remorse

How long do you think it will take a rat to decompose after it's been buried?

I've been thinking I might dig it up after an appropriate amount of time and retrieve its little skull. Clean it up and polish it and put it someplace with one of my little collections.

Does that seem weird?

There is an artist that works with skulls, Jessica Joslin, and I love her work. Maybe I could send her the little rat skull to make something for me.

sculpture by Jessica Joslin

edited

solstice

Nature is awesome. I just saw a picture of a parasitic nematode, the kind that can be transmitted by mosquito, that can, given no resistance, suck the life right out of you.

It's quite beautiful, don't you think? I do.

Makes you wonder about how something that can kill you can be so beautiful to look upon.

But if you think about it, the roundworm is also an expression of the godhead, whatever you conceive that to be. To me it is simply the source from which all this reality that we perceive emanates. It seems obvious that there was as much love expressed through this nematode as through us.

I have no way to describe what that source is besides life, energy, magnetism, love. A totally unknown source, of which you are but one expression but all of creation an expression of the same thing, floats in an unknown realm and...dreams.

I imagine the tendril of dream becoming thought and the thought becoming crystallized and the crystallization becoming manifest with the atomic breath and the link that cannot be broken because it is us. All of us. All of it.

Whatever ritual you pursue or recognition of a greater whole, whatever play you hold dear created to counter the long nights or if you have no pageant at all, the root of all is the end of the long night and the welcoming of the light. It is a story that has been told and retold over and over and written down for as long as humans have been able to write.

The long night is over and even though we know winter is still to come, we also know it will end.

It is a holiday for those with a religion and those without. It is a human holiday.

We celebrate the coming of the light!

earth day

I've been busy this week and haven't been very active in blogland. It seems the only thing on my mind lately is work or the gardens and I imagine everyone is tired of hearing about both. Or maybe I'm tired of writing about both. Since I quit watching TV, more or less, I have even less exposure to the outside world and to other things that might set me off on a blog post. And I've followed so may blogs now that I just can't get to every one every day, write my own and still get any kind of work done.

I was going to do an Earth Day post since this planet is near and dear to my heart, but here it is, Earth Day, and I have written nothing. So I thought I would just re-post my little rant from last year only I couldn't figure out how to do it without removing it from it's original spot in the line up. So here is a link to it:

earth day

Instead of a new post about saving the only home we've got and our disposable mentality, I have a challenge for you, a plastic awareness challenge. You can do this one or two ways (or both).

Make a list of every plastic thing you touch in just one day, any day. You can pick the day.

This is my list so far today and all I've done is get dressed and sit here with my coffee:

1. the frames of my reading glasses
2. my pill caddy
3. the filtered water container
4. my computer/keyboard/mouse
5. the handle of the coffee maker carafe
6. the laminate that covers my cabinet doors and drawing table
7. the floor tiles in kitchen and bath

This is the other challenge. Save all the plastic you would throw away for one week and then make a list of that. Don't include the plastic that you recycle (assuming, of course, that you do recycle), only the things that would go in the landfill.

I'm going to do both and will publish my results next Friday.

And remember...refuse, reuse, recycle!

another one down

and another one bites the dust...

My mother-in-law called last Thursday to let us know that Rosane was dying. Her health had been deteriorating for several years. She was in the hospital for a bleeding ulcer that was not responding to treatment and with her family at her side she decided to have them stop the transfusions and let nature take it's course. She was 84.

Friday we got the call that Rosane had passed.

My husband comes from an enormous family with lots of siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins out the wazoo and they all like each other. Rosane was my mother-in-law's first cousin. When I married into this family it was a little overwhelming, the more so because I come from a very small family. Life cycle events were/are celebrated by inviting everybody and everybody comes. It was not unusual to find myself abandoned in the midst while Marc hung out outside with the rest of the smokers BS-ing with the cousins. I learned to make my way and place and eventually, the names and the intricacies of relatedness. I still have trouble calling up some of the names of the younger generation but I know which cousin they belong to.

So at these gatherings that usually involve food and music along with whatever ritual is being observed I would seek out certain individuals of the previous generation, the current reigning elders, make sure I greeted them, provide whatever service. One of those was the flamboyant Aunt Florence. She left us 2 years ago. Some of them are Aunt Anna and Uncle Sid and I will be sad when they are done here. And one of them was Rosane. Rosane is, in the relatedness of it all, a first cousin once removed. Her son, David who is of our generation, is a second cousin. I would always go visit with Rosane and then take David away with me, David having remained single.

I would spirit David away with me to dance. I like to dance. I like the music, I like the beat, I like moving to it. Marc doesn't dance, doesn't really like it, doesn't really get it and though he will go out on the dance floor with me it's hard to drag him out there when he is outside. So unless David had a date we would hang out together. David isn't the only reason I would go sit with Rosane though. She was always warm and welcoming to me and interested in what I was up to.

Back when David's dad started to fail, he quit his job at an architectural firm to work freelance and moved home to help his mom care for him. Charles died 5 years ago and David stayed with his mom. And has cared for her as she began to fail.

For jews, usually, the funeral is set for the next day but maybe since Saturday is the sabbath, it was not scheduled til today, Sunday.

Many of the family had gathered for Rosane including some from Dallas. The casket was already in the pit when we arrived. The graveside service was short and to the point. People spoke, the prayers were said, the eulogy given, the dirt thrown.

The dirt thrown. This is probably my favorite part, aside from the being short part, of jewish funerals and I always take part. It just seems right to me.

At the end, after all is said, it is considered a mitzvah a good thing to help spread the blanket of dirt, putting the dear one to bed for the last time. Family and friends each take the shovel and throw a spade or two of dirt on the casket in the hole. I liked Rosane a lot but I didn't expect to get teary at her funeral. This part, though, is always the most poignant to me and I shed a few tears for her passing.

After all those who wanted to participate had, the two workers took over and proceeded to fill the hole. They were done before half the crowd had left. So now Rosane has passed and David is a caring soul with no charge.

Later, at the wake, I asked him.

“So David, what are you going to do now?”

He kind of shook his head, “I don't know” he replied, “everybody's asking me that.”

earth day

future trash

I am continually appalled at the ignorance, the selfishness of the human population. Well, not ignorance maybe but certainly our refusal to look at, to recognize, to react against our disposable culture, our refusal to care. Our landfills are overflowing, our air is polluted, our rivers and lakes are filled with trash, our wildlife is being strangled and poisoned, there is a continent sized pile of garbage floating in the pacific ocean, our forests are shrinking, 20,000 trees are flushed down the toilet world wide every single day and still more and more disposable products are being brought to market.

more future trash

When I was a kid, plastic had yet to make it on the scene. Stuff came in paper cartons, glass jars and bottles or cans. Glass milk and soda bottles were returnable. You paid a 1¢ or 2¢ deposit and got it back when you returned the bottle. Now, it's disposable everything. Use it once, throw it away...plastic bottles have replaced glass, paper towels have replaced kitchen towels, disposable diapers have replaced cloth ones. We have throw away plates, cups and forks; throw away mops, throw away wipes. Something breaks, don't fix it, just throw it away.

guess what this is?

Do we really need all this disposable stuff? Does it really make our lives easier? I mean how hard is it to grab a towel and mop up a spill? How hard is it to rinse out your mop and put it away? How hard is it to return bottles to the store? How hard is it to wash your own dishes in this day of dishwashers? And don't get me started on disposable diapers. Really, think how much money can be saved by just doing a load of laundry. We have curbside recycling now and the majority of people in my neighborhood don't do it. How hard is it to rinse out that container and throw it in the bin instead of the trash? How hard is it to get a water filter and stop buying individual bottles of water?

Yep, you guessed it, trash.

And the packaging. Snack size bites individually wrapped put in a box and wrapped with plastic. I came across a web site recently devoted to eliminating plastic from our lives. Beth Terry gives tips for replacing it with other reusable things. She also challenges everyone to collect all the plastic they are responsible for for a week whether you recycle or not. Even people who recycle still throw away an extraordinary amount of plastic every week. Her website, Fake Plastic Fish, is worth a visit. It's an eye opening experience. Certainly it's impossible not to use some plastic and she's not about making you feel guilty, just aware. And with awareness, hopefully comes reduction.

And people, if you don't recycle when it's so easy these days then why the hell not? I have always tried to live consciously because early in my life I developed a love for this planet. I have been recycling for 20 years and let me tell you, I had to go out of my way to do it. I had a compost pile. I started shopping at a grocery store because they had containers where you could bring aluminum cans and glass. They paid you for the aluminum but not the glass. I took it anyway. I would take accumulated paper to the paper company. I think they even paid for it, pennies. When schools started having paper drives, I would take it there. I have taken a motley assortment of canvas bags to the grocery store since before plastic bags were introduced, enduring the rolling eyeballs and smirks. I have refused bags for one or two items I can just as easily carry in my hands to my car. I'm not telling you this because I think I'm a saint, I'm not. But if I can do it, could do it all these years, then everyone else could too. It's not that hard.

All it takes is caring about more than your own self and moment.

Love your Mother.

Live consciously.

Refuse, reuse, recycle.

and in the end...

   

photo by Kathleen Kimball-Baker 

I wish I could say that my journey took me to exotic places but it did not.  I didn’t go on retreat to India nor to Tibet.  I didn’t go to Macchu Picchu or climb the holy mountains.  I didn’t even go to Native American pow wows.  I was married to my first husband then and I had to work since he would not.  So, although my body did not travel, my mind soared.  I read.

I read about the Findhorn Garden and the amazing communication that went on there.  I read The Secret Life Of Plants by Peter Tompkins which served to confirm my experience that trees and plants were sentient beings.  The empty slate of my belief system began to fill with love and respect for the earth and all the forms of life on it.  I became committed to an organic lifestyle, to nurture and protect instead of use and abuse.  I stopped killing things.  Creatures who found themselves trapped in the house were caught and released.  When I began to garden in later years, I was mindful, letting the plant go through it’s entire cycle.  I read up on herbal medicene and, much later, alternate forms of healing.  

A fan of science fiction, I had read Microscopic God and More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon, Nightfall by Issac Asimov, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.  I had started reading Greek Mythology when I was in the 3rd grade and continued with myths and legends of many cultures.  I checked The Golden Bough out of the library repeatedly.  I read about Hinduism, Buddhism and Zen, Taoism and Native American beliefs.  I embraced karma and many years later, reincarnation.  I read Life After Life by Raymond Moody.  

When I became pregnant at 26 I became even more interested in religion.  Having seen many kids get sucked into cults when I was in college, I wanted a foundation for my own whether they stayed with it or not.  Since I had married a Jewish man, I went to conversion classes to educate myself and was surprised to find that most of what I heard, I had already come to.  I liked that it was was a religion that focused on life, not death as Christianity did, that you lived a good life because it was the right thing to do, not for the reward of heaven or fear of the punishment of hell if you did not, neither concept being a part of Jewish theology.  I raised my children as Jews and went to Torah study.  It was a good home for me while I continued my journey.

I became very interested in the origins of religion, the religions of ancient cultures and the evolution of religion.  I read Sarah The Priestess by Savina Teubal, When God Was A Woman and Ancient Mirrors Of Womanhood by Merlin Stone among others.  I railed against the Patriarchy, embraced the Matriarchy, learned how inheritance rights shaped religion.  I read in the Kaballah.  I pissed off the old men in Torah Study.  Eventually I grew away from Judaism as well.

I read about the millions murdered and burned who would not convert, the millions killed and burned in the name of holy war.  I learned that religion was a man made institution whose purpose it was to control men and most especially women.  I learned that when conqueror’s came the first thing they did was demonize the local dieties, destroy the holy places and usurp the holy days for their own ends.  I learned that the dead and risen god was ancient long before christianity came on the scene.

I read Carl Jung and finally found equality.  I read Joseph Campbell.  I read The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light by William Thompson, I read about the power of the sub-conscious mind and New Age mysticism.  I read about Theosophy and The Consciousness Of The Atom.  I read Jane Roberts’ amazing channeling of the spirit Seth.  I read about how we create physical reality, not only our own but the nature of physical reality as well, that there is no Evil in the world, only things we do not fully understand or comprehend, that some thing that is good for one person, can be devastating for another.  I learned that thought is energy and energy becomes manifest.  That what you put out there is what you get in return.

The specific books mentioned are, of course, just some of the very many.  Through 30 years of reading and perusing, questioning and pondering, my understanding evolved, my belief system emerged.

So what DO I believe?  This was my comment on Bonnie’s post :

Here's the thing. God is the sum total. God is the good AND the bad. As compassionate beings we should try to relieve suffering when we come across it. But God cannot 'do' anything about evil or suffering since it is part of the sum total. The All That Is. And the all that is is the full range of existence. God is existence, from the smallest mite to the grandeur of the cosmos and everything in between. It is the black as well as the white.

There is so much more, of course, to what I perceive to be the nature of god/dess and the universe from grand concepts to the smallest details but it would take many more pages.  We are the Dream.  We, and by we I mean every mote of physical existence, are the Avatars by which the Source is manifest.  It is to this Source that we return when we are done on the physical plane.

...the love you take is equal to the love you make.

seeing god

I was 18 the first time I saw god. (And I’m not talking about losing my virginity either, that came a little later.)  It was the morning after my prom and I had come down from my first acid trip via Purple Ozley.  I was on the beach with my date.  We had driven to the coast after all the parties and fallen asleep in the car.  Back then you could drive on the beach and it was deserted.  I woke up just after dawn and saw the most amazing thing.  Everything around me glowed with an inner light...the water, the sand, the driftwood, the morning glories, firewheels and sea oats that anchored the dunes, the sky.  This was the connecting light or energy that infused the universe.  I calculated the hours since ingestion and decided that plenty of time had elapsed for me to be returned to normal.  I wondered if this was my new normal, not quite what I was before.  If so it was OK with me.

By the time I was 18, I had rejected the Episcopal church.  It took a few more years before I rejected christianity altogether.

I was 20 the second time I saw god.  I was living in Chicago, ostensibly going to the Art Institute but in reality cutting most of my classes.  One of the things I did during that time was hitchhike to Washington DC for one of the big anti-war demonstrations.  During this experience, I, we (my companions and I) met someone (several someones actually) who had a spiritual advisor from India (not unusual at the time) and one of only three of this person’s teachers happened to live in the greater Chicago area.  How we met these people and the incredible experience it was is the subject for a different post.  Suffice to say it was enough for us to look up this teacher upon our return to Chicago.  We arranged to meet this man and four or five of us took the train to his home.  As he talked to us this incredibly bright white light emanated from him until it filled the room and the only thing I could see was this man and the light surrounding him.  This was not a drug induced vision.  I could, if I looked away, see the room but as long as I looked at this small man from India, it was all I could see.  Now, I do not believe, and didn’t then, that this man was god.  Rather he was the vehicle that god shone through.  Over the next year, this man introduced us to meditation and yoga.  Never again, after that first evening, did I see his aura but I have never forgotten it.

By the time I had reached my early 20s, I knew that I no longer considered myself a christian.  What I was, I had no idea.  But thanks to the 13th Floor Elevators, I knew that the kingdom of heaven was within me.

The third time I saw god, I was 22.  This time I was definitely on drugs, the finest organic psylicibin in a capsule I had ever had.  We had planned to get to the Atlantic coast to spend the day but it came on so fast we were lucky to make it to this beautiful lake surrounded with a forest of evergreens.  It was August in New Hampshire.  It started with a double rainbow and was a most amazing day.  Everything glowed and vibrated and peace and love was in the air. 

Thus began my spiritual journey.