Showing posts with label Prayer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Prayer. Show all posts

Thursday, August 17, 2023

What Some Prayers Are Made Of


 

Cairn

 
 
"Gravity & Friction"

Canon G7x Mark II
Snapseed
Carbon

 
 

~






Thursday, March 10, 2022

A Different Kind of Petitionary Prayer

 

Jizo 


All y'all Boody Protector deities - why don't y'all just hang up your spurs and take up another line of work? Or maybe - take up a hobby - golf is nice I hear - or what about scrap booking? 
 
Because - here's the thing: Y'all ain't doing fuck all in the protecting department as far as we can see....we who are hip deep in the gore of blown up children's hospitals, blown up children, blown up mothers, and every other kind of violence every goddamned fucking day.. 

Amen.


~



Thursday, March 3, 2022

Crying won't help you ~ praying won't do you no good

 

 

 

[turn this up to eleven]

 

When The Levee Breaks

~ Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie ~



If it keeps on raining, levee's going to break
If it keeps on raining, the levee's going to break
When the levee breaks, we'll have no place to stay

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, oh
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan
It's got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home
Oh well, oh well, oh well
Ooh

Oh, don't it make you feel bad
When you're trying to find your way home
You don't know which way to go
If you're going down south, they got no work to do
If you're going north to Chicago
Ah, ah, ah, hey

Crying won't help you, praying won't do you no good
No, crying won't help you, praying won't do you no good
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move, ooh

All last night I sat on the levee and moaned
All last night, sat on the levee and moaned
Thinking about my baby and my happy home
Oh-ho

Going
I'm going to Chicago
Going to Chicago
Sorry, but I can't take you, ah
Going down, going down now
Going down, I'm going down now
Going down, going down
Going down, going down
Oh
Going down, going down now
Going down, going down now
Going down, going down now
Going down, going, dow-dow-dow-dow-down now
Ooh, ooh 




~




Sunday, February 20, 2022

Coping

 

 

Crane-dala (in progress) 
 
 
 
 
"Crane-dala"
(In progress)

Nikon D7200
Nikon 10.5mm Fisheye
Lightroom
SnapSeed




A coping mechanism for depression / despair has manifested itself (once again)... Repetitive motion and/or  repetitive mark-making. I don't even recognize the behavior until I'm well into the cycle. It's not like I say to myself "Hmm - let's completely cover Dorothy's coffee table with paper cranes with the metta prayer written on them.."  It just starts... and then I wake up (ever so slightly) to what is happening.. 

And then there is the matter of the metta prayer that is written on each one - 

May you be peaceful.
May you be happy. 
May you be safe.
May you awaken to the light of your true nature.
May you be free. 

Are these notes to myself? That thought makes me recoil in disgust. "How selfish!", "What a baby you are!", "Spoiled!", "Indulgent!!!". So - I do my best to convince the inner critic that they are for everyone else "out there". 

Even when I finish placing every single one out in the world. He still won't believe me.





~

 

 

 

Monday, July 12, 2021

Just us and the heat

 

 

Walker Hancock Angel

 

"Angel of the Resurrection"

~ Walker Hancock ~


Wouldn't it be nice if there were angels
who would pluck us from the flames
and carry us to safety and peace?

Imagine?

But there aren't any angels outside of our
imaginings. We're on our own. When we fall in flames,
we'll just burn to white ash.

As strong as the urge to call out is during
our incineration, there is no use in it
 since there's nobody listening.

It's just us and the heat. 


 

~



Friday, May 15, 2020

All the way through



Mystery



Everything begins in mystery
And - ends that way too.


~



Friday, October 26, 2018

Beauty


Parking lot sunset


In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk
It has become beauty again

Those are words from a Navajo blessing prayer. They came to me yesterday when I was walking around the huge parking lot at my job. The location of the plant and the facility itself are not, at first blush, a place that you could describe as beautiful.. But walking around outside - beauty was unmistakably manifest in the sunset, the phragmites swaying in the breeze and road calligraphies executed in ribbons of hot tar on the asphalt roads..

It surprised me...

I suppose it shouldn't have surprised though.  The Cathedral of the Great Wide World is, well, everywhere. Not only on the shore, or the forest, or mountaintops, but in apparently barren, ugly, corporate parking lots.. Like Shakespeare's observation that "the quality of mercy is not strained", so it is with beauty too... the quality of beauty is not strained..

"It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath."

Phragmites


The Navajo prayer ends with:
Today I will walk out, today everything negative will leave me
I will be as I was before, I will have a cool breeze over my body.
I will have a light body, I will be happy forever, nothing will hinder me.
I walk with beauty before me. I walk with beauty behind me.
I walk with beauty below me. I walk with beauty above me.
I walk with beauty around me. My words will be beautiful.
In beauty all day long may I walk.
Through the returning seasons, may I walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.
With dew about my feet, may I walk.
With beauty before me may I walk.
With beauty behind me may I walk.
With beauty below me may I walk.
With beauty above me may I walk.
With beauty all around me may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
My words will be beautiful…
How fortunate I was in a place and time when I was able to hold hands with this Parking Lot Beauty.  


Parking lot calligraphy



~