Tumbleword

dancing muses

bridge

Fed Ex truck ^rushing gifts^ to U

Out last night, took a few rushing past the world photos.  Might take my camera out more often–but maybe not.

My mind hurts, like the wheels and cogs of thought burnt out all the oil (its been a heady week of exporting the insides outward–grace of it, I thank you.  I need a deep deep meditation today.  Yes.  But so much to do.  The vibration I feel out in the world right now, the hurry, the buy buy just to give, it seems ill against my being.  I try to enter it with peace, to stay witness of it, (I’ve lived that way and did love it sometimes) so I don’t choose to go out and feel recoil, because I love all the lights and the way at certain times of the year you feel this excited buzz around others, community builds and people share a happiness. 

It happens here at Halloween, when all the dressed up trick or treaters come out, everyone is in costume and open in the streets.  Otherwise, this town is too boring, too bankerish, too accountant… something whisper flee!

What else. I saw something yesterday that reminded me we are in a drought.  this is hard to believe but three squirrels were standing on limbs, all focused on one thing.  Another squirrel (and this is what caught my attention) was clanging a  copper stick thing I have in a ceramic pot out near my grill.  He was swilling his head way down in, to get at some mucky leaf drown water.  The others were waving their tales and waiting as if to get a sip.  I have never seen such a thing and its not my poetic sensibility imagining it.  I went out to check and they barely ran off, so I put some water out and in some old ceramic bowls laying around out there.  The neighbor’s cat is always sniffing for water drops too.  Thirst, for me, would be a terrible way to die, or even to live.  Try not drinking water for a few days, you will get mental.

Still have to decide where I want to spend the holidays.  By the fire more quiet, (more spiritual time) dinner with friends especially the “two saints”, or home where a huge group will eat a wonderful dinner and open tons of gifts and end up dancing around and a big party.?  One is less the other more (but too much maybe for the kernal of the dream). Boston just got socked with tons of snow yesterday–everything closed down at 2:oo and it took them four or five times longer to get home.  People’s cars ran out of gas, trapped in traffic and so they had to abandon them and that caused even more issues. One sister couldn’t get up the hill to her house.  It would be nice to have a sleep over by the fire with my sisters, stay up late talking, sipping wine, without anything else!  There is so much so much go here see this person go there see that person, so and so has open house, its like hopping from place to place, seeing and being seen and I have over the past five years like a man with a large chizzel “cut away” so much of what surrounds Christmas “tradition” and though at first maybe it seemed void (emotionally) of all the excitement and drama I grew up with, it has become more of a day to appreciate The Gift.  But then, this year, hmmm… i feel a party coming alive inside!

You know the world is shifting when the local evening news shows people praying for rain.  Well, it is raining and has been raining.  I have lit candles around the house, to sort of snuff out the darkness.  If I could, I would use candle light more than regular light… if light from electric power and light bulbs is regular in any real way.  I find bulb light offensive.  I like the idea of slowly closing down the day with candles lit around the house.  Always, its candle light at dinner, even if its still light out.  I think one or two of my sisters does this too. 

  Did you know scientists discovered school children learn better in real sunlit classrooms?   I always felt best sitting near the window, it relaxed me. The sun would come in and touch my hair, and warm whatever was still thawing from the wait at the bus stop in New England winters.  I remember this one teacher, what a Mutt, (did I just say that–must wash my mouth out with a glass of wine tonight); I remember she moved me away from the window for fear I was day dreaming.  Like you can’t listen and make pictures of what a teacher is saying if you’re not looking at her.  Or like the inner life is not worth paying attention to (you dumb drone). 

If I only knew what I know now, I would have stood up and told that woman a thing or two.  About me!  About children.  When I finished with her today, she’d be like chalk dust on the chalk sill and one of the boys who liked to clap erasers for her could wash her away with a wet paper towel and toss her out of the room.  See, venom hides in the nicest little girls.  Look at me.  I hadn’t thought of this in years… that teacher, when she moved me away from what was the prize seat in the classroom near a huge window, guess what she did.  She made me sit next to the local undertaker’s daughter. 

I was too dumb, or too shy, yes both, to tell her I felt less able to concentrate sitting over in the shadows with that girl.  I spent most class time wondering how she (Shannon was her namo) lived in that big house downtown where the funerals were held.  I mean she was a living girl and slept in a house with dead bodies in her basement.  People came into her parlor and wept.  She lived and breathed and ate breakfast above the vented formaldehyde and carried its gasses in to me.  Our desks stuck together like two paired off lovebirds in the back row.  Yes, I did use my imagination in those hours instead of listening to that t e a c h e r… who was dull as a lamp-less basement herself.  Without a candle or a bulb, how was she (teacher with no eyes in her head) supposed to inspire me?

Down the hall, doesn’t it just kill you, you knew there were other kids in way amazing teacher’s classes.  Teachers you already liked, or had a relationship with, teachers with style and personality and creativity who could come outside and play soccer with us all, and still maintain their P O W E R and yes,  A U T H O R I T Y as figurines in the little shop of horror grade school can so easily be turned into.

Right now, I remember this and maybe it is because one of my nieces is having a hard personality issue with her teacher.  I heard it on the phone last night, and all I could think was this niece is so powerfully capable of taking everyone’s attention in a room, the teacher must be taking her power back.  Who knows.  It woke up my memory.  Right now, ahhh, it is down pouring outside the window again… it sounds so nice, I want to record it.  The dry leaves are all stretched around like dry hides on drums, and it adds, really increases the sound patter.  It sounds like the world is saying SHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh all over… asking for peace.

In Mansuetude, This is my Tumbleword: Let the little genius in the little kids live.  Don’t blow out the candles of the brightest lights, just cause your own head is dim.  Start a bonfire. Its our future… living in those little eyes.  Those little hands, little big hearts.

I have been having trouble since this weekend with this Blog site.  I couldn’t get on, it timed out
and then I got all sorts of weird things in my box.  In the meantime, I just wanted to say….Thank You !

  In Mansuetude: This is my Tumbleword:  Even the things we can’t stand, the filthy, defiling, annoying… they all buzz off eventually.  So chill out.  I write this to myself… but you all already knew that….to say to self is to say to other and the other says back, yes… yes… I did that too… its like putting a great light in the wilderness and there is that terrible wolf, gnarled up and nasty, he frightened us but he really was just lost and hungry.  We get him some Alpo, he rests by our fire, he hunts for us now. 

It rained last night (sweet, heart sound).  I miss the sound of rain.  Walking the dog early, a bucket of murky water full on the deck.  I looked at it and thought, I should actually save that.  It was brine water.  It was … well… what it was.  But since this drought is getting larger, and some people think it is because of global warming, which is influenced by the use of fossil fuels, which is our own indulgence in what an anthropologist in Boston I studied with once named as THAT Fact That man has become dependant on his luxuries.  Yes.

What once was a luxury is now a thought of, sought after necessity in the USA.  I love my country.  Surely we need to slow down.  Think about it, open your icebox, look in, it glows like an immaculate room in a surgery.  It is loaded with …well, stuff you like.  Unless you are hungry… unless you have ever gone to bed hungry by no reason of choice, you have more than you need.  Like the water coming out of the pipes, do we not take it for granted… and the hot water even more.  Etc… what are we going to do without water if in 60 - 90 days the south runs out of its so called allotment?  Wolf…sounds erupt in the forest of my soul.

If it happens, I bet most of us are unprepared for the inconvenience.  I would not like to imagine what could happen in a country of us, people used to things, suddenly without certain simple turn the faucet on kind of you to come water.  Water, I love you. Did I ever tell you?  People, kind civil people, we’d get ugly without you.  Smelly, ya, but… nasty as rats.   Know how nice it feels to get out of the shower?  What if… ?  Ohh… Can you see the people in the streets?  ohh… Maybe it is time to move back to my love, my Beantown.

GO Red Sox…

Deer (Dear)!!!

North Carolina is in drought.  And in a drought of ideas of what to do about it.  Some say only a 60 day supply of water is left.  Since 1880 they have not seen half as little rain as we got this year and a dry winter is expected.  Dry winter does not mean that all the bars will close or that nobody will drink anything alcoholic, though there are still some dry towns in this state. 

Last night I saw on the news an invitation for restaurants to use paper plates instead of washing lots of heavy white plates in lots of warm sudsy water.  I have decide to stop drinking out of glasses when I can easily use paper or plastic, and I hate not to use glass.  Glass is one of my favorite things in life.  Plastic is my least favorite.  Everyone alive who knows me has been told DO NOT EVER put PLASTIC flowers on my grave…. Do you hear me?  I don’t know many people of the generation I come from or younger who might do that, but some people seem to think it is a gesture of love or beauty to stick a plastic cluster of imitation floral dreak at a gravesite.  I mean what is the word flower got to do with that–Micheals, you should be banned from selling them; Flowers are like delicate flesh wilting, fragrancing the eye, a discovery of silken color–what does flower have to do with plastic, dust coated ick… ICK> posing on metal spine pretense of floral arrangments?  Arranging flowers was once an art.  America, stop.

So there. 
I can drink out of those rather tiny cocktail plastic glasses with ice, the see through kind.  They actually cast nice shadow patterns on the area around the table when the sun filters through their empty little hollows.  Some friends are drinking more beer, and juice and gator aid.  I was thinking we might start watering the plants and fields of North Carolina with Gatoraid, the way they do in that movie Idiocracy.  The government of my city might think it is a good plan to fix the problem and vote on it despite the scientific evidence (in the movie Idiocracy for instance) against it. 

The Newspaper suggested today that if we drink water out of one glass we can use it all day, but if there is any milk, juice or other kind of sugared substance in the drink we must rinse the cup or it will forment with GERMS.  Really, do we need to be told this?  Yes!  Its like those people who during ice storms in the Carolinas that cling on the wires and knock out wads and wads of electricity (it never happened in New England blizzards back home) but here, an inch of frozen rain and the lights and the heat and all the goods in your freezer go to swill… for weeks of black out.  Well, during those times, it is weird but some sensible people actually bring their gas grills indoors with no venting to cook or heat their children’s frost bitten hands, and then as a result of this cleverness they gas themselves to a near death coma.  See?  Some things that seem OBVIOUS to one of us is in visible to another.  Weird, ha?

I am putting together a package of “goodies” for a very homesick dude in Iraq and if anyone has any suggestions, anything beside water, h2o, I have to save that for my plastic flowers.  They need to drink too, don’t they?  I would in my heart like to include a note, war is dumb, run away and come home while you can run.  I will hide you in a very dry root cellar. 

But he is already scared shit and heart sick just to be there.  May he come home safe and sound of mind.  To live a healthy life in a town where water is available to drink. 

GO RED SOX>>> You’ve worked hard and We Believe !!!

 

 

A darling person just sent me this image in an email and I can NOT explain what it did to me.  I am not a big email junk food Spam eater or receiver, but this raining path of WET green acted like a big SIGH on my whole body.  I sat at my desk staring into the monitor like it was a real window… aware that I was affected physically and sensually from a digital image as if it were real.  Why?  Because the rain is falling, and motion is more real than a static image like a photo of rain?  Maybe.  But no! Because after the heat wave and the dry spell of this summer, I WANT this to be real!  Do you hear me??

I don’t want it to rain all day (nor do I want flood or deluge).  However, I am stumbled by my response to this image.  I am now physically certain that those satires/stories/political cartoons of people in the future tied up to digital sensory images and experiences–well, it could come true.  I just experienced a hint of it; an extreme biological response in body and mind, and probably its chemicals (I am no longer craving chocolate and/or Margaritas).  So…. should I be pleased with this experience?  Yes.  But does it suggest that the kids born today might be living in a future more warped by increasingly powerful digital experiences–like in a Star Trek episode?  Yes, I think so.

If I lived in out of space and needed some sensual contact with the earth, well, I might accept the use of entering into a room of digital stimulation and experiencing what I was homesick needy for; but how far will one bent acceptance lead to another bending of my desire for the real into excuses for this new digital ”cut copy paste” real? 

When will it be simply easier to sit with digital rain, or snow (when homesick at Christmas)?  Or to sit at a digital beach (can I find a shark’s tooth there, bring my dog, get sand in my toes, walk across its moving shifting grandeur)?  Not yet.  How long till it’s easier to take a digital hike, instead of actually seeking out real life experiences, or real life change like hiking out of a relationship (I could just order a new digital lover).  Will we get out a credit card and order in a digital vacation (is that what a dvd is) the way we now order in pizza (is that even good pizza?)?  Instead of walls with wallboard, we could live in rooms of wall-to-wall hi definition images and change them from season to season, never have a real window to an uncontrollable outside, never see the sky or hear a real bird, only an audio version of it.  Is this (real) life?  We have already turned so far from the traditional hunter gatherer lives of once upon a time, the traditional farmers, etc… toward city life, computers, T.V., space travel, cell phone, skipe, sling box, i-pod, mp3, 1080p DLP, HDMI inputs, DVI, wi-fi, LCD, Gigabite, bluetooth, firewire, USB, GPS, mini-Dv–there is a whole new language happening here.  Even if spoken in our own native tongue, we need a techno-dictionary to translate.  Does anyone know ASPRIN?

I’m not even going to mention sexuality (cause its not sexuality, digitally what I am thinking) its something else.  And how well are we as a culture, as humanity, how psychologically fit are we now; will we grow emotionally enough and move away from the wholesale greed and the selling out of one person’s life for the wealth of another’s life–ever?  Or enough to use something physically and financially powerful as digital media will be?  Already most of us have pimped out our lives to products glitzed into our hearts via tv and movies (all product placement platforms).  Add to this mix the words peer pressure to increase the “I gotta have it” syndrome.  Remember, peer pressure doesn’t end at adolescence.  We are all into verbal and non verbal peer pressure; watch a political debate, listen to dinner table conversation, hear people argue over what news channel to watch, what movie to see, what brand of anything… it gets hot.  Nonetheless, tied into all the coming digital stimuli we could end up like slugs, sitting in recliners attached to whatever feels good, while we pretend to ourselves that we have some control over it all; some small choice in it, like the difference between ordering pepperoni or just cheese, we will make choices. 

I don’t need to continue .. for one moment this rain scene did me well; I felt a release as if rain had fallen, but I couldn’t open the door and smell it (though that will come) and I couldn’t run out into it and get wet till my hair ran with drops of it and my clothes soaked and sticking I would have to run inside to the air conditioned house and shiver, shower and change to dry clothes.  I can’t drink this rain, nor water my plants by it; nor is the lawn wet nor the birds bathing.  Only the dry earthy quality of my heart drank.  I did sigh, feel a memory module (what language is this) open up and give relief to what I wasn’t aware of missing so–till the image hit my eye.  I drank with my eye and my heart said, ahh good.  Then my mind, it went into the future, it said Oh boy! Beware!  Because (I think therefore I am) of so many possible scenarios of what this little digital enjoyment could lead to…. to a future offered by a past (now)? 

The greatness of pure creative pleasure within mankind and it polar opposite of destruction, the way of bondage–exists within us as our potential.  Our responsibility is great, to find and enforce a balance for the good of all.  Oh… boy, the power of us.  Take it in your hands (with mansuetude) ask the help of grace.  It doesn’t matter what kind of technology or what kind of political system we use to think about the life we will create on earth–all systems and things are made by mankind, and used by mankind, hence exist within his/her limits of willingness to use well or abuse.  Construction and/or Destruction.  As R.W. Emerson once wrote, “All things have two handles, be careful which one you choose to grip.”   

May men be brought to respect the digital information age and use it wisely, from one hand to another, one eye to another, one pleasure point to another, one bank account to another–all in a higher balance of extremes better than greed and power.  May most men beware.  Remain vigilant to what is worthy.  That is all I can say.  For now, with mansuetude towards all, I’m going back to watch the (?) rain.