And a Happy Equinox to you all:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbnujaAbD2A]

And as if on cue, to take advantage of the Pope's arrival, HRC (aka FSC, aka Her Nibs) decided to ride his cassock tails and declare she was opposed to KeystoneXL for the following reasons:

I think it is imperative that we look at the Keystone XL pipeline as what I believe it is: A distraction from the important work we have to do to combat climate change, and, unfortunately from my perspective, one that interferes with our ability to move forward and deal with other issues

I just wonder what kind of dressing goes with that word salad?

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxgmskQgb9U]

catholic person I've known, was Robert Stone. He said this:

They saw wild pigs running near the lake, and a soaring osprey. The mountains drew closer. Papyrus grew beside the water. Pelicans made their geometric, card-trick pterodactyl dives.

They had reached the edge of the Paz petrol roadmap Lucas had been using to navigate. Its corner sections were worn away and missing.

"Do we have a decent map?" Lucas asked.

"Just this," said Sonia.

She handed him the rental car company’s map. It was not very detailed.

"This is the kind of map that killed Bishop Pike," Lucas said.

"The one for us," said Sonia.

He said this:

His weariness with things was frightening; it smacked of obliteration, a wall of anger and fatigue that felt as though it might sweep him into nothingness. Worst of all was loneliness.

There were times when he was capable of rejoicing in himself as a singularity—a man without a story, secure from tribal delusion, able to see the many levels. But at other times he felt that he might give anything to be able to explain himself. To call himself Jew or Greek, Gentile or otherwise, the citizen of no mean city. But he had no recourse except to call himself an American and hence the slave of possibility. He was not always up for the necessary degree of self-invention, unprepared, occasionally, to assemble himself.

And sometimes the entire field of folk seemed alien and hostile, driven by rages he could not comprehend, drunk on hopes he could not imagine. So he could make his way only through questioning, forever inquiring of wild-eyed obsessives the nature of their dreams, their assessment of themselves and their enemies, listening agreeably while they poured scorn on his ignorance and explained the all too obvious. When he wrote, it was for some reader like himself, a bastard, party to no covenants, promised nothing except the certainty of silence overhead, darkness around. Sometimes he had to face the simple fact that he had nothing and no one and try to remember when that had seemed a source of strength and perverse pride. Sometimes it came back for him.

He said this:

"We're supposed to believe that Christ has gone on to reign in glory," Lucas said.

"No," said Herzog. "Jesus Christ suffers from now until the end. On the cross. He goes on suffering. Until the death of the last human being."

"And that," Lucas said, "brings you here?"

"Yes," said Herzog. "To attend. To keep on waiting."

From the steps of the church, the evening smelled of car exhaust and jasmine.

"I realize that in this kind of world," Lucas said, "I have no business being so unhappy. I realize also that on a religious level I'll always be a child. It's absurd and I regret it."

For the first time Herzog smiled.

"Don’t regret it, sir. Perhaps you know Malraux's Anti-memoires? His priest tells us that people are much more unhappy than one might think." He offered Lucas his hand. "And that there is no such thing as a grownup."

He said this:

"I would like to go to the Lion’s Gate," Raziel told him.

The Romanian volubly refused. When Raziel realized that his driver's mind was not about to be changed, he got out of the taxi and set out on foot for the Old City.

Approaching the end of the Via Dolorosa, almost at the Lions' Gate, above the shouting he heard a voice he knew. It was the voice of Adam De Kuff speaking from the upper quadrant of his interior universe, strong, unafraid, joyful, thoroughly delusional. Raziel shouldered his way through the ranks until he saw the man himself.

He wore what looked like an army jacket that fitted him so badly its cuffs stopped a little past his elbows. He had hugely baggy army trousers and untied muddy boots whose laces coiled around his ankles and twisted underfoot as he shuffled passionately from one end of the bench to the other like a dancing bear. There was a kippa on his head and a white scarf tied around his forehead like a turban and he crooned at the top of his voice.

Raziel kept trying to force his way closer to the old man. He had the notion of taking him away from there, before the thing failed utterly, before all spells and mercies were suspended, before whatever grace that had touched their pilgrimage was withdrawn and the violence and raw holiness of the place overwhelmed everyone.

De Kuff himself understood only that he was in the place he knew and loved best, the scene of his successes, the ancient Serapion and Pool of Israel. All that day he had been trying to reach the souls within himself as they weaved in and out of his consciousness. He had begun to think that everything he had ever believed about soul and mind was wrong. There was no way to exercise control.

But there at the Fountain, his souls were manifest and his heart was full, and in the completeness of his joy he had no choice but to tell about it. It was necessary to tell everyone, anyone, no matter how distressed or distracted they might be by politics or by the illusion of separateness and exile that burdened everyone. He felt elected and protected by God, ready to support the Ark in the holiest of places. He used the metaphors that were employed in this city, although, in a way, it might have been anywhere.

"Call me as you like," he explained to the angry crowd. "I am the twelfth imam. I am the Bab al-Ulema. I am Jesus, Yeshi, Issa. I am the Mahdi. I am Moshiach. I have come to restore the world. I am all of you. I am no one."

There were screams of terrible passion. "Perish he! Death!"

People began to throw stones.

"Death to the blasphemer!"

De Kuff opened his arms to them. For a moment those who were advancing on him stopped. Raziel, shouting, shoving, tried to get through.

"You don’t have to listen," Raziel said to the crowd. "It's all over. Rev," he shouted to De Kuff, "it's all over! Another time, man. Another soul. Another street."

The men who were taking hold of De Kuff, pulling him down as he tottered on his bench, also laid hands on Raziel.

"Another day!" Raziel told them. "Another mountain!"

"I tell you," De Kuff informed them in his restrained Louisiana drawl. "That all was once One and will be and has always remained so. That God is One. And faith in Him is One. And all belief is One. And all believers in Him, regardless of sect, are One. Only the human heart divides. So it is written.

"See? Do you see?" De Kuff asked the men who were pulling him down. "Everyone's waiting. And the separateness of things is false."

He went on declaiming, using the images, the reversals, the metaphors everyone knew, expounding the souls, raising their voices, until the great holiness turned to fire and he lost consciousness.

And he said this:

When he began, she thought: I must do this, I must finish this, not him. She cast the compassing of her mind as high and wide as she could reach toward strength and mercy. She cried because at first, there was nothing at all. Only the blows falling.

Though he beat her beyond fear, she kept trying. Until she was awash in all the shameful juices of living and still she kept on. Though she forgot in time who he was and what the pain was about she was able to think of the tears, the blood, and mucus and loose teeth in her mouth: these are not bad things, these are just me and I'm all right.

His electricity was shaking her loose of her bones. She never worried about screaming. The shocks blinded her, they were going to kill her.

He had hurt her head somehow and closed off light. She knew it would not get better and that she would never come back. She reached out as she had to the unresponding sea in the empty afternoons of the last months and still there was nothing and she cried. She could only live between shocks and the time was so precious. She was no hero.

Sometimes the best I’m capable of, she told him, is a little quiet probity. Tried to tell him.

Once she saw her fingers moving and she knew the electricity must be moving them. Her ring was gone. Then something began to come and she did not recognize it. She asked herself what it was when she had the time, in between. Whether it was inside or out there. Whatever it was, there was hardly anything else. It was greater than electricity and electricity was strong. It was stronger than the strong, stronger than love. It seemed as though it might be love. She was too weak to bear it. Too tired for it.

You after all? Inside, outside, round and about. Disappearing stranger, trickster. Christ, she thought, so far. Far from where?

But why always so far?

"Por que?" she asked. There was a guy yelling.

Always so far away. You. Always so hard on the kid here, making me be me right down the line. You old destiny. You of Jacob, you of Isaac, of Esau.

Let it be you after all. Whose after all I am. For whom I was nailed.

So she said to him: "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord."

Hey Nancy, I'm so sad over this, I have nothing to say. Two 60' trees taken down that could have been saved but they were not in the plan. The brown brick building is also for sale, so the other trees down the street are doomed as well.

are enamored that he purports to support one or two things that they also support and that he thereby pisses off the G.O.P. Temporarily ignored are the things he opposes that they support and the things he supports that they oppose. Unnoticed, or at least unmentioned in that fact that he devotes essentially none of the Church's vast resources to attacking these problems that he exhorts us all to solve.

Meanwhile, he is also here to sanctify Fra. Junipero Serra, an imperialist colonizer, slave holder and slaver, guilty of torture, genocide and mass slaughter. He is being "sainted" because he was such a great recruiter, by force, bribery and other nefarious means, converting the natives by the score. He is, in short, being sainted for committing cultural genocide. This has ever been the Church's role and model in world affairs, and rings like a bell in the conscious when one reads the "is it war yet" article.