Getting dinner at Donna's before Zeldas. Three college girls at the next table, talking non-stop about who's drunk, who's a slut, dresses, who's a natural blond...do my conversations ever sound so inane? Well, probably so. But that's my inanity...

Had about a dozen people over last night for the second annual Emperor Norton celebration, a nice little party. Think I'm going to try to spread to meme of making September 17 a holiday.

writing exercise: poem from details of experience

1) write about a pivotal experience, with as much concrete as possible:

The silence of a snowy day as I lie on my back, looking at the clouds. I've just made a snow angel and the chill of the ground seeps into my back. My friends, on the ground nearby, are silent; maybe some vague road noise from Greenbelt road in the background, but the breeze in the tall dried grass stalks and the scrub trees is louder here in the middle of this empty field. The LSD vibrates my body like almost too many cups of coffee, my bodymind rings like a bell. The sky is bright cerulean with white frosting, a party cake, when the dragon forms from the clouds and smiles on me, a bright hexagonal rainbow tunnel connecting us, a blessing.

2) collect the images and make a poem

This week's Zelda's Inferno exercise, drawn from Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones:

I remember my grandmother, sitting at her kitchen table, watching TV, smoking Pall Mall cigarette, her bright pink lipstick smeared on the filters , the lipstick such a contrast with her pale skin, Lupus kept her out of the light

I remember playing wallball in the alley with my brother, bouncing a sponge rubber ball off the retaining wall at the bottom of the yard across the way, stopping when a car came down the alley

Here's an idea: in "energy work", we sometimes talk about how the energy (qi, whatever) flows through but does not come from the practitioner. The practitioner acts as a focus, a lens, a mirror even perhaps, but not a source.

Now, what if we apply this idea to love? What I do not give love, but merely act as a lens, a mirror, redirecting the love I receive?

Then to love, I must let love in, fully accept it, believe myself worthy of it; for if I block the incident love, there is no refracted or focused or reflected love going out.

Now I'm on the way back from Boston, where I just attended the AOBTA conference. Always a good time, just some of the best people, plus great leaning opportunities.

Just before I left I got a message from Robin on my answering machine. She had been mugged! She wasn't hurt, but her computer was stolen, her cell phone too. It was after midnight when I checked the machine, so I didn't call back until I was up here, and it took me a few days to be able to reach her. But it looks like they've caught the thieves (they used her cell phone to make a call - not the brightest crooks), so it seems to be resolving as well as it possibly could.

Friday I took a great class in "Tai Chi Easy", a well-constructed simple set of qi gong exercises from the 108 move Tai Chi form. Just what I needed to get my stuck energy moving. There was a class on marketing your practice, that I got a few good ideas from, and a neat class on doing research that talked about a statistical method that I think could be a good alternative to the double-blind clinical study (hard to do in bodywork, or psychotherapy, or surgery...).

From Newsweek/MSNBC.com:

In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation." But beyond the irony lies China's true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region's Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country.

Tangential but highly interesting, the article notes that a Gallup poll found that 20 percent of U.S. adults believe in reincarnation, and surveys by a Christian research group have found one in four Christians - including 10 percent of "born-agains" - hold with it.

I'm not sure how one resolves reincarnation with Christianity. But then, I'm not quite sure how one resolves reincarnation with the teachings of the Buddha.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: from what was intended to be a guided group meditation. I went off in a different direction though, since "out of body" meditation is 180 degrees away from the work I'm doing: instead, started with here-and-now:

three pillar candles burn in the center of the table
flames dance in the breeze of the here-and-now
breeze
from the ceiling fans
from the A/C unit in the window
from the breath of the people around the table
from the small echos of far distant hurricanes
the breeze that permeates the world

trance words are spoken but I watch the flames
they dance both together and apart
the same breeze moves them
but
they each dance differently
and each blows its own small breeze to the others
and to the people who sit around the table

does anyone see? does anyone feel that breeze?
once against I am befuddled by things sensible people take for granted

last night I kissed an old girlfriend

last night I kissed an old girlfriend, and that got me wondering about things that might have been

for me, for her

thirteen years gone by now

in some parallel universe where the symmetry of love broke differently

I
could be a husband
a father

can you believe it?

She
maybe didn't meet and marry that abusive asshole she started dating after me

years of pain that didn't happen

sometimes I wonder about the karmic backsplash of that one

last night I kissed an old girlfriend
wondered all these things
said goodnight, got into my car, and drove off

Zelda's Inferno exercise for August 19: we made a group "Universe Deck", then I laid out word cards in a Tarot-card style.

universe deck tarot

vortex - significator
clit - cover
nerve ending - cross
spiral - below
stroke - above
moon current - behind
climb - before
incline - self
jiggle - house
windshield - hopes and fears
iceberg - outcome

the sweet vortex of sex pulls my thoughts
until I can't get anything done

Something I posted on Slashdot
today, following on to a discussion about asking Presidential candidates about whether
they accept the reality of evolution.

Notice you didn't see a thread here encouraging people to ask Democrats [about taxes and Al Qaeda]

Well, this being a site whose demographic is more united in a concern with science than on an agreement about tax policy or foreign policy, no, you didn't.

I'm not a Democrat or running for President. (Yet...I've hit the age requirement, and looking at the current field of candidates, might just write myself in 2008.) But I'd love to hear such questions put to candidates.

Here's how I'd answer: well, sir, if you want to lower taxes, you have to lower spending. Now, given that Americans pay lower taxes than most nations of comparable economic development, I don't find the issue tops on my priority list; especially when we're talking about increasing taxes on the unearned income of the wealthy, whose share of the tax burden has fallen.

But as it happens, a tremendous amount of money is being wasted on American "defense" spending, especially in the Iraq occupation. (Not to mention American and Iraqi lives.) U.S. military spending makes up close to half of the world total, with the next tier of nations (the UK, France, Japan and China) with around 5% each. We could almost halve our military budget and still be outspending any other nation five to one! But talk about such spending cuts - which would enable significant tax cuts - and neoconservatives go apeshit. It's as if they view the military as America's penis and fear it shrinking. (I fear they've confused their rifles and their "guns".)

Meanwhile, they love to make a big fuss about cutting spending on welfare and social programs, which make up a very small amount of federal spending and wouldn't save the average American more than a few dollars a year.

Convergence of some things that have been on my mind regarding poetry, spirituality, and the Transcendentalists:

Lecture to reading poets:

Ok, I want to talk to the poets for a minute.
The rest of you, feel free to go outside and smoke, get a cup of coffee,
whatever.

Ok, poets? Come on up here. We gotta talk.

Look, guys, I've been reading some Emerson and Whitman lately. You heard these guys talk about poetry?

Ralph Waldo talks about how the birth of a poet is the principal event in history,