RAIN

A lullaby on my skin! And I can feel it alone... in this moment I don't need anyone - the knowledge of Something greater and all the small things are the only companions I need. I love myself; the icy drops of water hit my arms, neck, and shoulders and awaken little freckle-sized pieces of skin, one moment at a time.

R E S P E C T

HEY! Something good happened in world government, just to spice things up a bit!

They've elected - yes, elected - the first female president in Africa - Liberia's Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1341369

And the first female German Chancellor - Angela Merkel
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1335645&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

Took them long enough.

I'm not saying they'll be any better at politicking than many of the men we have in office, but how incredible that the people didn't let the leaders' sex get in the way of the elections!

GERMANY/LIBERIA, I salute you!!

And Oregon, land that I love... I wish I could be swallowed up by your rich earth and sleep in you for ages, being fed by the clear mountain streams and the deep, gnarled roots of the evergreens... it is so good to be in this place. I will miss my other home, but this, now, is fine with me. Ocean breezes, here I come!

more! more! more!!

GOD I love you guys!!!

just a little nostalgia...

beautiful, aren't they? i'm on an old picture kick - i'll post more tomorrow. we have a precious, crazy history. we were all pretty lucky.

FOR MICHELLE

"All men are like grass, and all their glory like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall" - Isaiah 40:6-7

I’ve been thinking about beauty. The curve of lips on one woman, the splash of ocean mist on a boy’s face, the hair of a loved one, some gem in a person that makes them able to express joy and sorrow in gilded words on a page, a heart that beats faster when it sees injustice, and longs to do good – everything passes away on this earth, after living for an instant in our bodies. The beauty of every human is lost when they die, or when the times change – if we added up all the goodness that has existed in this world, every good thing that come out of what people were or what they experienced… the whole universe could not contain every good moment. But these things don’t add up; once (if) they are noticed they are lost to the past, they’ll never happen again. Think of the value of that one instant when you opened your eyes and found you were laying under the soft covers of your own warm bed, and you looked at the clock, turned over, and sunk back into sleep again. That moment has disappeared.
I don’t know where I’m going with this, only to say that it’s such a shame that so many human hearts have been wasted. People with innate impulses to benefit the world have died with hardly the chance to affect a few people – people in labor camps, people who die young with a preventable disease, people who squander their time in the business of each day. Billions of us have gone wasted!! What can we do to catch this beauty, to realize it and show it to the world, where it won’t be forgotten, at least for one more generation. So many talents have been lost to the tragic way our world works. Where will the souls of all those people go?
I want to see and capture the beauty in every person I deeply love, and I want to hold onto it eternally, so that someone will triumphantly raise it high eons from now and cry “look! look! see what came into the world?? see what the world consists of?!”
But they will die, and so will I, and new beauties will be apparent in still more and still too few moments.
I wonder, if there’s a heaven – if there’s a God, if He…
He must be the most wonderful and terrible being that could possibly exist – he must be all those good things and all that torture added up, compounded and under some rationality that allowed Him to decide at the beginning of earth how to use all that horror and exquisiteness.
I think in some ways we choose how much of it we experience. Those of us who are privileged, I mean. Those of us who have money and homes and healthy bodies and political freedom. And yet I’m sitting here typing on my $2000 computer, and this is neither horrific or exquisite; it is nothing. I’m allowed to do as much nothing with my life as I choose, and also as much everything. I’ll choose nothing and little somethings most often, but I think I will always wonder about the everything I could be doing.

sexy beast

I was just outside in the cool autumn air, on my way home, when I felt the brush of the breeze on the nape of my neck, just where the hair had been blown back to expose bare skin. It felt startlingly like a human caress. And when a breeze grows into a numbing gust of wind and leaves are hurtling through the space around me, filling my ears and body with a sensation that at times makes me cry out and forget the rest of the world for a moment, I have to think an orgasm must be like that. I hope.
Maybe the original romancer was nature. It taught us how to feel, and what to feel, and we are imitating it in our actions toward one another. We do what we know feels good in the most primal part of our souls, because ever since we could first feel, we have been learning what it is to feel a good thing from the very earth we were born into. And touching one another is not only an imitation of this, it's a recognition of humanity - it's saying, yes, I am human too, I know this feels good and I want to be connected with you in this thing we cannot rationalize away, this basest and most beautiful of experiences. Sex, yes, but human touch in general, too.
Or perhaps it's not an imitation. Maybe it is what it is. Nature. The world's gestures and ours are one and the same. Our loving actions toward and with one another is the nature in us being revealed. It's an outpouring of what we are, which is - whether we like it or not - a part of this earth. Thank God each seperate soul comes with the ability to connect their version of the earth in them with others.

philosophy in tupperware

I had another epiphany today. This happens on a daily basis, but I generally forget them within two days. I think if we were able to remember them all in every moment, we would have life basically figured out by the time we hit thirty. Why were we cursed with the ability to completely space on the very insight that would carry us on gossamer wings in all wisdom through every day? Maybe so that we need people, to remind us of what we already know.

Education: derived from "educare", meaning "to draw forth (what already exists within)."

My discovery was the ability to place every day in a little tupperware container. It makes shit a lot easier to handle. Put the lid on at night and wake up with a fresh container. Sounds incredibly cheesy, does it not? But it totally works. For example, today, I am aware of the fact that I need to work on my philosophy paper. I am not doing so, but the fact that I am not bleeding my thoughts into tomorrow and already planning how I'll squeeze it in before class gives me the freedom to do it now, because today is all I need to handle. Dammit, now I feel obligated to do it. Maybe this 'one day at a time' stuff isn't so hot after all.