My name is Faust

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Faust

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This is my first Post on this Forum.

I am impressed with the generosity and the extended kindness displayed by the Forum. I will try to be as mannered as they seem to be.

I also look around and I see a wide assortment of Moslem personas which even though they are electronic sparks seem to be both elegant and sincere.

I am an American. I am an old man. I am a Professional soldier. I lived in the Middle East when I was younger and I have a wife from a distinguished family in the Sultanate of Oman. I have a son and a daughter by my wife and I also have two adopted daughters who are married, both were foundlings that I took as my responsibility during war. One I found in a bombed out train. The other was born clean of a Leper family. The father was an educated man and he was my friend. I raised his child as my own from her birth. Both married and I have five grandchildren. Their husbands are fine men. One is a body guard in the American Secret Service. He does work as a Marshall. My other daughter married a man who enlisted in our forces in Kuwait to fight beside us there. He was given American citizenship. He is a Senior Security Officer at a National Airport in the United States.

I am familiar with Islam. Like any religion it has good and bad people. Human nature is disappointing most of the time.

I may disappoint people here. I will try not to do so. I live in Islamabad and have a server with a National company in the United States who have a Sys Admin who is my son. I can post from anywhere on Earth and he will take my post and forward it to anyplace else on Earth. My son is half Omani, six five and weighs 230 pounds. he served in the US Rangers. I would have preferred that he serve in the US Marines but it was his choice and they offered him a very fine scholarship at Georgia Tech.

My daughter , also half Omani, is a Contemplative Dominican Nun in Rome.

I am working with the Embassy in Islamabad and I help facilitate the relief work for the Earthquake refugees up in the Azar. I am also a few other things.
But get to know me if you like. I wont lie to you. I will be honest and you will probably not like a man who is homest. Few people do. I was with Fourth Mech Recon and was in the advance when we took Baghdad. I went into Iraq four times on long range recon before the war even started. I was into Baghdad twice before the city fell. I was with the unit that went in the night the city came apart. We took Saddam City( now Sadr City) and stayed in the big Tobacco Factory there. My unit took Saddams Intelligence Archive and 58 prisoners.
 
welcome to the forum...hope you have an enjoyable and benefitial stay!!
 
salam alaikum
welcome to the forum and thanks for the detailed introduction.

We hope you will enjoy your stay here and find the forum both productive and a means for learning.

I will be honest and you will probably not like a man who is homest.
Click to expand...

We the Muslims more than anything love the truth and love for all people to be honest with themselves as well as others.

Looking forward to your posts.

Bro Aku
 
welcum here..hope u have a beneficial stay..
 
Welcome to the forum

Seems like you will have a lot to offer the forum. Enjoy your stay!!

Rabi'ya:rose:
 
Welcome!

Personally, I think you sound super cool. I've never talked to somebody who fought in the Gulf.
 
What is your favorite Book after the Scriptures?

I am contented by your hospitality. All of you who greet me accept my thanks.

HUMAN BEINGS ARE ENDOWED with a unique capacity: the gift of speech. By means of language, we give expression to our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Language enables us to communicate with each other in simple and complex ways and to contribute to the formation of life and world. We could say that the word-our participation in language-is the condition for a truly human world. What would we know of "world" and our presence in it without the instrumentality of language?

Alongside the distinctively human capacity for verbal expression, we have an equally potent endowment for silence. Because we speak and express ourselves through language, we can also choose to refrain from speech. We can remain silent. The choice to be Silent is not a merely negative phenomenon. If we believe that in silence "nothing happens," we may conclude that silence is indeed negative, a non-act. In reality, though, silence can be as expressive as the spoken word. When we keep SPEAK out of our inner Silence silence purposefully engages in a positive act: we do something with and by our silence. Understood in this way, silence becomes a communicative act that achieves parity with speech. "Silence speaks," as we say.

Silence and speech are, in fact, profoundly related to each other. Authentic speech depends on silence, for silence enhances the expression of our uniqueness in movement, gesture, and word. True words in turn foster access to the depths of silence from which thoughtful speech flows. If my words are not born of silence, it is a waste of time."\0mallfoÙ\0\0\0»ˆjq\0enter">
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Wow...Nice intro!

You actually fought in the Gulf? Well nice to meet you and hopefully you will like this forum
 
I am unfamiliar with the mechanisms of this Forum. I posted in Introduction and it dismissed half of the text and put up gibberish. Wanted to do a quote and it stopped doing the text.

I see I can not initiate a thread either. It is not allowed. I suppose one is confined to replies alone until one has made 50 replies and then gets to initiate a thread independently?

The people seem very polite. You may be accustomed to the incivility of other Forums. I am more familiar with the brutal handling of other Forums. This seems a very peaceful place.

You make reference to a "violent wind". Give me the whole quote from the Koran and put it in context for me.
 
Hey Faust.


Welcome to the forum, and i'm sure insha Allaah (God willing) you'll have a beneficial stay here. :)


Referring to your point about the truth and being honest; this is a duty upon us muslims that we should speak the truth. In the Qur'an it is said:


All who obey Allah and the messenger are in the company of those on whom is the Grace of Allah,- of the prophets (who teach), the sincere (lovers of Truth), the witnesses (who testify), and the Righteous (who do good): Ah! what a beautiful fellowship! (Qur'an 04:69)


Going back to the question you asked brother fozley; the verse/ayah mentioned is:

And the 'Ad, they were destroyed by a furious Wind, exceedingly violent; (Qur'an 69:06)


If you got any questions to ask about islam, then please do ask at any time. :)


Peace.
 
OK, here goes my favourite surah

In the name of God, Most merciful, most kind.

Surah Al-Haaqah (the reality)

"1)the reality (i.e. the day of resurrection)
2)what is the reality?
3)and what will make you know what is the reality?
4)Thamud and Aad denied the Qa'ariah [the striking hour (day of judgement)].
5)As for Thamud, they were destroyed by the awful cry.
6)And as for Aad, they were destroyed by a screaming violent wind.
7)Which Allah(god) imposed on them for 7 nights and 8 days in succession, so then you could see men lying overthrown (destroyed), as if they were hollow trunks of palm trees!
8)Do you see any remenants of them."

Well by this Allah brings back the story of the 2 tribes, Aad and thamud...

Read more of them here:

http://www.islamweb.net/ver2/archive/article.php?lang=E&id=53397
 
You make a reference to a "Violent wind" Folzey. Is your name Sapphire or is that a nickname? I am an old man, as I have said. I am also a gemstone dealer and know a good deal about Sapphires. I particularly like Star Sapphires.

Since you talk of "violent winds" and give me a Koran reference; here is something of mine from a book I did called "The Cauldron of Light"

The valley of the Children( Valle de los Ninos) was named that by the Spanish. But the name is older than that...the Indians called the valley the same thing...but in their language it was called Arinero. It meant “the place of the demons.”
There are two kinds of demons in the Arinero. One is a dust-devil, everyone knows what a dust-devil is. And the other is a sand-demon, which is not so well known.
The Arinero from which the valley got its name, are two very big dust devils. Each arises in the extreme eastern end of the valley as the sun rises. The wind and the air in that end of the valley are heated first because the sun rises over the Granite mountains and exposes the sheer sides of the opposing Crater and Growler mountains around the three sides of the valley to an ascending array of sharp mountain reflective faces.

As these mountain surfaces reflect the sunlight, the valley gradually heats from east to west in a steady march of temperature. The winds of the night’s cooler air rise and flee before the light. And as they flee westward the dust is driven before them, one from the north east and the other to the southeast. These towers of marching dust are three hundred feet high, bright and turning on the edge of the advancing morning sun.

These two small tornadoes every day for thousands and thousands of years are the dust devils of the Arinero. Every day they come like swirling stone-throwing bullies, one down one side of the valley parallel to the Growlers and the other toward the flanks of the Crater mountains.

Each goes to one side or the other of the tower called Okie’s Needle at the dead center of the valley. They can throw stones the size of your fist as they pass. By midday they vanish into the western end of the valley where the atomic bomb crater beckons in the narrow apex of the Granite and the Craters.

The great choker plug called Okie’s Needle in the center of the valley is about 800 feet tall and thin as a needle. It is very dense Verdic Basalt..a silicon volcanic material, but very dense with heavy elements, hard, heavy rock. It is all that is left of the volcano which is no longer there. The volcanic body has long since weathered away, leaving the stone vomit of the needle still rising even though the mound of the ancient volcano has drifted to dust.

There were, at one time, great boulders of verdic basalt in the body of the volcanic cone. But as the magma cone weathered away over the millenia, the boulders were exposed and settled to the blank floor of the arid stone valley. Usually they rested in a substrate of tufa and volcanic gravels...but these were blown around by an eternity of wind, century after century, millenium after millenium.

The great heavy boulders leaned and rocked ever so slowly as the sands and gravels shifted around their bases with the circling winds of time. Over the tens of thousands of years the hard heavy boulders ground down against the bedrock, and with the brilling of the sands to assist ,and the winds to power the process, the great boulders gradually turned and rolled and ground themselves to bits like enormous great drills..until there was little or nothing left of them. And the stone whirlpool result was a series of great cavernous sheer-sided pits near the base of the Needle.

These pits yawn hundreds of feet deep curling and twisting straight down like lairs to the wind. Shadowed leering openings that worm down into darkness and suggest menace and damnation. Ascending the stairs of the weathered foot of the needle..the pits open on the rock ledges like waiting mouths convoluting straight down into the roaring silences.

The surface rock of the valley is probably hotter than the air above it could ever be. The air at rock level is probably around 125 degrees F. Six feet higher it could be about 106 degrees F. Down in the pits curling back into ledges and windhollowed caverns the air might actually be much cooler, stagnant perhaps, but cooler.

However, the rocks themselves absorb heat in an intense manner, the rocks, after all, are very dense...almost metallic. The sun comes down in this volcanic valley with the suddeness and intensity of a detonating bomb. The rock itself under your boots at midday might be 165 degrees F.

I took shelter in the mouths of the sand demon pits from the heat of midday. It was while I sat in the brooding shadows of the pit that I listened to the silences which spoke just on the edge of hearing deeper down.

Whispers and groans of winds lived down below in the darkness. Shifting temperatures made the air of the pits vary like the bowels of some gigantic stone gut in the belly of hell.
The heat was unbearable..but I sat and bore it. I could get no relief...so I sought none. I endured. I pulled up the hood of my robe and lowered my head and sat in the darkness of the shaded pit..and I recited the psalms to control my waiting, so that my voice argued with the murmurs beneath me...as my will argued with my body commanding it to be still.

My voice alone disturbed the air. The groans and murmurs growled louder as the morning turned to midday and midday turned to afternoon... and I answered the voices of the wind below me with my own voice until there was a booming and a conversation between us. Me reciting the verses in Latin of the Dies Irae...and the groaning and the growls of the shifting air disturbed by the bouncing sound answered me louder and louder...until a breeze arose coming up from below ,dry and stale and full of acrid grit.

The mighty trumpet’s dolorous tone
Shall pierce through each sepulchral stone
and summon men before the throne
Tubamiram spargens sonum
per sepulchra regionem
coget omnes ante thronem
Mors stepubit et natura
Cum resurget creatura
judicanti responsura
Death and nature to amaze
Behold their Lord his creatures raise
to meet the Judges’s awful gaze

And below me, the darkness began to whine.

And suddenly the sand demon awoke below me, broke loose from the silent physics of the rock and heat, and began to come out.

The air at rock level, at the entrance to the pit, was well over a hundred degrees. The lip and the mouth of the pit themselves were incandescent in the direct sun. But just feet back into the pit, deeper by a yard or less, the temperature of the air was perhaps about only a hundred degrees.

Between the rock and the shadows within there may have been as much as a twenty or thirty degree difference. What the temp was down in the deepest bowel of the twisted rock was probably constant even at night. But the fact remains that the temperatures around me in the shadows were radically at variance within inches of one another.

There was a sharp and definite difference in temperature between the depths and the mouth of the pit. Anything that caused a tilting disturbance of this temperature balance would make the air in the pit shift. The heated air of the entrance would create a vacuum just at the entrance and that would be just enough to suck the air from beneath where it was cooler, up just a yard or two. That would be all it would take to awaken the coil of the depths where the air would begin to shake and unwind, its balance disturbed.

Then the motion of the air would accelerate and rise..the heated air probing in forcing the cooler air up...and in their contention..in the echoes of my voice...the shattered balance of the degrees would make the motions of the air become manifest.

And so, the demon in the stygian sand at the bottom of the pit would awaken.

A storm of sound and grit gibbered all around me and blew up from beneath, sending up billows of fine glittering siliconic dust flashing like microscopic sparklers, twinkling shards of infinitesimal glass.

The light of the heated entrance caught this burst of groaning sound and wind and in shafts of brilliant sunlight I was surrounded by a flare of violent hissing whining billows of dust from deep in the pit.

It came up like a snake, glittering and starlike all around me. Driving me out of the pit and into the anvil of sunlight with a blowing shriek and then as I stumbled forth.... the demon sighed and sank again down into the depths, as sudden to return, as he was to rise.

Quid sum miser tunc dicturus
quem patronem rogaturus
cum vix justus sit securus
Ah, how shall I that day endure
what guardian’s aid can make secure
when scarce the just themselves are sure?

Driven forth and having lost the argument with the pit’s master I stood forth on the great stair of the Needle and looked around me at the silent pits rising dark on all sides like curses waiting to be delivered.

I picked up a stone..a large hard dense flat stone and I brought it down so hard against the floor of the ledge beneath my feet that the sides of the cavity of that great stair resounded with the sound, echoing sibilant as a gunshot.

The air all around me bounced with the sound. And the ripples of the sound made the heated layers of the air bend and warp and shiver. The silver mirages danced and shimmered and for a second or two the air all on that stair danced and quivered with my challenge on the surface of the rock.
Every pit responded with a growl and every one sent up a gust of groaning whining sand...small towers of glittering spume dry and eternally waiting...which rose in a wail and then sank down again as the air settled and the waves of sound rolled far away in echoes distant and more distant.
Sand demons.

Then the heat settled around me and the silence too. And I stood exposed and unwelcome in this hell.
Shown the door.
Go, begone. Leave us!
Your voice disturbs us.

As the afternoon lengthened I descended the stair of the Needle heading into the lengthening shadows to the West, I walked the last miles toward the atomic crater in the western distance...the great hole. I walked all night in the cracks of the Valley of the Children, the shattered floor of bare rock, no dust, no soil. And the closer I came to the atomic crater the more the rock became deformed and strange and petrified in liquid agonies now still.

In the moonlight I passed dripping ledges of rock...whole seams had flowed away and the stone beneath my feet was bare and black and not even a single plant grew anywhere in the stark shadows of the atomic blasted narrow valley’s end.

I slept on the rim of the atomic crater awaiting the rising of the sun....then I would rise also... to descend.

With the dawn I would rope my way down into the thirty story deep half mile wide hole left from a quarter kiloton blast of plutonium.
But for now I lay down on the rock of the rim and slept.

Nunc Dimittis...my voice internally delivering me into the hands of my guardians.
Rex tremendae majestatis
qui salvandos salvas gratis
salva me, fons pietatis.
King of tremendous majesty
whose salvation saved me with its freedom
heal me now in the fountain of your grace.

And so, I slept.
 
Very nice.....I enjoyed that....By the way, if you're wondering what that 'Screaming violent wind' is doing at the bottom of every one of my posts.

Well that's my signature...| really like that story of Sarsain Aathiyah (the wind)....Also, it enchants me, sory that sounded a bit silly....

But anyways...I enjoyed your post....I hope you enjoyed reading the story in the quran
 
Another of the things I have written which speak of a "violent wind". Reality itself might be called a violent wind...change and event are a kind of wind.


There is a constant current of power and fire all around us and within us. All living things are choking full, swollen with the silent imageless birth. The power is clambering and pressing upon us all the time. A great storm of swirling power..The silent storm is all around you, whispering.

There was once a man named Tinh Thuy,a Marine in the South Vietnamese military . This Marine was on a night patrol with his unit just before the fall of Saigon. Tinh was one of the men still fighting in a war even he knew was lost.
NVA ambushed Tinh's unit in the dark that night and Tinh was point in the column as it advanced under the dark trees. A command detonated claymore mine exploded close in front of Tinh and cut him in half. It blew both his legs off and emasculated him. It opened his abdomen so his bowels were spilled and he collapsed in a pool of his own blood and excrement in the mud.
Tinh should have died.

His men respected Tinh. They lifted what was left of him and put it in a poncho and carried what was left of him out after they had beaten off the ambush and could withdraw. They thought he was dead, but they were not going to leave his body behind.
Perhaps Tinh was dead. He doesn't remember the blast. He doesn't remember anything. His body was taken back and it was believed that he was dead. The body was cut in half and the bowels were hanging out.
God spoke. This one. His name is Tinh Thuy.

An American medical corpsman opened the poncho that was wrapped around the fly covered carrion of half a dead gook Marine. The poncho was warm and full of clotted jelly blood. The corpman knelt in the dawn light and examined the corpse. He was careful to guard his breath against the stink and to keep as much of what he touched off himself as he could. He could always wash his boots later.

This one. God whispering and the American corpsman nodded.

Against orders and against responsibility and against sanity...this one.
Lord, I hope you know what you are doing...because that is exactly what they are going to ask me. Lord, you are not going to have to answer for this..I am.

"Load this one with the living. " the corpsman ordered.

The helicopter gook replied,"Bac si! He is dead."

"Load him with the living, I tell you. Do as I command!"

Tinh Thuy remembers nothing. He was taken into surgery and they sewed his abdomen shut and restarted his heart. They closed off his arteries in his femorals and they put in a series of drains. He was injected with IV's for fluids and pumped full of whole blood. For a year he remembers nothing..or next to nothing.
Men from his unit came to see him and went away again. He does not remember any of it. His mother came and watched beside him for months in the hot intensive care unit where he was hooked to a machine which monitored his vital sign and carried off his wastes. The machine pumped him full of more fluids. Most of a year passed.

In the following year the communist NVA took the city.

That night Tinh remembers the sky full of darkness and the lines of tracers and explosions. One of his men came to Tinh that night and took him from the dark powerfailed hospital . Tinh lay in the dark ward, abandoned. But one of his men came and found him.

One of his men came and found him abandoned in the empty ward. Not knowing if it would kill Tinh or not the man unhooked all the tubes and lifted the half a man out of the crib which contained him. And carrying his friend's dripping stinking half a body... that single loyal soldier struggled aimlessly through the rubbled streets in a city that was falling.
There was a woman in the same city on that night...she was middle aged, but looked much older. She was a nun. But for some time the Church had not provided anything for her or for what she did. She was completely on her own.
This woman lived on a quiet back street in Saigon. She cared for retarded and feral children. She had remained behind when she knew the city was falling. There was no one to take care of the children except herself.

When the Communists came finally to lead the dance in a world without end , Tinh was set down in the street and he survived as a beggar.
He was cursed by some unknown U.S. Marine medical corpsman to be half a man, starving and crippled beyond belief....alive.
Lord, I hope you know what you are doing. This one is dead...but I obey you. He will go with the living. I obey.
Lord, I hope you know what you are doing....
"This one."



Tinh should have died within five years (99% with no care from the filth of their own body's wastes do) from kidney damage or starvation or infections.
Tinh picked through garbage and ate the vomit of drunks. He cut up a truck tire and fashioned a pad to support his lower body and his bowels which had no sphincters. He made pads for his hands from truck tires... and on his strong arms that were longer than his torso he went down the street like an insect below people's knees.
He was a man of the dust..a baodi... a man people did not see...because everyone who looked at him turned aside and looked away.

Even with no legs Tinh stood at attention. He didn't beg like a beggar. He took off his Marine cap and he held it out and he looked you right in the eye if you would look at him. There was nothing of pity in him, nor anything servile.

The Communists had their own problems. They ordinarily would have taken the time to arrest and kill any man who had belonged to an elite unit. But in Tinh's case they made him sign a statement that he had served the puppet regime which no longer existed and let it go at that. He would be offered no care . The street was where he belonged and was all he deserved as far as the new masters were concerned.

Tinh's old mother was taken to a re-education camp. She was old. The Communists put her in a pit with a bamboo lid. She died in her own excrement in the pit. There was nothing Tinh could do to save her.

The next Spring Tinh met the old nun who was caring for the feral street children. Tinh protected the children when they went to beg on the street. The old nun had no choice about getting food for the survival of the children. She dressed them as best she could and sat with them near a park. And they lived on what people gave them. Tinh was on the same part of the street. He defended the old woman and the children from anyone who would have made them move.
In return for his kindness Tinh was asked to come and sleep on the covered porch of the house where the old nun and the children lived.
And so the half a Marine who never slouched when he stood on no legs became the protector of the children whom no one wanted in the house of the woman who had nothing but her care. They did not live well, but they survived well.


There was a man who had known the nun years before when she was a bit younger. He was a U.S. Medical corpsman much like the one ( He was the same man, why lie about it ) who had first opened the bloody poncho wrapping the burst corpse of Tinh Thuy laying in a pool of his own guts. This corpsman in 1979 began trying to find a way to communicate inside Viet Nam. It was very difficult. The country was closed and mail was not even delivered from outside the communist domains. The country was in the throes of the worst of the reconstruction to communist standards.

There was a man who escaped from Viet Nam at this time. He was the same man who had come to the hospital that night when the power was off and the city was under bombardment. This man who had saved Tinh in a moment of desperation escaped his homeland and went by boat as a refugee onto the high seas...going anywhere and nowhere. Just away.
This single loyal soldier, Tinh's only friend, wound up in a refugee camp in Hong Kong. He nearly died there. Many did.

By the grace of heaven this man got a job as a cook in the refugee camp. From there he got a job buying supplies for the camp. He met a man who gave him a job working managing a small cooking factory near the waterfront which manufactured fish sauce and seasoning sauces for Asian foods.
This man from Saigon began selling the wares of this small factory and became successful enough that he took to traveling around Asia selling the Soy sauce and the Nuoc Mam sauce his employer made.
He was so successful over the years that he became a partner and opened his own manufacturing outlets. He still travels back and forth..into China...into Viet Nam...from where he lives in Hong Kong.

The corpsman in trying to reach inside Viet Nam met a man who knew another man who knew another man...and that man lived in Hong Kong and ran a small business which occasioned his travel inside Viet Nam to sell soy sauce.



The man who sold soy sauce often made trips to old Saigon, now renamed HoChiMinh City. The corpsman asked the man to perform a service for him. They came to an arrangement.

The man who sold soy sauce traveled with a trunk which contained his product samples and various condiments used in cooking. Among the condiments was a large salt can.
The corpsman took the salt can and manufactured a false bottom to it. Papers and money could be moved in the false bottom of the salt can through the communist customs. A lucrative business in black market foreign exchange was begun taking large denomination American money inside Viet Nam where it would have a high value on the black market as hard value foreign exchange.

The corpsman asked the man who sold soy sauce to visit two people in Viet Nam and to give those people the profits in the money smuggling operation. One of the people was the old nun.
When the man who sold soy sauce came to old nun's house he met the man, Tinh, whose life he had saved that night long before...Tinh was sitting feeding the children on the curb of the street that very night. The man who sold soy sauce came to the house of the old nun with his salt can. So with astonishment Tinh and his friend met once more after years of not seeing one another. Both had survived.

There was another person the corpsman wanted to receive money from the saltcan. Her name was Li Min.

Li Min was a young woman of eighteen that year. When the corpsman had first seen Li Min she was a street child of perhaps eight who lived in an abandoned building in ChuLai in Quang Ngai province with other children who were abandoned due to war's grace.
The corpsman went and found a house near the beach in an area which was abandoned because it was near the coastal perimeter of a US Marine firebase of 175mm guns. Being so close to a perimeter was dangerous. The houses on the beach were abandoned. The corpsman cleaned the house and got some things for the house so that the children could live in it.

He came and got the children in the building in ChuLai and he moved them into the house on the beach. He brought them food in quantity and he got little LiMin to cook for the other children. He collected money from the men on the base and came down every week to check on the children and he saw that they were at least fed. There was not much else he could do. He taught LiMin how to read and gave her a New Testament Bible.

The Corpsman had friends and they had friends and with time the years passed and the children continued to live in the house on the beach. Other corpsmen came and went over the years. And when the Americans left Viet Nam then LiMin had grown old enough to care for her "brothers and sisters". Over the years she took in children as some grew up or others left.

The man with the soy sauce was sent to LiMin and told to buy whatever the house and the family that lived there...sixteen children, needed. LiMin was eighteen when the Communists came and she remembers it as a bad time. But the Bac Si who could not come himself sent the man who sold soy sauce.... and the salt can.

LiMin is now thirty four and the house is still there. She has a houseful of children whom she has taken off the streets. Four hundred dollars a year is her share of the profits from the salt can. A dollar a day will feed four people with some left over.

Tinh's share is a like amount of four hundred dollars. The old nun's health is failing and Tinh is in charge now. The children are fed and do not need to beg. A $100 bill will get at black market exchange rates a buying power equivalent of $140 and this converted into the Viet currency will purchase staples at the equivalent of nearly $800. A one hundred dollar bill in US currency is worth 150,000 dong in Viet rice...enough to buy food for a year for the house.
Tinh sent me a gift for Christmas...his teacup. It is chipped but it was his own possession...at one time his only possession. We know one another now.
But he still does not know who to curse (and never will) for saying,
"This one, load him with the living."
I will never tell him he was dead.

LiMin has never married and probably never will. She is the new generation to replace the nun who will soon go on to God. LiMin is a nun who does not know she is a nun. I am the Bac Si she has not seen in 28 years. We have shared pictures, and we have shared something else which is beyond a name.

And the man with the salt can sent me a small figurine from China for Christmas. It is an old man sitting fishing, there is a bait basket at his bare foot. On a small pole he has a newly caught fish. The old man is Asian with a beard. The old man is bald.
This year he sent me another figurine of the same old man squatting reading a book, dressed as an old mongol in a skull cap and felt boots. I use both figurines as bookends.

The Emptiness speaks and says clearly, "This one!"
I listen and I listen and I listen.
"This one".

Little brother and sister, you too are "this one."

There is a constant current of power and fire all around us and within us. All living things are choking full, swollen with the silent imageless birth. The power is clambering and pressing upon us all the time. A great storm of swirling power..The silent storm is all around you, whispering.
 
This is really good!!! U are a great writer!!

Can I keep a copy of this, just as a reminder, this wud mean a lot
 
I will go and get my copy of the Koran, I have a couple of them. One is a paperback and very dogeared. I have a large rubber band around it and carry it in a leather pouch with rawhide tie tags. The other is a larger hardbound book given to me by the Egyptian wife of a Special Forces Officer. She is a deeply pious and very good woman whom I profoundly respect. Her faith is worth seeing and knowing. There is no harm in her. She is a good woman.
Surah al-Haaqah...got it.

The cells of the brain, I understand, are about equal in number with the stars in the universe. This analogy of gray matter and star matter suggests to me the nature of poetry as a form of human revelation.This effort of the mind of man to approximate the farthest extent of the universe, this seeking by the terrestrial to reach the celestial, is at the heart of all revelation.

Revelation, Fozley ,is not over. As long as birth happens and imagination forms then God will speak to us . The Book of reveal-ation is always a new book contained in the Final Scriptures and continually revealed in every new human life

All forms of revelation help to personalize the universe for us. In the modern world it is easier for many people to understand revelation in religion, history, or science, than in poetry.

But any sort of knowing...the solemn gaze of any child beside the road...is God speaking.

As members of the Judaic-Christian tradition, whether Old or New Testament style, or both, whether churched or unchurched, men like myself are familiar with religious revelation and prophesy. All people of the Book are more or less covanented; they acknowledge and obey the law of Moses, or the law of Christ..or the law of the Koran. Despite the tribulations suffered by religion in the past two thousand years or more, and despite the abuses by men of revelation in Scripture, the core of revealed normative moral principles remains unimpaired. These principles are the revelations of God to man in Western civilization, which all men of faith and right reason acknowledge. Religion contains the greatest and most inclusive of all revelations, because it involves the ultimate origins, nature and destiny of man.
 
I found your quote near the end of the Koran in among the shorter portions.
I have a tape I made once during a sandstorm, of the sounds outside the tent, the wind. I listen to it sometimes.

The term for Resurrexion is taken from the word for the sound of breathing...sussura..sarsarin seems to be a derivative of the same sound, a similar word.

I will have to consider a nick for myself in arabic and post a picture also.

I see you live in London near Battersea? I used to live at 44 Chester Row up half a block from Sloane Square down from Knights Bridge. You could almost walk to Battersea Park from there. I liked to walk and London was such a nice place, a very civilized city. And transportation was so easy and relatively inexpensive. I went to school up off Regents park...use to walk down through Campden Town. Played Soccer in Regents Park and used a Welsh Guards gymnasium, a regimenal favor. Went to the Lancaster Club.
Had a German girlfriend who was a Nanny, her name was Ursula Scholten. She came from Munich. She was killed in a car accident. Had another girlfriend who was from Argentina in London, part of the Embassy crowd. They were just beginning to build ( big hole in the ground) the large American Embassy at Grosvenor Square in those days.

Battersea...lots of memories...I seem to remember a barracks near Battersea. Isnt there a barracks there? English military, very fine troops, they dont pay them enough.
 
Just read the rules for this Forum, very astute. I could not have composed a better set of rules. I sincerely wish other Forums would read that set and adopt a majority of them. It is going to take me a month to get fifty posts. I dont even know if these count, I suppose they must.

I dont know how to reply to anyone. I suppose you will have to help me and be patient with me. Well, at least you got me to read the Koran. I carry a lot of books but have the Koran so I can carry that one book on me and even fall in the river and have it make across if I make it across. That leather wallet has saved the book numerous times. I have written a couple of books and been published. No great literature. Just stories, about war and travel mostly. Paperback cheap stuff. E-bay is selling some copies though. Saw one for $36 the other day. Had to laugh...my royalties ran out decades ago.
 
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