Visiting an Art Guru

Releasing the Attachment to Suffering

Anatta is the Buddhist doctrine of  “no-self,” meaning there is no permanent, unchanging soul or essence in any living being or phenomenon. 

Instead, the self is a constantly changing composite of physical and mental processes called the five aggregates. 

The individual is seen as a collection of five constantly changing components: form, feeling, perception, mental formations (volitions) and consciousness.

The concept of anatta is one of the three characteristics of existence, along with impermanence (anicca) and suffering (dukkha). Understanding anatta is considered crucial for ending suffering by releasing the attachment that arises from believing in a fixed self. 

 (Ai summary)

The River Knows

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them -- that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

— Lao Tzu

Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Right Idea

"Ahimsa means 'non-violence' or 'non-harming,' and it is a core principle in religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It extends beyond physical violence to encompass harm through thoughts, words, and intentions, promoting compassion, kindness, and respect for all living beings. Practicing ahimsa involves being mindful of one's actions, speech, and even internal thoughts, as they can all cause harm."

Real Luxury in a World Opposed to It

The Dark Side of Mental Advancement

The Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book,  Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, is always on my coffee table. It offers great practical advice on recentering your mind and reenergizing your life.

Lured by Fox News

I always knew if Fox News was permitted to get away with it, without being exposed, our society would have had it.

Fox News, the Voice that Destroyed America

Fox News has been softening us up for fascist totalitarianism for a quarter of a century now. They’ve left the American electorate punch-drunk.

The Fox News “journalistic principle” is a simple one: everything the Democrats do is wrong, and nothing the Republicans do is wrong (even when it's the same thing).

Listen for when Fox News spokesmodels utter the phrase, "Some say." It will be followed by whatever propaganda lie they have been instructed to push today.

It is news media misinformation, spearheaded by Fox News, that has done the country in.

For Pete's Sake, Not Another Damn Rapture!

This must be the 57th Rapture I've been through.

Sigh. Just Sigh.

A road sign on the path to the slow, agonzing death of critical thinking in this country.

Kenshō Series: Bancroft

Kenshō Series: Hetherington

Kenshō — a Japanese Zen Buddhist term meaning “seeing nature” or “true essence” — refers to an initial, sudden glimpse or insight into one’s true nature, ultimate reality or the absolute. The experience is a temporary psychological state, a moment of awakening that signifies a fundamental shift in perception and understanding of oneself in the world. Kenshō is said to be not full enlightenment, but rather a critical first awakening that serves as a starting point for further training and integration of this understanding into daily life. “Kenshō” is often used interchangeably with “satori.”

That's 'Kill' as in 'Kilmeade'

Fox News has been softening us up for fascist totalitarianism for a quarter of a century now. They’ve left the American electorate punch-drunk.

So Shall Ye Reap

And empathy is, of course, the basis of morality.

Btw, it isn't “assassination culture” at work here, Washington Post headline writers. 

It’s gun culture.

In other news, we've had 46 school shootings so far this year in the U.S.

Oh, wait, that's not news any more, is it? Too common.

As Jim McNutt observed, “I see a lot of outrage over a shooting today. Where are your posts asking for prayers for the kids murdered in school today? Oh yeah, I forgot, that's just ‘the cost of the 2nd amendment.’”

Access to guns everywhere at all times now gives Americans the freedom to murder each other over political crack-pottery, childhood curiosity, too many drinks at the bar, not getting laid enough and the last parking space. The color of freedom is innocent red, and you can see it swirling down the street gutters.

Blame Those Who Refused to See

The perpetually surprised "both-sider civility" crowd effectively runs intellectual interference for the fascists. It sprays out the fog through which they attack.

Ah, the Aubergine

The deep blue-black flesh

of the eggplant glows warmly

when caressed by light.

Lighting the Lamp

“We have a lamp inside us, the lamp of mindfulness, which we can light anytime. The oil of that lamp is our breathing, our steps and our peaceful smile. When this lamp is lit, darkness disappears. Our practice is to keep it shining.”

― Thich Nhat Hanh, Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child

The Fourth Time’s the Charm

The fourth time’s the charm for Marvel Comics’ flagship super-team.

Fantastic Four: First Steps is in fact Hollywood’s fourth iteration of the FF (the first, produced by Roger Corman, was never even released). Lovingly directed by Matt Shakman and set in the retro-futuristic mid-century modern Manhattan of the 1960s, it’s the most satisfactory of the lot. There’s always something interesting to look at in this movie.

The summer’s other superhero blockbuster, James Gunn’s Superman, begins in the middle of the action, but this film takes a surprisingly leisurely approach to re-introducing us to these characters, presented as world-famous celebrities beloved by the public because they’ve already thwarted a string of bizarre menaces that threatened New York.

They are Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, respectively Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch and the Thing (names that are rarely mentioned during the film). Playing against type, the Thing is the most sensitive of the Four. Moss-Bachrach brings an understated charm to his role that I’d like to have seen more of, but the planet Earth has to be saved, after all. 

And the threat from the gigantic, cosmic, world-devouring Galactus is particularly overwhelming. The Fantastic Four’s super powers are as nothing against it, and the situation confronts the team with a horrible moral dilemma.

Galactus is heralded by the Silver Surfer, a character who has been pointlessly gender-switched. Nevertheless, Julia Garner gives one of the best of the several good performances in the movie — as coldly alien as her shiny metal skin. 

Pedro Pascal hits just the right note as Reed Richards, the noble, worried super-genius who, admittedly, has a lot to worry about. 

I have to think that, if I had seen these Superman and FF movies as a child, I’d have fainted dead away with delight.

As in the Superman movie, these characters are pretty faithful to their comic book versions. And again as in Superman, the actors worked hard to make these characters real — not an easy task with such childish source material. But the actors do not condescend to their characters.

One great actor we don’t see in the movie is John Malkovich, who played the intangible Russian villain the Red Ghost. But his performance was cut. 

Poor Malkovich has had bad luck with Marvel movies. He was to have played the Vulture in Spider-Man 4, but that film was never made.

Fox News vs. Superman

The scripted Republican attacks on Superman 2025 don’t seem to be working. It’s cleaning up at the box office.

“He’s creating a moat of woke, enlightened opinion around him. He’s got a woke shield,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld whined as an on-screen graphic proclaimed that the “Superwoke” movie embraced “pro-immigrant themes.”

Fox News has always peddled such ugly fascist trash propaganda aimed at destroying empathy and decency. Previously, Fox News called Captain America, Wonder Woman and Superman “un-American,” while describing the children’s gentle champion Fred Rogers as “evil.”

In its constant quest to gaslight its willing victims, Fox News uses panic mongering, character assassination and ad hominem arguments, psychological projection and flipping, the rewriting of history, scapegoating, conflation of violence with power, bullying, confusion, populism, invocation of the Christian God, saturation, the disparagement of education, guilt by association and diversion. 

Fox News’s most basic propaganda technique is simply to lie about facts, and it does so constantly.

Fox News is where Phineas Taylor Barnum meets Paul Joseph Goebbels.

Someone to Look Up At (and To)

In 2013, Zack Snyder gave us a Pa Kent who seriously suggested that maybe Superman should just let children die. 

But as repellent as that moral viewpoint was, it was in keeping with the amoral American zeitgeist that has come to a boil in the 21st century.

After all, we once regarded Lord of the Flies as a horror story. But by 2013 we were treating it as comedy on Survivor, a long-running hit “reality” show designed to teach the value of deception, con-artistry and personal betrayal. Children raised on nothing but Hollywood's product might well be forgiven if they thought the two most popular professions in America were “assassin” and “prostitute.”

And in 2013, Americans were only a couple of years away from installing Donald Trump — a man who epitomizes utter indifference to suffering — into the Oval Office.

Superhero comics were born with an inherent optimism, as colorfully costumed exuberant rescue fantasies. It’s no surprise that they would be “out of step” in an era where cynicism, greed and even torture can be celebrated.

Superheroes were essentially super powers plus moral exemplars. The current corrupt culture seems determined to lose the latter, leaving us with a bunch of super-powered biker gangs cutting each other to pieces for our “amusement.” No thanks.

And thankfully, director James Gunn has joined us in that “no thanks.” His Superman 2025 is a bright, shiny answer to nihilism.

I always had every confidence that Gunn could pull this off, because he had already taken an obscure Marvel property that no one cared about — the Guardians of the Galaxy — and infused it with fun, adventure and heart, making it a major financial juggernaut for Marvel. 

Gunn is as truly as masterful a storyteller as Frank Capra, and that’s something Hollywood is woefully short of these days. He understands that Superman is really more about rescue than crimefighting, more about heart than anger.

David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult are, simply, perfectly cast as Superman, Lois and Luthor. The story rockets right along, comic-booky from the first moments. Yet the complicated moral implications of Superman’s do-gooderdom are considered, and his relationship with Lois has a realistic and appealing vibe. 

Hoult’s frighteningly evil Luthor has understandable, if completely wrong, motives. And Krypto the lovable Superdog is not just cutesy-pie, but made integral to the story.

Over and over again, Superman is placed in extreme, chair-gripping peril, and that’s not something that’s easy for storytellers to do.

“Gunn describes his take as ‘a story about kindness,’ which sounds simple until you remember how little space our culture makes for that word without irony,” wrote Charlene Badasie. “Kindness is only cool in hashtag form, while those with pure intentions are accused of being naïve or performative. But Gunn seems willing to push back against that cynicism by building a story around a man (who just happens to be an alien immigrant) navigating the messy, uncertain work of caring.”

“If Gunn sticks the landing, this version of Superman could reflect who we are becoming – not just what we’ve survived. We’re weary, distrustful of dominance, and starving for connection. We don’t want gods. We want people who fail and keep going. So this Superman might just meet us where we are. Gunn calls him ‘a kind person in a world that thinks kindness is old-fashioned.’ And in a culture built on sarcasm and self-defense, a Superman who chooses kindness anyway might just be the most radical one we’ve seen.”

Gunn underlines the fact that Superman’s fundamental kindness is out of step with our world. But let’s face it, it has been for 87 years. And that’s why, in the hands of the right storyteller, Superman is always relevant.

Irritation Into Intention and Interest

Your irritation,

if wisely invested, can

yield to interest.

Fascism on the 4th

Masked secret police are kidnapping people on American streets. Happy 4th of July!

Very Alert, Very Still

“Life isn’t ‘about’ air raids, swamis, love affairs, places, deeds done or undone — those are only the shapes of the letters in which the message is written. To read the message, that’s all that matters. But how? By being very alert, very still. By holding your breath and listening, always, everywhere, in the midst of this earsplitting uproar.”

— Christopher Isherwood’s diary, Sept. 20, 1944

The Tousled Green Crowd

The tousled green crowd

of a tree enjoys its bath

in wind, not water.

The Four Faces of a Single Man

 “I did get the conception clear which Gerald often speaks of — of looking over the Ego’s shoulder while it’s jumping about.

“Useful to think of that part of my will which wants this way of life as a research worker, fallible but serious-minded. The research worker has to share his study with Maggie, his lisping, cute little daughter; Grandfather Chips, his miserly, selfish old parent; and Libido, an immense gorilla who, when aroused, can be really dangerous, but who spends most of his time snarling, or bolting his food, or snoring, or nastily playing with himself. 

“The research worker tries to concentrate, while Maggie dances about, prattling of her exploits, and Grandfather Chips fusses over his money and plans to get more. Sometimes he has to intervene to restrain the gorilla, who is apt to smash up all the furniture, and overturn the work bench with his apparatus…”

“Remember, every word spoken to another human being is spoken in the presence of these four. They all hear it, and make a note of the information, privately planning to use it for their own purposes, when the opportunity offers.”

— Christopher Isherwood’s diary, July 16, 1941

Knowing It's a Wave

“In Dharma, we learn to observe the mind.

We do not follow every wave. we feel it rise, know it’s a wave, and let it pass.

Anger, fear, longing, none of them define you.

They visit. And you breathe.

This is freedom from impulse. This is right mindfulness.”

— Mark Nicholls

How the Ruthless Rich Underestimated their Idiot

“In ditching democracy for autocracy, (the billionaires) underestimated the autocrat. If you’ve created a trillion-dollar business, you might naturally think of Trump the serial bankrupt as merely a cartoon capitalist. You can recognize, and bow down to, Trump’s political genius while imagining that it is merely an exercise in branding, a big Trump sign placed over the door of a tower that’s actually owned by you and your confreres. Since everything else about Trump is an act, you can assume that he doesn’t really believe that he alone can will into existence a radically reshaped American capitalism. Surely he does not imagine that a single crude weapon — a blunderbuss of tariffs on all imports — will undo the effects of decades of economic globalization?

“But he does. He has been absolutely consistent over nearly five decades in his conviction that American capitalism is an ideal system that will work perfectly once there is a leader strong enough to stop foreigners from rigging it. That leader, of course, is his indispensable self. America’s destiny will unfold from his instincts and impulses, so long as they are unchecked by democratic processes or the petty rationalism of evidence-based decision-making.

“If capitalism is to be made personal, it would be a good idea to begin by understanding the person who is going to embody it. There is a reason Western capitalism ditched absolute monarchy: personal rule is rule by whim, prejudice, grudge, and tantrum. There are always opportunists who make money from chaos, and they will batten on the spoils of Trump’s bedlam. But capitalism as a system abhors uncertainty. Its beneficiaries are now ruefully remembering, far too late, that science, intellectual freedom, international cooperation, and social stability create wealth — and that giving untrammeled power to an autocrat bent on obliterating all of those things is a very efficient way to squander it.”

— Fintan O’Toole, the New York Review of Books

'Thunderbolts:' A Bolt to Cure the Blues

I’d intended to skip Marvel’s Thunderbolts, having been disappointed in several of Marvel’s lackluster movie efforts since the pinnacle that was the Avengers saga. But I went this afternoon and I’m glad I did. 

It’s terrific.

What we have here is a collection of super ne’er-do-wells under the command of winsomely evil CIA director Julia Louis-Dreyfus — until they become “inconvenient.” These broken and hunted “superheroes” must band together to face an overwhelmingly powerful being and a Jungian apocalypse that is swallowing Manhattan. 

Thunderbolts has well-paced action, wit, deadly dangers and heart-tugging heroics — just the ingredients one wants in a well-made superhero movie. 

Marvel’s comic book Thunderbolts were created in 1997 by Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley, and while this bunch of characters is different, they retain the same unlikely-hero, against-the-0dds appeal. 

They have a sort of Guardians of the Galaxy vibe without being in any way imitative. Some deft, convincing screenwriting and direction has placed their humanity in the dramatic forefront of their super-humanity.

The Tools of Totalitarian Dominance

“ ‘(Totalitarianism) bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.’ Chronic unemployment, inflation and punitive taxation, the debasement or suppression of a public forum for action and debate, the dislocation that comes from moving from nation to nation or job to job, the imposed inconsequence of innocence and guilt, in groups and out groups, the threat of terror — all tools of totalitarian dominance — seem to prepare victims and bullies alike to undervalue their lives.”

— Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times by Anne C. Heller

Rumi and Rumination

TO BROOD is to wander through a grove

where one sheep strays

and a hundred wolves follow.

Why did I make brooding my vocation

when awe was an option?

Thought spinner,

mull the wine of wonder.

— Rumi (Sept. 30, 1207-Dec. 17, 1273)

I Am a Tree

I eat the sun, I drink the light.

I am a conjurer. My sugar is self-sacrifice.

I cut my arm to feed my leg.

I am waiting for nothing, needing for nothing. I am an army, I am the mother of them all,

I can regenerate.

I clone a nation from my foot.

I am a country of one.

I am a family; I am a household.

I have skin and I can bruise and I can bleed, and I can cry. I make my friends. We are connected.

We are inseparable. We grow intertwined.

We share the sky, we are agreed.

I can give, and I can care for.

I’ve got other mouths to feed.

They need me.

I am a tree. I know secrets that you will never know. I channel lighting. I see in color.

I make the air you need to grow.

I’m not a man, I’m not a woman. Surprisingly I’m both.

And when I know that I must die

I put the best of me back into the ground. I stretch for miles and miles and miles. And let’s not forget my leaves:

Clouds of green.

— Majel Connery

Endings and Improv

“Fifty years earlier, in a state of agitated anxiety, he had told an interviewer, ‘I don’t care about being forgotten. I fear getting to the end of my life and feeling I’ve wasted it. I don’t want to get to the end and think I haven’t tasted enough and touched other people enough and had a good enough time,’” wrote Mark Harris in his superb biography: Mike Nichols — A Life.

“In old age, that fear had vanished. All of his desperate urgency had given way to a serenity he had taken a lifetime to find. At one of his favorite restaurants, he had lunch with a friend whose son was about to go out on his own; he was looking for some advice he could share. Did he have any wisdom he could offer?

“He thought for a moment.

“’Well,’ he said, ‘just s long as he knows that things that start out poorly don’t always end poorly.’

He thought some more.

‘That,’ he said, ‘and study improv.’”

The Fracking of the Mind

I’ve long been aware what a dreadful attention sink we’re in now as a society.

It’s a topic that Laura Marsh talks about in the March 27, 2025, New York Review of Books.

“In The Attention Merchants, (Tim) Wu likened these developments to another kind of resource extraction. The smartphone ‘appeared capable of harvesting the attention that had been, as it were, left on the table, rather in the way that fracking would later recover vast reserves of oil once considered wholly inaccessible.’ Wu, a legal scholar who has written extensively on antitrust, tells this story through sketches of the corporations that unlocked new segments of our attention. (Chris) Hayes writes more often from the perspective of the user; the person whose mind is being fracked feels, he remarks, ‘that our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will.’ Distraction has always been big business, but the immersive quality of digital media, in his account, makes it much more powerful and toxic.”

“(T)he algorithms of social networks can show each user content tailored specifically to them, based on all the things they’ve clicked on before. (This is how Hayes loses an entire hour, one stoned evening, watching videos of people assembling sandwiches and slicing them in half.)

“Social media can also capitalize on direct appeals to the audience by name. One of the more intriguing facts that Hayes cites comes from a 1959 study of people’s ability to tune out background noise and conversation when they wanted to focus: ‘The only stimulus so far found that will break through,’ the researchers wrote, ‘is the subject’s own name.’ Platforms that notify users each time they are ‘mentioned’ work on this principle; the most reliable way to draw someone in, even if the content on offer doesn’t particularly appeal to them, is by creating the impression that other people are talking about them.”

If Only This, If Only That

“Moods dictate my behavior,” wrote Stephen Batchelor in Buddhism Without Belief.

“If something makes me feel good, I want to have it; if it makes me feel bad, I want to get rid of it; if it leaves me indifferent, I ignore it. I find myself in a perpetual state of conflict: emotionally pulled one way and pushed the other. Yet underpinning both attraction and aversion is craving: the childish and utopian search for a situation in which I finally possess everything I desire and have repelled everything I dislike. Deep down I insist that a permanent, separate self is entitled to a life removed from the contingencies and uncertainties of existence.

“And I invest my icons of craving with absolute finality. Be they sex, fame or wealth, they shine before me with an intoxicating allure unsullied by the ambiguities of lived experience. 

“I do not consider their implications. Diapers and tantrums figure as little in my fantasies of sexual conquest as do journalists and taxes in my daydreams of fame and wealth.”

“Instead of solving my problems, this new situation replaces them with others I had never suspected. Yet rather than accepting this as the nature of living in an unreliable world, rather than learning to be content with success and joy and not to be overwhelmed by failure and pain, rather than appreciating life’s poignant, tragic and sad beauty, I grit my teeth and struggle on in thrall to that quiet, seductive voice that whispers “If only…”

Carefully the Crow

Carefully the crow

soaks its prized piece of popcorn

in the water dish.

A Glass Half Broken

Psychiatrist and philosophical seeker Mark Epstein had a question for the Buddhist monk Achaan Chaa, who lived in a forest hermitage on the Thai-Lao border,

“What are you really talking about?” Epstein asked him. “What do you mean by ‘eradicating craving?’”

“Achaan Chaa looked down and smiled faintly. He picked up the glass of drinking water to his left. Holding it up to us, he spoke in the chirpy Lao dialect that was his native tongue; ‘You see this goblet? For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.’

“Achaan Chaa was not just talking about the glass, of course, nor was he speaking merely of the phenomenal world, the forest monastery, the body or the inevitability of death. He was also speaking to each of us about the self. This self that you take to be so real, he was saying, is already broken.”

USA RIP

In 2001, I feared that unbridled lies disguised as journalism on Fox News, coupled with the corruption of the GOP and the excuse of 9-11 terrorism, could lead to a fascist dictatorship in America and the death of the Constitution. 

Well, despite the best efforts of many of us, here we are. 

What now? 

What next?

I guess we can only hope that on some finer day in the future, the words “Republican Party” will be greeted with the same visceral, historical loathing that the term “Nazi Party” inspires.

The Clock in the Storm

“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

And to think that Stevenson lived in the 19th century, not the 21st. I have long maintained that mindfulness practice is a necessary antidote to the digital age’s unabated assault on our attention and ability to focus.

The Fox News Reality-Reversal Machine

How can Republicans possibly offer such uniformly low-grade, corrupt and often ignorant candidates for the highest office in the nation? 

Because they have developed a corporate media propaganda echo chamber/fog machine so high-grade that it’s capable of conning any number of citizens into believing that black is white, government is evil, invasion is liberation, poverty is freedom, health care is luxury, stupid is smart and contemptible is heroic.

If you have sufficient propaganda power over the news media, you can launch and sustain just about any horror. You can, for example, demonize an unarmed boy who had committed no crime, and make a champion of the man who stalked and killed him.

Serving the Idol of Ignorance

The human species is capable of both discovering wisdom, and of ignoring it. We’re busy with the latter right now in the U.S.

“We sneer at experts,” observed David DeWitt. “We spit epithets like ‘academic elites’ at professors dedicating their lives to pursuing discovery that benefits humankind. And we worship flashy internet hucksters selling lifestyle scams. 

“We mock intelligence and glorify egomania and materialism. We worship spectacle and are voyeurs for anger, confrontation, and violence. We live in fantasy worlds where what we want to believe is true regardless of whether it is true, because what we want comes first no matter what, certainly no matter any facts, this decadence of mind and body only afforded to us by modernity’s remarkable luxury and technology.”

“It is in these ways that I regard a very great many adults as simply overgrown children.”

Michael Bell wrote, “With the accumulated knowledge of all history at our fingertips, willful ignorance still wins the day.”

“Anti-democratic forces benefit from ‘post-truth politics’ because in the absence of truth, truth is defined by power,” as Chrissy Stroop observed.

And that’s why accepting lies as facts is a snake pit out of which all other evils crawl.

Flying the Flapdoodle Flag of ‘Freedom’

In America, the word “freedom” rings out like gunfire.

“Today we hear it used to shout down and bully school boards during their public meetings,” noted Bob Minor. “Nurses, school teachers, flight attendants and people just walking down the street have heard it used by people while the shouter assaults them. 

“Freedom” has become a meaningless moron word, having “…attained a status so undefined, so empty of a definition by those who constantly hide behind their invocation of the term, so lacking in thought about what it could mean, that it seems to be an excuse to do whatever one wants and to hell with those others affected by whatever it is someone wants to do."

As one wise wit once said, “The absolute funniest art of capitalist ideology is that they somehow managed to convince everyone that ‘freedom’ meant the freedom to choose between 63 kinds of shampoo, and not the freedom to quit a job you hate without losing your health insurance.”

The sad truth is beyond their rhetoric, a lot of Americans have never been comfortable with real constitutional liberty. They find the winds of freedom frightening, not bracing. They’d really prefer to smooch some strongman dictator’s bottom and just CALL that “freedom.”

“Freedom, among the base of Trump’s Republican Party, means license to do whatever you feel like on impulse — too bad about the cop you concussed on Jan. 6th, or the elderly woman deathly ill from COVID because you refused to wear a mask, or the election worker now in hiding because of your death threat,” Mike Lofgren wrote. “This kind of freedom is the freedom of the Freudian id, bursting out of its civilized constraints like the alien creature in John Carpenter's The Thing.”

What Republicans MEAN by “freedom” is they want perfect freedom for themselves (including the freedom to commit crimes) and they want you clubbed over the head by cops or the military the moment you say or do anything they don’t like.

Republicans love to shout “freedom!” while silencing everyone else in sight.

Panic and Perception: The Hare and the Fruit

A hare fled terrified from the noise of fruit falling from a tree, convinced that it was the end of the world. Other animals — including deer, buffalo, elephants and tigers — asked him the reason for his fear and joined him in his flight, until a great host of animals were running for their lives.

A lion, who was in fact the future Buddha, realized that the animals risked death if they continued to rush headlong toward the sea. He halted their flight with a mighty roar and questioned each animal in turn, finally coming to the timid hare. The lion realized what must have occurred and took the hare back to the tree, where he made certain that the noise had indeed been caused by a falling fruit. The other animals were reassured and calm returned.

— The Daddabha Jataka

For Once in My Life

Ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会) is a Japanese idiom that means “once in a lifetime,” “for this time only,” or “one chance in a lifetime.” It's a cultural concept that encourages people to appreciate the unique nature of each moment and to enjoy it fully before it passes. 

The phrase originated in the 16th century during Japanese tea ceremonies, where participants would meet to have tea knowing that the exact ceremony would never happen again. The term is made up of two words: ichigo, which means “one’s lifetime,” and ichie, which means “experiencing something just once.”

The concept of ichi-go ichi-e suggest that you: 

Be open to new people

Say yes to spontaneous invitations

Be present with loved ones and friends

Allow all emotions to flow

Look forward to the next encounter with curiosity.

(Copy and art created with the assistance of AI)