24.2.09

















The passengers were soaked by the time we had all queued up the stairs into the narrow cabin.

Plane guy hollered, “Everyone! Throw your luggage in a front seat, then move to the back of the plane to sit down."

That was the same flight that after finding a spot near a window I looked out over the wing and noticed a pink sticky note flapping on the top do not walk area. I didn’t want to know why.

The weather was in turmoil. I kept trying to forget that Noah's rainbow only promised no flood, not no destruction.

It’s strange how the many-thoughts-at-once thingy becomes noticeable when we are in emanate worry. I was concerned as to why there were two seats on the left row and only single seats on the right, that the pilot looked under age, that it could be so drafty in such a small airplane, and what about that swarm of something in front of the propellers?

A flashlight lit white sheet will render a rush of motley stupefied bugs as they fly onto the fabric. Bugs in headlights. Kind of like hunters paralyzing deer with the spot light from their truck. What does this have to do with philosophy? I don’t know.

One of those days where every word sounds like a quote if it were just written down. What does this have to do with who's talking? I don’t know that either. I had a teacher in high school whose standard annoying quip had been, “I don’t know, find out and let me know.”

Quan Yin told me in a dream, and not very patiently,
“Time has past, you should know these things.”

21.2.09





I’m tutoring in a second grade class. Math. Those of you know me well can pick yourselves up off the floor. The students are practicing addition and subtraction of 2 digit numbers.

For the visual types, e.g. 57+87=S


A girl in the class quoted me, from when I was her age,
“I don't understand where the numbers come from!” All caps.
The frustration in her face told me what she was thinking...
She surmised that math had the incarcerated feeling of a straight jacket. There were 9 digits plus 0 to work with. Only one barbaric correct way. One piss-correct sum for any given problem.
We call them problems, don’t we?
Well, she may not have thought these things, exactly.
I may have been reading into her furrowed brow.

I was going to tell her, “Don’t worry you’ll probably excel in the literary arts. With the English language you have 26 letters combined in legions of ways. There’s even room to create new words. Plus lots of punctuation. You will meander through, history, mystery,  fiction, auto and biographies, historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, nonfiction, fables, fairy tales, myths, reference..... but the bell rang and she had to git.


Deep work without being complicated.
Sometimes I continue to read something I can’t understand on to the end, hoping that by the time I’ve pushed through to the finish a grand flash will blind me into understanding in a total holistic way.
Reading on and on without recess to ‘get it’ is like listening to a lecture without a teacher pausing for the students to digest information.

And so, I am existing in this life lecture without pause. One a page ahead of comprehension confidently hoping it will kick in.

20.2.09

















"There is sometimes a greater judgment shown in deviating from the rules of art, than in adhering to them; and ... there is more beauty in the works of a great genius who is ignorant of all the rules of art, than in the works of a little genius, who not only knows but scrupulously observes them." 
        Joseph Addison - in The Spectator in 1714.

Peering into random journals, it occurs that it doesn't matter in what order a life is written down in a book. Linear prospects make no sense once you begin to see cycles and loops and back lashes. When meeting someone it’s not on the terms of ‘tell me everything that has ever happened to you since your birth, you can’t skip phases and you can’t go back to fill in.’ Getting to know someone IS much like filling in. A first impression may lay down the bare bones of a tentative sketch. Some areas remain empty for quite some time, and then, in a flash those blank spaces become rich with layers of kindred experiences in explicit detail.

“Cartoons don’t grow older, they just change their clothes.” ANHH