A Useful Compendium of Experience.
Mahatma Gandhi
An online archive of Gandhi’s writings and writings about him.
Orwell’s fundamental works online.
In response to this sickening story which came via wood s lot, I can only weep, and hold on to the thought that there is hope and peace out there, somewhere.
And I can also post this poem from John Morgan’s book The Arctic Herd which sort of takes me to where those Marines are now in a different way.
Ambush
A light with the richness
of cream pours over the bar.
Slack night. I sip a glass
of beer remembering who I think
I am and then forgetting.
“Killing’s more direct than talk,”he says, says he could do it still
but what’s the use? His breath’s
a heavy metal stink about like dirt
or the wide circles
of waiting he pledged allegiance to
before his birth.Camped in the Asian dark,
sick on his first patrol,
he tells me how they wouldn’t
talk to him, his alien platoon
that first night out. Then
something like a finger beckoning.He turns, hears in his middle ear
a bird’s frail tune,
thick eons shouldering over oceans of recall.
With hardly time to think
he’s off his stool, rolling
in a fit of peanut shells and drool.The mind at war
has got its reasons. Plunging
in a sink of need,
he’s there as well as here
hands tensed around his snub-nosed,
sharp-toothed pet,and suddenly I could do
with one less beer. Tomorrow
if he lives he’ll
burn a village, be a vet.
All wars are fought by country
boys used to this long road.
This war is stupid, a bloody waste of life.
Poesis by Douglas Burton-Christie
“Stone by stone it rises, this little house by the sea. Soft, damp sand for mortar, moss for the garden, driftwood for the roof. A tiny stone wall encircles the yard, a path winds toward the front door. I am on my belly working to bring this little dwelling into being. My wife and young daughter work beside me. A breeze from the ocean cools us. We have begun building this miniature house on a whim, but now we are going at it in earnest. We want to make it strong and beautiful. Pausing from time to time to consider our creation, we talk and laugh and exchange stories. We imagine the lives of the inhabitants of this place, how they live, what they care about. A whole cosmos gradually comes into being.
This desire to make things, beautiful things�where does it come from? I do not know. I only know that there is a pleasure, deep and pure, that comes from making something beautiful, from fitting stones into a pattern, laying a floor, creating a garden, making a life. Even if the making is all there is, even if the thing made is ephemeral and not destined to last, there is pleasure and joy in the making. Sometimes, though, our creations do endure. We are able to behold the work and feel it work its magic on us, kindling the imagination, taking us out of ourselves if only for a moment, into another world.”
From: Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2.2 (2002) vii-ix