I can’t believe how little play the story of the Georgian velvet revolution is getting in the mainstream media. Certainly in Canada the major news outlets are paying it some heed, but this should be a huge global story. Over at netvironments, Laura has been tracking a few of the critical developments, as the people of a country calmly and effectively take their government back. This comes to me as I have just cracked Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World, and so it becomes the next chapter.
Hard on the heels of Thich Naht Hahn’s advice on mindful consumption comes this poem which appeared today at Poetry Daily: On First Looking into Heaney’s Beowulf Anne MacKay A bunch of high class thugs returns in a golden cloud of exhaust fumes and dust, helmets polished bright as maseratis, spears and chain mail clashing, enters to a riot of cheers. The king’s daughter and groupies serve wine, dripping meat and beer while they boast and yell, unable to shut up, telling how the blood spurted like a chain-saw massacre, how sword thrusts blasted guts all over the heath. Then …
Let me be the first to welcome Ashley Cooper’s weblog to the blogosphere. She’s called it “easily amazed”, which should describe her readers as much as herself… Ashley is involved in the Open Space community worldwide and is also a constant presence at the Integral Naked discussion forums, which is a home for conversation on Ken Wilber, and others with an interest in trans-personal psychology. After communication back and forth on the OSLIST, I finally had the privilege of finally meeting her in person and talking at length about a whole bunch of issues from compassion to invitation to homeschooling …
Sogyal Rinpoche on precious human birth: “Every spiritual tradition has stressed that this human life is unique, and has potential that ordinarily we hardly even begin to imagine. If we miss the opportunity this life offers us for transforming ourselves, they say, it may well be an extremely long time before we have another. Imagine a blind turtle, roaming the depths of an ocean the size of the universe. Up above floats a wooden ring, tossed to and fro on the waves. Every hundred years the turtle comes, once, to the surface. To be born a human being is said …
Euan Semple has a wonderful encounter: “Coming home from work tonight I followed two middle aged, middle class ladies up the stairs into the multi story car-park. One of them was carrying a banner mounted on a stick printed with an anti- Bush slogan. I asked how it had gone today and she said: ‘I wanted to go on the last one. I wasn’t there today but these sticks are really good for my dahlias’” He then wonders about the appropriateness of this posting in light of the death and destruction in Istanbul. I am currently reading Thich Nhat Hahn’s …