Black out the erection!

+6:

Bugger protuberance shoved by Politician could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 yeoman old Mask Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scapula politician compacts in organ to black out the erection. OANN I watched, he feminist harder than was pushed. Was aiming scarecrow. Could be a set up?

Lilith chases chickens

Lilith and I were down the hill talking to a family member; we were at the part of Hui Kelu that has the most feral chickens roaming around. Kevin Chang showed up, his head covered by a blue bandana, and told us about two chickens he followed the other day that were literally trying to kill each other. "Like chicken fights without the blades," he said. Then Radhika drove up and stopped to offer us a ride. Lilith got incredibly excited, ran in circles. She'd been eyeing the chickens all along; what she did next was to twist her neck, pivot and back up; she was out of her harness! And she was off, chasing one chicken after another, making sharp turns, leaping over rocks. One chicken flew up in the air, unsteadily, but safe from Lilith, who kept running, farther and farther away . . . with Radhika now chasing after her in jeans. They disappeared behind a townhouse block and I started praying (is that what I saw doing?) that she not run to the nearby highway. As I came around another parking lot area, I saw a cute black rabbit with small ears. Later, I found out the rabbit had been lost, too. Two women pointed back in the direction we'd come, said "a girl is carrying the dog." By the time I got to the car, Radhika had Lilith in the backseat. I joined her and we took the one minute drive home. And that is how Lilith came to be in the living room without her harness, chewing her raw hide as if nothing had happened.

Meditation 67

5 June 2020

The point is not to capture an instant, arrest it, put it in cuffs and haul it to jail; nor is it to push it down to the sidewalk, watching it bleed from the head. Memory ought not be incarceration, but opening. The pronoun can’t afford its abstraction; that was an old man pushed to the ground by a policeman. National Guard troops stand shoulder to shoulder in Lafayette Park, behind fences, shining beams of light at protesters on the other side, not to see them, rather not to be seen by them. There were slave auctions in that park. The incarcerated body remains not in the bronze of a statue, but behind the thin skin of a police line. You can fence out skin, but not the breath.

Meditation 66

3 June 2020

Eating the first poisonous tomatoes of America—frightened on the dock. It’s your 94^th today, Allen; it was in her 94^th year that my mother died, who remembered walking the docks of New York, watching war brides come off Liberty ships, noting their farm-girl incongruities with mothers-in-law dressed to the nines, who wandered the corridors of Arden Courts with such purpose until the falls and the pneumonia installed her in a comfy chair in front of a loud television, who'd begun dying nine years ago and kept on dying until the 14^th of June. Someone came to the door and I said, “not now, my mother’s dying.” Her breath came in saccades, and then it stopped. She wasn’t carrying her body but was held by it, and the bones of her thumbs stopped grazing across her narrow hands, every ounce of her energy devoting itself to the end of being. That is my path, a woman said after meditation; the slogan popped into her head. You came to Charlottesville, Allen, in the 1980s, installed yourself on stage in a comfy high-backed chair, a stack of books on a three-legged table beside you, maybe even a cup of tea, declaiming about Pound’s prosody while we gazed down from our wooden seats. Far from Naomi mad on her toilet, or my mother breathing hard on her single bed, far from her home on Lee Jackson Highway near the NRA, the road I never found on the first try. Your cake will be baked in the shape of the Pentagon, which can only be levitated these days with the help of financial advisers. Soldiers stood in formation across the Lincoln Memorial steps yesterday, row upon row of them like unlit candles, so Lincoln couldn’t get off his chair to protest his incarceration. Only the flash of existence, then tear gas rolls down avenues like a mighty stream. 

--Quoted language from "Kaddish"

Lilith scores a pomelo

Lilith and I crossed paths with an old man, white hair pulled back in a pony tail of sorts, who was walking an unidentifiable hound. My guess is that he was Hawaiian Chinese. He started to cross the road, stopped, asked if my dog were male or female. I said female and he came back to our side of the street. Lilith and Milo sniffed and inspected each other, while the man and I began to talk. He said he lives up Ahuimanu Road, farms ten acres up in Kahuku (after ten years, too many weeds now, he grumbled). The dog found him. He and his wife have three cats, but the original female who was queen of the house, gives the newer female cat a very hard time. "Oh Barack," he said, looking at my "Obama 2008, Hawai`i" shirt. I said I'd been watching a live stream from DC of protests (he'd guessed I was watching MSNBC). He'd lived in Philly and traveled a lot to DC in the 1955s in the service. Went to college in North Dakota. So many different people in Miami, it was as if the rest of the US kind of spilled down into it. The US is full of so many kinds of people, he said. LIke groups of animals, he said. He asked what I teach at UH, and I said English. His face contorted a bit behind his big glasses. "Oh, local boys and grammar." Language is much more than grammar, I said. He'd taught at Kahuku for many years, was a high school counselor, even coached the football team. That was how he bonded with the boys. He pointed to his forehead, said "St. Louis," because I was wearing my scruffy Cards cap. Started talking about football, but I pointed out this was the baseball team. (He was wearing a yellow sleeveless teeshirt with baseball bat logo and something indicating he was an over 70 player.) "You remember Stan Musial?" Not really, but Gibson, Flood, Brock, I do. "Oh, the generation after--great team!" Lilith barked at a woman who walked by. She then turned in the direction we'd been walking, and Paul (he was) took that as a sign. I went downhill and he up. Some 50 feet later, I hear "Susan!" and turn to see him heading for an old SUV parked near where Lilith and I are standing, she sniffing. He disappeared behind the driver's side of the car, came back with a large round piece of fruit. Asked me if I knew what it was, and I failed the quiz. Said, "it's a pomelo. Like grapefruit, but better. Don't eat it if you take heart medicine." I thanked him, he got in the SUV and Lilith and I continued down the road. We soon turned back, because pomelo.

Sutta for these days

Sutta passage from yesterday's Volcano meditation group, shared by Mary Grace Orr:


"Others will kill. We shall not kill. Thus we should direct our hearts.

Others will be cruel. We shall not be cruel. Thus should we direct our hearts.

Others will speak falsely. We will speak what is true. Thus we should direct our hearts.

Others will be fraudulent. We shall not be fraudulent. Thus we should direct our hearts.

Others will be hateful. We shall become loving. Thus we shall direct our hearts.

Others will be unwise. We shall become wise. Thus we shall direct our hearts." 

May we carry these intentions with courage, as a beacon and a medicine, as a blessing to all we touch.

Meditation 65

1 June 2020

The dead man’s brother breathes grief in, sucking air and expelling it through his mask. On the right, “I can’t breathe”; on the left, “Justice." Everyone takes photos, even masked photographers as they take their knees, or chests. We take a knee, we bend it, we offer it. The officer’s knee was a perversion, his blank face a mask with nothing on it. The dead man’s brother kneels beside the curb where his brother died. He wears a Yankees cap, lives in Brooklyn. A minister lays reassuring hands on his back, his neck. Grief as the inversion of a particular violence. They are a peaceful family, he says. He loved this place; don't burn it down. The president hides in a bunker beneath the White House. There was a bicycle in the bonfire across the street. A white girl rushed out to kneel with a young black man. As the police advanced she put her body between him, their shields and batons. This is time sensitive, but not in exact chronology. Trauma’s time makes an altered sense, like collage, except it keeps falling apart. Too humid for such glue. Elements don’t cohere into proper equations, or chapters in a book. If you don’t let us grieve our dead, we can’t get six feet away. There are no ventilators on the streets to breathe for us. Americans refuse to mourn their bad history; this is the problem entire, a historian argues. I can’t remember her name or her book. A man calls out “say his name!” and those in the circle filled with flowers and peace signs call it out. Breathe in his pain, breathe out love for the broken world he left behind. Watch his brother stand inside the circle, then exit its embrace.

--in memory of George Floyd