Musings

                                                           

                               :::on knowledge and half-knowledge:::

Four frogs sat upon a log that lay floating on the edge of a river. Suddenly the log was caught by the current and swept slowly down the stream. The frogs were delighted and absorbed, for never before had they sailed.

At length the first frog spoke, and said, "This is indeed a most marvelous log. It moves as if alive. No such log was ever known before."

Then the second frog spoke, and said, "Nay, my friend, the log is like other logs, and does not move. It is the river, that is walking to the sea, and carries us and the log with it."

And the third frog spoke, and said, " It is neither the log nor the river that moves. The moving is in our thinking. For without thought nothing moves."

And the three frogs began to wrangle about what was really moving. The quarrel grew hotter and louder, but they could not agree.

Then they turned to the fourth frog, who up to this time had been listening attentively but holding his peace, and they asked his opinion.

And the fourth frog said, "Each of you is right, and none of you is wrong. The moving is in the log and the water and our thinking also."

And the three frogs became very angry, for none of them was willing to admit that his was not the whole truth, and that the other two were not wholly wrong.

Then the strange thing happened. The three frogs got together and pushed the fourth frog off the log into the river.

~ Kahlil Gibran from Poems, Parables and Drawings~

OneLove

:::MME:::

A Smile Is A Curve (...that sets everything straight..)

OneLove


:::MME:::

The Slow-Jammin Prez

We can debate 'til the break of dawn about President Obama - or about presidential politics, in general - but you have to admit, he knows how to deliver a message! The GOP had better come up with some dazzling footwork & impressive smoke screens if they want the White House. Look out for Romney doing the jitterbug in a zoot suit on Dancing With The Stars! Ah yes.....

OneLove

:::MME::: 

Musings

It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land~~~Sitting Bull 

OneLove

:::MME:::

Her Father's Daughter: Donny & Lalah

There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself ~John Gregory Brown 

 Have a blessed Sunday, y'all.


OneLove


:::MME:::
 

Poet's Nook: "Kindness" by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

(from Words From Under the Words: Selected Poems...dedicated to her daughter)

OneLove


::::MME::::

Poet's Nook: "An African Elegy " by Ben Okri

 

 

 

 

We are the miracles that God made
To taste the bitter fruit of Time.
We are precious.
And one day our suffering
Will turn into the wonders of the earth.

 

There are things that burn me now
Which turn golden when I am happy.
Do you see the mystery of our pain?
That we bear the poverty
And are able to sing and dream sweet things.

 

And that we never curse the air when it is warm
Or the fruit when it tastes so good
Or the lights that bounce gently on the waters?
We bless the things even in our pain.
We bless them in silence.

 

That is why our music is so sweet.
It makes the air remember.
There are secret miracles at work
That only Time will bring forth.
I too have heard the dead singing.

 

And they tell me that
This life is good
They tell me to live it gently
With fire, and always with hope.
There is wonder here

 

And there is surprise
In everything the unseen moves.
The ocean is full of songs.
The sky is not an enemy.
Destiny is our friend.

 

Killing In Our Name

(....and you have the gall to ask, "Why do they hate us?" You have no idea.....)


OneLove


:::MME:::

Poet's Nook: "Walker" by Antonio Machado

Walker, your footsteps

are the road, and nothing more.

Walker, there is no road,

The road is made by walking.

Walking you make the road,

and turning to look behind

you see the path you never

again will step upon.

Walker, there is no road,

only foam trails on the sea.

~ Antonio Machado ~ (Border of a Dream: Selected Poems) 

OneLove

::::MME::::

MME's Jam Of The Day

Wicked remix of a Bob Marley classic!


Look out for Marley: The Movie on 4/20/12....






OneLove


:::MME:::

Musings

(This interview of Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef is downright chilling as he predicted the 2008 financial collapse but more alarmingly, predicts something way more catastrophic......)


OneLove


:::MME:::

Breaking the Chains of Modernity: Reimagining Old Ways of Life and Death by Dustin Craun.

The philosophical and spiritual problems of our age are so great that what our time calls for are new manifestos of knowledge and being. We need a kind of spiritual change that exceeds the political. Unfortunately most of us in the Westernized world spend more time trying to escape from ourselves (sex, shopping, addiction, fashion, entertainment, success), than we ever spend reflecting on the state of our existence, our heart or our soul. We are people driven by our desires: desires which destroy our hearts and any ability to have a connection to the greater spiritual realities that are all around us. As the Qur’an says, “God does not change the condition of a people, until they change their own condition.”  




In the classic decolonial manifesto, Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire described Western life as a poison infecting the planet. Césaire wrote that to understand our existence, “First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.” For Césaire, “a gangrene has set in … a center of infection has begun to spread …” The poison Cesaire warned of is a philosophical and spiritual poison that infects each of us today. 


In the American Indian scholar Vine Deloria Jr’s final book, The World We Used to Live In, he writes: “The secularity of the society in which we live must share considerable blame in the erosion of spiritual powers of all traditions, since our society has become a parody of social interaction lacking even an aspect of civility. Believing in nothing, we have preempted the role of the higher spiritual forces by acknowledging no greater good than what we can feel and touch.” The de-sacralization of the self and our lifeworlds is leaving our spiritual hearts dead. 


To save ourselves, to avert catastrophe, we need to make what Walter Mignolo calls an “epistemic geopolitical move.” That demands a form of critique that is deeply engaged in what is known in Arabic as muhasabah, or self-examination, on three levels: examination of the self and one’s spiritual state; an examination of the dominant hierarchies that we all interact with such as gender, race, class, sexuality, and religious domination; and finally an examination of one’s local knowledge and the place from which critique is emanating. In recentering on the sacred in this process of self-examination, we can learn from Chicana feminists and the emerging idea of “decolonial love.


Laura Pérez, UC Berkeley Professor of Ethnic Studies, connects “decolonial love” to the Mayan principle of In’Laketch: tu eres mi otro yo (you are my other me). Pérez explains that “not only are we interwoven, we are one. I am you and you are me. To harm another is thus to literally harm one’s own being. This is a basic spiritual law in numerous traditions.” This shift in the geopolitics of knowledge involves a turn away from Descartes and Western modernity’s centering of human consciousness in the mind, to a recentering of consciousness in the spiritual heart (qalb). This idea of a heart centered knowledge is central to many spiritual traditions including Christianity, Buddhism and Islam, and is echoed by Subcommandate Marcos and the Zapatista adage to center politics below and to the left, where the heart is in Aztec and Mayan cosmology.

Similar to Gloria Anzaldua’s concept La Facultad, a form of inner knowledge, is the Islamic concept of Al Basira, the eye of the heart, which is the center of spiritual perception if properly developed. As the great Mystic philosopher Al-Ghazali put it in his masterwork of the inner sciences of Islam, Ihya’ ulum al-din, “Creation refers to the external, and character to the internal, form. Now, the human is composed of a body which perceives with ocular vision (basar) and a spirit (ruh) and a soul (nafs) which perceive with inner sight (basira). Each of these things has an aspect and a form which is either ugly or beautiful. Furthermore, the soul which perceives with inner sight (basira) is of greater worth than the body which sees with ocular vision.” In seeing with the eye of our heart we can begin to differentiate between form and meaning, as the outward forms of things are not always their internal and spiritual reality.

The vision of our hearts has become blinded by the poison of base materialism. In the verse poetry of the early female Sufi saint, Rabi’a al-Adawiyya: “O children of Nothing! Truth can’t come in through your eyes, Nor can speech go out through your mouth to find [God], Hearing leads the speaker down the road to anxiety, And if you follow your hands and feet you will arrive at confusion. The real work is in the Heart: Wake up your Heart! Because when the Heart is completely awake, Then it needs no Friend.


To break from the chains of modernity, we must learn both from philosophers of decoloniality and the spiritual sciences. Ultimately, we must walk down the path of love, to see each other in the divine light we were born into. As the great mystic philosopher Ibn Arabi said, “I believe in the religion of love, whatever direction its caravans may take, for love is my religion and my faith.”

(Dustin Craun is a writer, educator and community organizer who lives in Berkeley, California. This essay is excerpted from his forthcoming book titled Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World. )

Bob Marley On Loving A Woman

 

 “You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She’s not perfect - you aren’t either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can break - her heart. So don’t hurt her, don’t change her, don’t analyze and don’t expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she’s not there.”

- Bob Marley

 

OneLove

 

:::MME:::

Poet's Nook: "Lost Count: A Love Story" by Nate Marshall and Demetrius Amparan

Devastating power..... 

OneLove

 :::MME:::

Musings

OneLove


:::MME:::

The Education Of Tracy McGrady

This is quite an inspiring documentary of one man's journey to one of the planet's most miserable & dangerous hotspots - Darfur. You have to give NBA star Tracy McGrady a lot of credit for venturing outside of his very luxurious & secure comfort zone to a place in dire need of help. Despite the stereotypes, there are many NBA players who care a lot about what is happening in the world & use their wealth and influence to make a difference in people's lives no matter where they are. I particularly liked this documentary as you can see how Tracy's experience in Darfur affected him - his transformation towards the end is clearly evident. A must-see for the children especially.


OneLove


:::MME:::

The New Jim Crow

(See The Sentencing Project)


Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance (Will Durant)



Onelove


:::MME:::

10 Lessons from Einstein

1. Follow Your Curiosity: “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

2. Perseverance is Priceless: “It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

3. Focus on the Present: “Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.”

4. The Imagination is Powerful: “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions. Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

5. Make Mistakes: “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

6. Live in the Moment: “I never think of the future – it comes soon enough.”

7. Create Value: “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”

8. Don’t be repetitive: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

9. Knowledge Comes From Experience: “Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.”

10. Learn the Rules and Then Play Better: “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.” 

-by Paulo Coelho

OneLove

::::MME::::

Musings

  

   "Only after the last tree has been cut down.
    Only after the last river has been poisoned.
    Only after the last fish has been caught.
    Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten."

- Cree Indian Prophecy

OneLove

::::MME::::