THIS IS IT!!!!!

FINAL BLOWOUT SALE!!!!!
DO NOT PAY FOR ETERNITY!!!!!!
IT DOESNT' GET ANY SWEETER THAN THIS, FOLKS!

GET YOUR....

PICKLED BUDDHA

plus...

MOHAMMEDIAN MARMELADE

plus...

JESUS JERKY

Act now and we'll throw in at absolutely no cost to you....

A personalized set of the DEAD SEA SCROLLS in BRINE for free!!!!!!

YYEESSSSS!!!! It's all free!

Go to your local temple now!

Shifting gears.

What if our lives were just days,
Our days just seconds,
Our seconds just nanoseconds,
Of a greater life?

Would I worry so much about the things I do or don't do each day?
Would I be harder or easier on myself for my failures?
Would I hang onto my moments of joy and accomplishment as tight?
Would winter be as long?
Summer as short?

Would the universe be as big and incomprehensible?
Would my enemies seem as evil?
Would the future be as uncertain?
Would my atoms then become whole worlds?
My world an atom?
My lifelong plans just whims?
My whims expressions of a great plan?
A great desire?
To be with you.

How would I say,
"I love you",
If my life were just a day?

Just for a moment,

put all your pain aside,

put all you cynicism and optimism in your pocket,

take all your joy and leave it under a tree,

and see.

Not a River in Egypt.

It's not like it's well-hidden.
It is, in fact, right before your eyes all the time.

What?

Close your eyes.

What?

Open your eyes, and you'll see it.

Where?

Everywhere. In fact you can't miss it, because it is the first and last thing you see when your eyes will see. Not sometimes, not with or without glasses, not with the lights on or off, not if you turn this way or that, not if you read this guide or that pamphlet.

I don't see it.

How can you not see it? It's all there is to see. With your eyes.

What does it look like?

It looks like what you are looking at right now. Close your eyes slowly, take a deep breath, hold it, let it out, take in another one and open your eyes and look around.

!?

It's yours to see.

Those evil Nouns

I understand we are at war with a noun, namely the evil "terrorism".

Why not the messy and divisive "pluralism", or the sexually-degenerate "masochism", or holier than thou "catechism", or the light-bending "prism", or the darkly absurd "nihilism", or the deadly divider "schism", or the namby-pamby "pantheism" or the backwards-looking "regionalism", or the glutonous "consumerism"?

True enough, all the -isms are rather insidious as nouns go, because just as with anti-capitalist fundamentalists with martyr-complexes - as soon as you think you've blown the last one off the face of the earth, up pops another one, and then another one, sort of like that hit-the-gopher-with-the-mallet-game I played at the fair last summer and never won.

So I propose we go after easier to eradicate nouns, start simply and work our way up. Let's start with benignly insipid "magnesium". Wouldn't be too hard to round up the stuff, corral it so to speak, and then a few smart bombs, and boom, gone, no more magnesium. Probably have no collateral damage, maybe a few chemists and scientists who hang around the stuff - but at least no howling Muslim mothers who have just lost their children, children rarely go near magnesium.

Then, once victory were to be proclaimed and we spent a few years revelling in the economic boom which always follows a good conquering, we could set our sights a little higher. Maybe go after a slightly more general noun, like, say "streetcar", true a lot more collateral damage, but think of the road space that would be cleared up for our SUVs, which would result in much reduced commuting times and therefore an upsurge in worker productivity. (As a bonus, the collateral damage would take out a lot of people who actually like to ride on streetcars and who like all the -isms and don't see how vital it is to our survival that we eventually eradicate all of them, a two-birds-with-one-stone scenario, though that need not be publicized).

After that, oh gee, I don't know, how about: "bicycle", "sea cucumber", or if we finally get the right military satellite technology up and running we could finally destroy all the "rivers" in the world.

All I'm saying is that we should start small, and work our way up, and one day we can destroy all of the -isms once and for all. Who knows with diligence and fervent nationalism and enough money we could one day, one sweet and triumphant day, go after the big one, the mother of all nouns: "NOUN".

Crazy you say? Could never defeat that one. Well, I ask you, if we were not allowed to dream in this way would we have gotten as far as we have up till now?

Mandelbrot.

If you eat a Montreal smoked meat sandwich before bed this is what happens.

You dream about being at a party trying to roll a joint which keeps falling apart in your clumsy hands and then you decide to leave and ask this old nice Jewish fella and his wife and sister if they want a ride home, they say sure, and off you go, it is really late or really early depending on your point of view, they sky is just thinking about turning from dark blue to a lighter shade anticipating sunrise, on the way the man asks you if you wouldn't stop in at the Open Window Bakery, you say sure, next thing you know you are in this beehive of bakery, women in blue smocks and hairnets are rushing about everywhere with fresh baked breads and cakes and danishes, then it begins....

You follow Saul around and he is giving a Yiddish culinary tour par excellence, "Do you know vat this is?"
"No."
"That's mandelbrot, almondbread, it's like a biscotti but ohhh, not dry at all, but it's not soft neithuh, it's somewhere in between, it's heaven, and this?"
"No."
"Look at those loaves! Schweinbrot, pigbread, not because pigs eat them, no, because they are so plump and round, look at how round they are, pick one up, they're huge, schweinbrot, ironic I know. And this?"
"That's plum cake, and those are bagels."
"And if you toast them, ohhhh, the edges go crisp and the sesame fills your nostrils and the butter melts. Of course you could always go over there and do it right with the cream cheese and lox, oh the cream cheese, so rich, so smooth, like a cloud between the salmon and the bagel, and the lox just meltsaway , literally melts away in your mouth. And here, this is cheescake like I had when I was a kid, look at that! It's not so creamy like the cheescakes nowadays, it halfway to bread, that's why it's so high, and what do want on it? Sour cherries? Strawberries? Blueberries? Raspberries? You name it, kid! How about a bag of pretzels, look at the rock salt sticking to them, yes, they're soft, get a jar of mustard to dip them in, trust me, and the mustard will come in handy when we go down aisle six - the Deli, you ain't seen nothin yet!"

And on and on, Saul guided me through this magical bakery. In my dream I ended up spending two hundred dollars in this bakery, even after having left behind half of the things I had originally picked up, as I wandered around, dizzy and warm, breathing in the smell of fresh baked breads. And I'm not even Jewish.

Mazeltov!!

Letter from Gaia to the humans.

I am asking you to think of me as a single entity, it will help you to understand this message. I am your Mother. I am your Grandmother. I am the thing from which you came. I am much bigger than you. I could wash you away with water, but I will not, because you are of me. And so instead I ask a question of you. Would you connect, would you See, that your expressions of compassion are linked to the well being of the planet. The well being of Me. It is as if a virus were attacking me, causing me fever, causing me drought. Do you not see that it is your actions that determine the course of the future. The funny thing is that the more you harm me the more you harm yourself, because you are part of me. I am asking you to push yourselves to new levels of ingenuity, not of the mind which you are good at and has served you well, but of the heart. Ingenious heart! See your world through the heart’s eye, and watch it begin to change. Imagine a world where possession of money were not a priority, where possession of compassion resulted in bounty no amount of money could buy. Imagine that life were not about living for that intermediary thing, money, but it were about living for love. “It is!” you say. Then show me. Then heal me, by healing yourselves. That’s all Gaia asks of you, “Heal me by healing yourselves.” Be compassion and you will want for nothing. It is only the fearful heart which will never be fulfilled. And know that fulfilment is not to be found ahead of you in time, nor spatially outside of you. It is with you now, and nowhere else than where you are located right now. Look around you. See me. Know that you are part of me. Do I look sick? Do you feel sick? How to ever clean up that mess? With your heart. With your heart first and then your brain may follow, but always first and foremost with your heart. I await you, as a seed awaits sun and rain.

Aug 15, 2001

Our greatest gift.

The greatest gift given to us humans by the Great Spirit, our greatest attribute, is not the ability to do good - it is rather our ability to choose to do good. We do good and bad things everyday. Sometimes we know what value our actions have, most of the time we do not because to keep track of all the millions of decisions we make everyday seems overwhelming to our consciousness. But when we realise that there is choice possible, when we feel the power to choose between our rights and wrongs - that is when we discover ourselves - that is when all the contradictions of life which express themselves through our living fall away and we are left with the truth: nothing is separate from us, everything can be seen in our expressions - only through facing, blaming, and celebrating our own self can we come to understand what seems outside of us and out of our control. Only when we understand the inside, can we understand the outside. This is faith's leap, the great leap inside, to embrace everything outside.