Satyagraha

Winter Solstice and Planetary Alignment Easter Egg Hunt.

I have been thinking about Gandhi’s practice and teaching of satyagraha, “a policy of passive political resistance, especially that advocated by Mahatma Gandhi against British rule in India”, and adapted by Martin Luther King during the civil right’s movement in America. I read a book about this when Nancy and I were involved in protests against waste sites being located in southwest GA, areas predominantly poor and black. Real solutions to the waste problem, the problem of equity, and many other social problems can rarely, in our time be solved with violence. Violence begets violence. A counterpoint to this is the Bhagavad-Gita, a book influential in Gandhi’s development,. It is set in the midst of battle when Arjuno in despair encounters Krishna, an embodiment of the divine spirit. The text is also an expression of this divine nature and support for those who exist in this realm in human form, met always with hard choices and trials. It is a call to action, participation in this realm and a call as in Christian doctrine to act not through the lower ego, but through the Logos, “Not I but Christ in me”. Americans should look not only to the founding fathers and the constitution but to souls like Emerson, King, and all who truly seek liberation for all of humanity and by spiritual inference, our mother the earth and its creatures, even down to it’s mineral substances, spinning as it is in the greater cosmos of form and spirit.

Happy new Year from Stephen Hawks!

Babble!

I will get around to something more cheerful soon, but this is what emerged from my last session of drawing. I had the title as soon as I started the scribbles. The boy is like younger boys that were in illustrated books by Garth Williams I had as a boy, or I should say we had, my sisters and I. There was the boy who caught the leprechaun and there was the story book about Crispin’s Crispian, the Dog Who Belonged to Himself. I experienced an odd occurrence I associate with an illustration in his book Elves and Fairies when I was between 9 and 11 or there about. I was up in the playroom in the Gaskin Street house and opened the book to a picture of one of his leprechauns. It came alive and it terrified me. I shut the book quickly and left the room. When I was older I looked at the book again and tried to see what I saw then but couldn’t. My rational mind had blocked the intuitive child. I try not to block that intuitive child any longer. Both are needed to get at the truth. Thus the title for this drawing on the last day of 2020: Babble.

By the way, I always thought that Mr. Dog, the title of the book mentioned, was a mild form of propaganda. It clearly states that Crispin’s Crispian was a conservative.

Stephen Hawks