We are not alone / Our pain / reborn / reality /The dream is over / "Self-Portrait with Brothers of Mercy and Night Falling from the Sky" (Mourning Meditation) / a new morning in mid-October 2020

 

God is a concept
By which we measure
Our pain
I'll say it again
God is a concept
By which we measure
Our pain

I don't believe in magic
I don't believe in I-Ching
I don't believe in Bible
I don't believe in tarot
I don't believe in Hitler
I don't believe in Jesus
I don't believe in Kennedy
I don't believe in Buddha
I don't believe in mantra
I don't believe in Gita
I don't believe in yoga
I don't believe in kings
I don't believe in Elvis
I don't believe in Zimmerman
I don't believe in Beatles
I just believe in me
Yoko and me
And that's reality

The dream is over
What can I say?
The dream is over
Yesterday
I was the dream weaver
But now I'm reborn
I was the Walrus
But now I'm John
And so dear friends
You just have to carry on
The dream is over

"... I'd like to live to ripe old age with Yoko only, and I'm not afraid of dying.  I don't know how it feels at the moment, but I'm prepared for death because I don't believe in it.  I believe it's just getting out of one car and getting into another ..." (John Lennon, 1980)

"... if there is a God, we're all it ..." (John Lennon)

"... I'd like to live to ripe old age with Yoko only, and I'm not afraid of dying.  I don't know how it feels at the moment, but I'm prepared for death because I don't believe in it.  I believe it's just getting out of one car and getting into another ..." (John Lennon, 1980)

Believe it or not, after I published this post and then turned to the tiny bundle of cards that sits next to my laptop and has quotes from around the world -- quotes that I read on most days -- the card that was uncovered for today had these words from Chief Seattle on the subject of death:

"There is no death, only a change of worlds."

Then I discovered that Chief Seattle also said in the same speech:  

"... Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see ..."

Turlough, by Brian Keenan

Thank you, Sabine, for bringing Turlough, by Brian Keenan, to my attention recently.  Our public library didn't have a copy, but the interlibrary loan system borrowed a copy for me from the Western Michigan University Library.

From the dedication page to the epigraph by N. Scott Momaday for Part One through the journal entries of Mrs. McDermott-Roe and letters of friends and critics and storytelling and the final part of this quote by Chief Seattle to last page of the book, my attention and emotions were fully engaged in the life of Turlough and with the challenges of life in Ireland in the 1600s and 1700s and the power of music and all the light that the blind can see.



From page 5, from the journal of Mrs. McDermott-Roe who was a lifelong friend, patron and confidante: ... I explained to him how over all these years I have pressed flowers in my journal and how their shape or color transports me back to some incident that my memory had overlooked.  He stopped and turned to me, then said curiously, "Yes, I know, colour has memory, everything has its own color ..." 

From page 21:  ... she (am's note:  Turlough's mother) insisted that anyone who drank the flower's juice would be enabled to write poetry. In his imagination he saw fields of words stretching out into the distance.  When he told his mother she laughed and said he was already a poet without drinking any flowers.

From page 34:  .. Nervously he began chuckling to himself.  The idea came into his head that the fish were singing.  Somehow an outburst of life was coming from the silent fish ..."

From page 104:   ... One day she entered his room and placed a harp in his hands.  "Let this speak for you," she said simply as she turned to leave the room ...

From page 136:  ... He wanted music to convey a sense of the person and of the musician's response.  There would be no tortured plucking of the strings, no bitter regret.  He wanted the harp in his hands to be Bridget.  The music was to be about acceptance, a celebration of love, another way of loving ...

From page 224:  No law, no matter how pernicious, savage or inhuman, can obliterate the culture of a nation ... "

From page 270:  For the dead are not altogether powerless.  Dead did I say?  There is no death, only a change of worlds.

(Chief Seattle of the Duwamish tribe on Puget Sound, Washington Territory)

From page 296:  ... This was the secret that old Fionnuala Quinn (am's note: the teacher who placed a harp in his hands) had tried to impart to him.  Only blindness could release him to see more fully.  Blindness allowed him to stop living in front of things and begin to live with them, as part of them ...

From page 332 of 333, where a friend relates a dream Turlough had related to him:  ... Again he heard the peasant song, plaintive and full of exile and longing.  It seemed more than human.  It was compelling and intense, and pulled him to the great door of the waiting room.  He surveyed the cracked symbols and figures carved on wood.  To him the door was a manuscript of sound.  He seemed to hear its meaning, like a great sounding board reverberating in his senses.  As he stood before it, it opened silently.

Beyond it was a swirling fusion of unformed colour ...

Coast Salish Day And Columbus Day Become One In Bellingham, Washington / Indigenous People's Day And Columbus Day Become One In Seattle, Washington

"Children from the Tulalip Tribes showing off their garments for a picture while taking in a view of downtown Seattle following a successful signing ceremony for Resolution No. 31538, honoring indigenous peoples by declaring the  second Monday in October "Indigenous People's Day," Monday, October 13, 2014, at Seattle City Hall. (SEATTLEPI.COM Jordan Stead-- AP Photo)"

See additional article in the Bellingham Herald:

"By a 6-0 vote, City Council officially recognized Coast Salish Day on the date federally recognized as Columbus Day at its regular Monday night meeting, Oct. 13."

Here is more information about the Coast Salish peoples.

Christmas Eve meditation / There is Something, and everything is possible

"You undoubtedly know that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a progressive Christian and champion of civil rights and the social gospel. You may also know that he spoke out against the Vietnam War, harshly criticized U.S. foreign policy, and questioned the capitalist system that produced poverty. But do you know his theology?

Right up until Dr. King's assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had traveled to support striking sanitation workers, the civil right leader worked--not as a secular activist but as a Baptist minister--to awaken the conscience of a nation. What was the meaning of Jesus for Dr. King? Did he see Jesus as divine? How did he interpret the Bible?"

(from the Tikkun article ,"King's God:  The Unknown Faith of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.," by Robert James "Be" Scofield)

Transcript for the speech above:  A Christmas Sermon on Peace (1967)

Then I got to thinking about Mavis Staples and the Staple Singers' connection with the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, Jr.:

And Bob Dylan and Santa Claus:

And the Sufi dancers at the end of this video that was released the same year by Bob Dylan:

And Nelson Mandela.

And Chief Seattle:

"Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors - the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of  our people."

And Rosa Parks:

"God has always given me the strength to say what is right ... I had the strength of God and my ancestors with me." (from The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks)

And I remember the words of an elderly Jewish woman who was a friend of mine, "I don't have to be a Christian in order to be moved by the life of Jesus."

I have no religious affiliation, and I am not Buddhist, atheist, agnostic.  I am among those who can relate to what an elderly atheist friend of mine said in her last years -- that she didn't believe in a traditional God, but that she did experience, in her heart, Something that had brought peace to her in the last 14 years of her life.

"... And to see you're really only very small / And life flows on within you and without you..."

(George Harrison, from "Within You Without You")

"... the possibility that there might be something significant in the little things around them."

(from A Winter Walk, by Tolbert McCarroll)

"Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible."

(From Going Home:  Jesus and Buddha as Brothers, by Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk)