Lughnasa and the Korea Moon

Sunday gratefuls: The Jangs. Landed. Asleep in Conifer. My son, too. Cool Mountain Mornings. Shadow, defender of the yard. Kate, always Kate. That long thin line between the first single-celled organism and each of us alive today. That long thin unbroken line. Shadow’s upside down Dog move.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Jangs. My son.

Year Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah:  Ahavah. Love.

Tarot: Ace of Arrows, the Breath of Life

One brief shining: Odd to consider a whole family of South Koreans asleep only a few miles from Shadow Mountain, bunked in for now after a late arrival yesterday, asleep I imagine since on Korean soil the time is 9 pm and each of them traveled over 6,000 miles yesterday.

 

Just a moment: Yes. Up here at the top. Why? Two Donald moments that should frighten the bejeezus out of all of us.

The worst of the two:

Didn’t realize how deep seated my fear of nuclear Armageddon had become. Until my President-commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military-announced he had repositioned nuclear-NUCLEAR-submarines in response to a playground taunt from a former Russian president.

An instinctive response. Oh, my god. Dr. Strangelove. 7 Days in May. Not fiction. This is how it begins, who knows how it will end.

Recalled too the many drives before moving to Colorado. Through the barren reaches of South Dakota and Wyoming. The square plots with chain link fences and razor wire dotted every once in a while in the flat landscape. Inside them missile silos. Missiles with nuclear weapons. Too real for me.

In just three days we acknowledge a day that lives in infamy, to paraphrase FDR. August 6, 1945. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” And so it came to pass.

Those of us baby boomers could also be called the cold war generation. The generation of mutually assured death and destroyed worlds. Duck and cover drills? I don’t remember them but I apparently haven’t forgotten the ur-fear of my childhood, nuclear holocaust.

 

The more subtle, yet still horrifying second thing:

So let’s say a courtier brings a message to the king. Oh, king, the harvest in the villages. Some of it will rot in the field because your nobles refuse to pay for the work. Let’s also say that the king feared this message because it would him look like a bad king. Don’t kill the messenger came into common use only after many such messengers died.

And what did our naked emperor do to become famous? He said, “You’re fired!” He’s killed thousands of messengers since then in that third millennium way.

“These numbers, oh, king, are worse than we originally thought. The nobles failed to report them because it made them look bad.”

And the naked emperor did decree on that day that henceforth the nobles would report only good numbers because bad numbers, well, they made him look bad.