dreaminginthedeepsouth

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

You Who Let Yourselves Feel :: Rainer Maria Rilke

PART ONE, SONNET IV

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing that is more than your own. Let it brush your cheeks as it divides and rejoins behind you. Blessed ones, whole ones, you where the heart begins: You are the bow that shoots the arrows and you are the target. Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back into the earth; for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas. The trees you planted in childhood have grown too heavy. You cannot bring them along. Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Anam Cara

Every now and then in life, you meet a person who shows you something new about life, about yourself, about friendship, about love, about life itself. When I met Bea, I was at a low ebb in my life and had decided to take a workshop in Miami. I was assigned a roommate for the week and that was Bea, this funny and brilliant women who had seemingly parachuted in my life as if her entire purpose was to rescue me from the blues. Suddenly. A friend. We bonded at first glance, in a way the made people assume that we had been friends over a lifetime. Arm in arm laughing, joking, talking nonstop, dancing down the streets of Sunny Isles. I've never laughed so much as I laughed that week. This woman was an embodiment of everything about love. We exchanged confidences, we told jokes, we ran on the beach, we cheered each other on. She is one of those irreplaceable, indelible people who are put on earth to shine shine shine. May her memory always be a blessing and a reminder that love, more love is always the answer. Can someone so uniquely lovely be gone from planet earth? How could that even be possible? I am a fountain of tears. Still in shock and warming myself in the fire of her memory. Goodbye my dancing partner, my most beautiful most generous pal. My Soul Friend.

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“In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares two-pence about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history…That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. This love (essentially) ignores not only our physical bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections. At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague, or subordinate. Not among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Hence (if you will not misunderstand me) the exquisite arbitrariness and irresponsibility of this love. I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which gave value to survival.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[from my files]

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Instructions on Not Giving Up More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all. Ada Limón (Source: poets.org)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

//…Egon Schiele…// “Liebespaar” (The Lovers) 1909 :: Verocska Kosch’s Art Corner

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The most beautiful thing in the world is you - Alvin Ailey

[alive on all channels]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Flooded London by Squint/Opera 2

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“So lasting they are, the rivers!” Only think. Sources somewhere in the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia. Tribes, nations pass, and the river is still there, and yet it is not, for water does not stay the same, only the place and the name persist, as a metaphor for a permanent form and changing matter. The same rivers flowed in Europe when none of today’s countries existed and no languages known to us were spoken. It is in the names of rivers that traces of lost tribes survive. They lived, though, so long ago that nothing is certain and scholars make guesses which to other scholars seem unfounded. It is not even known how many of these names come from before the Indo-European invasion, which is estimated to have taken place two thousand to three thousand years B. C. Our civilization poisoned river waters, and their contamination acquires a powerful emotional meaning. As the course of a river is a symbol of time, we are inclined to think of a poisoned time. And yet the sources continue to gush and we believe time will be purified one day. I am a worshipper of flowing and would like to entrust my sins to the waters, let them be carried to the sea.

—Czeslaw Milosz, “Rivers” (translated from the Polish by the author and Robert Hass)  [theparisreview]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Illustration: "Ergiz" or "Pride" depicted by King Ocozias rushing from the top of a tower. By Frère Laurent. From: Somme le Roe, done in Alsace, c 1294. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Department of Manuscripts. French 938. Folio 74 r.

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"Pride is a stubborn insistence of being what we are not and never were intended to be. Pride is a deep, insatiable need for unreality, an exorbitant demand that others believe the lie we have made ourselves believe about ourselves."

~ Thomas Merton

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

RAYMOND PETTIBON NO TITLE (VALENTINES YOU YOU),2005 - 2011 pen, ink,acrylic and collage on paper 17 x 17 inches

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"Red is holy. Nobody understands it. It goes on, on, without the world’s understanding. Blue is holy. Blue goes on without the world’s understanding. And the heart…the heart can’t wait. Revolts without understanding. Boom. Goes on. Without the world’s understanding."

Tennessee Williams, from Selected Stories; “Oriflamme,” c. January 1944

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

(Art: Photograph by Henri Cartier Bresson)

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I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.

~ Hermann Hesse

(Book: Demian)

(Philo Thoughts)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the 'real' world - rock, bone, wood, ice - and elements of the real - not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself - inside stories and tales and dreams."

- Rick Bass

[alive on all channels]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The main quote on my desk bulletin board since 1980.

First saw this quote a long time ago - I think it was on the cover of an issue of the Heartland Journal in Chicago. It’s become part of my credo.

David Lauterstein

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[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"The ethic of Jesus, as I understand it, issues from the ever so slight edge He grants to life, in the 'life v. death' conflict of the Easter hymn. He grants the edge (better, He wins the edge) from the edge. From his chosen place in the world."

Daniel Berrigan, "An Ethic of Resurrection," Testimony: the Word Made Fresh

[Berrigan collective]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Monte Wolverton, Wolvertoons

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 22, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 23, 2025

Perhaps in response to the growing outcry over last weekend’s rendition of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador under a legal justification a federal judge has found questionable, President Donald Trump last night told reporters that he didn’t sign the proclamation that set that legal process in motion.

When asked when he signed the proclamation invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, by which Trump claimed that Venezuela is invading the United States by sending alleged gang members over the border, Trump answered: “I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it.” Trump was on his way to his golf club in New Jersey, and seemed to be handing off responsibility for the declaration to someone else, perhaps Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Other people handled it,” he said. “But Marco Rubio’s done a great job. And he wanted them out, and we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”

But, as Matt Viser said in the Washington Post today, on Friday White House communications director Steven Cheung said Trump personally signed the proclamation, and his signature appears on the document in the Federal Register of official government documents. The gap between the two versions of events raises questions about who is in charge of White House policy.

Trump’s habit of deflection might explain last night's statement, and his habit of distraction might explain today’s social media post, in which the president returned to an exchange of words between him and Maine governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, more than three weeks ago. At a meeting of the nation’s governors at the White House on February 21, in a rambling speech in which he was wandering through his false campaign stories about transgender athletes, Trump turned to his notes and suddenly appeared to remember his executive order banning transgender student athletes from playing on girls sports teams.

The body that governs sports in Maine, the Maine Principals’ Association, ruled that it would continue to allow transgender students to compete despite Trump's executive order because the Maine state Human Rights Law prohibits discrimination on the grounds of gender identity. Trump asked if the governor of Maine was in the room.

“Yeah, I’m here,” replied Governor Mills.

“Are you not going to comply with it?” Trump asked.

“I’m complying with state and federal laws,” she said.

“We are the federal law,” Trump said. “You better do it because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t….”

“We’re going to follow the law,” she said.

“You’d better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding,” he said.

Mills answered: “See you in court.”

As Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing of Politico recounted today, after the exchange between Trump and Governor Mills at the White House the administration opened investigations by the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Agriculture into Maine’s policies. The Department of Agriculture temporarily paused funding for the University of Maine, then restored it and cleared the university system of Title IX violations, saying it had “clearly communicated its compliance.” The University of Maine system said it was “relieved” and added that it had never violated Title IX compliance.

On March 11 the Department of Education abolished more than half of the offices in its Civil Rights Division, getting rid of more than half of the division's employees. Last Wednesday it said it had concluded its investigation into the Maine Department of Education and had determined that the state was violating Title IX by permitting transgender youth to play in the boys’ or girls’ sports that conform to their gender identity. It gave the state ten days to follow the administration’s interpretation of the law.

This morning, the president posted on social media: “While the State of Maine has apologized for the Governor’s strong, but totally incorrect, statement about men playing in women’s sports while at the White House Governor’s Conference, we have not heard from the Governor herself, and she is that one that matters in such cases. Therefore, we need a full throated apology from the Governor herself, and a statement that she will never make such an unlawful challenge to the Federal Government again, before this case can be settled. I’m sure she will be able to do that quite easily. Thank you for your attention to this matter and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! DJT.”

Mills was a former state attorney general, and her position is that it is her job as governor to follow state and federal law. But Trump seems to be trying to make his fight with her personal. So long as she is willing to kowtow to him, the “case” can be “settled.” Exactly what she is supposed to be apologizing to him for is unclear, unless it is that she stood up to him, a rare enough event that at the time, Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times noted: “Something happened at the White House Friday afternoon that almost never happens these days. Somebody defied President Trump. Right to his face.”

At the White House, Governor Mills was not only reinforcing the rule of law in the face of an authoritarian who is working to shatter that principle; she was standing up to a bully who claims to be protecting women and girls but who has bragged about sexual assault, been found guilty of sexually assaulting writer E. Jean Carroll, and barged in on teenaged girls dressing in the Miss Teen USA changing room.

Trump’s political stances have also belied his claim to protect women. He has worked to deny women and girls access to health care, including the right not to die needlessly from a miscarriage. He has undermined women’s right to control their own bodies and defunded or stopped the programs that protect their right to be safe from domestic violence and sexual assault. He has ended programs designed to protect women’s employment and has fired women from positions of authority.

Mills stands in dramatic contrast to Trump. Her career has focused on helping women and girls to overcome domestic violence, the threat of sexual assault, and inequities in the workplace. As a district attorney—the first woman elected as a DA in New England—she grew frustrated with the ways in which the criminal justice system failed victims of domestic violence. She co-founded the Maine Women’s Lobby to advocate for battered and abused women, which then led to her election to the Maine legislature and from there to state attorney general and then to the governorship.

While Trump’s demand that Mills make a “full throated apology” to him is in keeping with his habitual attempts to dominate women, Mills follows in a tradition of women from Maine who stood up for the principles of American democracy against bullies who would destroy it.

In a similar moment, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, of Skowhegan, Maine, stood up to Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy. McCarthy and his supporters were hoping to gain votes in the 1950 midterm elections by stoking fear that the communists who had recently taken control of China threatened the U.S. On February 9, 1950, during a speech to a group gathered in Wheeling, West Virginia, to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, McCarthy, a Republican, claimed that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department and that the Democrats refused to investigate these “traitors in the government.”

Sympathetic newspapers trumpeted McCarthy’s charges—which kept changing, and for which he never offered proof—and many of his colleagues cheered him on, while Republicans who disapproved of his tactics kept their heads down to avoid becoming the target of his attacks.

All but one of them did, that is. Senator Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation. On June 1, 1950, with McCarthy sitting two rows behind her, Smith stood up in the Senate to speak. “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she said. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves, she said. She condemned those trying to stifle dissent.

“I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear,” she said. “As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist. They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”

Senator Smith ended with a warning: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Little Mermaid Saved the Prince, Edmund Dulac

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To be human we need to experience the end of the world. We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is. Hélène Cixous, from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. (via xshayarsha)

[Alive On All Channels]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

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“I think Dostoevsky was right, that every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.” ― Rollo May

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Thomas Wright :: The Pleiades 

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"The Clear Bead at the Centre changes everything There are no edges to my loving now. I’ve heard it said, there’s a window that opens from one mind to another. But if there is no wall there is no window, And if there is no window, there is no need for a latch There are no edges to my loving now. The clear bead at the center changes everything." ~ Rumi (translation by Bly & Coleman)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

My Dad with the 41st Infantry Division on Sanga Sanga in the Tawi Tawi Islands of the Sulu Archipelago.

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“It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life — and herein lies its secret — takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.”

— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

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“Into this wild Abyss/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave–/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,–/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross.”

― John Milton, Paradise Lost