Switching to Friends Only. You can talk to me through using my LJ mailbox to become a friend, if you're not, already [it's at the top of of my Profile page].

This entry will become some kind of spiffy banner once LJ FAQ monitors will tell me how to do that in simple English. Doubtless all of *you* know how to do that right now, but I am a total LJ newbie [thanks to Ki.]

the master of all masters works with nothing.
the more you bring the master into your work, the more the Presence will be there.
we have talked so much.
remember what we have not said.
and keep working like the master.
laziness and disdain are not devotions.
your effort will bring a result.
as dawn lightens, blow out my candle.
dawn is in your eyes now.

do not run to your study in the morning and bury yourself in a book.
take down a musical instrument.

i keep a secret in myself
a paradise that does not exist.
is that good? is that bad? i don't know.
for years i gave away sexual love with my eyes.
now i don't.
i am not in any one place.
i do not have a name for what i give away now.
whatever the Eternal gives,
...that you can have from me.

*** *** *** ***

compiled from Rumi, 1258, and Coleman Barks translations, 2006.

peace, of course. resting in there? maybe not .....

We had gone shopping. For lots of stuff. As it turned out.

"Can you find another market like this?
Where, with your one scarf,
...you can buy hundreds of singing looms?
Where for one seed you get a whole wilderness?
For one weak last breath, you own the divine wind?
Now let your water-bead go and drop into the ocean again
...where it came from.
This offering is not repentance.
It is a deep honoring of yourself.
When the ocean comes to you as a lover,
...marry her at once, and quickly, and well.
Don't postpone it. This existence has no better gift.
No amount of searching will find this.
And, look! She has come to you.
A perfect wyvern, for no reason,
Has landed on your shoulder and become yours."
========


I modified a couple of words of this, from the Turkish, from Coleman Barks' translation of one of JAL Rumi's poems. The feeling and tone, of course, is intact. Rumi was a top academic student and tenured prof at university, as a young man: who, after living a transforming spiritual moment, completely turned his life around, quit his jobs, and went into spiritual teachings and verbal poetry for the rest of his life: he was a 13th-century Islamic who founded an order of spiritual dance which continues into this day.

Kiota wrote about wyverns, probably without knowing that one-name word but describing them perfectly, when she was 11 or 12, and posted her poem about that in her poetry pages. In her young eyes, the wyvern she knew [and thoroughly loved] at that time came to a sad end with her pen [and keyboard].

This new wyvern is immortal and so is she. In fact, this new wyvern was with us as we sat together for the last time on Friday before I flew away.... flying not atop a wyvern that I was aware of....until now. I guess mine knew the way to Boston, as well....

Rumi was talking about "fana" and he was deeply personalizing that. Discussing fana would take much too long here but you can Google it easily. If wyverns are new to you, they live in Googlespace too ;)

I met up with Rumi and his life and his poetry and fana long before I met up with Kiota.

Butbut: sometimes things are timeless. Right?

This month is Mental Health Awareness Month, and we're reminded by LJ News.
As if we needed it.

For two USD you get to give a virtual gift icon called Emerging Sun and some of the price goes to support the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, DBSA, which helps sufferers. The funds go for a very good purpose and they always need more.

So I sent one to Ki and another to myself. It gets displayed on your Profile Page for a couple of weeks. Profile pages are public.

WHAT? But won't one of us never see it?

Don't count on that.

I may have a daffy streak a mile wide but I'm not stupid.

your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart.

who looks outside, dreams.
who looks inside, awakens.

------------------

posted by one of my favorite artists [not Ki.] she quotes CG Jung.

...but when you look at yourself in the mirror, I hope you see yourself. Not one of the myths. Not a failed Man -- a person who can never succeed because success is basically defined as being male -- and not a failed Goddess, a person desperately trying to hide herself in the dummy Woman: the image of Men's desires and fears.

I hope you look away from these myths into your own eyes and see your own strength. You're going to need it. I hope you don't try to take your strength from men, or from a man. Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot. I hope you'll take and make your own soul, that you'll feel your life for yourself, pain by pain and joy by joy; that you'll FEED your life, eat, eat as you go ...

In this barbaric society, when women speak truly, they speak subversively --- they can't help it. If you're underneath, if you're kept down, you break out and you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

That's what I want: to hear you ERUPTING. You young Mount Saint Helenses who don't know the power in you, I want to hear you, whether you're writing an article or a biography or a poem or a letter, taking one photograph or many, or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations. Speak with your women's tongues. Come out and tell us what time of night it is !! Don't let us sink back into silence.

If we don't tell our truth, who will?

------------------

:Ursula K. LeGuin, 1986 Bryn Mawr Commencement Address [excerpts]

======================

This attracts me partly because "Ursula" is the feminine form of the Latin word for 'bear' and both my friends Megan and Laura are totally into bears: one as recipient, the other as painter / creator.

The graduates who sat in Ursula's audience that day are now in their mid-40's and hopefully some [or many] of them have erupted ... publicly and / or privately ...

night after night
beached mer mammal,
kin to seal and dolphin,
she lies on her belly
and cries to the sea:

oh cover me, cover me,
my element, my delight:
why do you never
kiss me under this moon?

i do not walk on knives
for an alien peacock;
my pearly tail writhes
and craves my salt love.
i carry my large creature,
i carry my load of desire:
unburden me of my sorrow?

my full breasts
press into the sand,
i heave and squirm, i am wet,
but my heart is parched.
i am ache, i am empty,
lying in this shrinking tidepool,
will you not fill me?

the wavecrests foam,
i hear her coming,
her strength, her eagerness:
o reach me quickly,
do not abandon me
on this moonbleached beach.
dissolve me, merge me to you,
irresistible myrrhine Venus,
capture me, supple and light,
so may i exult, somersault
in the undertow of your arms,
now
take me now and forever ...

.............

and i would be the moon
spoken over your beckoning flesh
breaking against reservations
beaching thought
my hands in your high tide
over
under
and inside you
foaming in the passing of hungers attended,
hungers forgotten.

darkly risen
the moon speaks my eyes
judging all your roundnesses
filled with delights ...

-----------------------

:adapted from Dinah Livingstone and Audre Lorde
(c) qv from "Ain't I a Woman: A Book of Women's Poetry from Around the World", 1993

I've just found out that Abir's dad is coming to Temple this Sunday; Ohavi Zedek is just down the street from campus. Abir's mom and one of her sisters is coming, too. Along with a former member of the Israeli Air Force.

Abir, however, won't be able to come.

Abir was 10 and coming home from school in the West Bank when she was forced to run away from an armored IDF car. A soldier inside the car fired at her head, fracturing her skull. She died two days later.

This was a year ago. What makes Sunday noteworthy is that both of the adult men, from different sides of the war, have decided that killing will not solve a single thing. So they combined to found a group called Combatants for Peace. And they are on tour together to give their message from the same platform.

Abir's dad had been a teenage terrorist member of Fatah and got thrown in jail in 1986 at 17, for seven years. The IAF officer was a founding member of a Black Hawk chopper unit in the IDF, until one day in 2003 he told his CO that he wouldn't fly any more missions because the war was illegal. End of IAF / IDF career.

What makes this war, and all wars, unfortunate, is what they do to mothers and kids. Who, by and large, are innocent civilians. No matter what flag they wave.

My own sympathies lie generally with Israel, mainly since I don't see them as terrorists and who, like Americans or French or Italians or Nigerians or any other population, I think have the right to fight back against anyone who desires to 'wipe them off the face of the Earth'. Besides, I have some Israeli friends. Both here and irl.

I think the responsibility lies with the genocide-sympathizers and suicide-bombers. To shut up, and to stop.

That would go a long way towards saving the next Abir. And the next Rachel, the next Matat and Kinneret ... all of them. We need them.

===============

Abir: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6403.shtml
http://www.combatantsforpeace.org

A few days before Christmas who should I see in front of the downtown mall but Beagley and Twistpeach. 'Twas unususal because they are about the only two LJ-ers I know irl, in fact I knew them that way first --- since we all had had Nightmares Vermont '06 together. [Photography, exec.direction, and lighting design, in that order.]

They bounced a couple of hard-rubber balls toward me and called out 'Spread the Joy'!!

Turns out they were bouncing them on the street towards everyone, one by one, almost all strangers, (1) to see if they'd catch them (2) to see what their expressions were.

So there were big people and little people running all around with smiles, trying to catch them and chasing them down and bouncing them to someone else.

Beagley and Twistpeach had gone into Old Navy and bought a bunch of them to just throw to people with that message. And I was totally totally charmed because:

(1) there was another man there with them who looked like a bigger Beagley [perhaps B's dad]

(2) my LJ friend Kiota had written a friends entry about doing the same thing in cyberspace: post a wishlist for yourself; and, if you could possibly grant some of the ones you would go and read at other LJ journals, do that ----- in order to spread the joy, to those owners, and to yourself as well.

How neat.

So I bounced along there with them merrily for a time: one girl caught one in each hand although she was loaded down with shopping bags! And, I kept one for myself. Haven't decided whom to throw it to, yet.

But the thought is very fresh although by now all the Christmas trees have been thrown out and all the dreidels put away for another year.

Spreading the joy doesn't ask to be confined to one day, one season, or one rubber ball.

When little Sierra was a Denver kidlet of 6 she dreamed of being a Little Mermaid because she had just seen the movie three times and had gone bananas over it.

Now a bigger Sierra is 25, way growed up to 5-5 and long past fighting teenage battles with her father about curfew [presumably], and she just opened Disney's new musical last night on Broadway, in the title role. It's too early to tell how long she will be swimming around there, but my post title is also the title of the Times review, which indicates that while little Ariel ascends to the beach to flop around with her Prince, $15 million USD has descended into the ocean depths of oblivion. On the other hand, also suggested: the show's motto "You can never go broke underestimating the taste of preschoolers." So the producers are hoping that a bevy of present-day six-year-olds will wrap enough of their tentacles around enough parental credit cards to keep their show afloat :: nevermind that the single-ticket price has floated up to $100 USD or more, and also nevermind that the stage sea looks like malevolent advancing plastic or that the costumes give Sierra / Ariel both legs and a mermaid tail --- quite long and seashelled and attractive, indeed --- at the same time. When the whole point of the story is that she trades her tail for legs by making a deal with the evil watery Queen so she can become a human and frolic with her human boyfriend, not only on the beach but all over Hollywood and Vine. Against her father's orders, natch.

Well I have found the movie delightful, and it plunged me into loving the new uses for clamshells and orchestral lobsters. And it was considerably less than $100 / seat. That, and I <3 red hair.

The new show might be worth my while to see Natasha Katz's lighting: she's been there 25 years [not there under the sea, but as a Broadway designer *gurgle*] and won last year's Tony Award for Utopia [script: Tom Stoppard] to go with her earlier one for Aida [music: Elton John, maybe that's why it ran for 4.5 years]. I once saw her design for "Burn This" and it totally totally sucked, so obviously she's improved. Or at least gotten bigger budgets. LOTS bigger.

But as I seem to be fresh out of $100 bills to invest, maybe I'll offer to take along a fave 6-year-old that I know. In fact, she can buy both our tix: her parents are loaded. And there's no way I will underestimate her taste, it's superb. Even though she's a blonde.

=========

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/popup?id=4120412

Neither Wal-Mart or Walmartopia is.

But that letter is in both words, with lotsa humor, which describe the musical's attitude toward top management: the second of those words is YOU and the first begins with an F :)

Walmartopia has now closed [Dec. 30] but their website is still up at http://www.walmartopia.com and you should go look at that while you can [click on the happy button on top of her left breast.] I sat in the first row last week, with [of all things] a retired NYC showbiz electrician and his wife, and I was totally mesmerized. Not just by being four feet from all the happy commotion happening on stage at eye level, but by how much the show champions women's rights and the ornery independence of Vermont and the values of antimaterialism. I could watch all the lights dance around, too.

Wal-Mart the Musical tromps all over the rights of their female employees as to salary level and promotions, and Wal-Mart the Megacorporation right now is being oh so sued in a Class-Action case in civil court. For just that. Some of the funniest lines concerned Vermont's declaring itself -- the whole state -- as a National State Historical Preservation Museum, in order to keep the store from expanding into every tuft of pasture-museum we have. That is hilarious because --- well, you have to live here........

They went right into presenting one farmer, dressed in straw hat and manure boots and looking bewildered and holding a bottle of VT maple syrup [not the commercial, sugared kind].

For those who do not know what manure boots are, they are hip boots you put on and tromp out to the pasture and stomp all over what comes out of the south end of a Vermont cow facing north.

The show was in the West Village on a tiny [for musicals] stage designed to look like endless rows of W-M shelves; even the bedroom of the mother-daughter star team was vertically propped against the racks [they could only afford one chair and one bed on their combined "salaries".] A total hoot.

We have this one hamlet, called Saint Albans, about 22 miles up the freeway from where I'm typing this, who's successfully blocked W-M from building a freeway spur and opening a new store there: another hamlet is Williston, who chose lots of tax inflow money over our quaint local mom+pop stores and allowed this gigantic W-M to be plunked down next to two Indian footpaths [since greatly expanded, following eviction.] The rest of the State saw what this did to our quaint way of life and mightily puked.

I just came from this one earlier today and the only reason I went in was to visit Dunkin Donuts and to laugh out loud at my memories of the show. It's sooooooooooo right on. They even have suited-and-attache-cased executives dancing while sitting the entire time in their wheeled executive office chairs and it is totally a scream. [That's the Musical not the Williston Megastore.]

Since I am soon to be a FORMER resident of this fair state, I'm overjoyed to pack away such memories. I figured if anyone fell off the lip of the stage they'd hit the electrician first. He's a lots bigger target than me. And if it was the Hooters dancer waitress, [which it almost was, indeed] --- his wife would push her my way lol

http://www.walmartopia.com

That's how you say her name. Maybe everybody in Israel says Iris that way.
Anyway, it's also how you say brilliant in theatrespeak.

Iris Bahr grew up in New York City and moved to Israel at age 12, stayed there until she got out of the IDF [Israeli armed forces] ...maybe after 19? ... Then she came back here and got into TV acting, film directing, got into Brown Univ in Providence and graduated with a degree in neuropsychology and religion [interesting combo, that.] She also wrote the solo hit DAI. Which in Hebrew means "enough" and in English means the same thing.

She plays a female CNN reporter [French extraction] doing random interviews in a Tel Aviv coffee shop at exactly the wrong time. She also plays each one of the persons interviewed --- and they are all blown up by a suicide bomber, each one by one, as their separate interviews proceed. Each explosion is deafening, shakes the seats, and kills everyone on the stage and in the audience; of course, there is only a single physical person on the stage. Who revives herself, changes costume into another personality, and goes on ...

Regardless of the PR photos, Iris does NOT appear naked behind the Israeli flag [although she told me her current version has had some scenes deleted, to fit into the small time slot preceding the next same-evening show which is a totally different attraction] ...

This is pretty dark material, but along the way she even gets some humor out of the characters and explores a love affair. The favorite coffee-shop personality is Svetlana, the whore from the Ukraine who remarks that she has to be careful what she says in the heat of passion, since she doesn't want to be induced to blurt out "Oh, Shmuel, you were soooo soooo good, that's a 200-shekel discount !!"

We were about 60 in the small theatre and it looked like there were only five or six Gentiles [including me]. So I was very intrigued by what the reaction to Shmuel [and the others] would be. Many stared daggers at the stage with looks that would curdle milk ... while others, including groups of middle-aged Jewish ladies, laughed themselves silly and then became miserable when appropriate. Many of us jumped at each explosion, even though we knew it was coming -- quite well done. Well-written, too: the reporter describes the front-door entrance of the lover whom we know is the suicide bomber and the reporter does not [yet] ... he goes right up to his girlfriend, hugs her, and

Iris is lovely, utterly charming, and very fluently bilingual --- and I *really* felt marginalized because when I met her post-show, I was the only one in our group who was unable to speak Hebrew with her: she told me that she'd performed both downtown in the West Village, in the round [audience on all four sides of her] and in Edinburgh, on a standard stage in front of thousands. She liked the results in each of the theatres, it was a "totally different feeling" among the staging varieties.

She also wrote a book subtitled 'my travels through Asia as a twenty-year-old pseudo-virgin'. No explosions there, I guess [not nitrate-related, anyway].

http://www.irisbahr.org

Show's been extended into March 08: it's just off Times Square on 47th :)

It's called The Blue Point and it's at 662 Ninth Ave in NYC.

Seafood and desserts and special drinks.

They have strings of tiny blue lights hung in the windows and blue and green mosaic tiles on the wall and this fabulous rotating colorwheel effect on the frosted glass behind the shelves of bar glasses. It seems like you could be swimming off Auckland.

They also have Olga. Olga is from the middle of the Russian Steppes but instead she looks like an exchange student from Edina MN. If you don't know what that refers to, think Michelle Pfeiffer in her early Australian days.

Limelime is a real person and Olga thought for a moment that it was her real name, too ... lol This limelime has a prancing longhorn steer for her LJ icon which looks exactly like she's had a few martinis over the line. A few of my girlfriends in Texas look that way all the time, too. So of course I had to go see what one tasted like. [The drink, I mean.] My friend Judy and I went there before the show. We would have taken the real limelime along too, except that she's busy hiding from 108-degree temperature on the other side of the world [Down Under], a bit far to prance to exotic New York.

So ---

Me: I'd like a limelime martini.
Olga: We have the Flirtini, the Pear and Watermelon Martinis ...
Judy: Who else would YOU buy a Flirtini for? [bats knife eyes]
Me: I really do want a limelime martini.
Judy: I'll taste one too.
Olga: What it is?
Me: Will the bartender know?
Olga: Of course. She knows them all. But just in case she asks me, can you tell me maybe?
Me: Well ... I've never had one.
Olga: Nooo?
Olga: [is dazed and confused]
Olga: What kind of vodka?
Judy: Stolychnaya.
Olga: O da, of course. [adds $2.98 Australian to the bill for each of them]
Me: Then maybe you could put in --
Olga: Some lime juice. And a spritz.
Judy: And two limes on the rim.
Olga: Two?
Me: Yeah. Limelime.

Good thing we made up the recipe. The bartender was clueless and she really *was* from Russia [no vodka confusions whatever].

So we saw and they came and they conquered. VERY tasty. 'Twasn't my idea at all. We have to thank the worldwide spread of LJ and the prancing steer.

The show afterwards turned out not nearly to be so entertaining. In fact these martinis were the second highest point of the evening.

Dessert was moist and tasty and had just the right amount of sugar.

====================

http://www.bluepointcreperie.com
http://limelimemartini.livejournal.com

i wish jen would come home
so her cat will stop being so annoying.

i thought it was so cute at first
until it started following me around all the time
wanting attention.

all it does
is meow and meow and meow.

it even follows me into the bathroom.

i swear, it's just like having a boyfriend.

=============

This blog is written by *Lauren [some time back.]
*Lauren isn't her real name.
But everything in the post IS real: cat, Jen, and ex-boyfriend lmao

We hear the word KARMA thrown around pretty loosely these days.

Karma is a law of cause and effect. Originally in Vedic times Karma referred to the ritual of sacrifice. People would sacrifice something they valued tremendously to nature at first, then to their deity or deities, in order to show thanks to the heavens and also with the hopes of receiving some goodness and prosperity back in return. For them, goodness could be anything from a fruitful harvest to plentiful rains, or even being spared from plagues.

====

:Christy Turlington, "Living Yoga" (c) 2002

====

The current pop definition is to say that our actions don't occur on a straight timeline, as the government measures our birth day forward to our death day, occurring in some year with a greater number. Instead, our life actions happen along the rim of a circle since our personal lifetime is really a circle, so that "What goes around, comes around."

Under this definition, if I commit some injury upon someone, I will be injured in turn, later on, perhaps in a place and day and by a person totally different from the original event. The same principle applies to performing some good deed or other for someone else, or for a group of friends or artists ... the spirit that drives it will return in a good deed for me.

Some corrupt this to mean that they do good deeds as an investment since they expect to get it all back in another [preferably greater] form. But for me and in this season, it reminds me of the definition of The Perfect Gift: in which both the giver and the receiver are unknown. The corollary is that in giving we will receive its satisfaction. And that takes no time at all!

Especially when love is involved.

Most of us yearn to 'belong', so we often seek companionship in order simply to feel connected. But, in truth, we are *already* connected in this web of life, so just why is it that we so often seem to need another being to complete us?

And, once we do find someone possibly to share our lives with, we tend to hurt one another simply by living out our respective life truths. Ideally, we should come to see our partner as a complement --- someone who brings out the very best qualities in ourselves, and someone for whom we can return the favor. Potential ignites potential.

True Spiritual love requires openness and trust at every stage. This level of openness will allow each partner the freedom required to develop independently, so that ultimately, together, two beings become a single whole.

I have learned that self-reliance is only an achievement if it allows you the time and space to give and experience more. Otherwise, it is an empty destination...

Also, dependence in a relationship can be quite an achievement if there is total equanimity, where an equal exchange of the Spirit is shared. Otherwise, it becomes debilitating and weakening...

--------------

:Christy Turlington, "Living Yoga" (c) 2002

Et credo in unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam:
confiteor unum baptisma in remissionem peccatorum,
et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum
et vitam venturi saeculi.

[btw that's a small letter c in the first line of course]

But you gotta hear it from a choir singing Byrd or Victoria or de Lassus.

======

You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure.

But don't worry.

You will someday.

OWL

last night at the joint of dawn,
an owl's call opened the darkness

miles away, more than a world beyond this room

and immediately I was in the woods again,
poised, seeing my eyes seen,
hearing my listening heard

under a huge tree improvised by fear

dead brush fallling then a star
straight through to God
founded and fixed the wood

then out, until it touched the town's lights,
an owl elsewhere swelled and questioned
twice, like you lean and strike
two matches in the wind.

===========

:Alice Oswald, from her book "Woods Etc." (c) 2007
http://www.jeanettewinterson.com

from :Charlotte Kasl, "Women, Sex, and Addiction" (c)1988

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

From a very early age, Lesbian women are shamed for their independence, strong-mindedness, and unwilllingness to conform to stereotypical female behavior. "My mother was always trying to get me to wear little dresses and I hated them! My sister got a lot more attention for getting a hot date than I did for excelling in basketball!" As a result, Lesbian adolescents often feel "different" and "wrong", which spills over into their sexuality. As one woman said: "I would see other girls getting upset over guys, and I just couldn't get it. It was like they were from a different tribe or something. I kept thinking 'Something must be wrong with me.' I didn't realize that they were feeling the same things I was feeling for my girlfriend Jody."

With so much in common, women in Lesbian relationships find that they also approach situations similarly. They tend to work together cooperatively --- a value taught to them as little girls --- whether on cleaning up their room or completing a major study project.

I don't want to suggest that Lesbian women, having internalized the programming of our culture, don't encounter difficulties with sex and with relationships: their relationships are not always equal. There is usually a power difference between two people, but a great potential for equality exists because both of them are women.

The most powerful form of repression is to simply pretend something doesn't exist. Dismissing girls' sexual love for each other as adolescent or immature is another attempt to discount the power of that love. If half of your emotions are buried, so is half of your potential for fully connected and fulfilled sexuality.

Imagine pretending that there is not a single Jew or Hispanic anywhere in America. According to the Statistical Abstract, the US population share of both of those groups together is 8.4%. The total of Lesbians and gay men in the same population is about the same, estimated at 10%. That represents at least twelve million women and girls. Refusing to acknowledge them is like pretending that the metro populations of New York and Chicago do not exist!

Who is so poor
that she cannot offer a smile
or a kind word?
=======
:Anne Frank (c) 1942

=======

includes dreams that smile back at you, too.