draft -- not for circulation

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The well-informed bodhisattva has a much more difficult and radical undertaking demanded of him or her than limiting herself to giving everyone a big smile, using bio-friendly washing-up liquid and radiating good vibes to distant prisoners of conscience.

Without reservation she strives to respond to the three great moral imperatives of our time - to heal the violated planet, and to enable both the underclass at home (one in five of the population) and the wretched of the earth to win dignity and freedom. To the traditional Buddhist task of calming the mind is added that of employing it to transform and dismantle social systems and processes which supercharge the suffering of humanity as well as encompassing the ruin of the planet and its creatures. Without the inner work we become part of the problem rather than part of the solution, as the history of communism has so tragically demonstrated and as the history of capitalism is on headlong course to demonstrate in an infinitely greater tragedy. As Mahatma Gandhi observed, the belief (whether of Lenin or Adam Smith) that we can devise a social system so perfect that no one will need to be good, is one of the great delusions of our time. But without the outer work the inner work cannot be socially manifested on the scale that is now required.

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Cacophony of small birds at dawn
May it continue
Sticky monkey flowers on bare brow hills
May it continue
Bitter taste of early minors lettuce
May it continue
Music on city streets on summer nights
May it continue
Kids laughing on roofs, on stoops, on the beach, in the snow
May it continue
Triumphal shout of the newborn
May it continue
Fine austerity of jungle peoples
May it continue
Rolling fuck of great whales in turquoise oceans
May it continue
Clumsy splash of pelican in smooth bays
May it continue
Astonished human eyeballs squinting through aeons at astonished nebula squinting back
May it continue
Clean snow on the mountain
May it continue
Fierce eyes, clear light of the aged
May it continue
Right of birth and of naming
May it continue
Right of instruction
May it continue
Right of passage
May it continue
Love in the morning, love in the noon sun, love in the evening among crickets
May it continue
Long tails, by fire, by window, by dusk in the mesa
May it continue
Love in the midnight, fierce joy of old ones loving
May it continue
Live music
May it continue
Grunt of mating hippo or giraffe, foreplay of snow leopard, screeching of cats on the backyard fence
May it continue
Without police
May it continue
Without prisons
May it continue
Without mad houses, high schools that are prisons
May it continue
Without empire
May it continue
In sisterhood
May it continue
Through the wars to come
May it continue
In brotherhood
May it continue
Though the earth seems lost
May it continue
To exile and silence
May it continue
With cunning and love
May it continue
As woman continues
May it continue
As breath continues
May it continue
As stars continue
May the wind deal kindly with us
May the fire remember our names
May springs flow, rain fall again
May the land grow green, may it swallow our mistakes
We begin the work
May it continue
The great transmutation
May it continue
A new heaven and a new earth
May it continue

(diane di prima)

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Away with us he's going,
The solemn eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

(Yeats)