up early, dropped off truck for starter/ignition switch fix.

getting some nice prints from epson r300. above i did this morning to send to my father. it's looking out one of his windows, called "indian peak".

big cleanup: a lot of photos and cassette tapes going. clothes and blankets too.

working on poetry book. i can print it here if i use 5.5" x 8.5" page size.

if i get truck back today will aim myself towards monday night drumming instruction.

"The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy."
Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947)

pencil, drew it in arizona. piece of the feminine puzzle i suppose.

talked to mona, may, and june on the telephone, three very different women. there seems to be a great concern that i will fall back into the clutches of mona.

i don't think so. but i would like to talk with her someday, somewhere, share truth.

slept all afternoon. started difficult watercolor, trying something new.

now for a walk in the gray mists of morning.

[later] friends meeting. back here, stayed burrowed for the rest of the day. talked with marshall.

getting good prints with premium luster paper. do you know any premium lustre folks? me neither.

but there is no way to outline today, and yesterday is already filed somewhere else.

an interesting day so far. bed last night at 8, up at 5:30, maybe 2 hour walk. quick trip to grocery store. lots of this's and that's.

i call picture above "ofeelia".

pencil drawing of daughter nicole's cat, kally. i don't think it is spelled "kali", but you never know these days.

nothing much to say today so why am i typing this? it's a routine i picked up a few years ago and surprises continue to bubble up from time to time.

ray charles died, and ronald reagon died. of the two, ray affected my life waaaay more than ron. i was buying and listening to his early atlantic 45s in the 50's. "sinner's prayer" has always been one of my favorites. i didn't listen to much of his later music, i was already on to jazz and in the 60's electric music for the heart and soul.

what do i listen to nowadays? not much, mostly classical muzak turned down low.

it's good to see thomas friedman coming around:
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Dancing Alone: "'Hey, Friedman, why are you bringing politics into this all of a sudden? You're the guy who always said that producing a decent outcome in Iraq was of such overriding importance to the country that it had to be kept above politics.'
Yes, that's true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too."

well it's 11:30 in the morning and I just finished my morning ablutions which consist of 1) making a picture (above) and 2) putting it up.

I won't even go into if this routine makes any sense. I have no idea.

went to tibetan buddhist sitting and talk last night. It was fun and I learned a little bit about vajrayana - undoubtedly spelled incorrectly.

this makes 4 days in a row that I have been involved in some sort of group practice. Hammy.

now here's my plan for the coming presidential election which I believe bush will win unless:

1. Edwards is the vice presidential nominee. He and an excellent team of emergency respondees field all of the dirty tricks and heavy artillery that are already positioned to overwhelm them. Edwards it seems to me is the best possible point man to handle incoming, quick, alert, experienced at brushing aside bombs in simple straight terms without offending Joe Sisyphus and friends.

2. This allows Kerry to more or less continue on slow methodical path, back off into "thoughtful reflective" mode. Trick here would be to outlast the glitz and glittery static of the republican campaign. There is a good chance that the public - you and me and strangers - are on the cusp of rejecting this mode.

that's it.

6,9.4

picture i did at ken wilber meeting last night. very animated discussion of diamond approach by almass.
Ridhwan Foundation Home Page: "THE DIAMOND APPROACH TO THE WORK"

truck starter went south, i�ll deal with it tomorrow. roll it to start in a minute and make a pick up stuff run, take it in thurday morning.

reading the lost language of plants by buhner. he is in to a lot of interesting facets of the present culture which has turned into a box for so many of us. here�s some of what he has to say about TV:

"...it is intricately bound up with our need to dream...

"...mircea elide comments that...

'[man] - is continually fascinated by the chroicalling of the world, that is, by what happens in his world or in his own soul...�

"...before printing, dreaming was crafted as art through story telling...after printing, story telling followed a new tack and developed as art through written fiction. they all involve our human capacity and need to dream...

"with movies story telling even more closely began to resemble dreaming because dreaming contains such sights and sounds...

"with television, dreaming no longer is an irregular, isolated event like sleep-dreaming, the theater, or a trip to the movies (events set off in time and space as important), but a habit casually undertaken anytime one wishes...and the dreaming process is continually interupted by commercials - a unique shift in our evolutionary history of dreaming...

"as a result, people are continually exposed to dreaming that works withvery shallow and homogenized meanings relective of one particular inustry and way of thinking.because the level of meaning is so shallow people begin to live more and more in a world of less and less access to deep meaning."
one way to describe why bush got elected.

6.8.5

another pencil drawing from arizona messed with this morning.

gray torpid day, a little wet, a little too humid. that feeling that something is hanging in the air.

went for 1 1/2 hour walk with bobby this morning. short health appt this afternoon, while i was out picked up a few items.

when i returned from arizona last week, i totally spaced out on phoning sister and dad to tell them i landed on this side safely. matter of courtesy and respect, routine. i thought i had made the calls, but i didn't. kind of worrysome, chalk it up to the "mind-body" crashing for a short few days.

so here's what i've been wondering about: identity, personal experience, the experience of consciousness right now. or maybe just this week.

about 10 or 15 years ago i felt like the "personality" or personhood in general was changing in the culture, and that what is outside in the culture shapes the outside of the personalities that live within it. there was no way to call this personality that was emerging in the culture "good" or "bad", it was just different than the one i had. although from time to time i did wonder:

whether it was a neo-darwinian case of adapting to the actual and was not totally obsolete

OR

if it was a change that lost something, i.e. lost the type of personality that existed when i was living youth.

in the first instance i am old and in the way, in the second maybe something is being called from me.

today it seems like the question has escalated: all over the culture there is a question not only of how "I" exist in the culture, whether the possibility of change exists in this realm today, but whether the whole phenomenon of identity has outlived it's usefulness. always with the contrary, the compliment, that the experience of life in the world of 10,000 things can be lived in a way that both needs and doesn't, us "identities" milling around.

glad i got that off my chest.

6.7.4

another picture done in az - pencil - and messed with here.

this is an interesting item, leads to thoughts of movie wars, the fusion of entertainment and politics:
Pumping Kerry

otherwise business as usual, have fallen back into old habits of puttering around the house everday, talking to the muse and staying amused.

6.8.4

woke up at 7, thought about getting ready for hike.

i think i was still thinking about it when i lay down and woke back up at 10. so no sycamore cove trek for me today. the place i inhabit is an ADD disaster so i'll clean and organize. who knows what i'll find.

this is what i found, an old & forgotten doodle.

tried to email richard and debbie in the ukraine last night, it bounced back this morning. richard and debbie, if you're out there, email home.

loaded up on CD's and mysteries from the library yesterday. got an 87th precinct book by Ed McBain. that's good because i'm experiencing difficulty getting into any book these days, and this series i've always been able to read no matter what the state of my psyche.

greg brown tonight. i worked with a friend years ago who tried to get me to give a listen to him, but was stopped cold at the time by some sort of preconception that he was a member of the lake wobegone crew, which even back then i couldn't tolerate.

but recently i have heard a few CDs and get the idea that he is a rough and tumble redneck with a definite streak of noir, right up my alley. so we'll see.

[...later] the usual obscure run-arounds to get this posted.

now that (some) of archives are (sort of) accesable, i've been browsing through them. found a number of poems i think i will add to the book i'm working on. here's one:

someday maybe i'll feel new
but these days those days are mighty few
the sky leaves clouds like a clue
hangs question marks in the blue

atmospheric ice-crystals are cold
artificial memories i've been told
pathways lost in wars so old
storms of life bought and sold

for the last 2 days i've been back to my old sub-normal. lot of catch-up to do, and i've been busy briquologing.

got a good walk in today before the heat. dr. r. stopped by for a visit. going to see cold mountain tonight. heard talk of "preemptive joy" today at friends meeting.

picture above started at my dads house.

[a little later] saw cold moutain and kind of liked it. i thought the female lead was pretty inappropriate lokking, but by the end of the movie wasn' thinking about it. seemed more like exclusively romance that i remember the book being.

then there is this hameed ali thing that keeps circling around: "the diamond approach". don't know why but i feel better just having read a little of him.

is similar to dissapearing through the skylight. both are about the waning of the personality and identity.

Blogger Knowledge: "There are as many kinds of blogs as there are kinds of people, but there are only three motivations for keeping one: information sharing, reputation building, and personal expression. And though any one of these may be the primary reason for a blog, no one maintains a blog for any length of time without eventually doing all three."

back in aville, feels like I've been gone for years. Driving up 40 from chapel hill I had a moment when all of the green hit me in the solar plexis. Welcome home.

a lot happened in my heart and head while I was gone, all necessary, it's all good.

what did I learn?

I am equal to the present moment. Always already all ready. No guarantee that I am right or wrong, but if I'm in it I'm part of it.

Picture above from my dad's back yard.

I'll be redoing this blog. slim it down and shape it up soon.

Last day in sunny southwest, fly to NC in the morning. Probably spend a day or two or three visiting children and grandchildren, altho that is always contingent on their schedule and the heat.

the new yorker had a piece listing blogs that are being turned into books, or might be. Here is the list:

http://blogs.booklocker.com/matchmaker/archives/001506.html
instapundit
hit & run
the lack table
dong resin
zulkey
low culture
lindseyism
megnut
maud newton
meme-first
old hag
pressthink
i keep a diary
buzz machine
engadget
eurotrashgawker
the kicker
the minor fall, the major lift

I haven't checked any out.

the new york review of books may 27 has review of ghost wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afhanistan, and bin laden from the soviet invasion to sept. 10, 2001. The review is by ahmed rashid and the book is by steve coll. Buy it, get it at your library, read it and figure out how the contents can be converted to bumper stickers or burma shave signs: it would ensure bush losing the next election. Which people are getting, in my opinion, a little too confidant about.

my sister has a DMS-IV around the house which I took a gander at. Even tho categorizing consciousness in Dewey decimal like format is a crackpot idea, there were some interesting tidbits. Here's one:

"... pervaisive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others...referred to as psycopathy, sociopathy, or dyssocial personality. Because deceit and manipulation are central features...It may be especially helpful to integrate...information collected from collateral sources...

"persons with this disorder disregard the wishes, rights, or feelings of others. They are frequently deceitful or manipulative in order to gain personal profit or pleasure (e.g., to obtain money, sex, or power)... They may repeatedly lie, use an alias, con others, or malinger...Display a reckless disregard for the safety of themselves or others... may engage in sexual behavior or substance use that has a high risk for harmful consequences...may neglect or fail to care for a child in a way that puts the child in danger...

"... Show little remorse for the consequence of their acts...Having hurt, mistreated or stolen from someone...[they] may blame the victims for being foolish, helpless, or deserving their fate...

"...Lack empathy, and tend to be callous, cynical, and contemptuous of the feelings of others...have an inflated and arrogant self-appraisal...Excessively opinionated, self assured, or cocky...May display a glib superficial charm and can be quite voluble and verbally facile...Exploitive in their sexual relationships...irresponsible as parents...more likely than general population to die by violence..."

well, we all know the DSM-IV is bogus and in our dull daily rounds we don't bump into people like the above. But if you do, you're fresh meat.

6.1.4

Memorial day in phoenix, went to Cosanti and was fortunate enough to meet paolo soleri. nice gent. otherwise spent the afternoon in a daze from the heat.

reading this and that came across this (and that):

"when we are listening to egocentricity we have the feeling that we know beyond doubt how we should be operating and how life should be.

"our heart doesn't tell us what to do. being at one with our heart means simply being present to and appropriate in the current circumstances.

... it might be helpful to consider:

-as long as you want to be right you'll be wrong.

-when you accept that you'r wrong, you'll be right."

from a 1990 california buddhist tract that which you are seeking is causing you to seek.

5.29.4

In phoenix. Cool spell - very hot. Driving south from Prescott this morning endless gridlock headed north on hwy 17. I've said it before: I will not live in a city ever again. That part of my life is over.

watched TV coverage of WWW memorial dedication. Guess it will give bush a bump in polls.

saying for today:

"...Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
and let the winds of heaven dance between you.

love one another, but make not a bond of love:
let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls."

K. Gibran

5.28.4

leaving for phoenix in am with sister jane. prescott has been most restful, caught up with sleep.

about the (s)news:

if we had attacked mexico after pearl harbor,and if they had played us for suckers, and if our political establishment scooted from photo op to photo op convinced that God had elected them, the USA would have been about where it is today.

except i don't think the public would have put up with it.

Sister Jane arrived today with great salad for lunch. Just took meandering walk down dry willow creek. Very hot but beautiful breeze blowing. About finished with diamond approach.It's a little like a scattered travelogue. Some very interesting pieces and places. Like:

"by now, we are beginning to see which of the different qualities of Essence are generally related to which kind of issues from one's past. These relations between the Essential state, the "hole" or specific sense of emptiness which resulted from the loss of that state, and the emotions and beliefs we create to fill those holes,and finally the conflicts in our lives which arise from the resulting false personality, are all understood."

I picked the above paragraph at random. The weird thing is that it makes as much sense as windoze help files, I mean more sense.

do you dig holes? Or fill them.

it's 5 pm, i'm going to have a glass of wine and go outside and listen to the birds.

Still in Prescott AZ. Very quiet release for me from the self-inflicted eccentric projects at home. I purposely brought only paper and pencils - oops I think I said that a couple of days ago. As luck would have it there is a legacy ppeecee laptop here that I can't quite get my head around. The only reasonable way to fix is zero out disk and start again - like survivors do.

Venus the evening star is still bugging me.

the bird sounds here are incredible.

I think I have enough present moments left to last me the rest of my life.

one of the biggest questions for human beings today: where is intimacy? Without it we are sullen robots. With it? dunno, have not had the pleasure.

I'm alone, but I'm not alone alone if you know what I mean. Some of us might be.

Sunday,took the day off, drew insane doodles. Got the diamond approach from library. Sample:

"for some of us, the longing feels like an ache or a sadness just below the surface of our usual awareness and concerns, a background so common we fail to take notice. For others of us it may feel like a gripping desire to gain and hold on to these qualities, an intense drive in which we set our sights on some distant spiritual paradise. Still others of us may adapt a frustrated resignation in which we devalue these qualities as an impossible or even undesirable fiction...

when we are cut off from our natural strength, our energy and passion are less available. The sense of expansive vitality escapes us, and we feel weak. To make up for this, we push too hard or strain to capture that passion. We try to convince the world that we are not as weak as we feel. Bitterness or hostility flavors our relationships."

been said a million times I guess but that last bit reminds me all too vividly of the strong take charge woman I knew who was a weak and needy rejected little girl. And myself of course.

Standing in the Prescott library checking email. Quiet peaceful visit so far. My sister and husband got back from Italy last nite. Still fooling with getting dad online.

for entertainment this visit I only brought sketchbook and pencil - well I did sneak a repedigraph in also - I am going to learn how to draw - again.

I have been pondering the emotional mess I left in aville. When to be silent and when to be real is a lifelong learning curve for me. Sometimes anger is justified and necessary, but I sure hate the aftertaste. "be real - or forget about it."

one way to express your "real" self without impinging on others, of course, is to write. I do have a piece in mind that I am thinking of writing, it's creeping up on me and I guess I'll do it, but I have to admit I resent the time it takes to put down all those words. So I'll do it like I do these pages, off the top of my head.

far from home. i'm beginning to think the altitude is slowing me down - mile high - because i got zip for energy. couldn't sleep last night so went outside around midnight. jupitor was very bright and seemed to be staring at me.

continue to tweak laptop for dad. can log on to AOL. unbelievably ugly and braindead.my prediction: it will metamorph into some kind of simple portal only soon.

i can't yet log on to MSN which is what i want to do.

seen a lot of CNN lately. news. it all sucks. so far i have only noticed one person who actually "said" anything. i am using the word "said" in obsolete sense, one that involves soul, not just lips.

but at the moment can't remember who it was.

man,am i whacked out. in addition to jet lag, and generalized meloncholy, i have been working all day w/ windoze ME and AOL. totally bogus, both.
been thinking a lot about who i am talking to. very very few. "heart-to-heart" is the cliche. from the alone to the alone is what plotinus said. and here's what i found this morning scribbled in a notebook:
""i can be separate from you because at a deeper level we are joined in something inseparable. i cannot be alone alone." from breakfast at victory by carse.

Been talking to a good friend this morning about "backbiting".

I may have backed into this mode inadvertently the last couple of weeks, mainly by ruminating on some of the experiences I have been through lately. Maybe I'm naive. I handed my heart over to someone who lied to me repeatedly and when I finally came to I was really pissed at both her and myself.

but I have absolutely no desire to charactorize her or judge her, I wish her well, and have to thank her once again for the wake up call she delivered to me by her actions if not intent.

I wish us all the best. It matters.

ate lunch with yougest son nathan. his common sense and native feeling is seeing him through. he recently washed his hands of a lady who went from being a bautiful saint like woman to methadone, and lost her nurses license and son in the process. he is less naive than i, quicker tosee the futility of being used by a person in that zombie like unfortunate state.

went for a visit to jim's ranch. what a relief to talkwith someone who knows you. we grew up together, i,m not sure there is any other way. the lone wolves i have run across lately are highly overated by themselves.

it takes two to tango, two to talk, two to love, and one to make a problem ouy of a problem.

i'm past rage. any raised voice you here from me is nothing.

what is a sociopath anyway? would you know one if you knew one?
go here to see list of ten traits.

i'll be in deep seclusion for awhile. leave you with this image which is not a pretty picture. it is out of my head, not in it anymore.

Yesterday was a blast from the past.

as some of you may not know, this business of daily posting is a self imposed discipline. I post a little of this, a little of that. I make it up as I go. Do not take anything I write literally. It's all metaphor.

Lately these posts have become a little more personal as I have struggled to extricate myself from a very unhealthy relationship with a lady I thought I knew and whom I trusted all the way.

being a guy whose mind never stops churning, I have gradually over the last year been shifting my attention away from the mental thought-stream to intuition, instinct, the hara, heart, or whatever you might want to call it.

and this is what told me to break off the relationship. I had no facts to indicate she was compulsively unfaithful. No one told me this. It was just an inner voice that told me to "get out anyway you can". even though I was still in love with her. I have learned to trust that voice and follow it; the results are often not what I had in "mind" but that's ok.

So yesterday I got a call from the lady in question. She said she had been to the doctor and had something important to tell me(!). I asked her to do so, but she insisted it had to be face to face. I agreed to meet her in 30 minutes at her house. my mistake. She didn't show. I left a few unanswered phone messages. This is her standard mode of treating people.

I drove over around three for the second time, knocked on the door and opened it to be greeted by her coming down the stairs shouting indignantly at me to knock on the door which I had just finished doing.

Turns out what she had to tell me was the result of a "miscommunication". Apparently someone had told her I had written on this site that she was "diseased". The doctor thing was a trick.

I think we agreed that sociopathic is what I had meant to say, and it was not about her anyway. Just me and my inner life. After telling her why I thought this was a not unreasonable description of how i had been treated bt her, no need to go into details here, there was no denial, just that I must have been talking to "somebody" whose credibility is zero in this town. Now anyone who has told me anything about her she knows about. I have no additional information about her. Just a very bad feeling.

Then she closed the door and said "it doesn't matter". probably the most sincere statement I ever heard from her.

so folks, those of you who are interested in this imaginary melodrama, just remember: nobody told me nothing; nobody had to; when I split with miss multiplex, I knew nothing about her except what she allowed me to see.

That was enough for me to leave - I don't know the details, don't want to know them. My heart tells all I need to know. i'd been used, abused, and confused.

As always, what I am writing here is my experience and feelings. I could of course be totally wrong. She may be the most honest, sincere, compassionate person on the planet. The best friend a body could have. My perceptions might be skewed. Probably are. You make up your own mind.

I have long since forgiven her for being her, and myself for being me.

And I refuse to use this platform to judge her. That is not up to me. I don't know her. Don't want to know her. Don't want anything to do with her world. It may be a delightful place, but I don't like it.

End of story.

Spent yesterday inside, finishing book proof to send to Jeff in myrtle beach, gathering together stuff to take on trip. My old friend bobby D. Will be house sitting with his cat. By end of today I should be already ready.

PBS news with Jim Leher last nite had segment featuring psychologists and other experts opining on
why good kids join army and become bad prison guards. Key question: why were they smiling and beaming when photographed
in sadistic miasma?

I don't know, but it strikes me that we are products of sadistic culture. Jobs and livelihood are fear driven, almost universally. Implicit message is do it or die.

and then there is the sexual pressure on the young, especially the young women. unlike when I was young, many of the women of today accept the role of sexual being, unfortunately all too often taking it over the line to
anything for an orgasm. "what's love got to do with it?"

the thread that broke my infatuation with sociopath Mona was when she sat on her couch lying to me. Her smile gave her away, the smile of a little girl filled with glee to be putting something over on me. Still in love with her, that evil smile woke me up, busted any trust I had in her, and I had to get as far away from her as I could.

there are a lot of different smiles.

tuesday morning. saw an Israeli lady speak at Jewish community center last night. she is working on her own to promote peace with both cultures. beautiful presence, lifted my spirits considerably. i love her definition of peace:

"peace is when i look in your eyes and see myself reflected." not the opaque quality i have experienced recently.

i notice that posts are now displayed in proper sequence.

dot dot dot duh dot

blogger has relaunched and the most recent post now appears on the bottom instead of top. i'll fix as soon as i can.

picture from citizen-times. that's my outside inside the circle.

ways to go before i can send book pdf to myrtle beach. it's going in the morning.

a lot of folks i see seem to be more and more emotional about the fix "people" are in today. the invisible culture cage is starting to show, snapping of synapse, subtle bodies compressing, all auras bent.

beautiful day, now threatening thunderstorms. last night i went downtown and stood in the square with the ladies in black for an hour. they have been doing this since the warped war began. the air was very crisp, the wind blowing, and the echos of the traffic bouncing off the high rises all made it feel like some timeless place. i made the papers in today's offering, photo of prayer for peace gathering i'm in there somewhere. wondered down to civic center, great latin band from richmond playing, beautiful crowd, good food, little kids dancing. then i sat for an hour or so in the drum circle happening in the square. body music, total immersion, tourists gathering round and breaking into dance.

aville is definitely either the paris of the south or the sedona of the east. i'm ready to enjoy it.

perhaps because of the van gogh stars shining empty space i was released from the spell that has been pulling at me these last few weeks. the ghost of the spanish harlem mona lisa finally faded into fact. some of the girls who dated ted bundy must have felt like i do. i was conned, but by one of the best. totally sociopathic dissociated persona, a broken preditor who gives nihilism a bad name. how unbelievable, sad and unecessary.

pome
i'm feelin mighty empty
like when the clouds they blow away
the woman just walked out
she had nothin more to say

i knew her but i didn't
that was just her way
i bought it all, the good and bad
the nightmare and the day

i thought when we were naked
no need to hide from her
we weren't strangers when we met
but when she left we were

her gift to me was magic
a reflection in the sun
a mirror blazing in my face
what else could i have done?

helplessness is part of life
a part of strength also
twisted by an evil child
i knew i had to go

honesty demands a price
it must have a voice
like a hungry ghost
she thinks she has a choice

dark desert queen
thrills still pull you on
to the distant wreckage
i guess you call your song

this is page from my notebook. what do you suppose it means?

from
Black Mountain College Museum&Arts Center:

Isn't it interesting that the muddle of one's personal search turns into human history for others! Doesn�t it feel substantial that what we choose to do individually makes a supportive fabric for others in due course. The interweavings of time past, present, and future-the interweavings of personal imagination and community endeavor-this spiritual cloth, this gold of our life-looms is being woven whether we sleep or wake, a garment we are making for each other and the planet. Or so it seems. Though it be beaten thin by the impact of experiences, still the gold of our lives keeps its nature even when worn through, even when dust, gold dust.

pretty much lost yesterday. gloomy.

found in today's email:

"Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible," Klee wrote..."

apropos of nothing, i want to produce 12 postcards or notecards and place them around town for sale. below is the first of 12:

heard at the asheville friend's meeting this morning:

"80% of love is showing up."

i might have put it:

"80% of love is showing up anyway."

yesterday was an unusual day. i spent the afternoon dealing with the health dept., archetypal state civil service, endless ugly green corridors, employees sleepwalking here and there with paperwork in hand, endless waiting in hard chairs.

but the occasional bodhisattva would appear, fully human and cheerful, to inject a little humor and perspective into this setting.

then last evening dinner for 45th high school reunion. six of us showed up for very elegant and pleasant time. the ambience was southern aristocratic living at it's best. an atmosphere i do not experience often these days.

you might think that visiting these two separate worlds in a single day would be confusing. but at this point in my life it was like any other day, each minute a mysterious surprise.

when i got home my trusty g4 would not boot up, system wouldn't load. i fixed it this morning - i hope. thank you disk warrior.

i did the above a couple of weeks ago probably. just scanned it and printed it out on r300: really beautiful print i think.

yesterday was a busy one. talked to jeff and nan, and worked most of the day on the new life, the book we are all working on for ultimate publication. last nite went to the benefit premier of M.C. Richards: The Fire Within, excellent documentry of a woman i was unfamiliar with. mostly filmed when she was older. if i ever want to know what i think is true about the imagination, creativity, the kosmos, and what conciousness is for, i only have to see this movie again: she says it all.

Movie Review: M.C. Richards: The Fire Within / Mountain Xpress / Asheville, NC: "M.C. Richards: The Fire Within"

to see a few things flash is capable of, go here:
[ uncontrol ]

here is interesting piece on the human being, science, reality with capital "R", etc:

Presence of Mind - The (Scientific) Pursuit of Happiness: "New evidence shows that as the brain can change its mind, so can the mind change the brain."

tonight i go to high school reunion. 45th i think.

from an oil i did awhile back:

after 5 in the afternoon. pretty soon i can watch the snews.

bought a ticket last nite to phoenix, round trip, dates may 14 - june 3.

actually a busy day, dealing with doctors, the post office, the library.

just re-read the last 3 weeks postings. to see the shape that i was in. not too bad.

but i do have a dilemma . has to do with silence and conversation. both are so very important.

but i suspect one of my failings in this life has been an inability to discriminate well between the times when each serves it's purpose. besides, it's pre-dispositional. a person doesn't think about it, whether to converse or not. one is either engaged or not.

this is not meant as self-castigation: i'm just checking the weather out. i'm livin in a new world. let the heart talk. and listen.

scattered frost warnings tonight. i guess i'll close the windows. finally made it to the grocery store. played with colored light.

you probably never read bill the galactic hero by harry harrison, a sci-fi tongue in cheek book of about 30 years ago. pretty good one too. it features a large group of people described as "the unplanned". these are folks who have fallen thru the cultural cracks of the hypothetical future and no longer possess official papers or a plan.

i find myself in a similar situation, but by the end of the day should belong to the "re-planned". my sister convinced me not to go camping while i'm on antibiotics for the respitory illness that's going around and which she says is bad to reoccur. i don't think i'm going to make it to myrtle beach mid-may. and i'm bumping up trip to arizona to around the same time.

spent yesterday printing color samples from epson r300, what a spiffy piece of hardware. using it, i think i can emulate pretty closely archival giclee prints on hevay matte or watercolor paper, not to mention postcards and notecards. so get ready summer tourists, they'll be in the shops.

4.26.4

monday around 5:00. what my sister used to call the "arsnic hour". visited doctor who gave me antibiotic for tail-end of galloping gozodiac, chest rattle, "it's going around". bobby c. from columbia moved in a u haul load of furniture and such. i met him at the southerndharma center seems like a hundred years ago.

did a little business downtown, like buying shoelaces at tops shoe store. light rain, the streets seemed empty.

i'm in a delimma as to what to notice here; what to write about. usually i let my fingers do the talking, and that's what i think i'll keep doing. reframe the mundane.

watercolor i finished yesterday. delayed birthday present for son-in-law doug. it's in the mail.

this morning early it was raining, nice gentle rain. i remeber a long time ago being told by somebody i can't exactly remember right now that rainy days were "spiritual". i guess they are or arn't, but most likely whichever share that quality with all other weather. maybe it is because if you were sitting in a dark cave - which in a way we all are - the weather would leave nothing to do except 1) sleep or 2) wake up.

meanwhile this blog is morphing from trenchant if mispelled commentary on the culture & politics into a personal journal of inner weather. which i'm not sure i like.

but you have to understand my methodology which over a period of time i have come to realize is unique to a lot of folks. i sit down and write with no thought. postcard from nowhere. and i can't or prefer not to edit, rewrite, etc just like i would not want to do if i recieved a letter from someone.

so it is what it is.

i'll most likely head out for the high country tomorrow and spend a few days hunting mushrooms, brooding, slow down. not sure where but i'll know when i get there.

survived another sunday. so far. reminds me of a routine i heard on the radio today:

"have you lived your whole life here?"
"not yet."

i'm not bored, just a tad depressed. found scattered, which is mona's book and i'll send it to her in the a.m. reading it, it is interesting to note how the words motivation, interest, libido, hyperfocus and love can all be used, to a point, interchangably. and how the lack of interest or respect for the outside, the other, can be a desert of forgotten bones.

so i keep my eye on depression level by interest level. which is low right now, but bumping along. finished two long term projects today, working on two others.

talking to richard today about "creativity". my present take is that it does not function inside humans, humans function inside it. the lame and the blind, which we all are, do not feel this. which like all denial takes a lot of energy, if not all of it.

some of us get a taste of it now and then and god what a relief to deal with the real, or the realest that you can deal with. it's the only way out, and the only way in.

on the other hand, to just live the life of a persona, say a gangster's moll or a bank president, and nothing more is just waiting to die.

i've slowly been learning that jung's "active imagination", which i've always been curious about, is something that i have been doing for awhile, in my manner. it's nothing more than actively engaging the little people. respect them, talk to them, listen to them. treat them like they don't exist and they get pissed. i know the feeling myself, having been treated that way in the recent past.

ok i'm signing off. that line of mr. d's, "feel like talking to someone, but i don't know who".

god it's only 2 in the afternoon. i feel like it's been weeks since i woke up, but good weeks: the air is clear, the inner winds are a breeze, some kind of sun is shining on me.

off to a reems creek wedding. i hope it's a humdinger.

{later} back. saw a few old friends, maybe some new ones.

ran into s. the taxi guy who didn't have much to say about our mutual friend mona. Attempting to talk of the real, albeit twisted, wrong, inadequate and bent must be taboo in some circles.

i don't understand these people, or maybe i do. mum's the word. you're out there, and i'm in here, all by myself. The heroic mode sometimes moves in pathological ways.

otherwise a nice spring evening, felt like summer, beautiful changing sky, lots of old folks, lots of young. and not a few zoot suits.

i made the above from a 20 year old cibachrome print i did before the earth was cool. busy day, low hanging clouds to the east. is numinosity enough? can you talk to the images in your head?

been cleaning up all week, loose ends, unfinished business, lost items. i feel like i've been thru some natural disaster, like a flood or fire. or tornado actually. strolling thru the aftermath slowly, shaking my head now and then at the wreakage.

actually i'm making good progress and things - objects, moods, intentions - are already more comfortable. i'm outward bound, ready - i think - to re-engage the world of 10,000 things.

haven't mentioned the ken wilber study group that met tuesday evening. i really enjoyed it, the frothy edge is really splashing around, and none of us knows why we are meeting. but, as i think we all agree, why not? there is an unfolding taking place, each new minute is a mystery.

plan to go to photgraphic exhibit tonight to see what happens.

pay some bills today and wash the dishes and i'm almost caught up with that wispy, tantalizing, moist and misty always receding thing, life with a lower case "L".

tuesday morning. good nights sleep. here's my astrology tip for the week past:

godomighty i'll say.

to continue what is turning into a personal confession, i worked all day on forgiving the Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa, and myself, because i don't want to drag this anger around. it's not worth it.

ate lunch with richard and spent $50 on a technical manual for quark xpress 5 which i'm using to typeset the new life. somehow i can't get anchored picture boxes for the photos to work yet.

continued a watercolor i owe my son-in-law doug; this one may work. in general cleaning up loose ends because next week i'm out of here, it's the perfect time to head for the high country and camp out for a few days.

monday evening. quiet. light low. birds asleep. it's not dark yet, but it's gettin' there.

the weekend was a wowser. my lady friend, the Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa had been keeping me at arms length all week for no reason i was aware of.

saturday i walked to town and saw a movie, touching the void. absolutely beautiful high andes scenery. the narrative was grim survival,

sunday morning i went to the friends meeting at 10. it was held outside, in a quiet spell and space, cool wind, hot sun, birdsong, the quiet murmer of children at play. the best hour i've had in weeks. stayed until 2 with a group of maybe 20 to ponder some of the quaker ways of doing something.

came home and called the Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa who told me she was unavailable for visiting, no further details. this is a person i thought i was in a relationship with, a strange one, but a relationship nonetheless.

so i flipped, totally lost it, drove to her place where she was hiding, not answering locked doors or phone, hiding god knows what. my pretense was to give her back her assorted paraphernalia, and get mine, altho i could care less about it. i just wanted to confront her. it had to be done. somehow i got into the house and banged on her door. she slipped out, intent on one thing: getting me outside all locked doors. cool, collected, her expertise at running parallel lives showing.

i don't feel good at having to lose my temper to survive core deceit but as silly as it is, i guess that is what it is for. in full blown anger i said some things i meant, and somethings i didn't. i guess it doesn't matter when you're talking to a brick wall.

too much information here for you? that's too bad, i'm so sick of lying and denial i don't want to spread any more around. i'm venting here, angry, hurt and very disappointed.

picture i did the other day. at the moment i can't remember how i did it. probably started off as watercolor, graded into oil pastels, and finished with photoshop.

i've been doing a lot of mountains lately. yesterday saw touching the void, mountain climbing movie with grim story but what beauty.

every since i can remember i have been fascinated with mountain climbing and polar expedition narratives. what does that say about me?

ran across the following quote yesterday:

"for rumi the appearance of formal beauty comes as a natural response to being spoken to. the rose opens because it has heard something. the cypress grows strong and straight because a love-secret is being whispered. elegance in language arrives in response. . .

"i have a friend who, when she wants to know who i am seeing, who i am in love with, asks, who am i talking to? the exchange of deep friendship makes a fine entrence into love and trust, into the mysterious action that moves through the eyes, the voice, the heart."
colman barks.

early spring. mud season.
woke up yesterday with a heavy duty head cold. boxes and boxes of kleenix. out of the blue. sometime during the night a switch was flipped. i don't get colds or flu much. so i am declaring the next 2 or 3 days stay in bed days, try to shake it. maybe even clean the house.

another postcard from nowhere. been spending a lot of time there lately.

yesterday was another stay at home day, altho did run a few errends, the most important being getting truck license renewed. now to get it inspected and i'm good for a year, or at least truck is.

today is another gloomy rainy day. good day to spend in bed. i think of this kind of day as "billy holiday" weather, gloomy sunday has been running through my mind non-stop.

i had a strange experience yesterday. lay down for respite around 5. npr playing very quietly in background. at 6 they began a program about the meaning of passover and easter. i got up and turned TV on, pbs news w/ jim mclarer or whatever his name is.

as sometimes happens, i was most likely hypoglycemic, still in hypnogogic state, lord knows what else. anyway the tv and radio played together and both seemed to meld into the same meaning, which had someting to do with what reality is really, and it wasn't what we take it for every day.

well it's just another psuedo-memory now, along with a lot of others.

one of those days yesterday when i never took a step outdoors. there are a few too many objects hidden in the house somewhere i can't seem to find, so i have backed into what you might call "spring kleening". my biggest find so far is a pair of blue jeans, near new. no easter eggs.

this morning it's gray and misty out, had to turn heat on last nite. so i guess i'll stay put another day or two. working on "new life" book every day, trying to get it to a point where it is presentable before the month is over.

watched a bit of the sunday news shows. all concerned are speaking a stylized lost language i can only get pieces of meaning from.

except for somone on the moyers show, in fact two someones: kevin philips was one, jon anderson of the new yorker the other. the democrats should pay to have these two interviews broadcast everyday until the election.

interesting movie out there somewhere:Quantum Physics, Brain Science and Spirituality in the Movies.

saw mr dylan and band last nite:

Asheville, North Carolina
The Orange Peel
April 9, 2004

1. To Be Alone With You
2. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
*3. Unbelievable
4. Make You Feel My Love
* 5. Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine
* 6. Can't Wait
7. If Not for You
* 8. Cold Irons Bound
* 9. If Dogs Run Free
10. Highway 61 Revisited
*11. Not Dark Yet
12. Honest With Me
13. I Believe In You
*14. Summer Days
(encore)
15. Cat's In the Well
16. Like a Rolling Stone
**17. All Along the Watchtower

small venue, 900 people i guess. i stayed in back where i could lean against the rail. great sound from that location. i guess it's pretty much agreed at this point that this ain't no nostalgia act. the starred songs were magnificent.

there was something sweet and enduring about hearing these songs at this point in time. the band, including bob on keyboards, was rock- (so to speak) solid. his delivery was crystal clear, confident, playful. he used his present voice to great advantage, mixed perfectly. there was something elegaic about the whole evening. it's not dark yet...

total communication and respect between the musicains and the audience, a venacular understood by all having to do with the experience of humans living today. what a relief and rest to be in a crowd of people so receptive and uncynical in these times. an oasis. don't miss this tour.

i couldn't resist extracting this picture from movie some of you high bandwidth folks might want to take a look at (http://www.psrla.org/video/BULLDOG7.MOV). music by j. lennon. thanks for the link tucker.

me, i'm still trying to figure out how to change the time to daylight savings time on my watch. my wristwatch.

watched the news last nite for the first time in awhile. dismal. but predictable.

going to see bob dylan tonight in a small venue. i dread the hourlong wait in line, and there are no rocking chairs for geezers like myself. but hey, no pain no gain.

couple of restless nights. visit to doc's yesterday to check burnt hand, he did some minor clean-up, seems to be healing ok. just woke up from a nap, first one in a long time.

home is chaotic, rampant entropy, too many objects misplaced or otherwise among the missing.

finished reading cosmopolis by delillio. spooky. kept running into sentences that were... well, odd but timely, remote, icy, but somehow personal.

bought a hammer today.

heard the most horrifying reportage on shortwave last night on child soldiers in sudan or somewhere. then dreamlike report on diabetes from some christian outfit broadcasting from the west.

good idea: know your enemy, know where you are, know your assumptions are assumptions.

above is a photo i took - i think - of my sister jane & dad in arizona. jane is getting her feet wet in the cyber world using aol as so many of us have, and was unable to download photo i sent to her yesterday.

i worked long and hard yesterday on too many projects. starting to have great fun with flash, in many ways it reminds me of photoshop: elegant, deep, robust and just very well constructed. about ready to start dropping photos into "new life" book i am typesetting. got truck ready for inspection. semi-finished repairing some floor damage caused by great refrigerator debacle. some computer routine maintenance,

but most exciting was, due to slight skew in medication, i had dreams last night. been a long time since i was aware of any. i think the full moon helped.

beautiful day yesterday. worked on odds and ends of maintainence in the morning and walked to town at 12:30. (wait - i just remembered that this was saturday). saw a 1:00 movie matinee, the fog of war, a documentary consisting of robert macnamara, age 85, looking directly into the camera, closeup, dark background, talking, intercut with news and tv footage. veeery slow, i almost dozed off, but liked the movie. it was more personal than political - there is a difference - and i think we could all star in a vehicle such as this if we make it to old age. there are things to say, and you won't find them in written text.

on the way home saw the bumper sticker of the day:

I Heard I was Back in Town

spent the rest of the weekend with jill, visiting ancient languid limbic lakes, the sun that always shines, the far lands that just are.

this morning up at 5 working furiously on bhau's book and flash course.

what about the news?

haven't heard any, but did enjoy carlos santana superstition cd.

pencil drawing done at southern dharma center.

today is the 2nd annerversry of my mother's death. i think it is 2 years. in about 2 hours there will be a blessing in phoenix at the casa, and i will be there in spirit. she was a true human during her time on this earth who continued to learn and grow, as i hope we all do. she is missed by those of us whose life she continues to be a part of.

another postcard from nowhere.

today is cleanup day, or to put it another way, the day to rearrange the wreckage left by the refrigerator that came in from the cold. chaos in the kitchen. more later.

another pencil drawing i did at southern dharma center last weekend.

my refrigerator finally gave up the ghost while i was gone. my landlady, who i get along with fine even though it is probably fair to say she is one of those appalachian eccentrics who has never left the mountains, came up with a solution which involved me and my friend bill o. shuffling refrigerator from upstairs to my kitchen downstairs. we ended up sliding it down a wet grassy hill among other things. there is now wet grass and dirt all over discombobulated living room so i will be in regroup mode for awhile.

got a call from mimi who has been on the road for a month i guess. next week she will take a look at site i have up for her, and then i'll tweak away to make it suitable for her. also dropping pictures into quark layout for bhau's book, which i need to get to some presentable point before early may, orders from the DA.

all this with a badly burned right hand which seems to be healing ok. this afternoon a visit to the dentist to have crown inserted. then i might go to bed for a couple of days.

a piece of something i did when i got back from hotsprings sunday nite. yesterday caught up on online flash course which incidentally seems to be shaping up as very useful; like the dreamweaver course i finished a few weeks ago, it gives you enough of the little conventions and methodologies to let you figure out the rest. paid billz and otherwise caught up on daily maintenance.

but tuesdays real adventure began when i took blood glucose reading prior to meeting jerry at drum gathering in the evening. somehow i'd been on reduced basil rate for awhile and blood sugar was 388 so i cancelled and bolused a lot of insulin to correct. then fried some bacon, maybe for the first time in a year. somehow managed to dump hot grease on right hand. stuck it in cold water and drove immediately to ER.

during the maybe 2 hours i was there i told the people that i was probably getting very hypoglycemic because dinner had been interupted, and as very often is the case in these situations it was not until i reached the end of the process that the nurse doing the actual dressing listened to me and took my blood glucose reading: 35. she was amazed that i could still talk and make sense and treated me to lots of orange juice and assorted goodies.

anyway right hand is out of commission for awhile, don't think i'll be doing any drumming soon.

this picture was taken fri nite sat morning. i guess 900 tickets were sold for an intimate gathering of fanatics at the orange peel, asheville and i got one thanks to the above. i was in meditation hall at southern dharma center at the time. couldn't pass up the chance to experience our poet lauriate one more time. and it takes a lot to get me out after dark.

just returned from 4 day retreat at Enter Southern Dharma Retreat Center. i'm not sure what i thought it was going to be, but turned out to be a lot of sitting in beautiful meditation hall. drew the above there. colors wrong, but hey i gotta be me.

of course when i got back i was quickly sucked into same old backwash. so tired of thinking and not seeing, much less being. on a brighter note, changes happen.

from a group of pictures i did in 1990 i think. for postcards i was making called "things to look at".

find myself working on how to lose my temper. it'll be some kind of change.

had to fix that thing below. it was the ugliest thing i've ever put up - i hope.

but then i'm feeling ugly these days. i think it goes something like this:

"...for it is human nature, as we popularly define it, to react to insult with insult, to fear with fear, and take an eye for an eye. this is the crucial point in the whole matter. to refrain from taking revenge may be merely an escape. in my own case this has often been true. but this is not the work we have in mind, even though it may seem saintly. there is nothing to be gained in 'taking things laying down' or false martyrdom, except some spurious credit from others. no, the point is that we must really know and feel all our inner devils, and at the same time not let them possess us. and perhaps before we can know them we may have had to act them out, really see ourselves possessed by them, and really see their effects in the world. the wrong way has to precede the right way."
david hart, from vol. 3, psychological perspectives.

i guess that's what i saw in myself last night. the internalized undeveloped bitch. didn't know i had it in me.

man it is hard to believe that 5 out of 10 days a waste a couple of hours doing things like the above. i noticed a mention of the word discrimination mentioned at the friends meeting. i guess living - and being a part of - the 10,000 thing world, discriminate we must. might as well do it well.

i had a great nite last night. comfortable with the mystery. lucid dreaming, it's mutual.

very elegant flash site here:

yannarthusbertrand.org

gotta go, stuff to do.

picture above began life as ad from an old "life" magizine, so to speak. a treasure trove of visual material. now i won't have to think any more for awhile.

site was inexplicably down today until a few minutes ago. i think it's the equinox.

went to aville peace demonstration yesterday, walked downtown and milled around for 5 or 6 hours. observations? polerization as in late 60's has nowhere near set in, police and civilians were all cool. for some reason the three speakers that seemed to be really saying something were all woman. one was a poet named i think melinda. her piece was so powerful and right on plus about way more than the war, that it floored me. had to seek her out and shake her hand. a very emotional talk by woman ex-marine. and then the spokeswoman for the "women in black" read a really powerful indictment.

made it to friend's meeting this am and stayed around for 2 hour practice, kind of like meditation, contemplation. after this week, it was a welcome relief.

Another bit of nothing much: this one i found penciled in a book i don't remember buying, much less reading.

an ocean full of itches
a sky full of scratch
i believe it is an elliptical reference to the neo-hellenistic pseudo-alexandrian description of the kosmic situation immediately following the biblical creation of up and down.

today i'm going to go to the global peace demonstration. i am not going to blow a 50 amp fuse.

very rainy, dark day. the kind i love. stay home and brood, pace, sit, paint and have fun.

woke up at 5, planning to take truck in for minor fix at 8, got totally sidetracked, now i'll take it in tomorrow & maybe not have to walk home 2 miles in the rain.

heard a little bit of news last nite on shortwave. chaney the man of steel - or is it oil? - stated that if kerry had been in charge, saddam would still be in power.

this is an example - many more to follow - of why the democrats need edwards as point man. instead of noodling around for an adequate response, it would take him about a new york minute to point out that that was probably true, but osama and friends would have been hunted down, and the proliferation of small mobile islamic terrorist groups could be waning. in other words we could have been dealing with the enemy, not some boogy man.

this is from a pencil drawing my friend bev in canada sent me. as usual, i played with it before i put it up.

big news here is forsythia is out in full bloom, making it official: spring has sprung. (altho it is very possible in the smokey mountains for it to snow a time or two later on.)

2nd tai chi class this morning. i like it very much so far and think my instincts were right on that drove me to it.

finished first pass at mimi's website and put it up early this morning.

got a temporary crown yesterday. first time in the dental world in some time.

and like that, y'know?

i like this drawing. close up from notebook i did 2 nights ago.

this whatever-it-is site is getting more difficult for me to keep up. i think content is a puzzle for me these days. anything having to do with politics, technology, even the continuing and sometimes amusing meme parade is way too far away. i can't see it anymore.

this phenomena is not unique to me; for instance is related to low voter turnout.

it's a problem because political, cultural, technological, and artistic action are all needed to avoid the mega greek tragady we inhabit.

my own relationship to the world of 10,000 things feels very different to me now then it did long ago, and even not so long ago.

so what i am getting at is the lack of trenchent cultural commentary leaves me with only pictures to post.
unless i want use this site in a more "personal" way and air out my inner life. and i don't, not because i am too inhibited to try putting that realm into words, but because i don't think it belongs there. it lives face-to-face with another human - or tree i guess - in personal, honest, two-handed coversation.

last couple of days very intense, little sleep, i am reminded of that great line of burning spear's "...when i was regaining my energy...". took first tai-chi class, had first theraopeutic message, saw dickie betts and friends - i think they played 4 hors - and i can't stand still when he is on and he was on. up early next morning and spent day with sam driving around table rock- hawk's bill area. gorgeous day. it is so entirely positive to spend some time with old friends.

if you have any interest in the future of the web you might want to check this out:

Search upstarts storm Google's gates | CNET News.com

one of the interesting search engines in the pipeline is group oriented. that is, for a group with a common interest, the collective searches would somehow (can you say "synergisticalay? can you spell it?) increase search results of the context you have in mind.

ok so i am not making sense.

found a new old notebook the other day. here's a sample from it:

woven wonder
delightful heart
simple enough
to only start.
complex beauty
accelerates pain.
the sky jewel
accepts the rain.
wet with wonder,
without care,
mind drawing images
written in air"

another day. they just keep coming. so far.

interesting day yesterday. had oilpaint lesson in the morning from new friend (i hope) dan. excellant teacher for me because i am just interested in the nature of oil paint, how it mixes, how it flows, how brush is loaded. etc. i have no interest in composition, perspective etc. becuase i am blessed with a zillion images, endless, in my head.

the images i've been posting the last week or so are a game: i sit down and see how quick i can come up with something for the day. a cyber-doodle or maybe rorshach event.

in the afternoon i visited karen and very much enjoyed the conversation. she leant me the episcopal hymnal in which i will try to locate a song elizabeth mentioned a few weeks ago. don't remember the words, but they resonated with me, in fact almost knocked me out of my chair.

today i start tai-chi, looking to develop flow and balance.

got a PC richard gave me spread all over the living room, trying to fix it and get it up and running. why? i don't know, just to "see what happens", my mantra lately.

tomorrow nite going to see dicky betts play. nite on the town. past my bedtime. i have seen him on a good nite play as well as anyone on the planet. friday going to try real hard to get to table rock a good ways north and east of here. for reasons entirely unknow to me this has become holy grail for me. everyone needs a holy grail.

no image today. ninian arrived from tennessee a day early, , so we walked downtown, wondered around, feet on the ground. it was another gorgeous day to stumble forward. worked on mimi's website, hoping to have version 1 up this week. wrote a letter to someone who may be a figment of my overwrought imagination.. checked lunar colander. busy 3 days ahead for me, beginning with dentist's appointment this am (toothache).

began reading attitudes and latitudes by thomas friedman. he's a funny one. his grasp of the Palestinian dilemma seems accurate and helpful, but his insistence on inevitable globism seems a little Darwinian - peoples that can't keep up go under. at least that's what i got from his last book.

watched a bit of the sunday news shows instead of going to friend's meeting. the sound was off. i think the bushies (they are not real republicans) have got the democratic candidate they want to run against. kerry just doesn't come across on the tube. my advice for what it is worth: he needs to play up a lincolnesque persona, not grow a beard but evolve from craggy to just a touch of haggard, thoughtful, deep. edwards as VP is crucial, he's the only guy who can respond tit for tat to the deluge of public innuendo the bushies have lined up for kerry. and he can unravel the mimetic tangle they are going to tie kerry in knots with. in a heartbeat.

the spread of pseudo-democracies across the globe has highlighted an unnoticed trend: fake elections. remember the soviet union? all of the 3rd world countries with their various ways to have an "election" that one way or another is a setup? they are just beginning the process, do not have the infrastructure or cultural history to use the electoral process in an ideal manner.

we, on the other hand, are evolving past the electoral way. public relations - a bland description of a well worn manipulative path - and big money has pulled the plug on our own elections. witness the last presidential election. it was an invisible coup-d'etat.

as far as the republican ads featuring bush puffed up in front of 9/11, let him wrap himself up in that image. then ask why it happened, why planes weren't scrambled per SOP, and why we responded by declaring war on a nation state when the enemy is a group of "super-empowered individuals" (friedman).

above: today's picture, done in a flash. below: something i found in one of my notebooks:

"wingin' down the highway
in a '64 ford.
i can do it my way
or fall on my own sword.
the feeling is too dangerous
the sun has sunk too low.
the Friend must be hiding out
lost in a taillight glow."

3.6.4

totally depressed yesterday, couldn't make a move. today i awoke feeling amazingly well. took care of a little houskeeping business and finally, after a loooong time, determined that i can walk downtown from here in 30 minutes.

checked out a few books from branch library yesterday (so i guess i could make some kind of move after all) and while i was there scanned a few magazines. was reminded there is no way i can use them as a source of information.

item: the first newspaper published in the usa said in the first issue that it would be published whenever there was anything important to report.

item: 40 years ago k. vonnegut maintained that "visceral knowledge" was all that you needed to know the news.

item: title of one of robert bly's books:news that stays news

i call it "snooze".

Daily Devotional: "In his essay, �Peaks and Vales,� Jungian analyst James Hillman writes of cultivating the vales of our low-lying moods. Compared to the glittering peaks of spiritual aloofness-the Mount Siniai of the spirit- the bottomlands of our despair are fertile with imagination and insight.

The brooding desolation of such depressed emotional landscapes, Hillman writes, was described by the poet John Keats as "the vale of soulmaking." To Keats "the use of the world"-the defeats and dejection�s of everyday life-was that it forged the individual soul.

But the plunge from the heights of spiritual joy into the depths of spiritual darkness often feels like the loss of faith. In the grip of such darkness, life seems meaningless, a landscape drained of color.

"I felt that the ground on which I stood was crumbling,� wrote the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy of his own crisis of faith, "...that I had no reason for living..."

In the Words of James Hillman, Psyche's Hermetic Highwayman: "Neglect of beauty neglects the Goddess, who then has to steal back into the departments as sexual harassment, into the laboratories as 'research' experiments with sex and gender, and into the consulting rooms as seductive assignations."

Country song i started writing last nite; actually, it started writing me:

"i'm feeling like an empty sky
when the clouds they blow away.
the woman just walked out
she had nothing more to say.
i knew her but i didn't
that was just her way.
i bought it all, the good and bad,
the nightime and the day.
love demands a price.
it must have a say:
the silence of indifference
can blow away the play."

twangy, huh?

picture is another quickie. sort of. skipped trip to table-rock, too ragged. pleasant walk around the paris of the south with friend ninian this morning who was visiting from out of town and is now on his way to... nasheville? somewhere like that.

me, i'm going to hide under the bed for 4 days or so.

[later]

just caught a little of the newz. apparently trench coats are the hot new fashion item, so the economy is going to be all right.

this blog has never been one of a confessional nature. st. augustine started the genre, words describing the personal, interior life as it occurs and is remembered. today the interior life is well established, and most would agree that words do not do it justice.

but i'm going to have to get into it because my head and heart are mourning for the loss of a beautiful person in my life, someone far smarter than me, far more observant, and much quicker than i. (all of the women in my life were and are much quicker.)

things i learned:

suffering is highly overrated. i heard it last week, it finally sank home this week.

my point at the time was that it exists in a relationship and can be tolerated and worked with because the relationship is worth it - to both of us and also to whatever the kosmos is.

her point seemed to be that that might not be the case. wreckage ensued.

this week i looked at a handout on the key distinctions of nondual therapy by david fenner. common deserata if you will:

broading the river of the mind: not making a problem out of problems.
letting things be: the practice of noninterference.
doing nothing and knowing nothing.
being intimate yet detached
doing nothing until it is obvious.

i blew every one of these precepts last week. and i'm paying for it. and i'm surprised, i thought i was capable of feeling and acting along these lines. what a lesson in humility.

for what it's worth, fenner lists some of the personal attributes that might keep me or you from access to the above wonderful and oh so necessary qualities:

attachement to suffering
the habitual need to be doing something
the need to know - what is happening and where we are
the need to create meaning

yeah, i still got them all. do you?

i really don't know what i'm doing. i am maybe experiencing a time when thoughts only get in my way, especially repetitive obsessive thoughts about loss of connection to value and meaning. but these and other thoughts are becoming more and more like background muzak. i am happy to say the thought-stream is more and more distant. it's not like you lose your mind; it's still there, and if a moment contains a surprise, like for example you have to go shopping, you just do it. mind kicks in. nothing is lost. mind based actions seem to be on-demand. there when you need them.

the mind buzz when on idle is obtrusive but for me is less and less so - may it always be so. but truthfully it's still there, the monkey mind.

in a recorded conversation i heard between k. wilber and rabbi Salman Schachter, the rabbi - who seemed like a real kick to talk with - remarked that he thought buddhism needed to look again at the eight-fold path:
1. Right Knowledge
2. Right Thinking
* Decide to set a life on the correct path
3. Right Speech
4. Right Conduct
5. Right Livelihood
6. Right Effort
7. Right Mindfulness
8. Right Concentration

he thought because the human world has changed that

Right Relationship

should be added. relationship with you, with the world.

whatever a right relationship might look or feel like i do not know, but thinking, the mind, the future, secrets, fear of harming others because of personal worthlessness, helplessness, or hoplessness, fear of doing the wrong thing, none of these serve as the basis of right relationship. they might be part of it as we are after all humanoid. but acceptance of the luminous gift with all that entails is what matters.