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November 25, 2003 By Uncategorized

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.

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November 25, 2003 By Uncategorized

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 the big guy shouts how,
at great cost, he hacked the
slavering homo-monster and its
disgusting mother to pieces,
brought back the slimy head and
taloned arm. Roars of laughter.

Meanwhile, the bard, who’s
no dope and knows on which
side his meat is seasoned,
commits to memory every heroic,
bloody word; great deeds to
inspire a millennium of brutal
bullet-pocked worlds to come.

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November 24, 2003 By Uncategorized

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 to prisons at the Practice of Peace conference a couple of weeks ago.

Glad to welcome another Open Space weblog to the world!

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November 24, 2003 By Uncategorized

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 by Buddhists to be more difficult than for the turtle to surface accidentally with its head poking through the wooden ring. And even among those who have a human birth, it is said, those who have the great fortune to make a connection with the teachings are rare; and those who really take them to heart and embody them in their actions even rarer, as rare, in fact, ‘as stars in broad daylight’.'”

— Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Thanks to my friend Ashley Cooper for reminding me of this.

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November 23, 2003 By Uncategorized

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 latest book, Creating True Peace, in which one chapter is entitled “Turning Arrows Into Flowers.” Based on that I posted a follow up in Euan’s comments:

Thich Nhat Hahn, who knows a thing or two about violence, counsels us to practice mindful consumption and not to ingest scenes of death, violence and hatred into our consciousness. This seems like avoidance on first blush, but one can see from a Buddhist perspective how it actually leads to peaceful liberation, as one avoids generating the energies that keep us locked in hatred. This is not to say one should not have compassion for victims of violence, far from it. In fact, he says that this practice is what allows us to have compassion. With hatred and violence dominating our consciouness, it is impossible to have compassion for anything.

In that respect, this story about the women making dahlia posts from protest signs is a huge teching for me, Euan. It is literally, as Thich Nhat Hahn says “turning arrows into flowers.”