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MARCH/APRIL 1999
Only he who attempts the
absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.
--Miguel Unamon's epithet about Don Quixote`
The Movie Go Round
A Simple Plan
is so stark and bleak and believable that at time you have to remind
yourself that "its only a movie." You feel the chill immediately as the
incredibly beautiful snowbound wilderness of rural Colorado comes into focus,
you sense yourself to be one of the rather ordinary characters who stumble upon
millions of dollars in a plane that had crashed unseen beneath the
ever-descending showers of snow. And all at once you know how easy it would be
to go along with a guilt-free, foolproof plan to maybe keep and use this money
for the good of you and your folks. Suddenly we are these culprits, the moral
chaos of compromise is an all too familiar landscape as events in this tragic
human parable spin radically out of control.
This is not an easy film to watch,
but if one is willing to go along for the ride with no hope of redemption and no
respite from this most searing vision of personal corruption, it's quite a ride!
PREVIEWS:
Payoff, for instance, a complete turn-off as far as I'm concerned,
bombastic, juvenile explosions, monster-moments of ultra-violence. Meanwhile
armies of children are being forced to murder each other in Sierra Leone.
Haven't we had enough of this? Apparently not! The History Channel takes
pleasure in presenting "Blood and Guts Sunday", and you can send in for the
video called "A Century of Warfare". What fun!
I think we'd be far better off with previews depicting a world at peace, rather
than the madness of mutual destruction that so fascinates our sub-human,
reptilian nature. We are all here for so brief a time, and we are all in the
same leaky boat we have created for ourselves. Why not rush to one another's
side and build up the whole body of humanity, all for all! Could it be something
just so simple that might create the ultimate miracle of universal salvation &
peace!
Bill Joyner (2-18-99)
|
Life can
be very painful. Everyone has the same burdens, and how ever much you can
share those burdens makes life easier for everybody. It's lonely
otherwise. Every moment that you share someone else's pain, feel what they
feel, makes you more human. I went through a lot of pain in my divorce. It
made me feel empathy
for people I don't even like, because they are going through it. I grant
them all the slack I can.
--Bill
Murray in PARADE
When I
hear bread breaking, I see something else; it seems almost as if God never
meant us to do anything else. So beautiful a sound, the crust breaks up
like manna and falls all over everything, and then we EAT; bread gets
inside humans. It turns into what the experts call, "formal glory of God".
But don't let it worry you. Sometime in your life, hope you might see one
starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope you
might have baked it or bought it or even needed it yourself.
--Daniel
Berrigan, S.J.
Leadership is the
ability to hide your panic from others.
--Anonymous
Sass is a colleague,
Risk is a loss;
He may wind up
As your next boss.
--Cecil Baxter
If you do not ask, the
answer is always no.
--Owen Laughlin
The future is not
predetermined.
... We should not allow either the literary form of prophecy or its
misuses by Christian fundamentalism as spurious proofs of the Christian
message to divert us from its main impact: seeing history as the field of
man's moral responsibility for the future.
--Harvey
Cox On Not Leaving It To The Snake
The Lord
of Love is an artist, who knows the alchemy of parables and other oblique
revelations. The essence of divinity is the essence of reality,
expressed androgynously, with all mysteries alive and intact, in the most
subtle possible styles of infinite, loving grace.
--Bill
Joyner
...Voyage...
And the days and the years flow by
as a river rushing to the sea...
What has remained of this voyage of life?
Someplace in that abyss of my mind
I pressed a forest of green fine trees,
captured a menagerie of red birds
and multi-colored butterflies,
preserved the ice-blue cold of
a mountain lake,
and admired the grey skyline
of a large city.
Like butterfly wings battling the wind
my soul resists the current
but in the end must be pulled to the sea.
--Victor M. Ellison
c2/10/71
START PLANTING!
ALL THEY NEED ARE THE SEEDS!
US COMMITTEE FOR UNICEF P.O. BOX 97294 WASHINGTON, DC 20077-7660
|
Two curiously similar books were
recommended by readers of THE SEED CATALOG, good friends Penny Rosel &
Chrystalle DeLuca. Excerpts from each follow with my enthusiastic suggestion
that both are well worth acquiring!
--Bill Joyner
START WHERE YOU ARE by
Pema Chodron
I HAD AN INTERVIEW with someone
who said she couldn't meditate; it was impossible because she had real-life
problems. In the meditation we're doing, we're trying to bring home the very
supportive message that real-life problems are the material for waking up, not
the reason to stop trying. This is news you can use. Today's slogan is "Whatever
you meet unexpectedly, join with meditation."
This is a very interesting
suggestion. These slogans are pointing out that we can awaken bodhichitta
through everything, that nothing is an interruption. This slogan points out
how interruptions themselves awaken us, how interruptions themselves -
surprises, unexpected events, bolts out of the blue - can awaken us to the
experience of both absolute and relative bodhichitta, to the open, spacious
quality of our minds and the warmth of our hearts. This is the slogan about
surprises as gifts. These surprises can be pleasant or unpleasant; the main
point is that they can stop our minds. You're walking along and a snowball
hits you on the side of the head. It stops your mind. The slogan "Rest in the
nature of alaya, the essences" goes along with this. Usually it is considered
a slogan for when you're sitting on the cushion meditating, you can then rest
your mind in its natural, unbiased state. But the truths is that when the rug
is pulled out the same thing happens; without any effort on our part, our mind
finds itself resting in the nature of alaya.
STAYING PUT by Scott R.
Sanders
The Taoist book of wisdom, the
Secret of the Golden Flower, speaks about a condition of utter
clarity and selflessness as "living midnight". I don't know a word of the
original Chinese, and I might well misread the translation, but I am haunted
by this phrase. Living midnight: to face oblivion, to drown in the
annihilating water, to dwell without fear or fret at the still center. Hardest
of all is to live through midnight, to accept the knowledge of one's own
private extinction and still return to daylight charged with passion and
purpose. Earth is sexy, just as sex is earthy. Each of us is a landscape of
plains and peaks, valleys and thickets. I speak in metaphors. As through a
garbled phone line, but what I mean is plain and simple: body and land are one
flesh. They are made of the same stuff. Their beauty is one beauty, their
wounds the same wounds. They call to us in the same perennial voice, crying,
come see, come touch, come listen and smell, and O come taste. We
explore them alike, honor or abuse them alike. The health or sickness of one
is inseparable from that of the other. There is no division between where we
live and what we are.
BEACON PRESS, BOSTON
|
The
mind covers more ground than the heart but goes less far.
--Chinese Proverb
You
have got to do something about it to make it count.
--Carl C. Conway
"I have
lived; it is your turn now. It is in you that my youth will be prolonged.
I pass you my powers. If I feel that you are my successor, I shall resign
myself more easily to dying. I hand on my hopes to you.
The
knowledge that you are brave and strong enables me to leave life without
regret. Take my joy. Let your happiness be to increase that of others.
Work and strive and accept no evil that you might change. Keep saying to
yourself, 'it lies with me'"
- Andre
Gide
Sass is a colleague,
Risk is a loss;
He may wind up
As your next boss.
--Cecil Baxter
If you do not ask, the
answer is always no.
--Owen Laughlin
The future is not
predetermined.
... We should not allow either the literary form of prophecy or its
misuses by Christian fundamentalism as spurious proofs of the Christian
message to divert us from its main impact: seeing history as the field of
man's moral responsibility for the future.
--Harvey
Cox On Not Leaving It To The Snake
The Lord
of Love is an artist, who knows the alchemy of parables and other oblique
revelations. The essence of divinity is the essence of reality,
expressed androgynously, with all mysteries alive and intact, in the most
subtle possible styles of infinite, loving grace.
--Bill
Joyner
...Voyage...
And the days and the years flow by
as a river rushing to the sea...
What has remained of this voyage of life?
Someplace in that abyss of my mind
I pressed a forest of green fine trees,
captured a menagerie of red birds
and multi-colored butterflies,
preserved the ice-blue cold of
a mountain lake,
and admired the grey skyline
of a large city.
Like butterfly wings battling the wind
my soul resists the current
but in the end must be pulled to the sea.
--Victor M. Ellison
c2/10/71
START PLANTING!
ALL THEY NEED ARE THE SEEDS!
US COMMITTEE FOR UNICEF P.O. BOX 97294 WASHINGTON, DC 20077-7660
|
THE MOVIE- GO-ROUND:
Shakespeare in Love
was so disappointing to me. It is superbly crafted, all the actors shine in it.
And yet, it seems such a trite, shortsighted, hot-bodied perversion of what pure
love might possibly be. So much for one more futile attempt to domesticate &
trivialize "the real thing", which, if you want to find it, go check out the
video of Franco Zaferelli's
Romeo and Juliet.
--Bill Joyner
|
Perfect
love exists between two people only when each addresses the other with the
words, "O Myself!"
--a 9th century Mohammedan Mystic
...salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed: the night is
far gone, the day is at hand.
--Acts 13:11
"It's
pretty hard to tell what brings happiness. Poverty and wealth have both
failed."
--Kin Hubbard
"MY
LITTLE PARK AND ITS PAIR OF SQUIRRELS, A POSSUM, THREE HUNGRY ALLEY CATS.
SOME DAYS THE HUNGRY - CAT AND POSSUM - SIDE BY SIDE. RED CARDINALS WITH
THEIR TEEN-AGE OFFSPRING, COOING MORNING DOVES, SOME DAMN GOOD SINGING
PURPLE HOUSE WRENS, AND MY FUN BIRDS / RED-WING BLACK BIRDS. AND ONCE IN A
GREAT WHILE, THE CROW DROPS IN."
--Ronald E. Stefanik
The
above saying was sent by my perfect friend, Ronald E. Stefanik in
Cleveland. Ron has the spirit and the presence of an urban monastic saint.
He has the gift of creating laughter! His letters are classic,
down-to-earth signals of living hope.
Religion
will be revealed to us through absurdities. ... Facts will speak in a loud
voice. Truth will no longer reside in lofty words, but will be
present in the bread we eat.
--Louis
Pauwels & Jacques Bergier (quoting Blanc de Saint-Bonnet in The Morning
of the Magician Stein & Day, p. 309
Warriors of Love
We are
foot-soldiers of love
in God's unending war of peace
Rainbows of refracted light
across the darkening sky,
we cast our long shadows
of sure grace and disperse
all traces of doom and despair.
We are
life's perpetual advance upon
the frozen void of death
agent provocateurs
in the service of
love's all-conquering
ever-regenerative realm.
--Bill
Joyner
For
love is strong as death...
Love no flood can quench, no torrents drown.
--The
Song of Songs 8:16 |
1210 E. M.L. King Blvd.
Tampa, FL 33603
Email: [email protected]
The Seed Catalog
William T. Joyner, Editor
THE SEED CATALOG is available by mail for an annual suggested donation of $5.00
-- or any expression of interest. I try to do at least 6 issues a year. Thanks
for tuning in!
--Bill Joyner / P.O. Box 3411 / Sarasota, FL 34230
Send me your feedback - comments,
suggestions and contributions welcome