Two declarations I felt I wanted to make:

My dear wife and boys, my dear boys and wife
I want you to know I love and cherish the three of you
more than anything
and that the most important thing in my world
is to do right by you

__________________________

the world is full
of beauty and splendour
especially
when you surrender
________________________

of course there is terror
along the way
but on the other side
is freedom
vast love
without fear

_________________________

A cost-benefit analysis of the notion of agency

See also the entry on post-personal psychology.

Feeling my way towards a poem - bird on a wing, of Thee I sing

I saw a National Geographic article by Jonathan Franzen on the way songbirds ( to my mind beautiful and largely harmless creatures) are snared shot caged blinded trapped and generally maimed and killed in their millions as they migrate across Europe and Arabia on their way to Africa.

There were several photographs of delicate limbs broken by traps, of the very symbols of freedom, wings in flight, glued helplessly to a twig coated with lime. Besides the theological conundrum this always evokes for me, as do most acts of seemingly wanton destruction (and see my previous post), I needed to try and process the not unfamiliar feelings and responses these pictures evoked. (Pictures courtesy of National Geographic and David Guttenfelder)

Here is one poemlet that came up:

Its only a bird
trapped in a snare
that fills my heart
with bleak despair

but then I start looking for a redemptive way of framing what seems like the end of joy, the cutting down of song, and the human in all its mad destructive aggressive and indifferent nakedness, the human as angel of death and deliverer of suffering, then my poemlets take a different direction: And I am powerless to halt or change all this that goes on before me, after me, beyond my reach. So how does a good G-d allow this? My angles of attack are

a) what is this this? I have no access to the experience of these birds, it is all conjecture and assumption but, if common sense empathy supports the idea that there is pain as I know and dread pain then

b) the pain in those pictures is already past, gone, and as Byron Katie says "the great thing about suffering is that its always in the past" (unless I keep on dragging it back into the present)

c) the hope that pain and suffering are the birthpangs into some great freedom beyond name and form, a birth into invulnerability and eternity. (And I refer you, tangenitally, to David Sedaris's beautiful short piece "the squirell and the chipmunk" which awakens in the heart that great longing for Avinu shebashamayim, tzur Yisrael ve goaloh,  for the rock from which we are hewed.)

I saw a bird that flew
that flew  
I saw its wings ensnared
with glue
I hope by then it knew
it knew
(may this be true)
the spark of life


OR

I saw a bird that flew
that flew  
I saw its wings ensnared
with glue
I hope that then it knew
it knew
that IT was only passing through
may this be true
be true
be true

OR

A bird that soared and sung and flew
was trapped on a twig smeared with glue
I'd feel much better if I knew
that some indweller just passing through
this world of name and form

But here is Hatikva...the hope: a man using his spittle to clean a rescued bird

________________________________

Notes towards...

then there was the falcoln whose eyes were sown up and flew off blind:

they took away your flight
they took away your sight

The G-d Theorem

If it is a given that

a) G-d is everything (in Hebrew ayn od milvado)

and

b) that G-d is good (Ayl rachum vechanun, olam shel chesedyibaneh)

the it follows that every thing that appears to me to be "bad" - for example

sex trafficking
domestic violence
child neglect
cancer and various degenerative diseases
debeaked chickens kept in A4 sized cages in which they cannot move
the human capacity for indifference and disassociation
song birds caught in traps
the Holocauast and prior (the Armenian) and subsequent genocides

is not ultimately bad, and not ultimately real, because they too are are a manifestation of G-d, so in some way they are His/Her angels, His/Her messengers. And the message I must suppose they bring ultimately is no matter how fiercely I cling to my name and form, to tidying up my bedroom, as Mooji puts it, in the end I will be pried loose by chesed to realise that I am that all encompassing being that does not die and is not born.

Essence of Adolescence: At The Rugby Game

Click on the images to enlarge

In The Production Office

For those who have worked in what insiders refer to as "the industry" (said in a knowing and sophisticated insiderish tone of simultaneous deprecation and yet enormous we=know-how-special-we are) here is a small attempt at humour

Muddy(ing the) Waters

Why doesn't Mr Roger Waters take on a more difficult and intractable assignments like Darfur, like the Congo, like Chechnya, like Tibet where Han Chinese have displaced and replaced Tibetans, or Xinjiang province where the same thing is happening with Uighurs, or perhaps become a spokesperson for the Kurds struggle for autonomy, ...all of these protracted issues have quantitatively involved far greater loss of life and liberty than in the disputed territories...is it because Israel is a soft and easy target, and you're guaranteed an instant crowd, or is it because Waters was raised and lives and breaths in a cultural milieu where Jews are always guilty of something, and if no crime of suitable proportions can readily be found then one must be manufactured?

I think Israelis and Palestinians have a better chance of reaching an enduring compromise without Mr Rogers muddying the waters...and that a brave new world can not be built on the mother of all prejudices

It's not every day that a supermodel takes on a rock legend. But today, Bar Refaeli told Roger Waters if he's going to boycott Israel, he'd better take her picture out of his concert art. http://htz.li/19JkaWL

______________

Erdogan's Song:

"How can I stop them looking at me
how can I get away from accountability
how can I distract from my own country's inequity
I need someone to blame
I need someone to shame
quick: call out a name...
Israel: