Gaia Community: jikishin's Blog

Rememberance IX

http://jikishin.gaia.com — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:05:08 GMT

In the first conversation my parents ever had they confessed their love of Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man.

I like that I might owe my presence here to a young couple being enthralled with their awareness that each rise of complexity in the great arc of evolution has brought forth a rise in consciousness.

No one of their generation took the work of Teilhard further to heart and deeper into the analysis of cultural history than Thomas Berry, who died this morning at 94, "full of days".

Fr. Berry, a Passionist priest, alive to the Life which held his living, spent his days attuning his love to the Love which holds us all. Critical of religion's complicities in our long devaluation of nature, he admonished us that our reverence will either be total, affecting our every function, active and passive, or we risk depotentiating even the chance of human reverence.

At a bio-regional conference, I heard him say that, "Wonder World is making Waste World", one of the succinct distillations of his broad studies. The "wonder" of that Wonder World, a world of novel convenience for the short-lived few, was seen to be a by-product of the suppression of our capacity for true wonder, of the ability to be infused with awe at the grandeur and glory of Creation, and to be ready students of our context.

For Fr. Berry the so-called growth of "growth" addicted economies was known to be a cosmic immaturity, the greeds of a rude guest oblivious to stewardship, and ignorant of the host. Ignorant of how the guest is also the host.

That very obliviousness was witnessed as seeding eddies of oblivion in the greater flowing fields of immaculate immensity and precious particularity.

Meanwhile, he arose, prayed, celebrated Mass, taught, wrote and spoke giving voice to what makes us possible, and imploring us to make all this no less probable from here on.

Tags: Thomas Berry, ecotheology, cosmic responsibility

Rememberance IIX

http://jikishin.gaia.com — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 05:27:30 GMT

On this the 40th anniversary of the passing of Thomas Merton, and the second anniversary of my first online post , I'd like to bring part of that first post here.

"Seeing this post/call for quoats of Thomas Merton gave meback a memory of the first time I cried in a zendo. That warm morning, as a fan was turned on to cool the room,( reminded of how he went ) I sobbed with thankfulness for being reminded of him there, for an invocation of his influence.

Turning to what he called "Antipoem I" I recalled his friend, Jacques Maritain, writing something about the power of a poem, or artwork, being in the prophetic relation to the destiny of the poet, or artist."

Antipoem I

O the gentle fool
He fell in love
With the electric light
Do you not know, fool,
That love is dynamite?

Keep to what is yours
Do not interfere
With the established law
See the dizzy victims of romance
Unhappy moths!
Please observe
This ill-wondered troth.

All the authorities
In silence anywhere
Swear you only love your mind
If you marry a hot wire.

Obstinate fool
What future we face
If one and all
Follow your theology
You owe the human race
An abject apology.

                                                -Thomas Merton ( '67 )

                                                             * * *

Today, another poem of his. One from a year earlier.

            The Night of Destiny

In my ending is my meaning
Says the season.

No clock:
Only the heart's blood
Only the word.

O lamp
Weak friend
In the knowing night!

O tongue of flame
Under the heart
Speak softly:
For love is black
Says the season.

Red and sable letters
On the solemn page
Fill the small circle of seeing.

Long dark -
And the weak life
Of oil.

Who holds the homeless light secure
In the deep heart's room?

Midnight!
Kissed with flame!

See! See!
My love is darkness!

Only in the Void
Are all ways one:

Only in the night
Are all the lost
Found.

In my ending is my meaning.

                                                  - Thomas Merton

The phrase, The Night of Destiny, may have been a reference to the end of the fasting of Ramadan, a celebration of the penning of the Koran. Merton's official biographer, John Howard Griffin, saw "something of the Spirit of Christmas" in the poem, "...a feast when the heavens open and the 'Word' is heard on earth."

Come New Years Eve, this year, I hope to be with Fr. Richard Rohr, who was living in Merton's hermitage back in 1985, about the time I "first cried in a zendo".

Tags: Thomas Merton, endings/beginings

Rememberance VII

http://jikishin.gaia.com — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 01:52:54 GMT

Nomali's mention, in her GAIA blog, of car lights watched from a balcony brought on a memory of a turning point in my spiritual practice.

I'd like to remember someone who must remain anonymous here.

It was a Hosan, a day ‘off' in a Zen monastic schedule. Hitch hiking from a monastery to a mosque just after sundown, I was given a lift by a man in crisis.

After I said something about Zen practice being a way of working with the problem of life and death he took a sharp breath in, held it, then released it in a sigh, an opening up. He struggled with a question, begining to say something in halting pauses, shifted in his seat, loosened his tie, looked at me...

He'd been drinking. We were speeding down the highway. He asked, "What would you say if I told you I was going to buy a gun tonight, kill my girlfriend, wait until cops come and kill myself ? " (His despondency, it came out, had been triggered by being dumped by a girlfriend who's family rejected him due to his racial appearance.) Gauging whether his statement was b.s. or if it revealed a scenario with any traction in the stream of his deciding... Over the next hour I took him figuratively into the next day, alluding to impacts, the headlines, the story, the rippling of effects...

Raising my voice like I'd known and loved him forever, laying into him with a fierce yet playful inquiry: who-are-you-really, why-are-you-alive... Again and again falling silent into vigilant attentiveness to his presence and process, riding core into circumstance, calibrating the tack taken with him to the movements in his re-orientation, leaving him in his own power at every step, not imposing outcomes, holding space into which he might arrive at his own dignity and grok his inseparability from the whole catastrophe... sharing my perspective...

Relaying this episode to my Roshi, Daido affirmed, "That's the transmission of the Buddha Dharma!". Telling my Sheikh about that sequence of events, they were attributed to being a vessel of Hu . That ride made a good case for all that sitting still in the quiet of the dawn, all that entrainment in a 700 year old lineage born at a crossroads of civilizations. Careening down an interstate with drunken homicidal suicidal despair at the wheel are also exquisite ornaments arising in awareness.

As we approached a huge suspension bridge with the long sweep of car lights rising into the night, a metaphor presented. I asked if he recalled Jacob's Ladder from the Old Testament, the image of angels ascending and descending. In the sight before us all the lights on the this side were red, on the other, all bright white.

"Look at these demons! climbing out of hell. Look at those angels coming this way! It may look like your life sucks... but look again. In every case there's no demons or angels, only a person at the wheel!"

Cresting the peak of the span and coasting to pause at the toll, his energy stirred, overflowed, and leveled off. Relaxed with a voice of relief he said, "I'm gonna call my brother. He'll put me up tonight."

The way I was able to be with him had been modeled for me repeatedly by spiritual teachers. That's something I wrote of in a recent comment on Nomali's blog. "...the quality of teachers who are able to help save our lives from the treacherous spots of the Left Hand excursions. The dangers on the Left are equally perilous, the views, just as stunning."

Without the gifts of the spiritual traditions, the long proven methods of praxis, and systems of evolutionary learning, where we would be at this point we will never know. The contributions to universal quality of life made via the influence of wisdom teachings may be untracable, but I wouldn't be surprised if we owe most of what we value dearly to the anonymous gestures of applied spirituality.

Tags: applied spirituality, modeling behaviors, accessing states

Rememberance VI

http://jikishin.gaia.com — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 05:43:15 GMT

To begin this entry where the previous left off...

I'd like to remember Eileen Egan on this, not a date of death or birth, but an anniversary of a survival.

It was on this day in 1945 that a plane crashed into the Empire State Building. Eileen, out of that 79th floor office at the time, lost all ten of her colleagues in the U.S Bishop's War Relief Service. The war was about to end and that effort of healing from war that became the Catholic Relief Services fell to it's new nucleus, one spirited little lady.

                                      ( Eileen Egan, Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa
                                          from the book A Revolution of the Heart )

During her friendship of over fourty years with Mother Teresa, Eileen, as a journalist, played a main role in introducing Europe and the Americas to the works of the Missionaries of Charity.

Eileen's friendship with the center woman in the photo (above), Dorothy Day, began in the late 1930s, while Dorothy encouraged her to persue journalism.

I recall sitting in the room that that photo was taken in, with Frank Donovan and Fr.Joylita moments before Fr.Joylita took the subway uptown to present the papers necessary for Cardinal O'Connor to formally introduce-the-cause of Dorothy's cannonization. ( At the point of this blog writing, Dorothy's 'standing' in the sainthood process is Servant of God, whereas Mother Teresa's cause has progressed to the determination: Blessed. )

I had the privilege, the pleasure really, of working with Eileen on a cover for her final book, Peace Be With You (a critique of just war theory and an advocation of gospel non-violence). There she was well into her eighties, sharp with enthusiasm and centered in the momentum of a life of acting on an ever-refining vision.

Late one Fall morning in 2000 I walked into St Vincent Hospital on the westside of Manhattan just as Eileen was dying a few floors away. Her personal assistant, and Dorothy's grand daughter Kate, were already there. Our impromptu vigil, informal and so very far from casual, remains for me an inexplicable inspiration.



Although Ms. Egan, who had made a career of facilitating support for the well-being of war refugees, who had been present to so many dying, shared her own death with only a few, her living, to this day, touches countless lives bettered by her exceedingly modest, extremely persistant path.

Tags: Eileen Egan

Rememberance V

http://jikishin.gaia.com — Sat, 03 May 2008 07:06:24 GMT

In these last few moments of this years Holocaust Rememberance Day I see that the final surviving member of the 'July20' attempt on Hitler's life has died today. Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager.

I'd like to remember another contributor to that "plot", someone who, as a youth, attended the Union Theological Seminary in upper Manhattan, who would then share in the worship services of the (Afro-American) Abyssinian Baptist Church, where the spirit of social conscience he was exposed to in the sermons would influence his later stance before the National Socialists.

I'd like to remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer's experience in Harlem, and his long freindship with Karl Barth seems to have balanced and blended liberal and conservative theologies, a balance which saw through and over-rode the simplistic or reductionist defaults of his time.

How is it that a pastor who wrote, "We are to serve our enemy in all things without hypocracy and with utter sincerity. No sacrifice which a lover would make for his beloved is too great for us to make for our enemy. If out of love for our brother we are willing to sacrifice goods, honour, and life, we must be prepared to do the same for our enemy." could have willingly taken part in assassination?

He continues, "We are not to imagine that this is to condone his evil; such a love proceeds from strength rather than weakness, from truth rather than fear... " .

The injunctions to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, pray for those who persecute us... are offen taught as contrasted with the easy, common affections and care that anyone might feel toward their own kind. I believe that Bonhoeffer countered the Nazi mentality, the nationalist-'socialist', developmentally Amber consensus with those injunctions of The Sermon On The Mount.

His father's pioneering in psychiatry, his time abroad, his singing spirituals in a charismatic congregation, must have contributed to planting him firmly in a world-centric broadly embracing mode of conduct and moral disposition.

Shortly before war's end Bonhoeffer was hung in the Flossenburg concentration camp. A few months before his death he wrote of his desire to go to India to visit Gandhi. I tend to see those two men as having already collaborated: kindred beyond kind, satyagraha and 'the power of truthfulness' lighting the way they lead.

Tags: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Art: Late Winter '88 and beyond

http://jikishin.gaia.com — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:26:18 GMT

Reflecting on Michael Garfield's interview with Ken Wilber (parts 1,2, and 3) I want to post an entry on visual art as I've practiced it so far. My medium, charcoal.

gorbeye 300

detail at ~300% actual size

The first, and to date most recent, artist statement that I'd drafted was this from 2001:

There was a time when I found people, in general, so absolutely beautiful that I could scarcely rest my gaze on a face without ascent into some subtle ecstasy. Learning that elation required radical grounding, turning to portraiture offered shade from these suns on the horizons of shoulders. It wasn't enough, to be astonished at the resplendent topography of the human countenance. I had to reciprocate. I had to give this miracle back.

Perception dictated technique. I came to disbelieve in lines, seeing instead, fields of variance and texture-scapes of gradation resulting in contrast. This shift of scale revealed the equal relativity of surfaces called smooth and flat. This was the recognition that the sky begins here. Papers are mountainous, cavernous terrains. These strata, receptive to the weathers of breath and touch, are fertile ground for celebrating us as the crest in this wave of carbon-based life. The medium, that same element shared with every organic form that supports us.

Exposing the conventional fictions, of line and two-dimensionality, allowed me to treat charcoal on paper as sculpture of slight recess and relief. Through intensive resolving of tonal quality, I watch each piece for the appearance of parallax at stillness, a single-frame cinema.

Today, I see my Charcoal Portraits as invoking three distinct primordial experiences. The way moonlight lends a reduction of hue to the eye. The way we are designed to comprehend the face, then expression, as the most meaningful locus within our visual field. And, especially, the way representation links memory and imagination.

One of the few pieces I have good record of is the 1988 portrait of Mikhail Gorbachev, shown here with the cover letter that accompanied the portrait when sent to him.

charcoal

The letter reads: Dear Mr. Secretary,

In gratitude for your creative leadership I send this one, small gift: a charcoal portrait entrusted to Fr. Luis M. Dolan of the Center for Soviet-American Dialogue...

As an artist, a student of religion, and a person with friends of many nationalities, may I express my intentions in the following hopes.

To share a singular craft in the commitment to a universal work of art: Peace.

That the fact of your receiving this token of acknowledged inspiration testify to our inter-dependence, and celebrate our essential relatedness.

That this portrait demonstrate (however metaphorically) the will to perceive humanity as we are, and to portray ourselves with even a generous accuracy.

That ever truer perception occur on every level, in every direction.

So that future generations actualize potentials made possible through the steps we presently take for their sake.

Let us offer this gesture together to those coming heirs of the accomplishments born of our crisis/opportunity.

Respectfully Yours, ...

It was my habit, whenever possible, to be reading the books by the person I was drawing while the work was underway. Also, to be listening to the musics of their countries or regions of origin, and to have some societal involvement that I could associated with the person/subject happening during that month or so it would typically take to complete one piece. For the Gorbachev portrait the involvement was volunteering for the Soviet-American Citizen's Summit. For one of H.H. the Dalai Lama, the completion coincided with the first seven of the nine days of the World Parliament of Religions (Chicago, '93, where we were both in attendance). For one of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, I drew the entire portrait in the middle of a Native American reservation.

To the extent that all quadrant factors could be aligned in accord with my immersion in the subject I've tried to accomplish that, as well as a kind of watching those factors fall into place, or be presented as option as the work unfolds in 'concentric' contexts.

Aware that I'm just skimming the surface with this first entry on my visual art I'll let it stand as such for now.

To be cont. ...

Tags: art, portraiture, perception

Ultimate Art: 2/11/1983

http://jikishin.gaia.com — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 05:11:41 GMT

I've been enjoying recollecting the idealism and positive orientation of my youth.

Having recently 'sent home', across country, for the notes and journals of my teens I want to share a page written 25 years ago this week.

Ultimate Art

February 11, 1983                                    Ultimate Art

1. manifests the (a) direct impression / expression.

2. comes from and is for the present.

3. is really alive.

4. is Holistic.

5. is Universally lawful.

6. is Naturally appropriate.

7. is indenpendent of limitation.

8. is dependent on Blessing.

9. is beneficial to local and global conditions.

10. exists only in service of Humanity [arrow] Divinity.

11. is an ever immediate challenge belonging to practical reality.

12. always involves utilizing comprehensive responsibility.

13. happens in significance.

14. effects life when and as necessary.

15. helps expand and extend the capacities and capabilities of its experiential participants.

16. is not necessarily placed in or on a vehical to facilitate its (solely) material passage through time other than its experiential acquirement and retainment by intelligence.

17. is presupposed by Empirical Engineering though unforeshown by such instrumentation, calculation and structural methodologies, thus characterized by Synergenic Revelation, the individual and collective sensing/perception of Glory.

18. in immediate retrospect exemplifies the Mystery of Birth/Growth.

19. augments, teaches, sanctions and fosters LOVE. (unity, wholeness-holiness)

The reverse of that page reads:

As if true Philosophy were Joseph, and true Religion, Mary, and Science and Technology the dream warning and burro in flight from Bethlehem, Ultimate Art can be likened to the arrival of Jesus Christ.

"As experience is directly related to religion, so observation is correlated to philosophy"
                                     - Hall - The Culture of the Mind, pg. 23

Was that Edward T. Hall, or Manly P. Hall ?

                                                                               ....................

I find it humbling to notice how powerfully formative that phase was for me, and how, in revisiting earlier writing, I recall the authentic audacity of setting a course and embarking.

It might have been Wordsworth (who I haven't read since then) who said, "The child is father to the man".

Tags: ultimate art, youth

Rememberance IV:

http://jikishin.gaia.com — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:04:24 GMT

On this the 60th anniversary of the assasination of M.K.Gandhi

I'd like to recall Dick Gregory, a serious student of Gandhi's methods and champion in his own right of our continuing collective leap to post-colonial worldspace.

In an Integral Health thread I briefly recount the time I worked for him.

As a black who ran for the U.S. Presidency twice (through the write-in ballot, 1968, and '76) I think of him (as I do Barbara Marx Hubbard in relation to Hillary Clinton's candidacy) as a cultural forerunner to the candidacy of Sen.Obama. By one analysis, if Dick had not run in '76, Carter would not have won. Rather than remember him as only political I want to express my appreciation for his modeling important aspects of Integral Life Practice.

Through hunger strikes he was able to wield his celebrity for the systemic sake of raising public awareness. Working with all quadrants, the practice of fasting was always accompanied with prayer. He taught this. A balancing of being politically active with spiritual practice; and of tending to the vessel, the body, in ways that reflect one's own degree of freedom from the myriad, subtler colonialisms still woven tightly into our increasingly post-colonial era. For instance, the rare form of cancer that he was diagnosed with in 2001 he is now free of, and which he treated with a thoroughly holistic regimen.

One lesson I Iearned from Dick is that revealing and examining our relativistic ruts and comforts is a valid instigation of Second Tier perspecting. I found him to be a reliable master at "highlighting our fixation to the green meme", which, as KW wrote in A Theory of Everything (English, page 29), "By highlighting our fixation to the green meme, I believe that we can begin more readilly to transcend and include its wonderful accomplishments in an ever more generous embrace."

After a screening of the movie, Gandhi, at the Whole Life Expo (Plaza Hotel, Manhattan, '83), Dick spoke to the packed house of holistic health practicioners and enthusiasts ( a sea of green? ). The crowd was aglow with the triumphal, romanticised depiction of their hero. Dick said, "That ain't nothin' but a vicious movie", and went on to point out a few consecutive scenes. In one, the Indian populace is affirmed in their capacity to accomplish their liberation on their own, in the very next, an altruistic white woman appears as a necessary catalyst for the movement. Implicit meanings of such a reading (of that scripting and editing) may not have been conscious, even for Attenborough, its producer, but the nuances of colonialism and its transposed perpetuations were recognized by Dick. And he still does that these days.

Dick is good at deconstructing the "golden shadow" of Green, prompting the members of his audiences to start with their own empowerment, thereby actualizing the Gandhian slogan, "Be the change you wish to see...".

He does have his far out side, and I don't agree with many of the statements he makes. But as someone who has long used their own position in society to reflect that society back to itself, I consider Dick Gregory an exemplar of the full richness possible for a single human life.

Tags: Gandhi, Dick Gregory, colonialism

Rememberance III

http://jikishin.gaia.com — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:44:00 GMT

On this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

I'd like to remember the man himself as related through the eyes of my friend and one time business partner, Jim Coleman. In between tours of duty, a Marine in Vietnam, Jim had and took the opportunity to serve as a body guard for Dr. King. Jim once told me, with a tear in his eye, that he felt "that if everyone in the world could have shook Dr. King's hand this world would be a very different place." Jim would recall King's humor, that he often took pleasure in simple practical jokes, like rigging a matchbox with a single match and a rubber band, so that when someone asked for a light, opening that trick box, they'd startle with the split second of propeller action achieved by coiling the one stick into the closed cover. I hear that one never grew old for him, though it only ever 'worked' on those newest to the entourage.

MLK etch-drawing

Thirty years after King's death, Fr. Dan Berrigan, myself and a dozen others were arrested outside the U.N. Headquarters for an act of non-violent civil disobedience, protesting the sanctions on Iraq, specifically, the embargo on medical supplies.

Two years later I entered the Gandhi-King Award ceremony at U.N Headquarters to find that my name was removed from the guest list. Knowing enough of those present it was no problem proceeding to the event, but it did seem somewhat ironic that my action two years prior could have resulted in being kept from that Award ceremony.

It's hard for me to know for sure just how far we've come. Having known black teens in Harlem, (NYC) in the 1990s, who did not know who Martin Luther King was, it's not at all clear to me that the progress we assume and depict is actual.

My hope for us today is that we see Martin down off the podium and back on the pavement with us. That we continue to glean inspiration from his example while acknowledging his (and thus our identical) humanity, and remember to enact the levity which does help make the bearing of tremendous burdens possible.

Tags: Martin Luther King Jr. Day, non-violent civil disobedience

tagged, all over again

http://jikishin.gaia.com — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 23:46:27 GMT

This time I've been tagged by Laura.

THE RULES:

1. Link to the person's blog who tagged you.

2. Post these rules on your blog.

3. List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself.

4. Tag seven random [?] people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.

5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog.

Seven (additional) weird or random things about me:

1. I died. Sort of. Twice. Both times were after swimming in too cold water for too long. I'd pass out, stop breathing, and come to after several minutes. It seemed that these episodes were more traumatic for bystanders than for myself. I hear that I've stopped breathing for somewhere between ten and twenty (thankfully not consecutive) minutes.

2. I dislocated my left shoulder eleven times in the course of a year and a half. The first two times, in the same football game, most of the rest were while swimming.

3. I didn't get a driver's license until in my mid twenties. I didn't own a car until my mid thirties.
However, I did most of my traveling before having a license.

4. About two years ago, for the first time, I bought a television set.

5. Last year, for the first time, I bought a computer and got online.

6. This year, for the first time, I bought a CD and a DVD player.

7. I was surprised to hear (in my mid twenties) of a study which concluded that the vast majority of adults do most of their waking thinking in language, forming sentences and phrases... This was not so in my case.

I remember mentioning this to a friend who had known me for a few years (who had recommended me for the librarian position at the biomedical ethics center where she was the only MD on staff). She said that I was one of the few people for which she could believe that to be true. Thinking in language seemed an inefficiant, indirect way to process experience. My surprise was that we would mediate most of our conceptualizing by description and discursive explanation. For me language seemed to be convenient conventions for the social layers of relating. Thinking seemed more like perceiving and an arranging of perceptions than a sequencing of signifiers.

My tagger's still busted. Can't get behind it. Can't pick it up. Don't know what it is. 3for5 is par for me.

Tags: tagged

Rememberance II

http://jikishin.gaia.com — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 05:11:38 GMT

Remembering a living friend on this Human Rights Day...

Yodon Thonden, a brilliant young lawyer with Human Rights Watch, who was among the first to call world attention to the extent of the plight of child soldiers in west Africa.

Just a few days ago the U.S. Senate passed the Human Trafficking and Child Soldiers Bill.

Grateful to Yo and all who worked to secure that important political step I want to include here one of the awareness raising videos produced by Human Rights Watch and Yo's colleague, Jo Becker.

Tens years ago, the week I asked my first wife out on a date, I'd also thought of asking Yo out. I trust that our respective roads-less-traveled (which have made all the difference) have been best for the world too.

Here's to the steps we each take in all the directions of common advancement!

Tags: Human Rights Day, child soldiers

Rememberance 1

http://jikishin.gaia.com — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 14:07:32 GMT

Remembering friends on this World AIDS Day...

Robert Genjin Savage, composer of 'Sudden Sunsets', title piece in a Lincoln Center commemoration, loved to bird in South America.

In his last year, one bright Summer day, he shut the motor of the lawn mower off, half done with an acre of slope, and fell on his knees reverently liftng up fistfulls of clippings raising them to his face with a deep whiff in.

Tags: World AIDS Day, Robert Savage

nonblog # o.o (a tag game)

http://jikishin.gaia.com — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 05:09:15 GMT

me, the first year

Tagged by Tim
, and gitanjali,

I want to cut to the chase and not wait to learn what it takes to comply with The Rules.

THE RULES:
1. Link to the person's blog who tagged you.

2. Post these rules on your blog.

3. List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself.

4. Tag seven random [?] people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.

5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog.

Weird facts about me: (weird is easy, "facts" is hard)

1. I grew up in a "mirrored" family. ( what brought this up was being tagged by a Las Vegas resident ) When I was born a friend of my mom's adopted a boy, just like this friend had done after the birth of my older brother a year earlier. And just like she did two years later after my younger brother was born. With each adoption my mother would add the photos of the new children, sent by the friend, to our own family photo album. This other family is/was the family of long time Las Vegas Mayor Goldman.

2. At age 10 I sat down to a piano and "just started playing". What I didn't tell anybody until years later is that while I was doing that I was aware of a spirit-ghost-light being-thing standing behind me to the right. What's weird to me now is that, a few years after that I researched and found that I happen to be a great,great,great nephew of Schubert and that I had held some strong opinions as to what ol' Franz should have done differently.

3. Having the task of tagging 7 next bloggers reminds me that, in my first serious romance, before she and I knew oneanother we both knew seven others who we considered friends who, among themselves, did not know each other.

4. Living in a cabin in forest, not having heard a radio for weeks I turned one on about twelve seconds after the Challenger disaster. Debre was still in the air and the impulse to link to the collective grabbed me.

5. While Yeltsin was standing on a tank durring the Moscow coup, I was (again without radio, in a cabin that had been the arts and crafts cabin for the children of UN diplomats ) writing a letter about democracy and atonalism to the friend who composed the first piece performed by the Berlin Philharmonic after the wall fell. The imagry that I was processing while writing that letter felt, when compared to the news the next day, like a direct feed. That was weird.

6. At a monastery I had this difficult to shake reputation for 'reading minds'. Unknown to me, confirmed by others. As far as I was concerned I was just saying what occured to me. A year after leaving I was called back to find something that none of the monks could locate. I had no idea where it was either. The abbot had a kind of faith that I could find it. I did. 'Slept on it' and the next day, walked right up to it.

7. This I wrote about in the Multiplex. I started working in the north tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2000. From that first day at work I would, while in between tasks, or walking the hallways, silently chant an old sanskrit dharani, The Gatha on Averting Calamity (Sho Sy Myo Kichi Jo Dharani). Mid Aug. '01, I left NYC for Santa Fe.

I've yet to tag. I'll get to it.

Days later: On second thought I'd rather quote Siona's mom, "I won't tag anyone in particular but invite anyone to tag themselves", who said what I meant to.

K

Tags: chain blog, weird