The Vibrant Channeled Creator

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2023  
For some months Sudan has been in the throes of a civil war that shows no sign of abating, and which is causing numerous victims, millions of internally displaced people and refugees in neighbouring countries, and a very grave humanitarian situation. I am close to the sufferings of those dear populations of Sudan, and I address a heartfelt appeal to local leaders to facilitate access to humanitarian aid and, with the contribution of the international community, to work in search of peaceful solutions. Let us not forget these brothers and sisters of ours who are in distress!
 
And our thoughts turn every day to the very serious situation in Israel and in Palestine. I am close to all those who are suffering, Palestinians and Israelis. I embrace them in this dark moment. And I pray for them a lot. May the weapons be stopped: they will never lead to peace, and may the conflict not widen! Enough! Enough, brothers! In Gaza, let the wounded be rescued immediately, let civilians be protected, let far more humanitarian aid be allowed to reach that stricken population. May the hostages be freed, including the elderly and children. Every human being, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, of any people or religion, every human being is sacred, is precious in the eyes of God and has the right to live in peace. Let us not lose hope: let us pray and work tirelessly so that the sense of humanity may prevail over hardness of heart.
Pope Francis 

Let’s pray together for the people suffering due to war. Yes, they’re suffering a lot. Children, the sick and elderly are suffering; many young people are dying. Let’s not forget Ukraine. Let’s think of the people of Palestine and Israel, that the Lord might bring them a just peace.
Pope Francis 
11/12/23 

We all want to come from the infinite galaxy and go to the infinite galaxy free of violence. jp

On this date in 1926, the United States Numbered Highway System was established. In the early days of automobile travel, the federal government wasn’t involved in interstate roads, because most people traveled long distances by train rather than car. Many of the highways were based on heavily traveled wagon trails. Most highways were located in and around larger cities. By 1925, there were more than 250 named highways in the United States, including transcontinental highways like the Dixie Overland Highway, which ran from Savannah, Georgia, to San Diego, California; the Theodore Roosevelt International Highway, which ran between the Portlands — Maine’s and Oregon’s — with a brief sojourn into Canada; and north-south routes such as the Jackson Highway, which ran from Chicago to New Orleans.
Local trails had their own boosters, who gave them catchy names and collected dues from any businesses that lay on the route. The booster organizations would then put up signposts and promote the route, which brought in customers to those businesses. But it was a confusing system for travelers. In some cases — especially out in the sparsely populated West — trails overlapped one another. And the auto associations were for-profit organizations, and that made their motives suspect. They would often route their highways so that they could take advantage of the dues that they could collect in cities, rather than choosing the most direct route. In 1924, the Reno Gazette commented: “The public is learning this fact — that transcontinental highway associations, with all their clamor, controversy, recriminations, and meddlesome interference, build mighty few highways. […] In nine cases out of 10, these transcontinental highway associations are common nuisances and nothing else. They are more mischievous than constructive. And in many instances, they are organized by clever boomers who are not interested in building roads but in obtaining salaries at the expense of an easily beguiled public.” Wisconsin was the first state to step in to organize and number its trails. The federal government took up the cause and on this date unveiled a standardized numbering and signage system for United States highways.
Perhaps the most famous of the new numbered highways was America’s “Mother Road,” Route 66. Roughly following a patchwork of old wagon trails that were built on the eve of the Civil War, Route 66 linked the main streets of small towns from Chicago all the way to Los Angeles. Until then, residents of these isolated communities had been cut off from any national thoroughfares. Trade across state lines had been difficult and slow. Travel had been limited. When the trucking industry took off in the late 1920s, national planners saw the promise of a diagonal route through the Southwest.

from the Poetry Almanac by Garrison Keillor 11/11/23

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2023  
In every personal or social situation or circumstance of our life, the Lord is present. He calls to us to live in our own time, to share our lives with others, to mix in with the joys and sorrows of the world. 
Pope Francis 

And the only way to receive what’s meant to be is to let go of what once was…
We are taught all our lives to hold on. Most of the time it’s out of fear.
Fear of loss.
Fear of the future.
Fear of the unknown.
But when you hold onto things that are no longer for you, you prevent the things that are actually supposed to show up from arriving. You stop yourself from receiving the gifts of life and traveling the path you were always meant to take. Evan Sanders 11/9/23 The Better Man Project

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2023  
Let us too ask ourselves: Do we try to practice what we preach, or do we live duplicitously? Do we say one thing and do something else? Are we concerned only about showing how impeccable we are on the outside, made-up, or do we also cultivate our interior life in sincerity of heart?
 
Let us turn to the Holy Virgin. May she who lived in integrity and humility of heart according to the will of God help us to become credible witnesses of the Gospel.
Pope Francis 

I am the servant of time…
obsessed over rhymes
shaking like chimes
panting to climb
yours and mine
full-time
rag-time.
show-time,
wake-time
zone-time
war-time
peace-time

11/7/23
jp

the Spirit moves the old bones

expands harmony

grows peace

animates grace

transforms the victims of war

11/06/23

jp

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2023

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2023

“Now, Mother, once more take the initiative for us, in these times rent by conflicts and laid waste by the fire of arms. Turn your eyes of mercy towards our human family, which has strayed from the path of peace, preferred Cain to Abel and lost the ability to see each other as brothers and sisters dwelling in a common home.” 
Pope Francis 

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2023
“Yet, Mother, amid those trials, you showed your strength, you acted boldly: you trusted in God and responded to concern with tender care, to fear with love, to anguish with acceptance.”Pope Francis

George Boole was born in Lincolnshire, England. He was a precocious learner, poring over mathematics journals and Newton’s Principia. A tutor taught him Latin, and then he taught himself Greek, becoming so well versed that at 14, he published a translation of a poem by Meleager. The work was so good that a local schoolmaster declared it a fake, claiming a young person never could have done such fine work. By the time he was 19, he’d founded his own school. He later married Mary Everest, the niece of Sir George Everest, for whom the mountain is named.
Boole’s legacy lives on not only in everyday mathematics but also on the moon: the Boole crater is named for him. The keyword Bool is also a Boolean data type in programming languages, and there’s even a road called Boole Heights in Bracknell, Berkshire.
When George Boole embarked on the writing of his book An investigation into the Laws of Thought, on Which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (1854), he wrote to a friend: “I am now about to set seriously to work upon preparing for the press an account of my theory of Logic and Probabilities which in its present state I look upon as the most valuable if not the only valuable contribution that I have made or am likely to make to Science and the thing by which I would desire if at all to be remembered hereafter.”

George didn’t need college to make his discoveries. He learned from his father. Or, was home schooled.

Peace
by C.K. Williams
We fight for hours, through dinner, through the endless evening, who
 even knows now what about,


what could be so dire to have to suffer so for, stuck in one another’s craws
  like fishbones,


the cadavers of our argument dissected, flayed, but we go on with it, through bed, and through the night,


feigning sleep, dreaming sleep, hardly sleeping, so precisely never touching, back to back,


the blanket bridged across us for the wintry air to tunnel down, to keep
 us lifting, turning,


through the angry dark that holds us in its cup of pain, the aching dark,
 the weary dark,


then, toward dawn, I can’t help it, though justice won’t I know be served,
  I pull her to me,


and with such accurate, graceful deftness she rolls to me that we arrive
 embracing our entire lengths.

“Peace” by C.K. Williams from Collected Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2023
“This is a dark hour, Mother. In this dark hour, we look to you, and in the light of your countenance we entrust ourselves and our problems to your maternal Heart, which Mother Mary you know. Be tender to us and fortify our hearts to walk in the light of your Son.

A story by Garrison Keiller !!/1/23

An ordinary late October day and the world is dense with stately trees in variations of reds and gold and orange that Crayola never contemplated — no need to shop around for magic mushrooms or give up your life as a good citizen for something involving incense and flutes — just walk down the street ignoring the Halloween skeletons and let your heart be lifted. I’m descended from stoics, our emotional range runs from A to D, once or twice we’ve hit L, never W for wonderment but here I am in New York where something in the water encourages self-expression and I see a man on the subway platform do some little dance moves he’d maybe seen in the theater the night before. He’s not a dancer but he doesn’t let that stop him.

A short woman approaches and speaks something to me and I see she’s holding a cardboard tray of candies and a little boy clutches her pant leg and I remember reading about the Ecuadoran refugees who’ve come to the city, the women earning money just this way, and I reach into my pocket and pull out a twenty, which is a lot to pay for a small bag of M&Ms but how do you put a value on the look in the boy’s eyes. He is three or four and very keen. A train is coming into the station. This must be all strange to him but he isn’t frightened thanks to his anchor. He studies me, then the crowd emerging from the open doors, a man with a handsome dog on a leash, a guitarist playing into a little amp on the platform, and I board the train. But those dark eyes stay with me.

The classic story: the elders make a desperate choice to spare their children the grief of history and put language and life story behind and become as children themselves in order to start anew. So you learn as much English as you need — “Please,” the woman said, and then “Thank you,” and soon the little boy’s English will race on ahead of hers, but you will always address your Creator in the old tongue, and so, the next Sunday, leaving my Episcopalians I walk through clouds of happy Spanish emerging from Our Lady down the street, women clustered around the priests, children orbiting around them, men smoking.

Every year, a dozen persons or so are shoved into a moving train as it comes into a station. A few are killed. To install sliding glass shields to prevent this would cost billions and so New Yorkers make it a practice to stand back from the tracks, to be wary of weird or troubled persons and keep your distance, and to stand with others and not alone. Safety is in numbers: where there are others, there is civility. Garrison Keillor

Association routinely occurs in our own conversations. We start to tell something to a friend — say, crows in the yard. We hardly finish the first sentence before the friend leaps in with a story that your subject brings to mind — perhaps, the nursery rhyme, “Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.” The friend interrupts himself with a different story, inspired by association with the first. That often leads to another and another until the first speaker can no longer find a way to finish what he began. The subject is now about Julia Child’s kitchen in the Smithsonian. There’s no way to get back to crows unless you’re as gifted as a Keillor. That form of association can be annoying or entertaining, depending on your frame of mind.
Association can also be put to work by any writer who picks up a pen, taps his teeth with it, and ponders what to write about today. At workshops I sometimes ask writers (or students) to write down a word and list below it ten other words or subjects that the word brings to mind. Next, pick a word from the list of ten, use it to start a second list, and again jot down ten words or subjects that you associate with the second word. Not satisfied yet? Choose something from the second list and make a third one. When you read what you’ve placed on the third list, you may be surprised at how far you’ve drifted from the first word you chose. That’s association. It’s also now a list of thirty possible ideas to get you started on something to write. The whole exercise doesn’t take any longer than to get from crows in the yard to Julia Childs’s kitchen. And like good stretch socks, the subjects can fit a lot of needs: a poem, a story, or maybe a whole book.