the face of the child left behind

Now where did I leave that phone bill?

Witness piece.

Imagine a battered life.
Imagine abuse, endless, and in many forms. Physical. Verbal. Psychological. Sexual.
Imagine the years spent drenched in sweat and stale body odor. Filthy.
Imagine a crown of thorns and the feel of your blood drying on your skin, on your face.

Imagine a battered life.
Imagine your blood in your eyes.
Imagine the smell of urine. Everywhere. Inescapable.
Imagine fear without definition.
Imagine a deer, an elk, a mountain goat, a bystander on the corner as the bullet goes in.

Imagine a battered life.
Imagine a wall covered with trophy heads, the eyes all staring. Some of them are human.
Imagine the hunger, the cold, the fear, the indifference, the isolation of years spent on the streets. No relief, not even for a moment.
Imagine rape on a scale of millions. A culture of rape.

Imagine a battered life.
Imagine murder on a scale of millions. A culture of death.
Imagine an ocean of blood, red foam on the beaches, corpses bobbing in the tide.
Imagine the rain forest burning, the cities burning, and the burning piles of the dead.
Imagine the face of the child left behind, the witness.

Imagine a battered life.
Imagine a battered life.
Imagine a battered life.

James Lee Jobe

        "What history has shown is that when you are granted a perspective bigger than the one you had been harboring, you end up thinking differently about the world. For the better."

Neil deGrasse Tyson

We lifted them up.

So it came to be that we lost some people,
More than a few. We determined to try to save the rest,
One color at a time. I can guess what you're thinking,
But no, I don't mean by race. Some people were blue,
Some were green, some purple. Hot pink. Fuchsia.
There was every color, all colors. And we lifted them up
To save them. This was slow, hard work.
In fact, it was all we could do just to get it done.
After each color, we would collapse, exhausted.
Then we would pick ourselves up from the ground
And start again, with whatever color was next.
We just did next the next thing in front of us.
We lifted them up. We didn't think about yesterday
Or tomorrow. And we didn't quit until we had them all,
Every person. We lifted them up, every survivor,
Until the sky was full of every color. Every color
That exists, up in the sky above the earth, above us.

James Lee Jobe

        "When the mind appears, reality disappears. When the mind disappears, reality appears."

Bodhidharma, 'Bodhidharma’s Teachings'

        What is it to be a human? We have love, sorrow, laughter, and music. And tools, language, and the craft of culture, among other things.  And like all beings, we have the cycles of being alive, the cycles of life. Just as I wrote that, a lovely breeze blew in through the open window.

James Lee Jobe

        "What's your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow."

Jack Kerouac

May I do some good today. 

James Lee Jobe 

Water flows over these hands.

May I use them skillfully

to preserve our precious planet.

Thich Nhat Hanh

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-jlj