Grid Patrol aka Butterscotch Watch

Grid Patrol aka Butterscotch Watch

    We've done what we've done through history–wars, inventions, poems, Wheatfield with Crows, chocolate souffles, collateral damage. It's time to grow up. Or grow out, grow over, grow around. We've allowed the hot and the toxic to dominate and besmirch the divine daily. We have military weaponed armies in heavy boots with grim guns. Being hard-weaponed has not increased the peace.
    It's time for the Butterscotch Brigade to be on Grid Patrol. Henry James said, “There are three rules for a serene life: Be kind, be kind, be kind.” How? We all have at least two minds. The rat mind, gnawing and snarling, peeved and aggrieved, needy and greedy. And we all have a kitten mind, playful, delighted, curious, soft, pliable.
    If we spent 5 minutes a day on Butterscotch Watch–well, think of it. 7 billion times 5 minutes is 35 billion minutes each day. [1440 minutes in a day; 525,600 minutes per year; 52 million 560 thousand minutes per century; 666 centuries per day.]
    666 centuries of kind mind per day on the Butterscotch Watch. That flood of butterscotch light into the wounded parts of the beloved globe will do such healing and soothing and balming and calming.
    Of course we need to butterscotch our own immediate lives, but serving others is a different mental/emotional muscle. Have you done your kind time today?
    So, say, we pick a wounded place with stubborn, hotheaded peoples on both sides. We can pour 35 billion minutes a day of butterscotch light for comfort and balm and simple goodwill into the noosphere, the fotizosphere there, and, like a lullaby, allay the fear, the suspicion, the rage.
    Think of it, feel of it, this way: You might once upon a time have had a 'pen pal' in Jerusalem. Now you can have a 'kind-mind pal' in Jerusalem. A minute here, a minute there. At a stoplight, during a commercial.
    Why not call for “prayer”? Because specific Religions are part of the poison. Here on the Butterscotch Watch, the point is our universal humanhood. Not one human-being is born Christian, Islam, Buddhist, Hindu. These visions and versions are encrusted upon us. What we 're doing here is universal–calm, balm. It's more like purring than praying. An expression of contentment without content. No creeds, no doctrines, no practices. Just goodwill and wellwishing–unconditional wishes.
    If we each did our 5 minutes a day in earnest and gentle snatches, in the interstices, waiting in the grocery line, we could do 35 billion minutes a day of goodwill. Now that's trez swell.

for D&D 08.01.10;
Notes:
Wheatfield With Crows is my favorite Van Gogh, my favorite painting;
noosphere: Our lively mote awash in galactic seas is waking up. There come big
surge-times in our story–the invention of the printing press, the
steam engine, the telegraph. Expanding our attention-point, turning on
more of our transformer, our brain and bones. We are presently in a
crescendo of rising, of brightning energy, élan. . . .The Next-Age
weirdos, of whom, like of the Democrats, I'm wryly and proudly one, are
attuned to various facets of this shimmering phenomenon. I don't cleave
to any version with the zeal of a convert, but I can feel the stirring,
the purring of the planet and its denizens awakening quantumly to a new
holo-mosaic of how consciousness is patterned. One can literally feel
this alchemic symphony of pulses in one's bones. If you don't notice it
yet, you will. It is both fuerte or strong and dulce or sweet. . . .
. Dear Teilhard de Chardin, mid-last-century
philosopher, spoke of the lithosphere, the biosphere, and the
noosphere. To which I, with humble glee, add the holosphere. . ..Litho means stone  The
lithosphere was the primeval furnace, lava rock of the planet which
dreamed and cogitated and desired for a long long time and blossomed
forth the
biosphere which is the lichen and the lemurs, the
octopuses, oaks, giraffes, and us. (Culminating in cats, the
quintessence of terrifying design.) This all rambled around, raucous
and timid, amoeba, hippopotamus, and condor, until forth was
effervesced the
noosphere, a knowledge sphere, a heady stew
of trivial and stupendous information. (Sadly, you cannot call the
noosphere a wisdom sphere, yet.)
fotizosphere..If the noosphere is the knowledge sphere, the fotizosphere is heart's-brightness sphere, soft and shimmering like the flame of a candle; the enchanted sudden dearness of  fireflys; an aurora borealis of luminous butterscotch light, sweet and gold.
(coined from Greek fotizo illuminate, light; wf Aug 2010.)

Ask Dr. Druid, Bk 2 draft

 
   
   

reading Reading the OED

reading Reading the OED


                                             calder

Dear Ammon Shea,

dictleasure .. the leisurely, treasured pleasure of reading a dictionary, most keenly the OED.

sheaman .. a person trained in the occult crafts and skills
of dictionary reading; coin from Ammon Shea's account of his fabulous
ascent of Mt. OED.

There should be a word for the muyyum [my only palindrome: muy yum] of reading Shea's Reading the OED
lying comfily on my back at 12:53:22 pm pst on Feb 19 2010, a day
before my erstwhile mother's 90th birthday with my chin buried in 14
yr. old tiny beloved Burmese Frolic's shoulder-fur as she lies purring
on my chest under my chin. A momentaryist, a momentaryissimaist, perhaps, one sequentially captured by each pearl of a moment lustrously passing.

cf funesist [foo-nay-sist] from Borges' story in Labyrinths,
'Funes.' Funes was bewildered that there was the same word for the dog
sleeping in the sun-struck village street at 2:15pm as for that dog at
2:16pm. The origamiing, magical folding of the thunder-strikingly
gem-like panoply ought startle and re-startle.

You'll be drolled that when I was in high school in these tiny
classes of seven kids, I thought I was funny. I was. But sometimes a
teacher would have had enough of my on-going commentary and I would be
“punished” by having to copy an entire page of the dictionary after
lunch while everyone else went out riding. Little did they know that my
CED, chronic etymology disease, was contracted then. I won't buy any
dictionary which doesn't have 'woven song' as the ety of 'rhapsody.'

In the vile poverty of college years, I was going to buy an
Unabridged anyway. I was contemplating a big fat one and saw that It
had “zeus” and “apollo” with “usu. cap.”  I ended up calling the
company & they apparently sold their own separate “Biographical
Dictionary.” Broke my heart that the real dictionary makers were
humiliated into putting “usu. cap.” On the other hand, in those days I
saw a blessed book I referred to as The New Century edited by Whitney
at Yale. For 'argus-pheasant,' it had the longlong tail actually
dropping down the column and other defs were written to it. I remember
trembling.

In my 20s, I got a copy of the first edition of the “malicious”
microprint OED, my pride in which slew legions of buttons. It was
FrissonLand for sure. I'm 99% sure it was stolen by villain (&
smelly) brother-in-law who lived with my ex-third husband and me for
one year and never said “Thank you.” A nefandous year, really. I was
delighted that the oed had a vast section of “Spurious Words.” Like who
else would get to say that?

Suppose 'wh' were a prefix? isper; eddle.

incalcowow — the incalculably stupendous joie that one gets reading Reading the OED,
luxuriously waking and falling asnooze of a weekday afternoon, tinct
with the wicked vagant frissony myyumminess of going to a weekday
matinee of A Fish called Wanda, feeling like one is eating eclairs whether or not one is actually licking chocolaty custard off one's lips.

Screw oysters, chocolate, pulverized panda balls — the oed is the
aphrodisiacal elixir, quintelixir. (When a word goes to lower case,
it's a made word — cf quisling; google.)

Re the matutinal
and their insufferable attitude, be consoled that eternity is very long
and they get theirs. I fondly imagine an 11PM meeting in which one
frequently cattle-prods them awake, oh frabjous joy.

paltry .. dictionarys willing to not be the OED. As in who decides which words to extirpate?

giftfish .. selfishly give presents to oneself (one's elf) as in running to Amazon to buy Reading the OED
so one can have a copy to mark up with sly wrys in the margins &
with fluorescent daffodil-yellow Bic highliters & have in the
bathroom to illuminate shiturient episodes de vie. Being a Bathroom
Book is the highest honor. Also sent two to friends with a clue.

halcyon .. the kind of sweet day in which a kingfisher can
make her nest upon the bosom of the sea; also the externally shockingly
swift but internally vividly serene passage of time while reading 
RTOED or seeing Avatar3D both the 1st & 2nd times.

cat .. a mystic tho not mythic beast at once liquid & solid; 'Frolic,' the name of my silver cat, means “swift gladness.” Catilex,
catilexing is luxuriously reading a book on dictionaries, supine with
one's soft silver Burmese cat, Frolic, perched on one's chest, purring
under one's chins.

nooner — truffle-pigging thru the oed is a voluptuous treat in any spare time;

I define 'multiverse' — multi-verse — as many-poem place.

I
was contemplating wistfully (zero upper teeth left) the
gnashing-one's-teeth words, now erstwhile, idly wondering if they too
begin with a silent 'g'? (ranch, rassil, rent, ristbite) or do they
echo my droll 'guh-nash' when (I swear) there's a Wagnerian knock at my
recluse door. I mumpishly haul myself out of my warm cocoon,
distressing also the sleepish cat. Infernal who thinks it's okay to
pound on the door before noon on a Saturday? It is, unbless them, the
putative Witnesses (never any photos) of Jehovah, damned lucky I didn't
besmote them, & I would have bespawled them but you can't spit very
far anymore sans teeth. Bedrooling people is less fiery.

Re prefixes, I've long loved that 'for' is an intensifier and
before it got wistfullized, 'forlorn' meant 'deeply deeply lost.' Years
went by before it occurred to me that 'forgive' must mean 'deeply
deeply give.'  Not that I do it ever, but I like grokking it.

When I was writing savage essays about Sicker Dick Cheney &
Karl Boy, I discovered that 'scruple' meant 'a pebble in the shoe.'
Doing a wrong thing would bother you (not them) with every step.
Some-horrible-how I lost where I found the medieval “Let them re-eat
their own vomit,” as wildly useful as “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln,
how did you like the play?” No amount of Advanced Search can find it
for me.

It's such a drag to have this book end. The word that
springbokkedly sprang to mind when I closed the covers of RTOED was a
neon !Thanks!

Sequel?

Your fondest fan,

Plunder Wonder 2010

**
If you're too jaded
To wade thru the joyous accolades
For our darling Planet,
The more vicious, and also delicious,
Politics is nearer the end, friend.
For me, the one allows me
To cope with the other . . .
**

Plunder Wonder

In a sugar plum-colored daze,
May the bounty of days amaze.
The sheep's plush fleece, the gossip of geese,
The cat purrs, licking her elegant whiskers.
Clowns somersault, salts clown around.
We're lucky to have towels and trowels and vowels.
Pluck luck from your pudding like plums.
Succumb to plums.  Steal style.
Flaunt jauntiness.  Hail heartiness.
Be tickled by pickles, relish fellowship.
Butter is better. More butter is best.
When you feel insane,
Butter your brain
With extra vaganzas,
Unleash a plethora of euphoria.
Pirate the treasure of pleasure.
Saddle up, pard, and rope them days,
A hot bath, forgiven wrath.
Club a sandwich, belly up to a sandbar,
Have a fine purple purpose,
Flout and rout pouting.
Ponder wonder.
Remembrance of Things Present:
Remember vermilion, the color of embers.
The gilt lilies frothing the field have no guilt.
Ponder only wonder.
.
Be harmless and warm, eschew other arms.
Praise the prize of days, the surprise of days.
'Frolic' means 'swift gladness':
May your gladness be quick and tricksy.
Be facile with docility,
Salacious for salad. Prefer tortes to torture.
Wreak wreaths, not havoc.
Have more siestas, more snoozes, more muses.
Be kind to your kind.
Under the grime of habit is the original shine,
Polish your time.
As you get old, pick courage, not rage.
The cartography of the heart
Is it a maze or a map?
Perhaps it's better to be polite than right?
Get stunned by fun.
With gusto and lusto, be happy, be sappy.
The solstice, the return of light,
The retreat of night
Shining on us all, the same sun
Makes us one;
Equal under the high and shining sky,
All our hearts are star bright.
The only task is to bask
In the holy glow of the fruited earth.
Linger, watch, admire. Remember.
Re-ember. Seize seeing.
Be a barnacle to your day.
There's lavender, provender, talent, gallantry,
There's silk, salt, and succotash.
Be bold, be brash,
Plunder the days for wonder.
****
In Avalon, the Island of Apples,
A unicorn foal, an otter,
And one silver kitten,
Enchanted by the moon,
Dance by the Lagoon of Dreams.
Slide deep into the Lagoon of Dreams,
Slide otterly deep
Into the Lagoon of Dreams
Where
Our hearts are songs of birds,
Waddles of penguins,
Soft as ostrich feathers,
As cawing as crows
With raucous guffawing.
*****
— January 2009 —
After the appalled derisions
With which we watched The Decider's decisions,
At last this year we surface from the Sea of Fear
Utterly playful again, like besotted otters;

           
“Hoppy Holidays, as a Frog might say,” I scribble daffily,
Drunk sans liquor with glee,
Ah, ahhh, we can tell stupid jokes again, verily.
 
At least Mount Rushmore and dimes are safe
From George's pipsquawk unsage image,
His flaws so fatal to so many who emptily died
For preemption, that rabid abstraction;
Heinous Cheney is deflated, if not checkmated.
 
Our dear Demos will lurch and blunder
But the massive hemorrhaging is ceased;
From the baleful rise of the 4th Reich,
That fathomless fright –
From their full frontal affront,
War as a codpiece,
We are released;
The Shadow, as Jung might have it,
Is revealed so it can be healed.

Hark! Embark on Prez O & Hillary's Ark,
Lambs & lions of service,
Fiercely mild in their souls,
Rallying the meek
To our inheritance.
It's a Team Dream
We're waking & making
On our gorgeous doting Planet;
Lend a hand, lend a heart,
Time to seriously, gladfully start,
Do thy ingenious, generous gallant part.

Invite your panself, holoself, remself,
To this' wildly surmising,' kaleidoscopically surprising
Sundream, moondream fiesta;
Tithe times ten your mirth
To our darling planet, Earth
Aka Vuravura, Jeegoo.
Teach your soul to be sunny and funny,
Carpe noctem tambien, carpe comedy,
Time for Team Earth
To prove our worth —
Gallop, gallivant, stroll, mull,
Earnestly act in delight & quixot.

***
— January 2010 —
I'm loath to mention the fly in the ointment,
Obama's been a bit of a disappointment;
It turns out that
Obama needs more drama,
Needs to be seen to matter
Instead of fiddling & faddling
While our fierce illusion shatters.
Too Beckett, too Waiting for Godot
While our bewildered hopes
Wither to woe.
Fierce Urgency Now
Would have been more F.U.N.
We'd be less stunned.
Oh well, hell, he looks great in a tux
And that's deluxe.

Hillary is splendid,
She's been triumphantly befriended
By the world's forgotten women,
Tireless champion, exorcist of
Historical & hysterical patriarchal demons,
Hillary of Arc has won their patient, brave hearts.

Assailin' flailin' Palin's a bit too fish-in-a-barrel,
The Finder of Enemies under every pebble,
Her feral pheromones, her floozy apparel;
Her dismal nasal prattle,
So obscenely mean,
Dangerous and unhinged,
Mesmerizing what we
Wish were The Fringe;
My fantasy would be to loose
A flotilla of rogue gorillas in Wasilla
And hope for the worst.
BTW, hurray for Bluejean Boy, Levi,
Who apparently can make a pariah of Sarah
If she rises too high,
Levi's my guy.

That we could allow
Aetna CEO silver-forked-tongued
Ron Williams
To make $97,000 a DAY
Fits in what moral universe
That isn't cursed?

There are better heroes of the bereft Left,
Ed the Lionheart stands strong for the needy,
Olbermann clobbers the greedy,
Maddow & Walsh prove
That rational kindness
Can bring light to our blindness.
Wonderful Wendell Potter
Who gave up comfort and riches
For the more lasting gold of Truth;
Sherrod Brown, Weiner who isn't,
Bernie, dear Bernie, Waxman,
And Barney of acerbic blarney,
Schumer, Guts Grayson,
Rockefeller put the MRI to the MLR;

Speaker Pelosi has the gonads
The gents are missing,
A big hero in spite of the hissing
Of the viperous Right
Who are so venomously Wrong.
I beseech particularly
That you forever forswear
The phrase “single payer”
And always say, “Medicare4All,
A less baggaged clarion call,
Not “socialist,” not “European,”
Save us from those sanities!

If (when?) we get to guillotines,
Slitherer Joe goes first,
That self-satisfied smirk
Into the basket of lickspittles & numbskulls.

Avatar 3D will hone & shine
Your raison-to-see
Out here on Mama Earth
aka VuraVura & Jeegoo,
Highest in our Who's Who
Of stupendous planets,
Our masterpiece of holoD,
Just open your eyes wide
And abide,
And remember that ember
The astronaut said,
“When I looked back at our planet Earth
What struck me
Is that there aren't any lines on it.”
All borders and barriers
Lie only in our brains,
Crippling fictions.
I remind the unkind
That until they speak
Fluent Cherokee,
To whose country
We swarming savage misfits
Had no right neither
Before nor after
We slaughtered their daughters
And poisoned their waters,
I suggest, at the least,
Probably futilely, humility.

I hope any hour finds you
mirthmost merry.

..wendy

When
multiplying gratitude Use some confounding, astounding number, Like the
number of leaves on trees, To remind you that however wisely you
galactisize your eyes, you still can't love it Enough; Revere what you
can, now, now & now. Immerse yourself in the Universe, Free glee to
fly in your sky like a bird of flame. Try not to get stuck in a God Rut
where you hurt or disdain others for dogma wrought by dead old bastards
who hammered tirades & tyrannies into a blade. Heroes are better
than Gods, less ambitious.

Health Reform Info 080809

Friends, these are some recent Comments on various articles and blogs from the New York Times to the wonderful Wendell Potter. I post these here for you to take phrases or thoughts or info to be arrows in your quiver re the healthcare debate.

==
2nd comment
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/opinion/08collins.html?_r=1
We
all need to know that the Wall Street Orcs-in-Suits control your health
non-care. Google Wendell Potter the ex Cigna big shot PR guy who's now
a whistleblower (http://prwatch.org/user/35267/track)
& you'll see that people like CEO Ron Williams of Aetna making
$24-million-dollars a year are not going to moderate quietly. Mr.
Williams is the Rescind-And-Purge=Evil champion of the Universe.

There's RAPE — Rescind-And-Purge=Evil. If you get sick, that Mr.
Williams of Aetna got the Gigantic Bucks because he fomented a computer
program to comb any claims for the slightest pretext for the insurance
corporations to rescind the coverage you thought you had. It's enough
to gag a maggot.

Re Purge, if you're a small business and have a modest group plan,
if one of your employees actually gets sick and needs to interfere with
pure unfettered  bloodsucking of premiums, your small business will get
a huge increase in premiums to purge or force you from their rolls.

The unspeakable medical-loss-ratio means that a health-scam
corporation's stock is flayed by Wall Street for any health care they
actually pay out to sick people. Any claims paid are a “medical-loss”
— they want them premiums for stockholders, not for patients.
Incredibly, payment for patients is considered a “medical-loss” by the
Vampire Capitalism of our current Wall Street.

My mind reels at the deep ugliness of the system. This is
Bernie-Madoff-League scamming, done by the best confusion &
legerdelying that fathomless Big Bucks can buy.

If you want to
keep paying an average of $14 million dollar annual
medical-industrial-complex CEO salaries, be my guest. I'd prefer the
choice of a public option where the money goes to help me or you. Gee,
what a novel idea. (Self-employed, I haven't had health coverage since
1979 — 262,800 hours waiting in line . . .)

LBJ said, “I will fight for Medicare as long as I have breath in my
body.” Our current leaders need an injection of LBJ-Fight. Speak boldly.

==
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/opinion/08collins.html?_r=1
Joe Califano recalled this afternoon (08.07.09) that LBJ said,”I will
fight for Medicare as long as I have breath in my body.” We need this
explicit passion from President Obama re the public option.

I'm
amazed that people are so vehemently eager to have Wall Street between
them and their doctor. The medical-industrial-complex insurance
corporations are only rewarded for collecting your premiums and then
*not* paying your claims. It's called medical-loss-ratio. If a
health-scam corporation starts paying too great a ratio of medical
losses (aka patient claims), its stock gets punished. (I learned this
from the wonderful Wendell Potter, whistleblower, ex-Cigna PR chief.)
==
email to David Sirota 080709
Dear Mr. Sirota,

Thanks for your town-brawl primer.

 I hope you'll spread the word about medical-loss-ratios, the odious detail that finally pushed me off the Sickened Cliff into a free fall of dumbfounded disgust.

I'm amazed that people in these
town brawls are so violently eager to use their premiums to pay CEO Ron
Williams of Aetna's $24-million-dollar annual compensation. I'm happy
for them to do that, but I'd like the choice, the public option, not to
buy the gold-rimmed luncheon plates on the Aetna jet.

 I'm amazed that people are so vehemently eager to have Wall Street
between them and their doctor. The medical-industrial-complex insurance
corporations are only rewarded for collecting your premiums and then
*not* paying your claims. It's called medical-loss-ratio. If a
health-scam corporation starts paying too great a ratio of medical
losses (aka patient claims), its stock gets punished. (I learned this from the wonderful Wendell Potter, whistleblower, ex-Cigna PR chief.)

I think if people
knew more and weren't responding to fortune-cookie propaganda, there'd
be no question that they'd demand a public option to at least slow the
juggernaut of the built-in rapacious greed-for-profit of the current
gold-rimmed-plates Let's Dupe the Sheeple arrangement.

According to Joe Califano, President Lyndon Johnson said, “I will fight
for Medicare as long as I have breath in my body.” We need this passion
in the current Democrats.

Thanks again,
Wendy
Wendy Fleet
Mountain View CA 94041
wendyfleet@gmail.com
650.966.1542

==
http://www.russfeingold.org/blog/a-thank-you-message-from-russ.html
In a sea of Profiles in Jellyfishism, you have always been a Profile in
Courage. Progressives are grateful. I'm amazed that people in these
town brawls are so violently eager to use their premiums to pay CEO Ron
Williams of Aetna's $24 million dollar annual compensation. I'm happy
for them to do that, but I'd like the choice, the public option, not to
buy the gold-rimmed luncheon plates on the Aetna jet.
I'm amazed that people are so vehemently eager to have Wall Street
between them and their doctor. The medical-industrial-complex insurance
corporations are only rewarded for collecting your premiums and then
*not* paying your claims. It's called medical-loss-ratio. If a
health-scam corporation starts paying too great a ratio of medical
losses (aka patient claims), its stock gets punished. I think if people
knew more and weren't responding to fortune-cookie propaganda, there'd
be no question that they'd demand a public option to at least slow the
juggernaut of the built-in rapacious greed-for-profit of the current
gold-rimmed-plates Let's Dupe the Sheeple arrangement.
President Lyndon Johnson said, “I will fight to my last breath for
Medicare.” We need this passion in the current Democrats.

==
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/opinion/07krugman.html
I'm amazed that people are so violently eager to use their premiums to
pay CEO Ron Williams of Aetna's $24 million dollar annual compensation.
I'm happy for them to do that, but I'd like the choice, the public
option, not to buy the gold-rimmed plates on the Aetna jet.

I'm amazed that people are so violently eager to have Wall Street
between them and their doctor. The medical-industrial-complex insurance
corporations are only rewarded for collecting your premiums and then
*not* paying your claims. It's called medical-loss-ratio. If a
health-scam corporation starts paying too great a ratio of medical
losses (patient claims), its stock gets punished.

 I think if people knew more and weren't responding to
fortune-cookie propaganda, there'd be no question that they'd demand a
public option to at least slow the juggernaut of the built-in rapacious
greed-for-profit of the current gold-rimmed-plates Let's Dupe the
Sheeple arrangement.  

==

labman57 & periscope are near the bullseye. We all
need to know that the Wall Street Orcs in Suits control your health
non-care. Google Wendell Potter the ex Cigna big shot PR guy who's now
a whistleblower (http://prwatch.org/user/35267/track) & you'll see that people like Ron Williams of Aetna making $24 million dollars a year are not going to moderate quietly.

Note the odious medical-loss-ratio which means that a health
corporation's stock is punished by Wall Street for any health care they
pay out (aka medical-loss –they want them premiums for stockholders,
not for patients. Payment to patients is considered a “medical-loss”).

Then there's RAPE — Rescind-And-Purge Evil. If you get sick, that
Mr. Williams of Aetna got the Gigantic Bucks because he invented a
computer program to comb any claims for the slightest pretext for the
insurance corporations to rescind the coverage you thought you had.

Re Purge, if you're a small business and have a modest group plan,
if one of your employees actually gets sick and needs to interfere with
pure unfettered bloodsucking of premiums, your small business will get
a huge increase in premiums to purge you from their rolls.

If you want to keep paying an average of $14 million dollar annual
medical-industrial-complex CEO salaries, be my guest. I'd prefer the
choice of a public option where the money goes to help me or you. Gee,
what a novel idea. (Self-employed, I haven't had health coverage since
1979 — 262,800 hours waiting in line . . .)
==

Ask Dr. Druid . Day 50 . What the Cactus Knows

Ask
Dr. Druid . Day 50
What the Cactus Knows

This
piece will read best for you
if you read it with your mouth as if
out loud
[
Ask
Dr. Druid
is
designed to begin at the beginning.
Click
here
.]

You can enter rem states as you're writing. That is,
you write from inside the vision. Or you can wake from the rem state
and write as you slosh in the shallows of the remembered dream/rem sea.
What keeps you from completely surfacing when you rise out of rem is
the silver-fish of a phrase or scene you use as a portal back to the
dream. Scribbling down this silver-fish-phrase can keep the dream from
sliding away into opaque depths. That's why I have my log next to my
pillow and a pencil there too. A pencil writes at any angle so you can
stay pretty asleep or in rem. This cactus piece was a rem vision I had
from semi-waking. I wrote it down as if I were writing a letter to you.

::-::-::
I find myself talking to a cactus. (Since I was a child talking to
trees before I learned that one did not talk about talking to trees,
'talking to' meant 98% 'listening to' trees.) Or in this case, cactus.
This was a proper desert with dramatic hilly ranges of lion-colored
sand. I felt like la petite princesse — well, ok, la princesse tres
rondelette. If I looked thru the earth, I saw the bottoms of kangaroo
feet nearer to my right and less far than at home so tal vez or perhaps
this immense sand sea was In America del Sur?

The cactus was not a
candelabra of my beloved saguaros, but one cylinder about 6 ft tall. It
spoke by imprinting me with oneiroglyphs, as trees speak. It was
reminding me, not meanly but with cactus-spine-sharp irony, that I had
had a “stupid prejudice to the leafy and needled” when I was younger.
That I had come “noticeably” late to the devotion to succulents and
cacti. That I had even said roughshoddedly that iceplants had “fat
leaves.” Being chastised teasingly by a cactus leaves you helpless with
abashed hilarity.

Cactus was very old but young at pith. The real
rootnets, it was saying, are the in-the-dirt antennae of the flowering
plants, the trees, the tomato plants, the corn stalks, the jungle
vines, ++. It tuned something in my daedalus or central brain matrix so
I could hear the hum/purr of their gossip + palaver with the bottoms of
my feet. It saw me not as I see my own body, but, instead of 'skin,' as
a swirling of 3D animated 'tattoos' of all the experiences which
inhabit me. Cactus was +very+ caustic about the “care-less-ness of your
species-ilk.” It was vexxxed. “We don't mind you. We don't mind the
squirrels and the rabbits either. But if you listened more with the
ears of, the screens of your feet, you'd learn to be less noisy.” In this tone, we took trez cool tour thru the filigree of the world's roots.

I had 'feelings' in my feet, not head nor heart nor gut. I also felt
the pulse of my blood in my feet — my feet beating, like small drums
speaking to other feet? I felt feet-bottoms to feet-bottoms with the
kangaroos. A new glot, feet-bottom-glot, or language to learn. Ham
dumble. 

I've been looking lately at some spectacular
altiplano desert picts of Bolivia by Gerhard Hudepohl.  I'm obsessed
with the Green Evolution. And with teaching tele + oneiroportation to
cut down on fossil-fuel combustions.

Re-start scribbling down your visions either as you drift to rem or as you return from rem. You are a rem reporter.
::-::-::-::
Notes:
..rem
.. I use rem as a general term for the imaginative states of vision and
nightdream. I see all our experiences as dreams along a spectrum of
kinesthetic persistence. So what you tend to refer to as your 'daily
life' would have great stretches of K1 or the first level of
kinesthetic persistence. The continents of the geography of your
experience. There are many stretches of dreamy or drifting
semi-perception thru your day which are the lacunae (little lakes) or
unkickable parts of your experience. (People are are proving that
matter exists by kicking the boulder and saying “Ouch!”)
..le petit prince , from the book by St. Exupery, spends much of his
time alone with his single rose. The joke here is that I feel my self
in this vision like the little prince, but a girl, and because I'm
chubby rondolette rather than petit or little. Tres (tray) means very
in French & my franglais or fractured French for that is often trez
— also a small droll because in the proper french you leave off the
“s” sound unless the next word starts with a vowel. Thus the French
would never say Trez droll, but it amuses me.
..suguaro is pronounced soo-whar-oh.
..oneiroglyphs .. 3D glyphs from oneiro or dreams; cf hieroglyphs made into scenes.
..daedalus bridge .. It's fun to re-ember the firefly-fraught
tale of Icarus & Daedalus. Now nobody has ever done psychology like
the Greeks. Well, they invented the word psychology too after all. (Jung called
astrology the accumulated wisdom of the ancients.) Daedalus &
Icarus are captured on some dullsville island. Daedalus, the master
craftsman, talks to them local bees and uses their wax plus the feathers of
cormorants and makes fine wings for him & Icarus. Daedalus extols
the middle way — not too high or the sun will melt the wax, the
structure of your dear wings, or too low lest the curling crests of
waves catch you in their idly tricksy grasps. Oh well we all know that
Icarus flew too high, wings melted, fell into sea. Daedalus, however
made it to the mainland. Hurray for, say, sensible madness. I like to use his name as the master craftsman to honor the
the corpus callosum, the middle of the joined-brain, the daedalus
bridge, the powerful middle way, as it were — the wings-crafting place
where the brain joins all its forces in a rhapsody, a woven song.

::-::-::-::
If
you know or are an agent, aspiring agent, editor, or publisher person
who would handle this kind of druid material, please let me know at

..
askdrdruid@gmail.com.
Please
put ‘agent’ in the subject line.
………….<^>……………..
It’s
an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.
You
may comment anonymously.
…………….<^>……………..
Check
pogblog’s
Glossary

for brave & nefarious words.
copyright
pogblog 2008 all rights reserved
copyright
ask dr. druid 2008 all rights reserved
blog
title image is a piece of andy goldsworthy
excerpt
image wf
article
title image wf
I’d
be very grateful if you’d send pogblog’s link to a
friend:
http://pogblog.blogharbor.com
email:
askdrdruid@gmail.com
..
keep your heart bright. beauty is rising.
.for
bombadilobo & diablobo.
<^>..
the
education-obsessed world begins today with you ..
..
if you make $50,000 a year, it’s gone in 4 seconds in Iraq;
..
let’s spend most of the Military-Corporate Budget on education
instead ..
-::-::-::-::-::-::-::-::-::-::-