The contrary human mind: A missed good-bye, 6 mosquitoes, and a son’s broken finger later, I am sitting, cheerful as a duck. It’s possibly my last night here with electricity, so I have the balcony Xmas lights on:
green red yellow green yellow yellow blue

Maybe it was the yoga facing the lights making my spine happy, or learning our son was ok after a few hours in ER. Good news after bad more exhilerating than good news alone.

I certainly have loved this place with the east-facing windows that greet the sun each morning. The bird impressions on the glass. The squirrel who snoozes stretched out like he’s sunning on a beach. The personable tree closest to the railing. The light that flows the whole length of the place, east to west, then west to east, trembling with the movement of leaves. The hummer that perches on a snag near the window. The high school band music that floats in on fall mornings.

It’s been a good space.

The Right Stuff reports that astronauts were rated not only on how capably they handled new and dangerous situations, but on how their vital signs reacted to such situations. I don’t remember the details. I packed the book yesterday. But one of the astronauts was highly admired because his vitals were steady no matter what. Another astronaut was treated with less respect because his vitals were all over the map.

I am more like the latter. I awoke this morning with my heart vibrating like a bird’s. I breathed as deeply as I could--but it wasn’t very deep. Fear has kept me from being as prepared as I might be. Others' doubts have enhanced my self doubt. I flunk the astronaut vital signs tests!

I remember that this is what I want to do. To explore, to trust my heart and inner wisdom when the community is pushing me toward the status quo. I don’t want a desk job, even though I am tempted by its acceptability, the loveliness of routine paychecks. (Really, at this moment, I just want to go back to bed with the covers over my head.)

A gold gummy star to panicked astronauts...

Somewhere inside me, I trust the beauty of the journey.

Meanwhile--back to earth--there’s an awful lot to do.

I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship.

Louisa May Alcott

slap, slap, slap, slap, slap
crazy kundalini
breaking loose energies,
snoring, breathing, chanting.

come in with pain
leave with healing
healing of self, of self with others,
of families scarred by distant events,
reaching to people not yet met
easing the ache of separations

On my knees
I cup my hands before me
feel hands cupped in mine
a bridge of peace

At some point you let all the clues flow through you, find peace with the mysteries in your life and return to the moment, the stillness within you.

Or maybe not. You still have a hunger to know, to understand. You take on figuring out God and the universe because that sure seems like an easier puzzle than the stuff at hand!

Everyone's worrying about your money, their money, the government's money. No one's worrying about whether there's touch, whether there's love, whether there is at least a cloth monkey!

I was walking and I heard steps behind me and boom I was flat on my face, a large man-child on top of me, simulating mating activity. Friends came to the rescue, but for a few minutes, I was at the bottom of the dog pile thinking: Well, this doesn’t happen every day!

I was not hurt physically. Though I was fine, I later wondered the classic question, was it what I was wearing?

His father and brothers said that they had to keep him locked up at home because he was a danger to women. They gave him medication. That he was a very agitated man. He did this whenever there was opportunity.

It was not what I was wearing, it was that I was a woman, any woman.

Years later, I ran into this man-child again. He was calm, almost beatific. People who knew him said he had been moved from his family long ago. He ended up in a house whose only other residents were five women.

The problem had then vanished.

We passed trees with silver leaves. We passed apple trees, laden with fruit. I so wanted a German apple—but I was on a bus, & the trees on private property.

The meal— a banquet in a yellow room with white latticed windows along 3 walls. The last light of the day shot through the chorus of wine glasses & silver on the tables.

I wandered to the bathroom & passed a bowl of misshapen apples on the bar.

When I returned I asked the bar maid if the apples were local—she said yes & that of course I could have one—and did I want a knife?

I said no—I’d take [the apple] with me.

I wanted apples and a bowl of them appeared. I ate mushrooms of the Black Forest of Germany--& drank & ate too much & rode on a [bus] that became rowdy with smokers & bad music & the last quarter moon rising & Mars rising and the hurricane a third of the wrld away threatening & it was the night of the autumnal equinox.

9-24-05

For a moment
the threads in place
for a moment
past and future
east and west
heart and head
weave into
whole cloth
lighter than silk
Horses munch their evening hay
a rhythmic, peaceful sound
The pale red-tailed hawk
reminds me of the way

I want to know if God has intent. Though the many religious beliefs are indeed like different branches of the same tree, this question creates a fundamental dividing line. Does God have conscious intention, an individual involved with the minutia and grandness of our lives and universe? Or is God an amazing undirected force off which we feed and find comfort? I am quite certain the reality is something beyond my imagination, beyond any A or B.

Still, our perceptions matter. An involved, active God with a will has very different ramifications than one that is a presence, a well, an available benevolence. “What God wants” would be a very real pressure for the people in group A, whatever they perceive God wanting. “What God wants” would have no meaning or relevance whatsoever for Group B.

People—and tribes of people--might behave very differently depending on which way they lean.

Last night I walked under a river of stars, clean water singing against limestone, coyotes barking and howling.

Today--I have been thinking about Harry Harlow’s infamous experiments with the cloth and wire surrogate mothers. I started to write about them--then thought I’d better look it up. Good thing. My memory had the date wrong (1950s, not early 60s), the monkey wrong (macaques, not chimps), and, in some ways, the whole point wrong.

I tend to wonder about Harry himself, what his parents were like, what led him to do research that involved separating baby primates from their mothers at birth. I heard Harry Harlow speak once in the 1980s. Reading his own 1958 summary of his work, like hearing him speak, reminds me there is always more to the story. What he was originally trying to study was love.

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Harlow/love.htm

A bird awoke me in the night, laughing: Fly, Linda! Fly!

And I did--like a swallow or a nighthawk, the only thing separating me from flight and the other bird was thought.

I got up and went to the balcony. Leaves rustled. Chimes below sang once. The light-limned clouds and trees celebrated my belonging.

If I could accept myself. If I could accept the flight.

I never saw the Alps in Switzerland, but I knew they were there.

A late afternoon swim, a skillet of hashbrowns and a few Hershey kisses finally cured this girl of being desperate to know. Too much universe in one night. Sometimes nativearthlings have to have their feet, please, firmly planted on earth.

A year ago today, I arrived in Zurich at the gracious invitation of a friend.

49 degrees, light drizzle, green green green, everything pristine. Stepped out in capris and sandals. Elated to be cold.

My life hasn’t been the same.

Even much of the writing in this blog finds its bent, its optimism from that week in Switzerland.

I still don’t know what to make of it.

This year--last night--I took flight again though I never left the apartment. As though again invited by others. And found communion, knowledge and beauty in infamiliar places.

Subtract the stars, the dust, the gases, the photographer; what remains?

November 03, 2005
Infrared Glow of First Stars Found

When NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope snapped pictures of a distant quasar in the Draco constellation in October 2003, the photo shoot was only intended to calibrate the instrument. Those images, however, just may have provided a glimpse of the very first stars in the universe.

"We think we are seeing the collective light from millions of the first objects to form in the universe," explains Alexander Kashlinsky of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who details the finding in the current issue of Nature.

"The objects disappeared eons ago, yet their light is still traveling across the universe."

Scientists have theorized that the first stars appeared as early as 100 million years after the big bang, which occurred 13.7 billion years ago. Prior to that point, the universe lacked light and was a featureless space filled with hydrogen and helium. Clumps of these elements eventually coalesced into stars, nascent galaxies and ultimately formed the brilliant universe of today.

According to the researchers, the light from the earliest stars is still detectable amidst the infrared light that makes up the background of the observable universe. Although this light was initially high energy, ultraviolet light, it has shifted to lower and lower energies and wavelengths over time as the universe has expanded, the so-called redshift. By subtracting out light from the camera itself, along with that from our solar system, interstellar gas and dust, and, finally, the estimated light from all the stars, galaxies and other light sources from the last 13 billion years or so, the team isolated what it believes is the dawn of light.


"We removed everything we knew--all the stars and galaxies both near and far," says co-author John Mather, also at Goddard. "We were left with a picture of a part of the sky with no stars or galaxies, but it still had this infrared glow with giant blobs that we think could be the glow from the very first stars." …

--David Biello

I went for a walk tonight
and noted vultures, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
floating and floating south
high above the breathless parking lot
no flapping of wings
just open arms floating

It’s as though they were in hang ten
that state surfers achieve when they ride a wave

It is what happens
with awareness of breath
breathe in breathe out breathe in breathe out
the very rhythmical flapping of the wings
and hold
you have caught a timeless current
and it isn’t about the flapping or breathing any more

breath ignites light

I have never lived in a place like this before
where the light runs through it like a river
sparkling water flows
over dish towels and carpet
a carafe, a bed—
ebbs and pulses
with the sun and moon

I have never lived in a place like this before
where the high school trumpets
call over the morning air
and the drum line makes a cheerful drone
as though they were cicadas
hatched this very morning

The train whistle blows
The light runs east to west and west to east
again and again,
the earth’s heartbeat,
and for this brief span
I live close to the Heart

I dreamed I was dressed like a nun. Wearing some half-cocked white-cloth headgear, hair sticking out every whichway. My kids were young and I was dropping them off at an activity and then going to see what was happening down the hall at my old school.

The real nun at the top of the stairs looked at me dubiously. She asked me a few questions as though to see if my quest were legit, but they were only to confirm what she already knew: I didn’t belong roaming around the cloister.

I gazed wistfully at a couple of the other nuns talking and doing paper work past her, but I was barred.

So I took off in my little car, chose not to take an off-road shortcut, but tried to time it so I wouldn’t be stuck at the red light for long, waiting to turn west on 38th.

tonight
you put on some brown rice
which takes a little less than an hour.

When it is perhaps 2/3 of the way there
in a separate skillet
you sauté a bit of onion, a bit of bell pepper
till nicely caramelized
and add
a 60-cent can of black-eyed peas
and let that sizzle till the rice comes ready.

the trick is
there is a point past which
the liquid of the beans
transforms from juice
to some eloquent song
and though things are quite good and cooked through
before that point,
after that point
the density
the flavor
the feel upon the tongue is
the melding of disparate voices
into an angelic chord

I guess you’d call
the rice and black-eyed peas
hopping john,
a glass of wine his friend--

you don’t need to be rich
nor a gourmande
to eat very very well
half the battle
is to have your very nice skillet
on the burner at all times
ready to go
waiting for you
to light the flame
and tango
when a mealtime approaches

There’s a book called The Snow Geese: A Story of Home, written by a fellow named William Fiennes. The author, in his recovery from a grave illness, decides to join the spring migration path of Snow Geese from Texas to the northern territories of Canada. He alternates stories from his journey with scientific tidbits about the mysteries of migration. What I especially like is that without drawing attention to it, he juxtaposes the migration of the geese with the stories of the people he meets on buses who, like him and the geese, are also traveling north.

The stories and explanations for why people travel are varied, but in the end you wonder if we are not subject to the same restlessness, the same body-awareness of sun angles and magnetic fields, as the other creatures who share the planet with us. Maybe like different birds and insects, some of us are hard-wired for travel…

The power of the internet has in the last decade transformed our ability to observe and understand bird populations. Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology and The Audubon Society jointly sponsor eBird: , a site that dramatically illustrates this evolution.

eBird accepts birding observations from people all over the hemisphere. (The site even accepts past observations from old notebooks. I have a dozen years of nature data I kept from my neighborhood--and over time I hope to transfer relevant avian info to eBird.)

The internet has linked together the eyes and ears of thousands of observers. With all of this data, the researchers now can document timing of migrations--how they vary each year, exactly where the birds go, how population size fluctuates. They can document trends of how human activity affects bird welfare. You can see through this website how the range of a bird species is not at all a static thing, in some cases shifting dramatically from year to year.

Isn’t it amazing how willingly each person volunteers their bits of information in order to create a clearer picture of the whole? In order to have a glimpse of the complete puzzle? The internet has accelerated the planet's brain-like evolution, increasing numbers of nerve endings and synapses, birds just one of the specialties interconnected into the spaciousness of human knowledge.

I dreamed of a work of black lines, of yellow, of red shapes. I dreamed Kandinsky’s Structure Joyeuse.

I dreamed of a great tree, its branches chopped. I planted a red seed.

I wrote an ode to yellow bells, to the esperanza in a chicken-wire cage. The joke on the jailer: Hope springs free as a jack rabbit.

To be effective in self-defense, he said, when the mind is active, one must keep the body still. When the body is active, the mind must be still.

Suffering results from action with an unquiet mind.

I see a beehive of light, like the reflector/refractor lens in a light house, each small segment magnifying the source, together a great beam of light.

I dreamed a single word: Peace

Srivatsa Ramaswami, a yoga teacher from India, spoke last night. He seemed a pragmatic man, and not at all self-absorbed. He said (as best I can recall his words):

Happiness is an experience. Peace is a state of mind. Happiness doesn’t last very long--like excitement. It is possible to maintain peace of mind across one’s life.

I’m a photoblog junkie.

crashed grocery carts, blue-lipped fish, personable orange traffic cones, auroras, a telephone mouthpiece, a bicycle under water, weeping willows --images as indelible in my mind as the public consciousness of The Scream or The Statue of Liberty.

In photography, like in most art, there's the artist's conscious communication, the artist's unconscious communication, what's simply there in the work (‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’), and what the viewer brings, is projecting, to the work. There is the physical body of the artist assembling some physical work that is physically received by the viewer. Then there’s that spiritual aspect that comes from who knows where. In photography, obviously, physical light is integral.

It’s that complexity and communication among layers that keeps people participating in art. We’re designed to enjoy puzzles.

Applied Materials Inc. says it is jumping into a new market--building equipment for making photovoltaic panels that turn sunlight into electricity.

Applied, the world’s largest maker of semiconductor-manufacturing equipment, says it will adapt its knowledge from making very advanced gear for processing silicon wafers and flat-panel displays into new equipment for making solar panels.

“We plan to change the cost equation for solar power through the adaptation of our existing technology and through new innovation in order to help make solar a more meaningful contributer to the global energy supply,” CEO Mike Splinter said...

Applied will show off some of its technology in Dresden, Germany, this week at the world’s largest solar show, the European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference...

Kirk Ladendorf
Austin American-Statesman
Tuesday, September 5, 2006

A Brief History of Lighthouses

Lighthouses have always had two principal functions: to warn of danger from a spot that sailors could see from a safe distance both night and day, and to be guides into harbors or anchorages… These structures were often constructed under precarious circumstances by skilled builders and were maintained, often at great personal risk, by dedicated keepers.

Lighthouses in the Ancient World

The first lighthouse on record was built on the island of Pharos. Later designated one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world…The Pharos lighthouse was the last of the six vanished Wonders to disappear (the Great Pyramid in Egypt still exists). It stood for about 1,500 years, finally falling victim to earthquakes in A.D. 1326. An Arab traveling in 1166 described the lighthouse as follows: the lowest of three stages was a square about 183 feet high with a cylindrical core; the middle stage was octagonal with 60-foot sides and a height of about 90 feet; and the third stage was circular with a height of 24 feet.1 The total height, including the foundation, was about 384 feet. It was reported to have used fire at night and a sun-reflecting mirror during the day.

The Pharos lighthouse was memorialized on Roman coins, and its name is the base for the word “lighthouse” in Spanish and Italian (faro), Portuguese (farol), and French (phare). Even in Britain before 1600, a lighthouse was called a pharos…

Technology and Lighthouses - The Light

The purpose of a lighthouse’s light is to provide a mariner at sea with a fixed point of reference to aid his ability to navigate in the dark when the shore or an offshore hazard cannot be seen directly. The distance at which such a light can be seen depends on the height and intensity of the light. The brighter the light and the greater its height above the sea, the farther it can be seen. Of course, when the weather is bad—with rain, snow, or fog—visibility can be greatly reduced…

Fresnel Lenses

Working in France, Augustin Fresnel developed lenses that enveloped a light source in all directions in what has been described variously as a “barrel,” “glass keg,” or “gigantic beehive of prisms.” By combining the reflecting (light-bouncing) and refracting (light-bending) characteristics of prisms above and below the light source, with a strong magnifying lens at the level of the light source, the light was concentrated in a narrow horizontal sheet of light…

http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/lighthouses/history.htm

3 gifts from 3 days in the tunnel:

1) A wake-up call

wakens the warrior within
to breathe
to survive
to say Yes!


2) Red things: marble, ruby-throated hummer, cardinal feather

Remember the heart.
Even one day out of touch with your heart
is a cold, cynical living.

3) The written words of others

Be light

This was a good meal for humans, and easy to prepare:

Slice 4 or 5 rounds, about 1/3 inch thick, of green chile polenta per person. Lightly coat your skillet with olive or canola oil and place over medium heat. Set the polenta slices within. With a spatula, turn over the slices when they are sizzling, and lightly brown the other sides.

Meanwhile, in each dinner bowl, place salad greens, sliced avocado and cantaloupe. Coat lightly with a vinaigrette that you like. Slide the rounds of polenta on top. Ta-da.

You don’t see them at first. You just become sensitive to the hint of flight among the junipers, the barely audible whirr of their wings. Yesterday, I became aware. I cooked up some nectar and today, there is a tribe of them buzzing in and out of the balcony, strafing each other with their wicked sword-beaks. It seems, with their warrior posturing, they burn more fuel than they consume. Their emerald backs glow iridescent even in today’s clouded light. The male stops his aggressive-defensive maneuvers, and hovers, still but in motion, above a juvenile that is feeding

A tiny jewel—sparkling red—he now sits on a twig against the juniper bark. It’s the male that has the ruby throat.


Hummingbird Nectar:
1 part sugar
4 parts water

Stir to dissolve sugar, then microwave @ 4 minutes. Cool to room temperature before serving.

On the other hand--maybe it is about the drink, about the cigarette itself. The pleasurable effects of alcohol or nicotine on the body. Maybe it is about the intriguing uniqueness of the person on the pedestal. Maybe the conversant license plates are a way to externalize your own hopes and fears, and washing your hands 30 times a day does keep you healthier. Talking nonstop gives a transient feeling of power over a roomful of people. Why not be obsessed? A complete set of 19th century Canadian coins has more value than two or three favorites--and perhaps brings more satisfaction.

Experts weigh in, developing opposing schools of thought and treatment: A) The pain and strangeness of your existence is a medical disorder, not at all your fault, we have just the pill for you, fix you in a jiffy. B) No, it’s a story unfolding, the symptoms are the clues. Pills just obscure the clues. C) Leave me alone while I enjoy the moment of my compelling habits.

We shape and reshape the shimmering complexity of unshaped story. An entertaining sometimes painful game for the theorist within. Existence, this writing, an entertaining mind game.

But the heart, the carnelian, is where the wordless answer lies.

We talk until we are hoarse to fill up any scary emptiness. We put people on strange personal pedestals and worship them from afar. We compulsively turn license plates into acronyms. (Well. I do!) We work beyond our needs, crowd out other parts of life. We eat long past when our bodies cry: enough! We collect CDs, dolls, coins, football stats until our shelves and minds are overflowing, until we’re no longer in touch with the live pleasure they brought at the outset. Is the sixth drink as good as the first?

Obsessive thoughts. Compulsive acts. Not about joy. Though initially the thoughts and behaviors may be very sweet or worthwhile. At some point, they lose their sweetness and only serve as brief distractions from fear or pain before anxiety builds up again.

I have so been there. I still look into my own rear view mirror, to see the very real problems that have been invisible to me for so long. As we consciously address the problems, the obsessive stuff no longer serves a distracting purpose. It crumbles away.

Yesterday afternoon, as I drove in the traffic behind car after car after car, all I could see in the rear-view mirrors ahead were sunbursts of light. Light incompatible with fear.

As Rumi describes in ‘The Pickaxe’, after the digging, the breaking of the foundation, there are two veins of carnelian.
==

ah. Very funny. I just took out the trash. At the base of the dumpster, half in the dust, something glinting in the sun. I bent down. A small sphere of transparent red glass. A marble! I took it in, washed it, set it on a sunny sill, and took its picture. It wasn’t until I sat back down to post this that it came to me: carnelian!

Obsession is not about the object of the thoughts and dreams that so occupy the mind of the obsessed individual. The rock star. The next door neighbor. Sex. Baseball cards. It’s about the great invisible hurt the individual is avoiding.

To gain release from an obsession, look in your rear view mirror and see what it is you are running away from. If you approach and address what you find there, the obsession will fade.

Of course, you will not believe this because you’re convinced of the perfection of and need for the object that’s always on your mind. If you are truly obsessed, nothing I could say would convince you otherwise.

So hold close your obsessive thoughts and desires. Do you have a choice? But. There is nothing to be lost and much to be gained by examining closely what you see in that rear view mirror.