Gaza demonstration 2018.From a newspaper [ not noted]
I must have got at least two of the special chargers but after nor using them for a while I decided to get another [rather than wreck the house].
As a mathematician would ,I ordered the wrong size,But the charger is good for another item I own.Then of course I found the original one and wondered why I had bothered!I must be too obsessional.It’s ok in small quantities
Against sadness:no-one here must weep
Nor lounge about in melancholy deep
Was Van Gogh senseless to permit his muse.
For even masterpieces ,was the price too steep?
We see the yellow chair but not his views
Nor his mind where technique made strange leaps.
Nor was his journey broadcast on the news.
Against sadness.
Happiness or joy is hard to find
When we rest, the News preys on our minds
Yet some are cold towards the slaughtered priest
His nose a beak of bone in old face lined
Now Muslims go to Mass and join Christ’s feast
Against sadness.
What rages in the mind make men kill thus?
In Syrian wars the innocents fare worse.
But these are our near neighbours so we weep
And wonder how to end the frightening curse
The sins we once committed hold us deep
We hold our hands out wanting to be nursed
Against sadness
Why is sadness labelled a mistake?
Should we grin and cheer as war planes fly?
Look out at this world and meditate
The children,human shields,innacurate
The mothers, fathers,cousins also die
Why is sadness labelled a mistake?
Our boundary is where the soldiers strike
We must stay in prison starved and dry
Look out at the world and meditate
The enemy is what we need, so fake.
Wars bring a cohesion, a false might
Why is sadness ever a mistake?
We are human ,how to indicate?
Why not raise our eyes to see the Light
Look long at the sky and meditate
As a baby’s born, we hear her cry
“Let me live in peace as your ally”
Why is women weeping a mistake?
Look at warring states and meditate
“When we lose someone we love, we are thrust into a world where we feel more vulnerable than ever before. Suddenly we must face the fact that there are absolutely no guarantees in life. Everything that once seemed sturdy is now fragile, particularly the people we love. These feelings can be incredibly overwhelming and oftentimes terrifying. It takes time and work to overcome them, to feel secure again in such a now-delicate world. And for people who suffer multiple losses in a short period of time, it can take even longer.
The anxiety that comes with grief can be debilitating, but because it is not included in Kübler-Ross’ five stages, it tends to be ignored or dismissed as a different problem altogether. However, anxiety is a very real and very normal reaction to grief and it must be recognized. It is also highly treatable once it is distinguished for what it is.
There is a wonderful and unexpected gift that comes with seeing how fragile our lives are. It enables us to be more present, to feel grateful for what is right in front us, to cherish what we are able to hold onto right here, right now. But in order to reach that level of acceptance we must wade through the tremulous waters of fear and anxiety, recognizing them as a part of a larger process that will see us through to a shore where so many of us have emerged changed, if not healed.”
by Meg Dowell Sometimes, writing less leads to deeper, more creative thinking. Have you ever wondered how some writers manage to write thousands of words every day — while you can barely squeeze out 500 words after an hour of trying (and failing) to focus? How do so many successful writers publish so […]
via 13 Habits of Ridiculously Prolific Writers — A Writer’s Path
I think this is very interesting and a very creative blog post whether you are a Christian or belong to another Faith or are an atheist or agnostic
Martin Luther King’s letter from the apostle Paul: two revolutionaries
MLK’s letter from Paul
I, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to you who are in America, Grace be unto you, and peace from God our Father, through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
For many years I have longed to be able to come to see you. I have heard so much of you and of what you are doing. I have heard of the fascinating and astounding advances that you have made in the scientific realm. I have heard of your dashing subways and flashing airplanes. Through your scientific genius you have been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. . . . All of that is marvelous. You can do so many things in your day that I could not do in the Greco-Roman world of my day. In your age you can travel distances in one day that took me three months to travel. That is wonderful. You have made tremendous strides in the area of scientific and technological development.
But America, as I look at you from afar, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress has been commensurate with your scientific progress. It seems to me that your moral progress lags behind your scientific progress. Your poet Thoreau used to talk about “improved means to an unimproved end.” How often this is true. You have allowed the material means by which you live to outdistance the spiritual ends for which you live. You have allowed your mentality to outrun your morality. You have allowed your civilization to outdistance your culture. Through your scientific genius you have made of the world a neighborhood, but through your moral and spiritual genius you have failed to make of it a brotherhood. So, America, I would urge you to keep your moral advances abreast with your scientific advances. . . .
American Christians, I must say to you as I said to the Roman Christians years ago, “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Or, as I said to the Philippian Christians, “Ye are a colony of heaven.” This means that although you live in the colony of time, your ultimate allegiance is to the empire of eternity. You have a dual citizenry. You live both in time and eternity; both in heaven and earth. Therefore, your ultimate allegiance is not to the government, not to the state, not to nation, not to any man-made institution. The Christian owes his ultimate allegiance to God, and if any earthly institution conflicts with God’s will it is your Christian duty to take a stand against it. You must never allow the transitory evanescent demands of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God. . . .
The misuse of capitalism can also lead to tragic exploitation. . . . God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty. God intends for all of his children to have the basic necessities of life, and he has left in this universe “enough and to spare” for that purpose. So, I call upon you to bridge the gulf between abject poverty and superfluous wealth.
I would that I could be with you in person, so that I could say to you face to face what I am forced to say to you in writing. Oh, how I long to share your fellowship. But I must bring my writing to a close now. Timothy is waiting to deliver this letter, and I must take leave for another church.
But just before leaving, I must say to you, as I said to the church at Corinth, that I still believe that love is the most durable power in the world. Over the centuries men have sought to discover the highest good. This has been the chief quest of ethical philosophy. This was one of the big questions of Greek philosophy. The Epicurean and the Stoics sought to answer it; Plato and Aristotle sought to answer it. What is the summon bonum of life? I think I have an answer America. I think I have discovered the highest good. It is love. This principle stands at the center of the cosmos. As John says, “God is love.” He who loves is a participant in the being of God. He who hates does not know God. . . .
So, American Christians you may master the intricacies of the English language. You may possess all of the eloquence of articulate speech. But even if you “speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, you have become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”
So the greatest of all virtues is love. It is here that we find the true meaning of the Christian faith. This is at bottom the meaning of the cross. . . .It is an eternal reminder to a power drunk generation that love is most durable power in the world, and that it is at bottom the heartbeat of the moral cosmos. . . .
I must say goodbye now. I hope this letter will find you strong in the faith. It is probable that I will not get to see you in America, but I will meet you in God’s eternity. And now unto him who is able to keep us from falling, and lift us from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, from the midnight of desperation to the daybreak of joy, to him be power and authority, forever and ever. Amen.
Social policy and love
What would Paul’s love look like today? Or MLK’s? We are a mass society, not a koinonia. The love we need is social love: housing for the homeless, food for the hungry, education for all who long to know, health care for every American (no, for every person in America), protection from racists and bullies. I could go on, but you get the idea: love can be a guideline for social policy if we let it.
_____________________
* I heard one of MLK’s last sermons and spoke with him briefly. He knew his death would come soon.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culturevultureblog/2006/oct/05/shareyourfavo
“Identity – who we are, where we come from, how we perceive ourselves and how others see us – has long been a theme of poetry. “I am! yet what I am none cares or knows,” wrote the poet John Clare during his 22-year incarceration in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum – the first line of one of the most powerful meditations on identity in the language. To celebrate National Poetry Day, schools, libraries, universities and literary societies around the country are asking people to suggest and discuss the poems they love that engage with issues of selfhood, so not to be left out, I say let’s join in and do the same on Culture Vulture.
For my money, the best poem on the subject is WH Auden’s In Memory of WB Yeats, which unites issues of personal and literary identity, and explores the question of the extent to which authors can identify themselves with their work.
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/memory-w-b-yeats
“For him it was his last afternoon as himself,” says Auden of Yeats’ dying day,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living.
The brilliance of Auden’s poem, for me, is that not only does he raise these fundamental questions in some of the most fervent, lyrical lines I’ve come across in poetry, he also uses his poem to enact the point he is making. The poem is divided into three sections, and in the third, Auden pays ringing tribute to Yeats in lines that have an unmistakably Yeatsian flavour. The two poets merge for a moment on the page, identity becomes fluid, and Yeats comes alive again through Auden’s lines. It’s a heartstopping poem: I highly recommend you give yourselves a Poetry Day treat and read it.
”There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.”
Simone Weil (1909-1943), French philosopher, mystic. “Illusions,” Gravity and Grace (1947, trans. 1952).
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/thesaurus-category/british/the-internet
nounused in the subject line of emails to warn people that they will soon lose their connection to the Internet
nounthe telephone number that is used to connect to an Internet service provider
nounthe name of a user on a network or Internet system
nouncomputing a series of letters, numbers, and symbols that show you where to find a particular website on the Internet
nounanonymous file transfer protocol: a set of rules for moving computer files from one computer to another, especially over the Internet, without having to say who you are or use a password
nouna way of checking who has visited a company’s website that shows the user’s system but not his or her name
nounthe imaginary place on the Internet where people’s blogs go so that other people can read them and react to them
a type of radio technology that makes it possible for electroniccommunication to exist between mobile phones, the Internet, and computers
nouncomputing an electronic way of marking an Internet website so that you can easily find it again
adjectivea Boolean search is one using the words ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘not’ to find a word or combination of words using an Internet search engine. For example you could ask to search for ‘car or automobile’, or ‘New York and not New York state’.
nouna measurement of the number of people who leave a website after they lookat only one page
nouna type of connection to the Internet that allows you to receive or send a lot of information very quickly
nouncomputing a computer program that allows you to look at and search through information on the Internet
nouna system in which a remote computer calls back the computer that has just called its number when trying to connect to the Internet, so that only the correct person can use the Internet
nounan area on the Internet or a computer network where people can exchange messages
nounthe number of times a website is visited in a particular period of time
nounthe series of clicks of a computer mouse that someone makes when they look at websites on the Internet
I never knew what this meant.It is when two people are in a relationship and one decides to end it then never ever replies to any phone call,letter or email from their former loved one.
.It happened to a friend.One text message after a 12 year relationship.Mind you my friend was very hot tempered! Still she soon got a new man and seems very happy.If you have children it is harder to ghost the other parent unless you emigrate to Antarctica.Or get diagnosed as an adult autistic like some mathematicians.Then they may understand why you were hard to relate to.A lot of people on the autistic spectrum are happily married.We just need to find the right person.
The point of living is to feel alive
Not caged by too high walls or steely fence.
We want to love, be taken by surprise.
Our wounded mangled self we can’t deride,
Recalling fights and struggles lived through once.
The point of living is to feel alive.
We dither to and fro in puzzled ways
We feel the anguish, still and quite intent.
We want to love, be taken by surprise.
The self’s spontaneous, not a thing contrived;
Formed with love and hate,with all intense.
The rage of living is to be alive.
When washed away by feelings glad, immense
That cross our borders without our lament
The hope, the need of living is our life
We want to give and take, yet fear surprise.
How my heart sings 