Tell people you can’t log onto Amazon
Never order eggs online especially human ones
Do not wear a watch, look at your phone
Don’t wear socks with sandals
Roll up a newspaper and pretend to hit people with it.
Smile and look faraway.
Do not  order pizza on the phone
Don’t eat Weetabix banana flavoured
Use full fat milk
Use butter
Drink cream
Keep saying,  je suis ici, madame/monsieur.
I like faux creme caramel.

Wear a kilt,collar and tie under a very old tweed jacket
Don’t keep your nails clean
Don’t express interest in Albert Camus ; who?
Polish your shoes nightly
Wear  old  nasty socks with  those weird short trousers
Don”t wear trench coats especially in bed or if dead or in the Army
Take a  talking cat out on your shoulder.
When out with friends do not ask what hermeutics is.And don’t ask in bed.Ask your Rabbi as Christianity is a  heresy of Judaisn so we are all entitled to speak to  the nearest Rabbi unless they have fled from anti-Semitisim
Wear a fake fur dressing  gown all day
Don’t appear intelligent
Walk round  square parks screaming Pi.? och aye
Talk about cricket and snooker as much as you can
Never tell your partner you adore them.
Always get married before sexual activity including to yourself.
What this old rubbish,? Be  off

The editor

Erich Fromm

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/race

Once I saw the face within your face
Vulnerable and lower than an ant
An image that fits many of our race
The human  seeing that forever haunts

The face within your face is  on my mind
As I think of Christmas and choose  gifts
I recollect the cruelty of our lives
When too much fighting did create deep rifts.

Often masks are fixed with superglue
The psychic rival sees no other view
We may have no one else to show them to
The pain of lying pierces us right through.

Yet we can’t live  now with no mask to hide
The vulnerable, the trembling heart inside

Haaretz.com

The world on fire

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68606/spiritual-poetry

“The root of “spirit” is the Latin spirare, to breathe. Whatever lives on the breath, then, must have its spiritual dimension— including all poems, even the most unlikely. Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams: all poets of spiritual life. A useful exercise of soul would be to open any doorstop-sized anthology at random a dozen times and find in each of the resulting pages its spiritual dimension. If the poems are worth the cost of their ink, it can be done.

But, no, I’ve been asked to choose, to recommend. The poems I suggest here are this moment’s choices, not “the best spiritual poems” (a phrase weighing nothing in so intimate and personal a context). The “gates” are an equally personal selection of entrance points into spiritual life. Some of the poems are well known, others less so. Each stands representative of many others. Each also, for me, plunges into the heart of the matter at hand, bearing witness in some essential way.

GATE 1. PERMEABILITY
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

Izumi Shikibu (Japan, 974?-1034?) [translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani]
The moon in Japanese poetry is always the moon; often it is also the image of Buddhist awakening. This poem reminds that if a house is walled so tightly that it lets in no wind or rain, if a life is walled so tightly that it lets in no pain, grief, anger, or longing, it will also be closed to the entrance of what is most wanted.

The poem, by the greatest woman poet of classical-era Japan, is one I first encountered in 1986 while working with Mariko Aratani, my co-translator for The Ink Dark Moon. At first, I had the poem’s words, I had the poem’s grammar, but its meaning eluded. Once it clarified, this became for me a life-altering poem, transforming my relationship to safety, permeability, awakening, and the mouth of the lion.

Che Fece… Il Gran Refiuto

For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,

he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he’d still say no. Yet that no—the right no—
drags him down all his life.

C.P. Cavafy (Alexandria, 1863-1933) [translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard]
Cavafy is not generally thought of as a spiritual poet. This early poem’s precipitating title comes from a story about a pope, as told by Dante, but that is not the reason it is here. Nor can I say I even fully understand the poem—the phrase “the right no” has been, for me, a decades-long riddle and harvest. But Cavafy’s basic proposal, that a person carries within himself or herself a great Yes or great No, requiring declaration—this surely is one gate to the spiritual dimension.

You let me see the face within your face
So vulnerable, so touching. eyes of pain
No posturing no masking, no mistake.

You did not wish to share a kind embrace
As trauma may revisit you again
You let me see the face within your face

Inside us is our heart, which others break
With their false love, when truth is what they feign
No posturing no masking, no mistake

Sensitive to what is merely faked
Agony is etched into your brain
You let me see the face within your face

Having been insulted’s no disgrace
Yet all alone, we ‘re victims of our brains
No posturing no masking, no mistake

For  humans there’s an insult set in train
When, powerless, we struggle but in vain
You let me see the face within your face
No posturing no bluster, I was graced.

At three o’clock,  we ran  across  the park
Then up the Wigan Road, three children roamed
Passed the houses and along the fields
Looking for our daddy coming home
Looking for our daddy coming home.

I was only three  or four at most
We passed our church and  saw the Pope in Rome
We climbed a fence and walked by fields of wheat
Looking for our daddy coming home
Looking for our daddy coming home.

From the distance came a tall thin man
A ladder on his shoulder, hair well combed
A bucket full of paints and  all his tools
Look, Paul, is that daddy coming home?
Bernard, I think daddy’s coming home!

A  look of shock, a smile, a cry, my loves!
He  rushed towards us,  happy  and transformed
What about your mammy does she know?
Yes, yes, yes it’s daddy coming home
Yes, yes, yes, it’s daddy coming home.

• Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism” is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by “patriotism” I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one’s own nation, which is the concern with the nation’s spiritual as much as with its material welfare—never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
  • Erich Fromm, in The Sane Society (1955).

By necrophilia is meant love for all that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction to death, to suicide, to sadism; the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic by means of “order.” The necrophile, lacking the necessary qualities to create, in his impotence finds it easy to destroy because for him it serves only one quality: force.

Erich Fromm  in Credo

Cred

If we do not grieve,  we lose  much more
The favourite gifts, the symbols of those gone
Emotions blocked will close the mind’s front door

In reverie, grief wanders  rooms and floors
But blocked, we are alone in only one.
If we cannot grieve then we lose more

Cut off from our own self, we lose  allure
So we are lonely, even as we win
Emotions blocked will trap us with’ steel doors

After  weeping, there’s an empty core
The onion peeled, reveals a tear alone
If we cannot grieve then we lose more

Yet emptiness creates a  new space dear,
An indolence  on fire to which bees come
Emotions blocked will close the mind’s own door

As we have little time till beetles own
Let us dwell in  love’s creative zones
If we cannot grieve, we can’t adore
For God is locked behind our  iron doors

Love of one’s country which does not include love for humankind as such is nothing but idolatry

Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving [see link below to pdf file]

Click to access the%20art%20of%20loving.pdf

←

A man devout in fasting, prayer and pleas
Made much of what his holiness could do
But pride became a flaw when he asked me
Who are you that I should pray for you?

The warm hand that I held has turned to dust
Yet I sense its presence here in mine today
I wish I could restore the loves  I’ve lost
And carry  willingly the  total cost
I loved your repartee, oh voice of trust
I feel an emptiness  where mystics pray
The warm hand I experienced  turned to dust
The total loss accepted is my prayer,

The face that was familiar is no more
Yet in my dreams ,he is alive again
If ,by a chance, his life could be restored
It would affect me like the hidden chord
Which played, my   own life  force would   go.
That one must live and one must die is plain
The face that was familiar is no more.
Yet in my dreams ,he is alive again

In between the  blackness and the bright,

Graded shades of grey and lilac lie.

These variegated  colours give delight.

And from my soul, I hear a happy sigh.

 

As we live, we dwell in mysteries;

Must take decisions based on  various views.

And unknown memories from our history

Bring out  the old then misperceive the new.

 

For  true perception, we must humble be.

Not for moral reasons but for sight.

The emptiness   lets flood creative seas.

And allows  bright  rays of  guiding golden  light.

 

We need to know we do not know at all.

And, trembling, hold  the doors of vision wide.

So gentle  should be judgements when we fail.

Then errors  we’ll appreciate, not hide.

 

We will  deal with life unknown, unclear;

Perception is  a better   guide than  fear

It’s nice to know that people in the government are able to refresh themselves with a bit of porn during their work  when Brexit is too much for them let alone Boris Johnson and his pals

But must they not be stupid if they don’t  have a personal tablet or netbook for private views paid for by them on a mobile network and not by us on our government’s computers

It’s the old attraction of the risk

One minute they are reading the DUP’s demands and the next looking at women’s bare breasts.How does that grab you, the voter?
How much more likely they are to mock women… and they’ve got one ready to burn?
Of course, they may be gay and so look at some man’s .woman’s private parts while phoning the Whips! Not to mention borrowing some whips

It makes me sick

When rotten government  ruins   these Islands
With economics cruel; with evil choice
When time has seeped like butter in hot sand
Then shall not British choirs sing with one voice…….

It’s time to exit Brexit

With   mental ill health, poverty and pain,
Tormenting fears of old and  young unite
Should we not stand with courage, with demands?
With common sense and wisdom, let us  state

It’s time to exit Brexit

When governing politicians harass and make poor
As bankers  meditate in handmade suits
Shall we not hear what the good ask for
And tell the wavering government ,as we shout?

It’s time to exit Brexit

I spent my adult life in foolish toil
At least it paid the rent and gave me space
Teaching calculus until heads boiled

As for understanding, lose your cool
Infinitely smaller, numbers placed
I spent my adult life in foolish toil

Disappearing just as they beguile
Numbers irritate the mental space.
Games like calculus  force heads  to boil

Yet if we must learn algebra let’s smile
As   neo-liberals lose the human place
I spend my  life in Pascal’s  counterfoils

One by one the  tiny x’s file
Through my dreams  to weave the demons lace
The holes of calculus were over-tiled.

When do we know we have found our place
Will it be in black holes of disgrace?
I spent my adult life in pain encoiled
Neither calculus nor boiling oil.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/ClassicalMythology

Artemis

Goddess of young women, of virginity, childbirth (yes, both at the same time), Women’s Mysteries, forests and hills, hunting, and, later, the moon (along with Selene). Essentially a liminal goddess who protected women throughout their lives. The Romans equated her with their goddess Diana.

• Action Girl: A talented archer and warrior.
• All Amazons Want Hercules: The only man she may have been interested in, depending on your myth, is the great hunter Orion. Unfortunately, Apollo disapproved of their relationship and tricked Artemis into killing him.
• Amazon Brigade: Had a train of warrior nymphs assisting her in her hunts. They were sworn to virginity and severely punished if they broke their oath.
• Archer Archetype: She emulates Zeus by standing on the peak of a mountain and shooting down arrows on whatever she feels like.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Actaeon, Callisto and Niobe are the most famous victims.
• Does Not Like Men: And that’s putting it mildly. Pretty much the only guys she was pleasant to were Apollo, Orion, and her priest Hypolitus.
  • It’s often subject to Flanderization in modern media. No, she didn’t like men, but looking at her relationship with Orion, Apollo, Zeus, and others, she didn’t dislike them either. Considering how much misogyny was in Classical Mythology, that’s actually rather impressive.
• Half Identical Twin: Her brother Apollo.
• Humanoid Abomination: A surprising example (especially when considering how Olympians are essentially humans with powers), her Ephesian depiction, while humanoid, makes her pretty much Lovecraftian. To the point that some Cthulhu Mythos writers identify such statues as an image of Shub-Niggurath.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Was tricked into sniping Orion from an island while he was in the middle of the ocean.
• The Lad-ette: Commonly portrayed as such in modern media, but the original myths often suggest otherwise.
• Lunacy: She was associated with the moon.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Rough-and-tumble Masculine Girl to her brother’s artsy Feminine Boy.
• Naked First Impression: This happened with Actaeon. It didn’t end well.

• Plague Master: She was also the goddess of disease, plague, and sudden death.
  • More so with her nymphs. In his Hymn to Artemis, poet Callimachus asks himself what nymph obtains Artemis’ love and then proceeds to list her favorites.
• Virgin Power: Was one of the three virgin goddesses, along with Athena and Hestia.
• Western Zodiac: Traditionally associated with Sagittarius, as the archer.

http://home.btconnect.com/mike.flemming/dragonfl.htmDr

Dragonflies