So, just as I was reading the intro for the lecture I remembered the Daily Writing prompt_ “How Important is Spirituality in Your Life,” _there was something something about the “square”
As everything is going virtual in our life, we are missing the point of the sense of where you are, in reality in our rapport with each other’s and within the Universe, the illusion that we exist after the Big Bang, and after the new discovery beyond the Big Bang theory by The Webb telescope, that other Universes exist as well as a multitude of black holes, that we are about to be swallowed up at any time, if not in matter of fact, in the next nanosecond we’ll be gone without any suffering, like the passengers of the Titan submarine suddenly, and sadly, perhaps they didn’t even know that, a split of a second before it imploded as they were looking to the wreck of the Titanic, with an awe
“The sensation as well as the intellectual understanding of polarity, that is to say that the inside and the outside, the subjective, and the objective, the self and the other go together
In other words what there is a Harmony, an unbreakable Harmony.”_Alan Wats
So, the answer is to “How important is spirituality in your life?” Harmony, an unbreakable Harmony, like for a Zen Master to live each and every moment serenely and in symbiosis on earth and in rapport with the universe, and this is “It”
I was watching a video TED’s Oficial Speaking channel in the link above and at the same time following the transcript as well, and in reading the first few lines that I report them here, courtesy to the author, it just sparkled in my mind that what is called in Zen Japanese culture “Satori.”
“Ideas change everything what we need in education is not Evolution but a revolution, they have the power to unlock empathy This idea of creating a safe haven for our kids it’s our excitement.”
As an introductory to the presentation, the speaker, followed other speakers, one by one on stage have said:
“yeah, I was somebody when I came l’Il be a bet for somebody when I leave and catalyze collaboration their Collective wisdom is much greater than mine”
“At a time with a right idea presented in the right way can Ripple across the planet at the speed of light”
“We can’t wait to see what impact your talk has on the world.”
And like addressing the dialogue to me the site presenting speaker, he said:
“Your number one Mission as a speaker is to take something that matters deeply to you and to rebuild it inside the minds of your listeners
we’ll call that something, an idea, a mental construct that they can hold on to walk away with value, and in some sense be changed by_I am using the word idea quite broadly here, it doesn’t have to be a scientific breakthrough, a genius invention or a complex legal Theory
It can be a simple how-to or a human Insight Illustrated with the power of a story or a beautiful image that has meaning or an event you wish might happen in the future or perhaps just a reminder of what matters most in life, an idea is anything that can change how people see the world.
If you can conjure up a compelling idea in people’s minds you have done something wondrous in a very real sense,”
_“a little piece of you has become part of them.”
And at that special moment, the last sentence provoked a sparkle like “Eureka, or Satori” so to speak, or a Koan, a Haiku as an example below:
Quick, into the hazy sky! quickly, quickly-the bird set free. -Issa_a Japanese Zen Master, English translation
とくかすめ
とくとくかすめ
放ち鳥
一茶
Toku kasume
toku toku kasume
hanachi-dori
-Issa
Fly baby fly
In this poem, someone has released a bird from the cage and bids it fly swiftly away until it vanishes in the hazy spring sky. That way, it can’t be caught again. But in the picture, the bird seems to have flown from a cage in a painting. How did this happen?
And this is another Haiku
“On a journey, I’d have as my companion on the road, a butterfly.” _Shiki, a Japanese Zen Master
道づれは
胡蝶をたのむ
旅路かな
一子規
Michizure wa
kocho wo tanomu
tabiji kana
Shiki
And here’s My Own Haiku:
“ On a journey, I’d have as my companion on the road, a goldfinch”
Think, what does it means to me?
It sent me back 12 years ago to the day I started my blog and created my first web site, “Mackneen, the Algerian Goldfinch, and my fist post was of a few words: Save the Algerian Goldfinch, because it was becoming an endangered Bird by the poachers and bird breeding smugglers.
And also, there is a habit or a phenomenon currently spreading in Algiers, and cities of Algeria and mostly in North-African countries around, you can see as travel or a tourist, people and mostly young men walking around and down the streets holding a caged goldfinch in their hands and even you can see hugging cages in balconies and at the entrees of cafes and general stores, so that the chirping glees of birds among the surrounding street noises and the gathering of people in fleas markets looking for species is the usual events and happenings
I had no idea what to talk about at that moment so I posted what ever thought crossed my mind that it had some thing related to endangered bird and species and as time goes there were a multitude of factors that contributing with pollution and climate change that accelerate the disappearing of millions of species all together around the world
So in a way, This idea of creating a safe haven for our kids it’s our excitement.” It hit me to the marrow that I begin to work on it and looking to the dozen of blogs and hundreds of posts to see what gives
I would like to say many thanks to the 284 followers and for their thousands likes and for all the comments made through the last twelve years thanks extra Large
I hope that they find some sense in my broken English and sense of humor please make a great use of whatever a kind of trove in my equilibrations
“I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it.”
Lives Lived:
Causes related
_Gisèle Halimi was a prominent French lawyer certainty she is; activist and author who championed feminist causes and human rights efforts for decades; She founded a feminist group with Simone de Beauvoir and played a key role in the decriminalization of abortion in France; In facts, and Before anything else, She came to lights, in defending Djamila Boubacha who sentenced to death during the Algerian-French war in the 60s.The French media have always occultes the fact that Boubacha was tortured, raped, until she confessed her acte in the bombing of a café in Algiers. Gisèlle Halimi died at 93.
The truth is essential.
Causes Relegated:
_Djamila Boubacha
Courtesy to Wikipedia Commons
Chapter:
(p.272) Preface to Djamila Boupacha
Source:
Political Writings
Author(s):
Simone de Beauvoir, Marybeth Timmermann
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press
DOI:10.5406/illinois/9780252036941.003.0013
A twenty-three-year-old Algerian woman and liaison agent for the FLN was imprisoned, tortured, raped with a bottle by French military men, and it’s considered ordinary.1 Since 1954, in the name of suppressing rebellion, then of pacification, we are all accomplices of a genocide that has claimed over a million victims; men, women, old folks and children have been slaughtered: gunned down during search-raids, burned alive in their villages, throats slit or bellies ripped open, many tortured to death. Entire tribes have been left to starve and freeze, at the mercy of beatings and epidemics in the “relocation camps” which are in fact extermination camps—serving also as brothels to the elite soldiers—and where more than five hundred thousand Algerians currently await their death. During the course of the last few months, the press, including even the most circumspect papers, has been full of horror stories: assassinations, lynchings, violent racist attacks on Arab immigrants; manhunts in the streets of Oran; corpses by the dozen in Paris, hanging from trees in the Bois de Boulogne and along the banks of the Seine; maimed limbs and blown up heads; bloody All Saints Day in Algiers….
I got inspired by the Prompt;“ If we were having coffee….” When I read it, It sent me back to the 70s, back then I was a teenager, I was in Algiers, Algeria, and it was then, the era with the hits of the French songs from songwriters and singers, broadcasted on air, when the radio among them were Serge Regiani, Charles Aznavour and many others and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a French Latin Quarters a neighborhood in Paris, like Soho, Tribeka, in New York where artists, writers and the French Intellectuals met there in bistros, and café terraces. So when I read the first line of the prompt, I reckoned a French song from Serge Regiani, “If I had twenty year old less, I would have been taking you to St Germanin-des-Prés for another coffee cream, a French Latte like.” So, here’s my version of the prompt
“If I had been ten years less
I would take you to St Germain-des-Prés
For an other coffee-cream
I would tell you “je t’aime”
I would order Tea-mint for me
And a Coffee for Thee
Thou for me
Me for you
You for me
Here, in a whim, I mad a twist to the prompt, so to continue
Kufeah for you
Turban for me
Turkish coffee or tea
Tea-mint for two
Musharabeah_ Moosh Arabeah?_
_a Dialogue between two lovers in Arabic dialect behind a Musharabeah
_Musharabeah isn’t Arabic? _ bi tahki Arabeah= do you speak Arabic?
_Dear Reader, I you owe an explanation: _kuffeah, a scarf or a shawl it’s Arbs men’s wear _Turkish coffee or Arabica coffee usual with Heel*= cardamon, _Musharabeah = a large window with woodwork blinds that covers the facades of buildings or a house in the Meddle-Eastern Architecture, see Orientalists painters, like Delacroix, Sargent, and others, and it’s still in display in the most of museums in New York, Paris and London
“There exists a sort of torture of memory if you let it come, if you invite the past to huddle beside you, comforting like a leech. He was telling her more—that a footprint in history has a thousand repercussions, that there are a thousand battles being fought every day because people couldn’t forget something that happened before they were born. There are few worse things than memory, yet few things better, he’d said. Be careful.”
Ah! Poetry, a tragedy; and always in the air-du-temps …
Strange things happened often with the daylight saving time ending 25 hour Sunday, so I got inspired by a strange behavior of birds and animals lately, in-visu and through the internet, to write this post, and occasionally, to participate in the NanoPoblano blogging challenge, and that’s just for fun I didn’t have the heart for writing, and it was the most beautiful day of the year, so I took a walk to the park, going my way along the waterfront a day ago. It was brisk yesterday late afternoon with a beautiful sunset. Flocks of birds of different feathers were gathering in the sky for departing for clement horizons far from the coming winter as temperature starts dropping day after day. Then today suddenly a wave of hot air came through the window this morning, announcing a raise of the mercury in the thermometer for a long Indian summer. So, as I stepped out for some errands, I saw the birds hanging to the electrical wires and populating the trees again as though they looked like someone had missed his flight because of the saving daylight hour change; he forgot to set one hour back his watch. So, I told you so, be careful what to wish for, and always look up in to the sky for some omen
There’s is passage in the video above on Allan Watts lecture: “When Life change don’t cling to it”, it says:
The Japanese Zen have a word _you again_“у-u-g-e-n”which has no English equivalent whatsoever and (you again) is in a way digging change
And It’s described poetically,
you have the feeling of “you again” When you see out in the distant water some ships
hidden behind the far-off island you have the feeling of “you again”
when you watch wild geese suddenly seen and then lost in the cloud you have the feeling of “you again”
But nowadays you have a strange feeling that sometimes is missing, the sense of “ Y-u-g-e-n”, a nostalgia for for the passage of flock of geese, a departing regattas in the offing, for a World Cup Race, and just flurries of snow in Christmas Eve on Central Park back then to the days of “Home Alone movie” and watching a sun set without the blurry view of smoke and pollution and that’s it
When I read this article on GoodReads, a newsletter e-mail that I received now and then, with the trauma left after the shooting of the Uvalde School, Texas, and What Dr. Amy Goldberg had to say about the Sandy Hook massacre could be said today about the shooting in Uvalde: “As a country, we lost our teachable moment…. The fact that not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really really dead. Ten-year-old kids, riddled with bullets, dead as doornails.”_Excerpt from Goodreads.
« Ten-year-old Kids, riddled with bullets, dead as door nails », reading this sentence gave me goosebumps, struck me to the marrow and stent me back the 60s, I just turned then Ten-year-old kid, it was in Algiers, Algeria, and the people of Algeria was reacting passively to the provocations of The OAS, the Secret Armed Association, a French armed sect refusing the Independence of Algeria, a colony then of Colonial France country.
At ten-year-old as kids, we didn’t understand nothing to the events happening in the background, we just aspired then to eat, live, play, and dream of the reach for the stars, to read the illustrated SC-FI books, and waiting for the Cinema-de-Compagne, a field Movie truck, a Sundae Ice-cream Truck like, safe that it projected a movie in the evening on any white beached wall of a school, like a panoramic screen and all the kids and the people of the neighborhood, and we kids, continued to dream, imagine and play, Spaceman, and Martiens, Superman and all the movies on Sindbad, Aladin, and the Tales of A thousand and One Night had just been left behind, looking for the future and reaching for the stars; the events were left to grown up person, it was their affairs. The war and the Battle of Algiers and the turmoil have just finished and a cease fire was decreed in common accord on the both sides of the the conflict and were negotiating the accords, but and ultra armed mouvement refused to let go and impeached the government and the French army after the deposit of the arms and the return of pacific talks, things that were beyond our understanding as kids, it was only games, heroes and bandits, but when the turn of the events took a dramatic change to a daily mass shooting to the people parade demanding independence and liberty and everyone was confined in their house, the OAS started bombing the houses and buildings, and any person walking outside or driving, regardless of age, elderly, kid, male and female, were shoot in the head with one bullet, because of one vote is voice, because the people of Algeria has voted Yes, for the independence of Algeria from France as a separate sovereign and independent country.
The ultimate force used to deny any means and purpose to existence of the Algerian people and as a person or a citizen and was only permitted to exist as an indigenous person and even that was erased by a bullet in the head. Why a bullet in the head? To erase the sole idea of being a freeman, independent and sovereign after more than a century of having being a denied citizen’s identity
In 133 years of occupation of Algeria, the French colonial rulers used all sort of tools and forces to denied the existence of a people; to alienate its identity to the marrow. After defeating the autochthonous insurgents in 1871, the last century, after 30 years of fighting against the rulers, these ones beheaded by the sword the warriors and exposed their skulls in display at the Museum of Man in Paris to show the supremacy of France to the old Europe monarchies, after the humiliating defeat against Prussia and Hungary. The leaders with some of their troops were deported to faraway overseas colonies islands, in New-Caledonia, they never saw their motherland again.
Next was the indígenat decree of Napoleon, then the assimilation of the indigenous people who accepted to became French citizens at the sole condition of renouncing at their religious believes and to embrace Christianity, even that was refused to them. They were enrolled in the army to be sent to the front in war war 1 and 2, the survivors were sent back home, the fallen were buried unknown soldiers who died for France a memorial was dressed for the circumstance in a cemetery. In the 8th of May 45, while the world was celebrating the end of WWII, either in France and the French colonial in Algeria, the Algerian People, not yet citizens went out in a parade asking for equal rights to be citizens and for their freedom after participating in the fight against the Germans side by side of the French soldiers, the response to their quest was reprimanded by a bloody riposte in a mass shooting that left behind 45000 dead people. the survivors were kept ready to be deported to the faraway Caledonia like their ancestors, a century ago. Peace and a pacified countryside were kept on for a decade until the launch of the war in Algeria for the freedom of the country in November 1st by the Algerian insurgents. After the sword, torture and an old and dormant instrument, the guillotine, an apparatus that was used to behead Louis XVI, the king of France to execute the captured insurgents during the Battle of Algiers a war that persisted for 7 years and until a cease fire was declared, then and ultimate mean to reprimand those rebels was a bullet in the head. With patience and after a long and heavier sacrifice and struggle, Algerian People finally gained their independence and “Algeria as a country learned by their own their teachable moment, that at any given moment, they can be erased from the map of the world by any mean, be it a bullet in the body or in the head, or being disabled, widowed, and orphaned. At the Independence Day of Algeria there were 120000 ancient warriors most of them disabled, millions of windows and orphans, and fatigued prisoners of war in Algeria.”
As I am un early bird, saying that, it became a ritual; I opened my blog, and I just read a featured post from WordPress favorites: The pelican’s perch, http://thepelikansperch.com/
it’s a blog all about collectibles fountain pens and the author telling stories in an anecdotal mood, where by association of ideas, it then stroked me to the marrow in a split of a sec, I remembered then a title of the book, “The Pelican Brief” from John Grisham, that I read a decade ago _ it was about an environmental disaster caused by oil spills on the seashores where gooey gulls, pelicans and the like pained to move in ponds of oil on beaches and creeks, and a lawsuit against a major oil company. Back then, I blogged about the endangered bird, The Algerian Goldfinch and the disaster of environment caused by poachers that trapped the birds with glued sticks and nets, intensively that almost caused the species to disappear for good in Algeria, and because of the growing demand for the bird as it is a favorite pet for it became à la mode for many people there. So, the pelican fountain pen with the goldfinch were parts of my childhood memories and the catchy smell of the ink floating in the thin air in the morning class. Back then it was in the 60s, I was a fifth grader, and in class we used quills, blue and violet inks poured in inkwells that was incrusted to the tables of the classrooms, at least in the elementary school as long as I remember. So, when I graduated, I received a Pelican fountain pen as a gift from my father_ he owned a tobacconist store that sells also school supplies. I don’t remember the series of course but I still have a glimpse of the shiny black and gold shaped cylinder with the golden quill, and so many moments of joy in writing with it, the disaster of the spilled ink on the notebook and the trashed homework to be done and due the tomorrow morning and the great pain when I lost it. So yes, it’s elegant, and it’s addictive to write with a fountain pen and very inspiring too
Mackneen, The Algerian Goldfinch 
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