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  The Burning Hand Beat
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   Sapientia in plateis clamitat [Wisdom cries out in the marketplace]
Refueling a contemplative, curious, creative, compassion-action counterculture.
Edited by Robert Daniel Smith, Poet, Catholic Worker, Dharma Bum, Broken-Vase Taoist,
Devotee of Divine Mother & Paramahansa Yogananda, Be Here Now Ram Dass, and
Gandhian Personalist
"pronouns": both / neither, proudly freak
"Come to my home. I will make tea. Noodles. We can talk poetry. -- Tsung Tsai

Ma turned the dough and stirred the coffee. "Listen to me," she said. "I'm gettin' cornmeal today. We're a-gonna eat cornmeal mush..."

"I been thinkin', long as I'm a outlaw anyways... I'll be ever'where -- wherever you look. Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there... why, I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad an' -- I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready..."
(The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Movie by John Ford)

   Icon of the Catholic Worker Movement

The Burning Hand Beat
Viewspaper
Refueling a contemplative, curious, creative, compassion-action counterculture.

Wild-Thought Fueling Station:
Page One
  (A Page that is always Evolving and Growing...)

The Kingdom of Heaven is within you!
-- Jesus

God is Love; His plan for creation can be rooted only in love.
   Every saint who has penetrated to the core of Reality has
   testified that a divine universal plan exists and that it is
   beautiful and full of joy. -- Paramahansa Yogananda

Mystery and reality emerge from the same source. -- Lao Tzu

The Great Woman's own Child said it free and clear:
Whatsoever you do to the least of us, you do to Me.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.

   As we grow in consciousness, there will be more compassion and
   more love, and then the barriers between people, between religions,
   between nations will begin to fall. Yes, we have to beat down the
   separateness. -- Ram Dass

   There was one more change I needed to make. I saw my reflection
   in the mirror -- a gray flannel suit, white shirt, and necktie, looking
   like a respectable middle-class white man. "That's not what I want
   to be," I thought. I threw the necktie away and let my hair grow
   long. I began a new life. -- Dennis Banks, Ojibwa Warrior

   Feeding the hungry is a greater work than raising the dead.
   -- St. John Chrysostom

   The rich take
what belongs to everyone, and claim they
   have a right to own it, to monopolize it.
   -- St. Basil

The price of the kingdom is the food you give to those who need it.
   -- St. Leo the Great

Did John, Basil, and Leo surprise you?
   If so, you won't like this:

My soul gives praise to the Lord!
... He has shown might with His arm, scattered
the arrogant in the conceit of their heart,
He has pulled down the mighty from their thrones,
and exalted the lowly,
The hungry He has filled with good things,
and has sent the rich away empty.
  -- Mother Mary, Peasant Woman of the Christ Revolution

(Jesus, as taught by his Mother, has designed the feminine New Creation)
(Imagine what Trump and MAGA would say about this!)
(How is it that MAGA folks don't think that Jesus actually meant anything that he said?)

By Mary, with Mary, in Mary, for Mary.
     -- St. Louis Grignion de Montfort

I am your Mother. -- Our Lady of Guadalupe

Remember the Mother. -- Fr. Bede Griffiths

I wonder if, for you as for me, the words "darkness" and "noise"
   express something of your life-experience: everywhere, there are the
   extremities of violence, hatred, racism, nationalism, sexism, and the
   many games of lies and of liars... similarly and deeply connected, is
   the seeming fact of noise... it is as if smiles, whispers, kisses, and
hopeful dreams have been tossed aside on some road, somewhere...
To the degree that this might be true, shouldn't it remind us of both
   the necessity and attractive beauty of Light and Silence? The cult-
   ivation of which could, perhaps, plant small seeds of sanity and happiness
in the very midst of all the darkness and noise...
Light is the building-block of manifested creation... And Silence is the
space for the birth of wisdom: resting, attentively, in Light and Silence
is the page-turner of our responsibility accepted...

   In the ultimate reality, the whole is present in every part
   and every part participates in the being of the whole.
-- Fr. Bede Griffiths

   It is.
   We are It.
We forget.
We remember.
-- Rev. Ellen Grace O'Brian

Walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone.
-- George Fox

Treat everyone you meet like God in drag. -- Ram Dass

     At the molten core of our own spiritual heritage there is a teaching, an invitation,
   to a simple, complex, earthy, highly devout communal life based on servanthood
   and stewardship. It's in the Gospels, and it is front and center in the Lord's Prayer:
   Your kingdom come, your will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven. It is not a
   prayer based on spiritual dabbling, nor is it a vision subserviant to civilized myth-
ology. The kingdom of God seeks to dissolve predatory civilization by creating
   a powerful social organism, a spiritual culture of servanthood and stewardship.
   The kingdom of God is an intensely spiritual form of ecological community.
The kingdom of God is Green.
-- Paul Gilk

We're all just walking each other home. -- Ram Dass

May the universe
Never be empty of
The moaning of lovers...
-- Hafiz

   I want to be where
   your bare foot walks,

because maybe before you step
   you'll look at the ground.
   I want that blessing.
-- Rumi

Soul is what makes beauty from the dance of the personal with the great mystery.
-- Coleman Barks

   The whole of life is sacramental.
-- A. B. Brown

We are Earthseed
The life that perceives itself
Changing.
-- Octavia Butler

   When I was a child, I saw God,
I saw angels;
   I watched the mysteries of the higher and lower worlds.
   I thought all men saw the same.
   At last I realized that they did not see...
-- Shams of Tabriz

   The place of prayer is a priceless habitation.
   -- John Woolman

     If you want to become whole, first let yourself become broken.
-- Lao Tzu
(Thus, "Broken-Vase Taoism")

   The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely
   free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
-- Albert Camus

I was plain, and would have all things done plainly; for I did not seek any
   outward advantage to myself.
-- George Fox

Belief initiates and guides action -- Or it does nothing.
-- Octavia Butler

  Poetry is the heart of the world. -- Tsung Tsai

The "Beat message" is still spreading its Word of dissent non-violent
   crazy wisdom and beatitude in a world that needs it more than ever.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Beat doesn't mean tired, or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian
   for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like St. Francis, trying to love all
   life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance,
   kindness, cultivating joy of heart... What are you searching for? they asked
   me. I answered that I was waiting for God to show his face.
-- Jack Kerouac

     All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm. -- Henry Miller

   If you doubt mountains' walking, you do not know your own walking. -- Dogen

   Beat: "Kerouac (in various interviews and lectures) was trying to indicate
   the correct sense of the word by pointing out its connection to words like
   'beatitude' and 'beatific' -- the necessary beatness or darkness that preceeds
   opening up to light, egolessness, giving room for religious illumination."
   -- Allen Ginsberg

   Beat literature sings against cynicism, apathy, injustice, deception, compromise,
   racism, consumerism, war, evils and cons of all kinds. -- Anne Waldman

Take courage, for human nature is divine. -- Pythagoras

The Common Good: a vision of society where the good of each member
is bound to the whole in the service to God.
(From the Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker)

  Stop demonizing pleasure... love up on each other...
-- adrienne maree brown

   I think the poet is the last person who is still speaking the truth when no one
   else dares to. I think the poet is the first person to begin the shaping and
   visioning of the new forms and the new consciousness when no one else
   has begun to sense it; I think these are two of the most essential human
   functions...
every man / every woman carries a firmament inside
& the stars in it are not the stars in the sky

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
   THE IMAGINATION
-- Diane di Prima

   There is a force in the universe -- call it God or spirituality or whatever you like --
   that wants the victory of truth and justice. This force will help you if you are steady,
   humble, brave, and patient. Never, ever give up, however bad things get.
   -- Nelson Mandela

Personalism: a philosophy which regards the freedom and dignity
   of each person as the basis, focus and goal of all metaphysics and morals.
Decentralism: we encourage efforts such as family farms, rural and urban
   land trusts, worker ownership and management of small factories, home-
   steading projects, food, housing and other cooperatives -- any effort in
   which money can once more become merely a medium of exchange, and
human beings are no longer commodities.
   A Green Revolution: it is possible to rediscover the proper meaning of
   our labor and our true bonds with the land; a distributist communitarian-
   ism, self-sufficient through farming, crafting, and appropriate technology;
   a radically new society, where people will rely on the fruits of their own
   toil and labor; associations of mutuality, and a sense of fairness to
resolve conflicts.
   (From the Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker)

Grow up or go extinct. -- Paul Gilk

The time for the Birth of Sacred Activism on a global scale has arrived.
Everything is now at stake and everything is possible. -- Andrew Harvey

The greatest challenge of the day is:
how to bring about a revolution of heart,
a revolution that has to start with each one of us.
-- Dorothy Day

   Be concrete be immediate! Imagine the world!
   If you embrace a child, can you consent to the death of
a child? each human face leads you (follow!) to every face.
-- Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ

I am convinced that in spite of the complexity of life in our society
what will save man is to serve another, several others, freely; and
and to form with them a creative and liberating community... in the
   certainty that we are playing the game of God, the interiorized
festival of life.
-- David Kirk

The Tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao.
-- Lao Tzu

   The cosmos is an infinite and eternal intelligence... The ultimate purpose
of human existence is to consciously foster and further the transmission of the
unifying, embracing, and all-encompassing intelligence of the cosmos into the
universe. -- Ervin Laszlo

   The Kingdom of Heaven is within you!
-- Jesus

On the uneven floor
we all lie down in layers,
a hologram of lovers...
-- Hettie Jones

you are beautiful / you are beautiful
   you are a hundred times beautiful...
-- Lenore Kandel

   God is voluptuous and delicious! -- Meister Eckhart

   The world would be better off
   if people tried to become better.
   And people would become better
   if they stopped trying to become better off.
   For when everybody tries to be become
   better off
   nobody is better off.
   But when everybody tries to become better,
   everybody is better off.
   Everybody would be rich
   if nobody tried to become richer.
   And nobody would be poor
   if everybody tried to be the poorest.
   And everybody would be what he ought
to be
   if everybody tried to be
   what he wants the other fellow to be.
   -- St. Peter Maurin, Catholic Worker

   Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist,
   every minute a chance to save the world.
   -- Dolores Huerta, UFW Organizer

There's a crack in everything... that's how the light gets in...
-- Leonard Cohen

   Anywhere is the center of the world.
   -- Black Elk

   Love one another as I have loved you.
   -- Jesus

I'm continually astonished that people really don't love each other.
     How can they do it?
     -- Jack Kerouac

   One positive thought produces millions of positive vibrations.
   -- John Coltrane

   The world is pregnant with God.
   -- St. Angela of Foligno

   Our work today is evidence of the unfinished status of planetary
   struggles for equality, justice and freedom.
   -- Angela V. Davis

   Emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex
   systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies. Emergence is our
   inhertance as a part of this universe; it is how we change. Emergent
   strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to
   embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.
   -- adrienne maree brown

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
   -- Anais Nin

   You -- special,miraculous, unrepeatable, fragile, tender, lost, sparkling
   ruby emerald jewel, rainbow splendor person. It's up to you.
   -- Joan Baez

  The philosophy of Tao embodies a cosmology rooted in that most primal and
wondrous presence: earth's mysterious generative force... this venerable
generative force appears most explicitly in Lao Tzu's recurring references to the
female principle, such as "mother of all beneath heaven," "nurturing mother,"
"valley spirit," "dark female-enigma." -- David Hinton

      We are clusters of vibration in-formed by the intelligence of the cosmos.
-- Ervin Laszlo

The nonviolent voice of Gandhi appeals to man's highest conscience.
Let nations ally themselves no longer with death, but with life; not with
destruction, but with construction; not with hate, but with the creative
miracles of love. -- Paramahansa Yogananda

      I was hungry and you fed me! -- Jesus

Every day: Chop Wood, Carry Water
-- Chinese Taoist Sage

  Come to my home. I will make tea. Noodles. We can talk poetry. -- Tsung Tsai

   The only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live
mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yearn
   or say a commonplace thing... but burn, burn, burn...
-- Jack Kerouac

   The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was
made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.
-- Edward Andrews

This may only be a dream of mine, but I think
   it can be made real.
-- Ella Baker

Embrace simplicity.
Put others first.
   Desire little.
-- Lao Tzu


Our power is in our soils. They sustain our every need. They are the starting
place when we return to the land with a seed in hand.
-- Poppy Okotcha

Make love. Take a bath. Make love again. -- Frida Kahlo

And then I ate hot bread. -- Gertrude Stein

God is Alive, Magic is Afoot. -- Leonard Cohen

   I am your Mother. -- Our Lady of Guadalupe

Nothing Immortal
There is nothing immortal
about these bones
   that I wear under my skin
   but the wandering clouds
   above
   ah as they dance through
   the blue
   surely they wear immortality
   as the skin of the Tao

Simple Way-Ultimate Way
The kingdom of heaven within you
is the bare-naked admission
of no-thing out-side
but all-things jumping
through possibility
into here...
then returning
into there...
neither of which
is different or separate
from the other

always Mother
always birthing
always celebrating
always transforming

this is Simple Way

and

Is is the always-rising
from the empty-belly of   Not

this is Ultimate Way

now-only

Wandering Cloud, Empty Mind

Wandering cloud empty mind
Counting trees
If Li Po drops by later today
I'll show him my winter-naked
Apple trees
Waiting for their spring-bloom
   I'll ask him if he would like
   A cup of tea
   And a conversation on poetry
   I know that I will also
   Ask him to meet my wife
   Later and stay for dinner
   And who knows perhaps
   He will
But for now I'll walk the dogs

   -- Robert Daniel Smith

OK -- so I left the mosque and went to the alehouse! The sermon was interminably long, and valuable time was wasting away. -- Hafiz

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion. Bewilderment brings intuitive knowledge. -- Rumi

What does God do all day long? He gives birth. From the beginning of eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth to the All. -- Meister Eckhart

Creation was fashioned to be adorned, to be showered, to be gifted with the love of the Creator. The entire world has been embraced by this kiss. Limitless love, from the depths to the stars, flooding all, loving all. It is the royal kiss of peace. God hugs you. You are encircled by the arms of the mystery of God. -- St. Hildegard of Bingen

Imagine Paradise, Practice Beauty

We are put on earth for a little space that we may learn to bear the beams of love.
-- William Blake

The Ultimate is experienced in the depth of the soul, in the substance or Center of its consciousness, as its own Ground or Source, as its very being or Self (Atman). This experience of God is summed up in the word saccidananda. God or Ultimate Reality, is experienced as absolute being (sat), known in pure consciousness (cit), communicating absolute bliss (ananda).
-- Fr. Bede Griffiths (The Marriage of East and West)

We were created by Love, for Love, to become Love. -- Simone Weil

Suppose it never, ever comes true, and there is no paradise... well, I'll still go on preaching. And yet how siomple a matter it is: in one day, in one hour it could all be brought about at once! The chief thing is to love others as oneself, that's the main thing, and that's it -- absolutely nothing more is necessary: you would immediately discover how to bring it about. -- Dostoevsky

I want to have more sex, travel more, drink more wine and love life. -- Zoe Saldana

If ordinary people really knew that consciousness and not matter is the link that connects us with each other and the world, then their views about war and peace, environmental pollution, social justice, religious values, and all other human endeavors would change radically.
-- Amit Goswami, Ph.D.

Dissolving into the Primordial Ecstasy:
   Into the breath,
   Into the garden,
   Into the water,
   Into the silence,
   Into the music:
   Everything fits exceedingly well...

   -- Robert Daniel Smith
(from The Jewel In The Lotus)

I am different from ordinary people.
   I nurse from the Great Mother's breasts.
   -- Lao Tzu