Out of the blue, The Upanishads have jumped into my life with a quick pair of peculiar and, perhaps, blog-worthy fushigi. (And provide me with an opportunity to blog one of my stories! Oh frabjous day, callooh callay!)
The 1st Upanishadsfushigi was set up with a small fushigi that began 2014.10.14 with my resuming to read Your God is Too Small by JB Philips in the morning before work. I sticky-noted what I'd read then because I felt I would refer to his argument when I wrote my review of the book. On the sticky I had written “The physical [is seen by Philips as] less beautiful [than the metaphysical that exists in our hearts and imaginations].” I read in Philips’ argument that he considers the existence of physical beauty as a pale simulacrum of a meta-beauty that is to be found where God resides. (This follows the Greek idea of an image of life that is outside life and which fallible life aspires to grow towards.)
Philips makes the argument that the existence of beauty is a suggestion supporting the existence of something beyond the limits of somatic reality, a hint of ‘God,’ so to speak.
Is it possible that beauty is a hint of the real and true and permanent…? No one, of course, can say. But the appeal of beauty which is universal, however distorted or debased it may have become, cannot be lightly dismissed. It is a pointer to something, and it certainly points to something beyond the present limitations of time and space. We can at any rate say that beauty arouses a hunger and a longing which is never satisfied (and some would say never can be satisfied) in this world (p68).
When I got to work, my intuition directed me to do something I haven’t done in perhaps a year, which was to read a particular post in a poetry group that I belong to on Goodreads, called The Boathouse. At one time I was very active in that group but, like my blogging, I have not been active of late because of a general time of busy-ness in life. I have no idea why I visited that particular post with the (to me obscure and completely unknown) title Dana Giola by Ruth. She had been to see the poet (I didn’t know that until I Wikied him) give a talk. From it she related the following observation:
Right on point was his topic, "Beauty." He defined it not as something pretty, but as something exactly right, a beautiful sunset, or a cruel hawk sweeping down on his prey.
He thinks there is not enough beauty in the contemporary US. He particularly cited the buildings. I have an idea that I might consider beautiful some buildings he would hate. But I have to agree with him about schools and public buildings which are utilitarian, but have no grace.
This lead to a typical discussion from several members of the group over the course of a week on the immemorial problem that one man’s beauty is another person’s ugly. I have no idea what drew me to join the discussion, but I did, and posted a comment only because of the fushigi of having read beauty defined an hour to two earlier.
On the morning of the twentieth I read RTO’s comments, and while driving in to work … well. Here is what I posted in that thread:
While driving into work this morning I was thinking about RTO's conflation of mind brain and ego. And I was thinking that with the body we easily distinguish between the function of a toe and an elbow, even though they are coterminous with 'body.' It would seem, logically, for things to be coterminous does not preclude distinction of function and perception of that function.
And I was also thinking, as to the specific notion of 'spirituality,' that one of the severe problems of existence is its existence. If nothing existed before something did, how did something arise from nothing? Old question of course, but given the way matter is being found nebulous and untouchable with modern physical examination, it is not facile to ascribe matter as a spiritual expression: in that it is because it is and predates logic and mind and the ability to be explained except vaguely and inconsistently. And if matter is, then the limitation of spiritual expression to 'just' a mind/body function is problematic: where does spirit in matter end and the 'fact' of the matter begin? And we enter the tail chasing dog arguments again, which makes me smile.
Anyway, I wasn't going to post these meaningless mindless (mindful?) meanders except that as I was pondering them, in a kind of fushigi, my intuitive function asked me to open a copy of The Upanishads I have at my desk. (I haven't actually read it, but keep threatening to.) But this morning I flipped it open, randomly, to Ch.10.2 of Chandpogya VI.II.
...good lad, all creatures, once they have come forth from being, do not know that they have come forth from being. Whatever they are here — a tiger, a lion, a wolf, a boar, a worm, a flying thing, a gnat, a mosquito — they become that.
This subtle part is what all this has as self. It is truth: it is the self. You are that...
Well, I found this funny. Well, the whole enchilada, which in all likelyhood doesn't really exist except as that which creates gas! LOL! Have a good day. My work function calls.
The 2nd Upanishadsfushigi began 2014.10.26 in the morning with my getting notice that one of my short stories on the UK reading/writing site ReadWave, “The Unwritten Room,” has officially become popular in the USA with it having reached the milestone of 50 US reads.
When I finished my busy Sunday, I came upstairs a bit tired, and thinking I’d like to blog my Upanishads’fushigi, and so picked up the book. But I wondered if I might something else amusing and perhaps enlightening in it. And so I flipped it open and stopped on Book III. I was surprised and delighted to see that not only did what I flip to correspond to the beauty discussion, but it connected it to ‘The Unwritten Room’ and to JB Bishop too! Here is the opening to my story:
My Janelle. To think
I once dipped strands of her hair
in India ink!
M.
It, the BIG it, has been called by physicists string theory. I have frequently wondered at that. Why not call it strand theory?
This is what I read in The Upanishads:
… the five subtle elements are called by the name ‘element’, and the five gross elements are called by the name ‘element’. ‘Their coming together is called ‘the body’. So the one who is said to be ‘the self in the body’ is said to be ‘the elemental self’. This self is to that one as a drop of water to the blue lotus on which it rests. The elemental self is overcome by the strands of nature. Because it is overcome, it falls into utter delusion. Because of this utter delusion, it has not seen him resting in the self — the lord, the blessed one, the causer of action. Delighting in the mass of strands and grown dirty, unsteadiest, fickle, utterly bewildered, full of yearning, distracted, it falls into conceitedness. ‘I am this: this is mine”: thinking like this, it binds itself with itself like a bird with a net. Overcome by the fruits that follow on from action, he wanders around (356, my emphasis).
To repeat myself: I find these funny. And, in their own way, very beautiful.
2014.10.28 Fushigi Addendum
The fushigi extended itself the day after I blogged this when I went into The WSS / Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company to see about entering this week’s Poetry Stuffage contest, the theme of which turned out to be 'A Winding Road'. And I was delighted and surprised to see this little fushigi continue with the title of M’s entry of the week: Unwritten Things. (It is a beautifully written villanelle!)
And so it seems to go, the winding road of fushigi appears to be an endless one.
P.S.: I did write a poem, too. Here it is:
The Road Not There
The rock, that rock looked familiar to me.
Had I seen it before, really? When? When!?
I stopped walking,
affirming with words directed to it in waves of air,
‘I do not know you you are a stranger to me!”
I looked at it and felt a tickle of dread, fear,
burble up up from a depth of darkness I didn’t want to know I knew.
I had seen it before, of that I am sure.
This winding road to nowhere is not endless.
My thoughts begin to tumble with the unstoppable possibility
that I had been on this road before and before that too.
I notice this rock’s familiarity. Noticed it today.
And that makes today special in some unperceivable way
because all the other days I’ve passed this way before have been forgotten
even as this winding road has been whiling me down its easy slope and pretty views.
The certainty of truth I had has become sand.
The feeling of earth’s rock hard knock hard lessons are fled.
When the spinning in my head stopped
And the clock spring on my watch stopped winding itself down
I turned and saw that the road I was on wasn’t there anymore.
The nowhere I was at awed me
Because there was nowhere left for me to go.
I was asked to write something for my yoga instructor's newsletter. This is what I wrote for the Nataraja Wellness Centre.
“I’ve lost it!” I told Steve. It was Monday morning, first day back to work after a weekend gone too quickly. “It would seem I have gone totally hippy!” And I started laughing with him.
“How so?”
“I have discovered the joy of yoga in a park, with the sun shining down onto us through tall trees, with grass beneath our mats, and the sound of birds chirping and flitting in the leaves. It was so much better than I thought it could be.” I shook my head. “Yup, I’ve gone totally hippy.”
Yes. A few weeks ago the gift of hippy-hood was given to me as another lesson in life from life. Or, to be more accurate, a reaffirmation of the old lesson that out of all things, even the so-called ‘bad’ things, opportunity and discovery and joy can arise and be embraced. The bad thing was the closing of Babeeta’s Wellness centre on 6th Street at the beginning of September. In response to that ostensibly distressing event a few of us took advantage of the closing of our cherished yoga centre and the nice weather to brave the outdoors. Pure heaven! It was far FAR more delightful and invigorating than I had thought possible. And so, out of the blue I enjoyed yoga under the blue. And outdoor yoga has become, after the fact, a bucket list item I have managed to complete. Thank you.
And I can’t stop smiling, even as I write this. Yup. Maybe the hippies weren’t all dippy after the all, for it would seem I have become one, as I lay on my mat with my friends and fellow yogis, with the sound of birds all around us, under the sun tickling our faces and warming our bodies. Ahhhhhh. And to close the event before we dispersed into our days, hot tea, fresh fruit and bread, and conversation.
I am reminded of a poem. A favourite of mine that has remained a favourite for more than 20 years. Oddly enough, it is set in winter! But here it is:
Waxwings
Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings
chat on a February berry bush
in sun, and I am one.
Such merriment and such sobriety —
the small wild fruit on the tall stalk —
was this not always my true style?
Above an elegance of snow, beneath
a silk-blue sky a brotherhood of four
birds. Can you mistake us?
To sun, to feast, and to converse
and all together — for this I have abandoned
all my other lives.
Francis, Robert. "Waxwings", cited in News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness, ed by Robert Bly. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980, p. 139.
Word fushigi: As I was beginning to prepare this blog, I interrupted myself to send to a new friend the list of e.mail closing quotations I’ve collected over the years. My sending them came about after I related to her how a director of mine asked me to stop using them. Given that I had been attaching them to my work e.mails in a random manner, which was indeed unprofessional, I understood his request. However, he added that he thought that they were fine, except that most everyone wouldn’t understand them, and that if I wanted, I could send them to him instead because he would appreciate them.
Anyway, I felt I wanted to clean up the formatting of them. And I was enjoying reading some of them again. As I was doing that, Laurie Brown of CBCR2’s ‘The Signal’ once again added a fushigi: “The problem with words,” she said, “is that they try to explain away the mystery [of life.]” She then elaborated that music did the opposite. She then played Cosmogony by Bjork.
The fushigi was that, just before Laurie began speaking about the problem with words, I had just finished reading the following quotation:
Men know how to read printed books; they do not know how to read the unprinted ones. They can play on a stringed harp, but not on a stringless one. Applying themselves to the superficial instead of the profound, how should they understand music or poetry?
From the Saikontan, by Kojisei (circa 1600) cited in Haiku by Robert Blyth, circa 1947 Tokyo, p. 73.
So I looked for my other ‘word’ quotations:
If words were satisfactory, we could speak the whole day and it would all be about the Way; but if words are unsatisfactory, we can speak the whole day and it will all be about things. The Way is the delimitation of things. Neither words nor silence are satisfactory for conveying it. Without words and without silence, our deliberations reach their utmost limits.
Chuang-Tse. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1994. Tr. by Victor Mair, p. 266.
And, the finally noteworthy word on the word/music fushigi is a quotation I’d forgotten:
...in developing the language, enriching the meanings of words, ... [the poet] is making possible a much wider range of emotion and perception for other men, because he gives them the speech in which more can be expressed.
2014.10.04 Word fushigi Addendum
This morning, when I checked my e.mail, I saw that I’d received notice that a dormant thread in Goodreads had come alive again over night. when is poetry not poetry is the thread’s title. I’d first commented in it July 08, 2014 and, up to yesterday, the last comment was September 13th. This adds to the fushigi because one of the issues the thread is philosophically bantering about is the gap in creativity between reason, words, and that which exists before/outside of them. Yesterday’s comment, from Greg, is a simple one: “God has no reason to exist.” This makes me laugh. And of course, post a comment.
Where to begin? At the beginning of course! But what if the beginning is outside the proper sequence of time? Hmmmm. So I will begin with the poem I wrote while I had a friend in mind. I submitted that poem to Amy King’s October Poetry Contest in Goodreads. It managed to receive an honourable mention.
We carried secrets
That like stars their gravity
Have moved and bound us.
Their weight guides our paths
With such soft unseen fingers
That we are like breath.
The breath that finds skin
And caresses it even
As the stars watch us.
SMALL MILESTONE in a minor key in this Song of Life
My pair of blogs passed 60,000 page views today! :-) LOL! Sometimes it is the small things that bring to our faces a smile. And as a friend likes celebrate these things, Snoopy Dance!
Nice fushigi.
At the end of August my yoga instructor closed her studio. And, on my last day there, she calmly extended to me two yoga mats. “Give these to M.” And I took them, her statement seemed to not allow me to refuse even though I didn’t know M’s address, phone number or last name. I stuffed them in my car, and waited, confident that I would see her.
Friday last I went to see my chiropractor. He is in the process of correcting my posture and ease some discomfort in my neck. He was preparing for a day long seminar the following day, and after he gently helped me, said ‘Wait up. I’ll come with you. I need to get a cable for my projector for tomorrow.” He was going to the store downstairs, and so I waited for him.
In the lobby of the small mall, I grabbed my smart phone to call my wife before braving the pissing rain. As I’m talking I see M, who is carrying three boxes and some bags. It was obvious M was getting ready to walk home, so when I waived M to stop. And thus I came to relay to her her mats, and have the pleasure of driving her to her house instead of getting drenched. Such a small event, but oh so delightful.
The world is filled with magic. But often it is lost to the roar of life’s busy-ness. And sometimes, perhaps often, the smallest of magical moments are tips of much more, the more that is too big for us to see behind the buzz of our tea-pot tempests.
There was a delightful magic in my life tonight, an odd fushigi in the guise of poem-like things in the form of 5-7-5 syllables. Not proper Haiku, but an oftentimes delightful perversion of the form that can be found in the creative WSS / Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company Haiku-Game thread.
I was FB-talking with Al. She was sharing her poems with me, when I got the urge to continue the Haiku game thread from #7823.
To continue the game I followed with imagery from the previous 5-7-5. I wrote:
In water she floats
With a humming bird's grace
And wet cigarettes.
“May I see what you wrote?” she asked when I came back to our conversation. Her reaction to my words was a single one: “Weird.”
Al disappeared for a moment, and returned with something she had written earlier today, on paper in her journal. As she describes it in her blog, Pens and Erasers, she didn’t like what she had written and crossed it out. However, after reading what I wrote she transcribed it. Here’s what Al had written:
A cigarette floats
In rivers of tears and
She flies away
So. Fushigi or not? Very very odd, at the very least. So much so she decided to blog it, and asked for my short description or definition of a fushigi. Here is what I wrote:
I call such connections fushigis. In and of themselves they may mean nothing to everyone in the world, but they mean something to the person experiencing them. They are unique meaningful acausal connections.
Singly they can be dismissed as chance by the pedantic. But when collected, their meaningfulness becomes astounding.
C.G Jung called such things ‘synchronicities’. Not too many years ago I was burdened in my thoughts that Jung referred to ‘important’ issues when he applied that word. Which is why I adopted the word fushigi. But I have read more of his words since then, and now I think he would see this little haiku-like life-experience as a synchronicity.
There are changes in my life. And so I find myself struggling between writing a blog about my having completed 108 rounds of yoga’s Surya Namaskar. And here is a good visual introduction:
Four months ago that would have been impossible for me to do. Such is how quickly the mind and body can change when mind and body and intention are working together. For her immeasurable help in making manifest such a change, I extend my heartfelt thank you to Babeeta Chabbra http://www.natarajawellnesscentre.com/ and her practice of Ravi Shankar’s Sri Sri Yoga.
(Although I confess to beginning to feel a bit of stiffness in my arms and shoulders as I write this.) The yogathoner beside me extended final relaxation:
Another accomplishment, of sorts, was reached this week while I wasn’t looking. My stories and poems published in the European reader/writer web page, Readwave, have been read 5000 times. A few weeks before that I learned that one of my stories, ‘Whose Déjà Vu,’ has been read by over 1000 readers!
And I have chosen to take a leave of absence from Facebook. Does that count as an accomplishment or as foolishness? I did get praise from one of my FB friends for this bold step. On FB. One of the side benefits of de-FBing my Self is finding more time to blog.
I am not sure it is entirely warranted, as better would have been to unfriend my few friends and delete my account. But since I expect to be back on, I have held off extirpating my Self from it. We’ll see.
Tonight I am torn between writing this blog and writing a real pen-to-paper letter to a friend. I love writing both. And I am missing my friend, as I have so much to share, and my BFF has become for a time out of touch.
Would food blogging be worthwhile? I have, in the last year, become the family cook. This has included my watching cooking shows on TV — haven't gone to YouTube yet, though! And it seems that food blogging is popular. (What was that movie with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams about Julia Child? Julia and Me, I think. Nope: Julie and Julia.) I have been taking some pictures, which I have occasionally posted on FB. But I don’t like the natural lighting in my kitchen, and haven’t set it up with the required lighting to compensate. We’ll see. I might, but I'm not enough of a foodie yet. [Odd fushigi — As I’m writing this Laurie Brown on CBC R2’s the Signal said ‘Let’s talk about food.’ And proceeded to talk about the history of jello. It goes back to the 1600s.] A friend has been encouraging me to write a cook book, the thought of which I find premature. Or it would be a very short one. But I have begun keeping track, with pen and paper, of my variations on recipes. We’ll see. Yes, we’ll see an example of my having taken a picture of the tarragon I crushed to prepare it for becoming vinegar.
This effort, tonight, seems to be less a blog than a blot in the blogosphere. A disjointed mess. Perhaps that is in part because I got about four hours sleep last night before an early alarm clock woke me to a day filled with yoga and people and busy-ness.
And with that I will finish. My eyes are starting to not see straight. And I do want to put pen to paper before I crash for the night.
Hello. I feel I need to apologize to my blog and muses for my long absence. I have missed you friends, but seem to keep allowing my busy-ness to keep me from wordiness. But I have made time to post a few empty words on the experience I have of the nothing of yoga. And so, I have let my fingers go.
When the teacher is ready the student appears cannot be less true than the frequently cited opposite. And so I, a student of the most elementary beginnings of yoga, have come to find in yoga a teacher. And I hope that the teacher has likewise found a student.
And as it happened yoga found me. Found me in the guise of Babeeta in the Nataraja Wellness Centre she happened to open on the half of a city block that I walk every Saturday morning. Odd because if the Nataraja Wellness Centre had opened up anywhere else the odds of us finding each other would have been negligible.
I have wanted to sign up for a proper yoga class for thirty plus years. And always other priorities superseded that want. On hindsight I recognize that at that time I did not value my Self enough to honour it with anything so selfish as attending to the needs of my well being. But something has changed inside me. And so when I heard with great clarity the modestly appointed Nataraja Wellness Centre calling me each and every Saturday, my struggle to ignore the call became increasingly difficult. I ignored its call for many weeks — I am nothing if I am not slow to respond to opportunity. Eventually I walked in to talk, to feel out this place that had been pulling on me so powerfully. The short conversation with Babeeta felt good and the price was right. The past fear I would have had for making such a bold and ostensibly selfish act no longer existed and this time I honoured my Self enough not to be dissuaded from taking the class. My budget would be adjusted to make room for yoga.
“Smile gently and feel joy.” OMG! In my first class ever of yoga I was being directed to smile gently and feel joy! And the student teacher relationship was for me sealed because the change in me that had brought me into this class was that of moving from anger and fear into peace and joy. In fact it was only in the week before this class that I first articulated that what I had begun to feel was joy. I had told Mark that until a few months ago I had never experienced genuine joy, and that it had taken me a while to become consciously aware that that is what I was feeling. And for my yoga instructor to articulate my experience of joy so soon after I had first expressed it was nothing short of miraculous.
You are not aware of the physical changes I have been undergoing in the last two years, of course. I’ve had more than one person ask me, with hesitancy, whether or not I am sick. I have smiled, and said ‘No, I am more alive now than I ever have been and will die, as I was born to do, when I do.’ Others have simply commented on how good and healthy I look. And I have been forced to buy three changes of clothes as my excess weight fell away without effort. Yet these changes are no more than a tiny reflection of what has been changing inside of me.
And that has lead me to an odd question. Who comes first: the student or the teacher? And then I chuckle about the age old chicken or egg question. I laugh because I have been a both a teacher and a chicken all my life, and what it was that egged me out of that and into being a student of yoga was a letting go of fear.
Without that shift inside — be it a shift in attitude or, perhaps, towards a ‘deep’ understanding of Life’s transience — all change will be superficial and transient. I’ll see if what I am experiencing will be lasting or not. I find myself laughing at my own pompous arrogance. 'Deep understanding'? Pshaw! Bullshit! I am aware that self-delusion is very hard to see, and that my perception of any truth is at best tentative. And that is especially the case as it applies to truths of one’s self. So for now I will continue to do yoga with Babeeta and accept it as a path to my awareness of nothingness.
I perceive that something has changed inside of me and I have been wrestling with how to verbalize it. When people have asked me about what they no longer see in me, I have answered ‘A small change of attitude, a small change in diet, and a small change in exercise.’ To others I have appended that with ‘But the change in attitude was the most important thing, and while it may have been small it was very big.’
But what has been the attitudinal change? That I’ve wrestled with too. And the closest word that I can find to describe it is acceptance. The acceptance of what? That my life is both completely insignificant and totally meaningful at the same time.
‘I am nothing, I want nothing, I do nothing.’ I laughed when Babeeta cited these words of her Guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. So true. And yet, I am enough to be aware that I am nothing! And that is not nothing. And so I have become intimately aware of Lao-Tzu’s observation that the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao. ‘The nothing that I am that can be named is not the true nothing.’
‘What is yoga to you?’ And each of us in her class provided a different answer. Exercise, to increase flexibility, get in shape, heal old injuries, etc. The answer that came to my mind instantly was that yoga is to integrate the spiritual in the physical. And this class represents that path with me. Babeeta’s Nataraja teaching of Sri Sri Yoga is the way I am incorporating more fully — i.e. deeply into my physical being — the shift in me from a fear-based life to one of openness and joy. There are people around me who have helped immeasurably in different ways. But in the end the change was mine to make. And took more than thirty years of effort to see without seeing it a small shift in attitude.
Very quickly in Babeeta’s class my body increased its flexibility far more than thirty years of self taught yoga had been able to do. And I know in my being, without a rational explanation, that where my body is stiff is where I’ve stored fear. As I find the inflexible and sore bits in my muscles, I feel the fear they have embodied, accept them and then release the fear. It is remarkable, inexplicable. And it is wonderful.
And while relaxing stiff muscles by letting go of fear may be an epitome of the immeasurable, there are measurable changes in my well being since beginning Sri Sri Yoga too. The most remarkable measurable change has been the reduction in the severity of my deviated septum. Since beginning yoga a few months ago, the obstruction in my right nasal passage is tangibly reduced. What surgery had made worse, yoga as spiritual embodiment has improved almost instantly.
The other remarkable measure of physical change has been my ability to sit in the half lotus position for extended periods. After years of self effort the best I was able to do was maybe ten minutes. Now I can sit for four times that. And there are other changes too numerous and too subtle to list.
I reread this and confess to wondering what it is I have written. It began with the request from Babeeta for me to verbalize some of the changes I was experiencing. And through that to bring energy to her centre and to promote an upcoming charitable yogathon for 'Care for Children'. If you are at a turning point, and a small voice is calling out from inside you to begin a transformation physical spiritual and social, please join Babeeta at The Nataraja Wellness Centre. If you want to have a great time testing your physical stamina while helping others on this planet, join us at the Rise for A Cause Yogathon Aug 16 at the Jack Poole Plaza.
I wrote a poem last week! And as I am struggling to make time to do that which I love to do, which is blog, I am using that as an excuse to do an actual blog. I have re-resolved to keep my blog posts simple, right now. So, what could be simpler than posting a poem. One that I actually wrote.
And, even better, a poem that generated with its genesis a small death fushigi.
It was prompted by the WSS's 188th Weekly Poetry Stuffage thread writing promptAn Old Bridge:
A Death Bed Rev1
I am alive in my death bed.
An odd place to be, I confess to having thought.
I sip fluids, not just water,
through a straw stuck in a spill-proof cup,
that is held by hands that are not my own,
that never seem to touch me, even accidentally,
masked as they are beneath medicine's need for rubberized sterility.
I move my eyes to see the source of kindness,
even if paid for and indifferent,
but I am unable to see who has come,
who quietly helps keep me alive.
Death watches me.
Sexless and hard, death stands weightless at my feet,
without expression or expectation. **
I didn't think Death would be this,
a visceral two-footed ghost
standing between the me I am
and the me
I am afraid
I will no longer
be.
I don't know why, but I thought Death would be a woman.
Odd.
And odd that Death would be more and less than her touch,
not la petite mort as I might have imagined in my bad poetry days.
My salad daze.
But then women were never what I thought they would be.
My sexual haze.
Ignorance. Billy boy claimed that vanity is all.
I thought I used to agree with him, but he was wrong!
So wrong. I know now that
ignorance trumps that wanton's mirror,
and vanity is merely its plaything.
I sip the fluids with which I am anonymously infused,
the liquid bridge between a diminishing old age
and the potential of nothingness laying in weightlessness.
I am alive in my death bed.
Rubber hands handle me
and all the while Death stands without waiting.
** Fushigi alert: As I was writing this stanza, in a random play on my iTunes, the Mumford and Sons' song Timshel came into my ears. The lyrics caught my ear:
...
And death is at your doorstep
And it will steal your innocence
But it will not steal your substance
...
And it is done.
2014.08.30 Addendum
It took only nine months, but A Death Bed has been read 50+ times on Readwave. Yes, a whole fifty-plus times, which brought a smile to my face.
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Confusing economic language often limits our ability to understand the many challenges that confront society at all levels, from federal to municipal governance, to big versus small business practices, and national versus international trade agreements. Furthermore, the media frequently presents an economic language that appears simple, but which has effected social changes that, with hind sight, have often achieved at best ambivalent or questionable results. ‘Economics Demystified’ is an introduction to economic language and critical thinking skills that can help the concerned individual pierce the veil of economic jargon and strengthen broad economic discernment, argument and action.
Banks Skanks
A few years ago the American Empire was in peril of total economic collapse because their banks had successfully defrauded the citizenry and then took their taxes to avoid their and the country's bankruptcy. That is what their spokespeople and media propagandized. And yet, the mighty empires of Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, India, did not have banks, as we understand the term. History belies what the media propagandized about them being too big to fail. But then, what are banks? What is a 'central bank', what does it do? Is the world bank really a bank? And, as it turns out, the far more important question is, 'What is debt?' [I suggest that Economics Debunked be taken before or concurrently with Banks Skanks.]
Details of the next course offering TBA. If you would like to be notified of when the next session is being presented, please send an e.mail with the subject 'Economics Debunked' to: gduperreault@gmail.com
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