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[ by Charles Cameron — do you suppose trees only prostrate before God, Q 55.6, during high winds? ]
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This admirable United Nations goal gains Taliban support..

The Taliban, in turn, have the encouragement of the Prophet:

The Prophet (pbuh) said:”If the Hour is about to be established and one of you was holding a palm shoot, let him take advantage of even one second before the Hour is established to plant it.”

and:

Allah’s Messenger (pbuh) said, “There is none amongst the Muslims who plants a tree or sows seeds, and then a bird, or a person or an animal eats from it, but is regarded as a charitable gift for him.”

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Sources:

Plant for the Planet, Billion Tree Campaign

BBC, Taliban leader urges Afghans to plant more trees

Hidaya Foundation, Why Plant Trees?

Muaz Nasir, The Value of Trees in Islam

[ by Charles Cameron — Ginsberg, McCartney & Philip Glass! ]
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I’m not a huge Ginsberg fan, but this seems like a wholesome follow up to yesterdays post 6,000 years and still together — written by Ginsberg in the run up to the United States presidential election of 1996, and touching on several themes of continuing interest today.

You can follow along the text here, and read-all-about-it in ‘The Ballad of the Skeletons’: Allen Ginsberg’s 1996 Collaboration with Philip Glass and Paul McCartney.

Hey, I’m not a great fan of McCartney either, but the pair of them together seems like an oxymoron.

[ by Charles Cameron — watching a Franco-British detective saga ]
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This police helicopter view from The Tunnel (series 1 episode 3 at the 16’21” mark) —

— raises the question for me: are anomalies blindspots, or are blindspots so anomalous as to evade even the “blindspot” category? Certainly my practice is to seek out blindspots, and anomalies may be clues..

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What’s interesting about anomalies is that they aren’t isolated, they’re precisely anomalous in respect to some norm or other, figure against field.

Which boils up to another instance of my repeated plaint that a single data point is nothing, that two is the first number — see, eg, It is always good to find oneself in good company.

[ by Charles Cameron — from a burial to Buddhism, just a skip and a jump away ]
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A sweet visual DoubleQuote I ran across today —

'Lovers of Valdaro'
Neolithic bodies of a man & a woman locked in an eternal embrace.
6,000 years old burialhttps://t.co/esSOkX6OdP #Italy pic.twitter.com/dSmSqIGEbY

— Ticia Verveer (@ticiaverveer) February 25, 2017

— shows on the right, the Lovers of Valdaro — a matched pair of skeletons of which Time wrote in 2011:

For 6,000 years, two young lovers have been locked in an eternal embrace, hidden from the eyes of the world. This past weekend, the Lovers of Valdaro — named for the little village near Mantua, in northern Italy, where they were first discovered — were seen by the public for the first time.

On the left, you have an artist’s representation of how they might have been embraced in death.

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All of which reminds me of Buddhist meditation on death, and of the dancing skeleton couple known collectively as Citipati:

By Wonderlane – https://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/3172647615/in/photostream/, CC BY 2.0, Link

Wiki tells us:

Citipati is a protector deity or supernatural being in Tibetan Buddhism and Vajrayana Buddhism of India. It is formed of two skeletal deities, one male and the other female, both dancing wildly with their limbs intertwined inside a halo of flames representing change. The Citipati is said to be one of the seventy-five forms of Mahakala. Their symbol is meant to represent both the eternal dance of death as well as perfect awareness. They are invoked as ‘wrathful deities’, benevolent protectors or fierce beings of demonic appearance. The dance of the Citipati is commemorated twice annually in Tibet.

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Considering two together as one is a recurring interest of mine, see also my posts on duel and duet — themselves a great pairing or dual — in Duel in slow time and more prosaically, Numbers by the numbers: two.

Also: Of dualities, contradictions and the nonduality.

[ by Charles Cameron — on the importance of spiritual commitment ]
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Scott Atran, author of Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What It Means to Be Human, speaking at the World Economic Forum, offered this slide with the following comment:

Our research with fighters shows that the US Government’s judgement is fairly mistaken about underestimating ISIS and overestimating the armies against it, because it denies th4e spiritual dimension of human conflict. Three critical factors are involved: sacred values and devotion to the groupz people are fused with; willing to sacrifice family for values; and perceived spiritual formidability. For example, among fighters on both sides in Iraq and Syria, they rate America’s physical force maximum but spiritual force minimum, and ISIS’ physical force minimum but spiritual force maximum. But – they also think material interests drive America but that spiritual commitment drives ISIS. The spiritual trumps physical force when all things are equal.

Here’s the short clip from which that slide & comment are taken — Friday 24th February 2017, WEF Davos, Scott Atran analyses the limits of rational choice in political and cultural conflict