These could come in handy sometime.
Alphonse
Beaufort
Benji
Blithe
Brycen
Champ
Dan
Darek
Daxton
Delphin
Dietrich
Edison
Eitan
Emmons
Ernest
Faber
Fleetwood
Fox
Garwin
Hedley
Harrel
Hassain
Jesiah
Junior
Kaleb
Lourie
Mahir
Montgomery
Moore
Nino
Orman
Orson
Osborne
Ramses
Roscoe
Ronald
Wes
Yoshiaki
Zachery
Zander
The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Well, they're your kids...."
My wife and I attended the third No Kings march in the same location where we took part in the first two, across the street from the Elgin, Illinois Public Library. It was a large and positive crowd -- I think I saw more upbeat messages, even though this time we had to protest against an actual war, illegally begun by donald, the man who observes no law.
Anyway, I wore my Commander USA shirt for the occasion, shouldering my peace symbol flag, but it soon became clear that it was too chilly for me to forgo the comfort of The Sweater. Fortunately, it got a lot of compliments, and two people asked to take my picture. I expect to post the other person's pic of me soon.
We're looking forward to No Kings 4, which perhaps will be a wake.
I think humans have a biological need for purpose, for goals to reach. I
think it’s literally what we are born for.
What, after all, is the ideal life that people imagine when they feel buried
by the noise and confusion of life? A monastery of some sort. That isn’t a
place where you sit and do nothing – it’s a place where you can give your full
attention to activity. A monastic life is spent, almost every hour, doing
something important: making wine, repairing churches, prayer. It’s not an
escape from goals; it’s paring down your day until it consists of almost
nothing except pursuing goals.
People imagine escaping from duty, labor and goal-setting, of a life where
all your needs are met lavishly without working, only because the goals set for
them come from other people, and the tasks are boring or worse, destructive.
Many people understand this, and imagine a life where they are free to choose their
goals, often difficult ones like service in the Peace Corps, or ones which
offer little monetary reward, like painting in watercolors.
Karl Marx envisioned the Utopian state of “True Communism” not as a place
of regimentation and overbearing rules, the way it keeps turning out in
practice, but as a world where a person could hunt in the morning, fish in the
afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as they
have a mind, without ever needing to find a paying job as a hunter, fisherman,
herdsman or critic.
This is the biggest reason I’m in favor of some form of Basic Income: you
can count on it that it won’t create a nation where nobody works, but a nation of people who LOVE their work.
This, too, is what we are born for,
this waking in darkness, unable
to see, but still able to hear the shush
of wind in bare branches, able to feel
the charge of our heartbeat, the swell
of our belly as it fills with borrowed air.
I have spent my life learning to love
these shapeless hours before the light
finds us, these shadowsome nights when
my whole being seems to stretch beyond
the bed, beyond the room, beyond the home,
beyond the valley, beyond even the globe,
as if I rhyme with the dark all around us,
the dark that holds us, the dark that surrounds
this whole swirling spiral of galaxy.
Sometimes, I feel how that infinite darkness
calls to the darkness inside me as if to say,
remember, remember where you come from,
remember what you are. And the darkness
inside me sings back.
The Magic Eight-Ball says: "By hammer and hand do all things stand."
No, they are not.
Genesis 1:27 says God created people as men and women? Well, first of all, that was before the Fall. Also, it doesn't say anything about what you can do with your body.
Deuteronomy 22:5 says men shouldn't wear women's clothing? A trans woman is not a man.
I Corinthians 6:19 says your body is a temple? Well, some temples need a remodel.
My answer to these erroneous interpretations:
Galatians 3:28 says all are one in Christ.
Psalm 139 says God made each of us as unique individuals.
II Corinthians 5:17 says everyone is made anew in Christ.
Matthew 19:12 says eunuchs are welcome.
Acts 10:28 says you should call no person impure.
Also, God sanctions name changes: Abram became Abraham, Saul became Paul, Simon became Peter.
Finally, God promises new and perfect bodies for everyone in Heaven (I Corinthians 15:42-44, Philippians 3:20-21, 2 Corinthians 5:1-2, and Revelation 21:4), so everyone gets to transition after death.
The Magic Eight-Ball says: God gave us grain but not bread, wine but not grapes, clay but not bricks, in order for us to have the pleasure of joining Him in the act of creation in a modest way.
https://youtu.be/YSsFcs8S4xM?si=AtA7xojqpK2oV2-L
As the group gathered itself by way of a shared meditation, the person guiding it invited us to hold our own hands and picture us holding one another's hands. I closed my eyes and imagined us as a group huddled close together, breathing the same air.
I felt the heat and closeness of such a gathering.
I smelled it.
There is a pleasant animal smell produced by a close gathering of human bodies. For obvious reasons, I have not smelled it in a very long time. In that moment, I smelled it.
I must thank the leader of the meditation for that.
The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Giving thanks is always in order."
“It is all one thing.”
I couldn’t tell who had said it. Literally, it could have been me. The
way we were all huddled together, our bodies touching, breathing one another’s
air, smelling one another’s bodies, it was difficult to tell where one person
ended and another began, if that term actually meant anything.
There’s a wonderful animal smell that is generated by multiple human
bodies huddled close together, their scents and their exhalations mingled. It’s
a beautifully comforting smell that’s not like anything else, not like the
smell of being in a close space by yourself or the smell of intimacy between
two people. The smell of communion.
At some point, the spell broke, and we began by an unspoken agreement to
move apart. The breaking of the communion was as much a proof of its existence
as anything that had happened while we were together. I looked around the
group, at the friends and co-workers and the friends’ parents and children,
thinking about the range in ages among us, which I knew to be from eight to
eighty-two, and felt an added delight in that span of time. This was my idea of
a utopian society, a community where people came together at all ages. So
different from the segregation of race and age and gender that Ernest
Callenbach imagined in his novel Ecotopia, where children went away to
boarding schools and old people went away to group homes (and eventually to the
equivalent of ice floes), while ethnic groups “voluntarily” or sometimes
not-so-voluntarily isolated themselves to keep things tidy and keep his
imaginary utopia blandly white and youthful and suspiciously able-bodied.
Qurum said, “Did anyone else hear someone say, ‘It is all one thing’?”
“Of course,” Daniel’s father said. “I’m not sure who said it, but it was
perfectly distinct. I didn’t think there was any chance it was hallucinatory.
Did it sound odd to you, dear?”
“Kind of. It seemed sort of…distant, like it might be coming from outside
the group, so I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it.”
“No, it was real,” Carl said. “So, who said it?”
Then Aaron signed, [It came to me, too.]
Everyone was quiet for a bit after that.
https://poets.org/poem/hymn-time
The Magic Eight-Ball Says: "It is all one thing."
“Nature has certain characteristics which are consistent at all scales,
from the microscopic to the cosmic. She displays a clear preference for
symmetry over asymmetry, for elegance over complexity, for consistency over
peculiarity. She requires you to be beautiful, since you are a part of nature.”
“And as I am a part of nature, it is clear that my own nature, greatly
though you may struggle with it, is also a part of nature’s symmetry, elegance,
consistency and beauty, even if you are unable to perceive it.”
“So now you are claiming to be part of nature, and acting in accordance
with nature, when every action you are performing is contrary to her?”
“Yes. Everything I am doing is in accordance with my own internal nature,
and is my own effort to collaborate with the laws of nature to bring my body
and my life into conformity with my inner nature. Exactly so.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard you say, and I’ve never
heard you say anything but absurdities. You’ve been at war with nature from the
moment you decided to reject your true sex.”
“You’re the one who is rejecting my true sex. I’m trying to approach it,
with nature’s help. You’re trying to keep me from doing so, with the force of
law, but all you can manage is to make my efforts more difficult. Even if you
succeed, all you will do is limit my options in seeking help. You won’t be able
to change my true nature. That’s the thing you can’t seem to get through your
thick skull.
“If I were living a hundred years ago, all I would be able to do is
choose what clothes I wore and train my voice, and that would have to be
enough. I’m fortunate to be living now, when medicine is more advanced. I’m
unfortunate enough to not be living a hundred years from now when medicine will
be able to allow people like me to make a perfect transition, and when, God
willing, there will be fewer people like you to make life miserable for us. But
here and now, I’ll do what I can.”
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Md481yOun50W4wpoWN8um_oRkMeEZOA2k8-tPmkApL4/edit?usp=sharing
The Magic Eight-Ball says: "To thine own self be true."
At the end of the play, the executioner walks onstage and pulls off his
mask. It’s Everyman again. He holds his hands to his chest and says, “I’m
breathing. It’s good to breathe. If you want to keep on breathing, don’t make
trouble – or if you must, make the kind of trouble they expect.”
Such is the “moral”, so to speak, of A Man For All Seasons. We
have watched how Sir Thomas More was humiliated, imprisoned and finally executed,
becoming a martyr to his conscience and his faith. All through it, Everyman has
watched each stage of the story, pointing out how Sir Thomas is making life
difficult for himself, how much easier he would have things, if only he would
co-operate with the people in authority over him. In the end, of course, he
cannot and will not endorse what he believes is wrong, and dies for it. His
reward is a place in history, of course, as well as sainthood (it has been
observed more than once that Utopia is the only science fiction novel written
by a canonized saint), but in life he still suffers and he still dies, and as
in the play, Everyman just wants to go on breathing.
Well, that’s not quite true. There are many other things Everyman wants.
But there are very few things he wants anything like as much as he wants to go
on breathing. It takes something tremendous to get Everyman to put his life, or
his freedom, or even, really, his convenience, at risk. Something tremendous,
and then, often as not, something tremendous but stupid, tremendous but exactly
the wrong thing, or at the very least something tremendous but trite.
So Henry keeps changing the rules, and Everyman wants to go on breathing,
and the hard part isn’t even facing the axe: it’s facing the years of
humiliation, loss of friends and hardship that come before. Those are usually
enough to turn the average Thomas into an Everyman. Only a few of us manage to
be something more.
https://janicefalls.wordpress.com/2019/09/12/ancient-language-by-hannah-stephenson/
[One of the members of the group observed, “Breathing is the first thing
they ask, ‘Is she breathing?’ and it’s the last thing they ask.” Having watched
breath leave the body more than once (but once, especially), I really felt
that.]
The Magic Eight-Ball says: "It takes more than breath to make life."
