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Month: April 2003

The Bird in the Hand

Published on April 11, 2003

If you can release what is your grasp
letting those cramped fingers stretch out and loose,
while strained muscles relax in a soft gasp
after long years of negligent misuse,

and just watch contented as what you thought
so essential to your old sense of self,
those safe and predictable treasures bought
with coin bearing the face of someone else,

now rise with the breeze and fly from your view,
leaving only a faint smell of feather
in the moist crevasse of your empty hand
that evaporates like the morning dew,
in that moment you, too, are untethered
from the painful need to misunderstand.

11 APR 2003

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Sign of the Times?

Published on April 11, 2003

Maybe it’s just me, but a bumper sticker this morning bothered me (I know, I know, such a little thing to get rattled over). It was on the rear bumper of an SUV belonging to a teacher at my daughter’s school (BTW, the #1 rated high school in the state, and the ONLY public school in the entire Orleans parish to be rated ABOVE unacceptable by state and federal education standards). You think you may something about New Orleans, and Louisiana, but here’s something else … rampant corruption (and more indicted former elected officials than almost anywhere else), miserable education (third from the bottom in the US), roads that will take your tires out with their unevenness and potholes, some of the worst projects in the US, industry 80% gambling and tourism combined with military bases, less than 10% of the population college educated, David Duke, West Nile virus, Napoleonic code still in place next to US federal law, horrible trash pickup service, termite infestations, locusts, rats, some of the highest violent crime and murder statistics in the world, oh, the list goes on …

The bumper sticker read…

LOUISIANA: Third world and proud of it

What exactly does that mean to you?

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A Thought on Artists

Published on April 7, 2003

“Who is that person whom you call an artist? A man who is momentarily creative? To me he is not an artist. The man who merely at rare moments has this creative impulse and expresses that creativeness through perfection of technique, surely you would not call him an artist. To me, the true artist is one who lives completely, harmoniously, who does not divide his art from living, whose very life is that expression, whether it be a picture, Music, or his behavior; who has not divorced his expression on a canvas or in Music or in stone from his daily conduct, daily living. That demands the highest intelligence, highest harmony. To me the true artist is the man who has that harmony. He may express it on canvas, or he may talk, or he may paint; or he may not express it at all, he may feel it. But all this demands that exquisite poise, that intensity of awareness and, therefore, his expression is not divorced from the daily continuity of living.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti, Living in Ecstasy, Ojai, California, June 29, 1934

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Current Reading List

Published on April 7, 2003

Total Freedom, Collected Writings of Jiddu Krishnamurti
Raja Yoga, Swami Vivekananda
Jnana Yoga, Swami Vivekananda
Be Here Now, Ram Dass
Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore
Selected Short Stories, Rabindranath Tagore
The Books in my Life, Henry Miller
1984, George Orwell
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard
Leonardo: The Man and the Artist, Sergey Bramley

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Prânâyâma

Published on April 4, 2003

Inhale:

Where am I in all of this confusion?
If I pause and take a moment to breathe,
letting go of this veil of illusion
[that separates (like two different leaves

along two slim branches that stretch their way
in opposite directions, yet never
touch, except through the trunk from which they splay)
with a soft touch easily severing

one’s sense of unity with all living]
just listening to the low, quiet breath
of an opened flower or an old tree,

I recognize myself; my misgivings
about my life’s purpose that make me fear death
fade away. I am at peace, at last free.

Exhale:

Am I just motion in some great chaos?
If I release this cloud from deep inside,
letting the soft flow of air slip across
my tongue and pursed lips, it does not collide

with the not-me of the universe, but
instead melts back into a single stream
of boundless energy that we each cut
and divide into our separate dreams,

imagining that these walls we construct
are so solid, so real, unbreakable.
Yet in a single breath these veils shatter,

our isolation seems to self-destruct,
and those beliefs once so unshakeable
crumble in the still space beyond matter.

04 APR 2003

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The Difference Between Media

Published on April 1, 2003

What’s the biggest difference between the media coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the media coverage of Vietnam?

Well, both were television wars, all right. But in Vietnam, the purpose of the media was to stop the war. To convey images back to the civilian population of the atrocities of war.

The purpose of the media in OIF is to reinforce the US’ role as the good-guy, to justify the war, to glorify the effort, and heaven forbid to show wounded or killed bodies on either side, to keep the war sanitized so that the American people feel more comfortable about being there to begin with.

What is wrong with this picture?

Why will the anti-war movement NOT work this time? Because the media are not interested in it working. Because they are more interested in playing for whose going to end up being the Ministry of Truth by the time its all wrapped up.

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