I was leaving for a meditation workshop just as my daughter called yesterday to tell me to put on CNN. The space shuttle had crashed. I called my son b!X, but he was already up and posting.
The meditation workshop included an exercise with a labyrinth, followed by time to write. So I wrote.
Walking the Labyrinth
I remember being able to move with grace.
But not now.
I remember feeling an open heart.
But it is not now.
I yearn to find again the Now,
to let go of what I am holding,
so hard in the shadows of my heart.
The shuttle explodes, bodies shatter,
and still babies nurse
and the old wake to wonder at a new day.
I remember wonder.
I remember that it is the journey I always loved.
The surprises around corners.
No hurry. No hurry.
Don

“A perfect day for a landing,” the news person on CNN-TV says.
How fragile our lives really are. Such a terrible tragedy! Seven lives lost and their families devastated. I hope our country’s leaders are deeply bothered by the fact that war would ratchet up that loss many thousandfolds — creating a much, much, greater tragedy.
In his announcement of the space shuttle tragedy, Bush winds up putting a major religious spin on his statement. Another tragedy for those of us religious non-believers who believe strongly that our secular leaders should refrain from insinuating their theism into their roles as government spokespeople.
It’s also a tragedy that more religious leaders — and purportedly religious government leaders — don’t share Andrew Greeley’s perspective:
It is also contended that a democratic regime in Iraq would open up the possibility for other democratic governments in the Arab world. Once cannot imagine a more absurd notion…
It may well be that Western style democracy is incompatible with Arab culture. Certainly an American style democracy imposed by force of arms in Iraq is not going to persuade Arabs that they should try to imitate such a regime….
One assembles all of these reasons, overt and covert, for war, considers them together and discovers that they are as thin a tissue paper…..
Many of these young men and women we have seen bidding tearful farewlls to their families certainly will die — thousands perhaps tens of thousands of them. Many Iraqs will die too, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Our leaders will be condemned all over the world as war criminals — which they sure would seem to be.
And a final tragedy cited today by Molly Ivins:
The U.S. now ranks 17th, below Costa Rica and Slovenia, on the worldwide index of press freedom established by the Reporters Withough Borders.
Why would any other country want to replicate the kind of corporate-sponsored non-democracy that we have here today in America?

Earlier this week, I got an email forwarded to me by a friend of mine who is a member of the National Association for Poetry Therapy.
The original email sent by Sam Hamill, a poet and editor of the highly regarded Copper Canyon Press, asked that every poet speak up for the conscience of our country and lend his or her name to our petition against this war, and to make February 12 a day of Poetry Against the War. We will compile an anthology of protest to be presented to the White House on that afternoon. Read about the history of the effort here. And if you want to submit a poem or statement of conscience, email it to kokua@olympus.net. I already did.
According to today

There is so much compelling and thoughtful stuff about our national crisis being written out there! For example:
This from a NY Times article by Bob Herbert —
President Bush has learned how to deliver a moving speech. But Tuesday night’s State of the Union Message did not address the most important question facing the American people: What kind of nation are we becoming?
The president spoke passionately about bringing “food and medicines and supplies and freedom” to the Iraqi people. But he is leading a hard-right administration here at home that is seriously eroding the economic security, the access to health care, the civil rights and civil liberties and the environmental protections of the American people….
The Bush administration is changing the nation in fundamental ways. However one feels about a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, over the long term a bullying, go-it-alone foreign policy wedded to a military doctrine of pre-emption is a recipe for destabilization and paranoia around the world.
This, by Gunter Grass in The Guardian: (this was sent to me in an email from a poetry therapy list; I haven’t found a link yet, but I’m trying.)
This looming war is a wanted war. It is already going on in the heads of the planners, in the world’s stock exchanges, and in what seem to be forward-dated TV programmes. The enemy target is in the sights. He has been named and – along with other enemies on the stocks who will be targeted and named next – he fits the bill for those who want to conjure a danger so grim that it undermines careful reflection.
We know how people create enemies where none exists. We know, and have plenty of pictures to illustrate it, what happens in war when the target is not quite hit. We are familiar with the words for damage and casualties which we are told to accept as inevitable. We are used to the relatively small number of its own dead that the world’s number one ruling power has to count and mourn while the mass of enemy dead, including women and children, go uncounted and are not worth mourning.
So now we wait for the new war and the old repetitions. This time new missile systems will be even more accurate. We can be confident about the choice of pictures from this looming war. The flow of images will be sanitised of every detail of horror. Familiar TV channels will be there to give us a new installment of war as soap opera, interrupted only by ads for consumers who are living happily in peace.
I need to fix a skirt for my mother. I really need to go out and walk in the sun. I need to see and cuddle my grandson. I need to start doing exercises for my bad back. At the least, I need to do the dishes in the sink since yesterday. Instead, I read what others are writing about my country’s slide into darkness, and I want to go back to bed.

I watched Bush

I agree with Tribune Media columnist Matthew Miller that

This is an old photograph/postcard of a “witches” coven at the Home of the Aged in Norfolk, England.
Today I spent a few hours in an expressive arts workshop given by a friend of mine. In addition to doing some yoga stretches, freeform movement, and meditation, we were asked to choose a photo/postcard from among dozens laid out on the floor — one that appealed to us for whatever reason, and get into it emotionally. I picked the one above.
Then we were asked to take sheets of paper and crayons and either write or draw what we were feeling. This is what I drew.

I loved these old, wrinkled women, having tea together outside, where everyone can see them, pointed black hats giving fingers to the rest of the world that thinks they’re weird hags, dressed in funny clothes. But they know better, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of them. They have each other to laugh and remember with, and their afternoon teas in the sun.
But, since I’m not there yet, at the suggestions of my Commenters to the post below, I’m going to check out 90-year-old Caleb.

Jennifer Balderama posts this ee cummings quote:
Stolen wisdom: to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
I saw the movie

Robert Jensen, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, offers one of the best analyses I’ve seen on cultural violence in his essay in the online journal, Feminista. It’s worth linking over to and reading.
Blow Bangs and Cluster Bombs: The Cruelty of Men and Americans makes the connection between pornography and war, explaining that “Pornography and the wars of the U.S. empire both depend for their success on the process of rendering human beings less-than-fully-human so they can be hurt — in the case of pornography to provide pleasure for men, and in war to protect the comfort of Americans.”
Jensen is a member of the Nowar Collective, author of the book Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream, and co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality.
His pamphlet, “Citizens of the Empire,” is available at
http://www.nowarcollective.com/citizensoftheempire.pdf.
Other writings are available online at
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/freelance.htm.
He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.