ERUTAN DNOCES SI TIBAH.
-Leonardo Da Vinci
Something for you on this Tuesday night….
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
Some Quotes For You…
Depeche Mode: “John The Revelator
Does consciousness reside in the brain? Lessons from near-death experiences
Charles Mungoshi: Zimbabwean Poet
Blind Willie Johnson – John the Revelator
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Some Quotes For You…
Trying to think about how we can make a big difference, we must not ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.
Marian Wright Edelman
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell
Life is act, and not to do is death.
Lewis Morris
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Thanks to Cliff for this…
Depeche Mode: “John The Revelator”
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Does consciousness reside in the brain? Lessons from near-death experiences
Dr. Pim van Lommel is a Dutch cardiologist who collected accounts of his patients experiences during the time their hearts were stopped and there was no blood flow to their brains. These patients had no detectable electrical activity in their brains. By standard Western theories, their brains were dead, and they could not have had any experiences. Yet some of these people about one in five report vivid memories from this time. The patients never report fear, and frequently speak of deep peace and connection, white light at the end of a tunnel, bliss.
Conventional medicine would like to explain these stories as hallucinations or fabrications of the brain. But in some cases, people saw and remembered things around them. Here is a story recounted by a coronary care nurse:
During night shift an ambulance brings in a 44-year old cyanotic, comatose man into the coronary care unit. He was found in coma about 30 minutes before in a meadow. When we go to intubate the patient, he turns out to have dentures in his mouth. I remove these upper dentures and put them onto the crash cart. After about an hour and a half the patient has sufficient heart rhythm and blood pressure, but he is still ventilated and intubated, and he is still comatose. He is transferred to the intensive care unit to continue the necessary artificial respiration. Only after more than a week do I meet again with the patient, who is by now back on the cardiac ward. The moment he sees me he says: O, that nurse knows where my dentures are. I am very surprised. Then he elucidates: You were there when I was brought into hospital and you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them onto that cart, it had all these bottles on it and there was this sliding drawer underneath, and there you put my teeth. I was especially amazed because I remembered this happening while the man was in deep coma and in the process of CPR. It appeared that the man had seen himself lying in bed, that he had perceived from above how nurses and doctors had been busy with the CPR. He was also able to describe correctly and in detail the small room in which he had been resuscitated as well as the appearance of those present like myself. He is deeply impressed by his experience and says he is no longer afraid of death.
Following up after such events, Van Lommel finds that typically those who have such experiences report that their lives are altered in three ways:
– A new perspective on their lives
– Enhanced intuitions, telepathic abilities
– Loss of the fear of death
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Charles Mungoshi: Zimbabwean Poet
After the rain
For one whole week
it rained without a
break.
On the first day of sunshine
and light clothes,
a bird smashed and broke a wing
against a wall on
First Street.
For eight hours
it lay on the pavement,
flapping now and again
its one sound wing
dragging the broken one
like a warning
from the far country of its
youth.
For eight hours:
breathing softly, while the
whole human city passed by.
Towards the end of the day
a beggar
wondered what mistake it had made
in its calculations
and muttering curses to a neon sign,
cupped it in his hands
and made his way to his plastic-paper shack
by the banks of the Mukuvisi River.
—
Before the sun
Intense blue morning
promising early heat
and later in the afternoon,
heavy rain.
The bright chips
fly from the sharp axe
for some distance through the air,
arc,
and eternities later,
settle down in showers
on the dewy grass.
It is a big log:
but when you are fourteen
big logs
are what you want.
The wood gives off
a sweet nose-cleansing odour
which (unlike sawdust)
doesn’t make one sneeze.
It sends up a thin spiral
of smoke which later straightens
and flutes out
to the distant sky: a signal
of some sort,
or a sacrificial prayer.
The wood hisses,
The sparks fly.
And when the sun
finally shows up
in the East like some
latecomer to a feast
I have got two cobs of maize
ready for it.
I tell the sun to come share
with me the roasted maize
and the sun just winks
like a grown-up.
So I go ahead, taking big
alternate bites:
one for the sun,
one for me.
This one for the sun,
this one for me:
till the cobs
are just two little skeletons
in the sun.
—
In the wilderness
The torrid silence of the October sun.
Miles upon miles and miles of burnt-out plains.
Suddenly you realise
you are talking loudly to your
shadow.
—
Letter to a Son
Now the pumpkin is ripe.
We are only a few days
from the year’s first mealie cob.
The cows are giving us lots of milk.
Taken in the round it isn’t a bad year at all –
if it weren’t for your father.
Your father’s back is back again
and all the work has fallen on my shoulders.
Your little brothers and sisters
are doing fine at the day-school.
Only Rindai is becoming a problem.
You will remember we wrote to you –
did you get our letter? – you didn’t answer.
You see, since your father’s back started
we haven’t been able to raise enough money
to send your sister Rindai to secondary school.
She spends most of her time crying by the well.
It is mainly because of her
that I am writing this letter.
I had thought you would be with us last Christmas;
then I thought maybe you were too busy
and you would make it at Easter –
it was then your father nearly left us, son.
Then I thought I would come to you some time
before the cold season settled in – you know
how I simply hate that time of the year –
but then your father went down again
and this time worse than any other time before.
We were beginning to think he would never see
another sowing season.
I asked your sister Rindai to write you
but your father would have none of it –
you know how stubborn he can get
when he has to lie in bed all day or gets
one of those queer notions of his
that everybody is deserting him!
Now, Tambu, don’t think I am asking for money –
although we had to borrow a little from
those who have it to get your father to hospital –
and you know how he hates having to borrow!
That is all I wanted to tell you.
I do hope that you will be with us this July.
It’s so long ago now since we last heard from you –
I hope this letter finds you still at the old address.
It is the only address we know.
YOUR MOTHER
—
Poet
Poised on the thin edge of now
like a poleaxed tightrope walker
the past a roaring lion in the underbrush
the future a nuclear mushroom I can’t swallow
this bare flat table I am sitting at
this blank white page I am looking at
beckon, like the drowning man’s straw.
Let us bear your dreams any place, some time,
for you.
Blind Willie Johnson – John the Revelator
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