doe Bom Kun Sunim

Hae Gak Juji Sunim

~

Sunday at Mun Su Sa

 

~

Flashing Red Exit Sign

As much as any Dharma teacher I have ever met, it is men like him and teachings like his that have pointed the way to the Dharma. With palms together, bowing - I give thanks to him.

~

Jeremiah 2:23 - Know what you have done

 

Knowing what you have done...

Always a tricky business for you and me.

Our knowing is prism'd by our faceted memories.

Impressions of the past, impressions of 

the present even - that's all we

ever really have.

And so I am struck by God's commandment

in the book of Jeremiah to "Know what

you have done." Surely He knew

it is a nigh on impossible 

thing for we frail

creatures.

I wonder if He knew what He

was doing by placing

such a heavy 

burden 

on an already

overburdened soul...

which He made

in precisely

the flawed

form

that

so

enraged

him? 

~

Sunday at MunSu Sa

Abhayamudrâ

Gesture of fearlessness, and blessing

~

that you almost cannot bear it..

"I'll tell you right now, the doors to the world of the wild self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door; if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much that you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door." ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés ~

(via whiskey river)

~

Go in pieces, the Mass has ended...

Another Second Amendment Martyrdom Liturgy (SAML) is underway. Seventeen innocents have been martyred to the most precious of American rights. Many do not know this, but the SAML patterns itself after the liturgies of the Empire's very own pet religion, Christianity. As in Christian liturgies, prayers plays a big role in a SAML - actually Thoughts and Prayers - both of which are dispensed as if from a fire hose. As in Christian liturgies - some readings are done in call and response fashion, with one side of the congregation braying for gun control, and the other somberly intoning that "now is not the time to politicize this tragedy." As in Christian liturgies - candles are sometimes used. There are many other similarities like clergy, community, and of course - how things go right back to business-as-usual after the Mass ends. Unlike those Christian liturgies however, SAML starts with the sacrifice instead of plunking it in the middle of the proceedings just after tedious church announcements. And - unlike Christian celebrations of the Mass, SAML always demands real human sacrifice - not merely some transubstantiated bread and grape juice mental gymnastics.. Real blood. Real pain. Real loss. Horrifying, I know. Despair-inducing, I well know. The depth of the horror and bloody sacrifice points to the vitality and power of this religion, the Empire's truest religion, one that undergirds the polite fascia of Christianity - The First Church of Guns & Ammunition. No other church would dare demand such an awful, unthinkable price as child sacrifice, but the The First Church of Guns & Ammunition does it with remarkable regularity. Any other church would be shuttered and torched to the ground if it even whispered about killing children - even that bunch that so loves to fuck little children - they'd be gone in a tick too. Where Christianity, the Empire's pocket-tool for pacification, is slowly losing its grip on the populace, The First Church of Guns & Ammunition thrives with the vigor of all new religions. Its expansion is guaranteed. Its success is written into the Empire's founding documents. The First Church of Guns & Ammunition is a savage, brutal religion for a savage, brutal land. Go in pieces, the Mass has ended....

~