Saturday, February 3, 2024
In bed at 8:45, up at 5:50. 33°, high of 38°, partly cloudy day ahead, wind SE at 6 mph, 3-8/12. Sunrise at 7:05, sunset at 5:06, 10+0.
Treadmill; pain. Bad wrist pain during the night made for a hard time sleeping, time on the LZB, and Tylenol at 1 a.m., but no relief. I notice the wrist pain is much better mid-afternoon, suggesting arthritis rather than some other problem. At 2:30 p.m., 31:29 & 0.70, while watching Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche's "Meditation and Going Beyond Mindfulness - A Secular Perspective" on YouTube/
I'm grateful but a bit ashamed of my collection of recliners: A Barcalounger in the TV room, a LZB in the bedroom, unknown brands in the sunroom, and in my 'man cave.' I live in a comfort palace, quite a change from 7303.
How are we supposed to feel about thousands of children being killed, maimed, or traumatized for life by American weapons? Outraged? Copasetic? Pleased? Indifferent? Supportive? Sad? Disgusted? Ashamed to be American? Ashamed to be human? Too bad, how sad, but . . .? All in God's plan? I wonder how many children we killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how many in the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities. How many children were burned to death in Dresden? In Hanoi and Haiphong and in Cambodia? A 1995 demographic study in Population and Development Review calculated 791,000–1,141,000 war-related Vietnamese deaths, both soldiers and civilians, for all of Vietnam from 1965–75. The study came up with a most likely Vietnamese death toll of 882,000, which included 655,000 adult males (above 15 years of age), 143,000 adult females, and 84,000 children. Vietnam's government claimed that 400,000 people were killed or maimed as a result of the after-effects of our Agent Orange defoliation campaign and that 500,000 children were born with birth defects. and studies have shown higher rates of casualties, health effects, and next-generation birth defects in Vietnamese people. The United States government has challenged these figures as being unreliable but there can be no doubt that the accurate numbers are staggering.
A rough sketch in oils done years ago from a news photo during the Balkan wars.
Epitaph on a Tyrant, by W. H. Auden
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
Journal entry a year ago today: "Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank. I watched this documentary of the photographer-film maker Robert Frank this afternoon on OVID. At the film's end, he ruminates on growing old "I'm growing old. Swollen toes. Nails falling out. Gum disease. Itching. Pain. Irregular heartbeat. No more pissing. Constipation. It's a grim picture. It's a natural disaster, growing old. It's an adjustment and you have to be careful. You have to be careful not to be bitter about it, not to become a nasty old man, but sometimes it's better to be a nasty old man than to be too polite and too, you know, . . " A grim picture indeed, and it only gets grimmer.
Mindfulness and Meditation, Meditation and Buddhism, Buddhism and Zen, Zen and Thomas Merton. I am a rank amateur at Mindfulness, though I have become much more aware of it since dialing into the VA Mindfulness group on Thursday mornings. I'm even more of a novice at Meditation, though I am starting. In any case, I've started looking into Buddhism since I got involved in this area and it seems to me that it's hard to practiced at Mindfulness and Meditation without getting into the wisdom of Buddhism. Thinking of this reminded me of Thomas Merton and his deep dive into Buddhism particularly Zen Buddhism so I've been looking into his writings on the subject. It reminds me of a lunch I had with the daughter of Harry John who funded the world's largest Catholic foundation, and her telling me that she (and many others) believed that Thomas Merton, did not die accidentally by electrocution as is commonly believed, but rather that he was murdered because he was threatening orthodox Catholicism with his embrace of Buddhism (and of Hinduism.) Merton's body was discovered by Rembert Weakland, then the head of the Benedictine order of monks and later archbishop of Milwaukee. I got to chat with Weakland at a luncheon of some sort years ago and always liked him, even after he left the archbishop's position in a scandal involving the spending of some of Harry John's money gifted to the archdiocese to silence Rembert's former gay lover. It was shabby business and Rembert did a public penance at the cathedral (or was it at the Cousins Center?) which I attended. (The Cousins Center is named after the former archbishop of Milwaukee, William Cousins, who, in his early life as a parish priest, officiated at the marriage of my parents at St. Bernard Church in the Englewood neighborhood in Chicago in 1940.)
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