For some reason I started following a trail of thought I had awhile back. I'm kinda surprised I found the thread, but as I followed it through the maze I decided that if I could recall where it went I would share it. Here's how it goes, more or less.

I think it started with explaining how chakras and yoga work to my daughter. Why a full lotus is really about joining malkuth to that other chakra at the groin. Names are hard for me to hang on to, but that's why I'd make a lousy hermeticist. Anyway, as you follow the Central Pillar to the final glorious point you pass the two chakras, male and female principals and then on to the ONE. So suddenly I thought that Time requires two, which is why the ONE is beyond Time. But here's the deal. Without two things there is no time, but without two things there can't be a question and an answer or time to pose them. So the ONE can not be said to have self referenced as that would imply a point at which ONE was not self referenced, ie, a TIME when One was not self aware. And there is no time without TWO THINGS. So, logically, there is no ONE. Only two, the male and female principals. ONE is a myth presented by implication, by inference. You see two lines not parallel and you presume eventually they meet. You see TWO and you think there must be a ONE behind them. Each part of the TWO is a ONE in itself, right? WRONG! Can't be. With ONE there is no time. Sort of like an infinitely small measure of time. Try to remember your calculus. or the final measurement of Pi. No such thing. This really explains a great deal if you can wrap your mind around it.

When my sweety pie and I talk, we frequently manage to say the same things at the same time. I often know what she is going to say before she says it. So we talk as if we two are one. And in a sense, we are. We are, for instance, a couple. A team, a family, if you include the kids. But all those ONES are not real except by virtue of the illusion of duality. The trick is, the Great Illusion, that of Duality, is itself an Illusion of Itself. That is to say the principal of the Great Illusion is that there is a ONE behind all Things, a ONE which joins all things together. But at the end, which is still within the domain of time, there is still TWO. You don't self reference, I suppose. You still have the observer and the observed. You reference back to a previous self and or a future self, but never the present self because that is busy referencing the other two. That central principal is the Point of Illusion where things get murky. A threshold between two states of existence. And as I have pointed out, Thresholds are the domain of the Trickster, Master of Illusion.

Otherwise there would not be Existence at all. There would be only ONE. So I guess in the final analysis, Trickster IS the Creator God. Give the God it's due, Trickster did it All. Well, That's where I ended up. Now I need a beer and have no car as my sweety pie and my daughter are out getting school things for next week. So if she can understand where I am coming from, even from a distance, what do you think is the chance that they will recognize that I haven't been able to get a beer and my back is really amazingly painful tonight. Like between a 7 and an 8. A beer would wash those pain meds down nicely and give me some relief. Morpheine would be good too but I doubt the drug store would release any just on her say-so.

Indeed, Trickster is in charge.

For some time now you may have noticed that I've been bitching about my back pain. In point of fact the pain is not simply in my back but down my legs, down my arms and in my neck. The tingling is constantly in my arms and fingers and midback. The burning in the legs has slowed down, maybe because I'm trying so hard to adjust my posture, but the tingling has increased. Just so you know.

I called a massage therapist in town yeaterday. I'd been to see her before and it was very nice to have hours of no pain whatsoever without being dizzy from drugs. I mentioned that I had bought the last MRIs and radiologist's report and she asked me to read it to her. I obliged with her helping me through the technical terms and then she said "So what they're saying is that from the T12 down thru the sacrum your back is trashed." That's what I've been telling people for some time now but it's nice to hear someone else reach that conclusion. Friday I'm going to see her and get some work on the problem. I want to find out if the insurance will cover such treatments. You'd think it would since the drugs I'm taking constantly must cost a lot and without some kind of therapy on the root causes of the pain I'll be taking drugs for the rest of my life, wearing out my liver and kidneys in the process, but then the insurance says it covers accupuncture until you try to get them to pay and then they explain that they only cover accupuncture when performed by an MD. Why they think a western trained MD would be better qualified to needle my back than someone with many more years of training and experience is beyond me, but that's what they want.

I've been wanting to use my little tape recorder to get down some random thoughts for this blog, but I can't find the tapes or the machine anymore. The drugs trash my memory, which is why I wanted a pocket recorder to record my thoughts. By the time I get over to the computer I have forgotten so much of my line of thought I tend to ramble. On the other hand if I try to go without the drugs the pain is so bad I tend to truncate my writings so I can go pace around for awhile doing lamaze breathing. Right now it feels like my left arm is getting ready to go into shingles mode, like some brute is pinching my elbow and my right hand is tingling. One of the neat things, though, is that I can trace some of the larger nerves by where the pain is. So I got that going for me.

A born again Christian writes in the editorial page that God hates homosexuals and destroyed Sodom and Gomorra so gay mariages will result in God destroying America. I wonder why God hasn't destroyed any of the other cities in the modern world where gays are running around? Ptown on the Cape, for instance, is right out there in clear sight. Maybe He ran out of fire and brimstone so He's going to have to use nuclear, biological and chemical weapons this time around. Oddly enough, another writer pointed out that the King James version of the Bible was authorized by a flaming queen: King James. Well, I'm sure once the True Believers convert America into a theocracy we'll sort it all out. Shuffle all the gays, gypsies and pagans into Vegas and then nuke it. St. Hitler would be so proud of us! Nothing like a little rabid hatred after the morning prayers.

I wonder what would happen if we got a bunch of grandmothers to march on Washington to demand that their families come home from the war? I wonder if Kent State would be revisited? Most of my daughter's friends don't know much about the smaller demonstrations where people were clubbed to death or maced in the eyes and blinded, but they know about Kent State. They know it could happen again, to anyone. These folks don't care about who they kill and maim, or they wouldn't be so quick to drop cluster bombs on children.

It's really hard to stop the back from hurting when your heart is hurting.

I saw my boy yesterday, saw that he looked as bad now, four years after the accident, as he did when we first got him back to NY and into a decent facility. But all facilities are manned by people and these people have given up. Last night I saw Michael Moore's movie and saw a vet with brain damage trying to talk about things. If Jon ever talks again that will be about as good as it gets for him. We are making thousands of people just like that, many of them Americans. George doesn't care. His drunken happy daughters will never go to war, never risk their lives for others. That's all he cares about. If I were to take him to Lake Katrine and show him the crippled Americans dying there all he would worry about would be if they voted or not or if there was a camera nearby. Trouble is, it's about the same for Kerry. He's making money off of death. He'll never have to work again either, just talk. He'll be a millionaire by talking and hell, I can talk til you're blue in the face, why aren't I even remotely rich? I have $30 in the bank and a boy in a wheelchair who can't come home in part because his bedroom has two buckets to catch rain water from the holes in the roof. But at least our toilets flush and our lights go on, which is more than can be said for the poor slobs living in the countries we have liberated in the name of rabid American Christian Capitalism.

You might have noticed that tired old men with acheing backs get grumpy. We also get tired of being tired, tired of holding up our kid's heads to show them a poster on the wall. Tired of mopping up mucus from their chests where the trache leaks. Tired of waking up to cat vomit and dog shit. My friends tell me to cheer up and get on with my life. I'm not always sure I want to, but then, who would hold my son's head?

Around 3 am I woke up to the sound of dripping in the bedroom. I knew the roof was, once again, saturated, cracked and leaking. I got out the buckets and then lay down to try to sleep. My sweety-pie was sleeping peacefully away. The lady can sleep through a train wreck. I jump up at the whisper of a mouse. Then I heard our guest, my sister in law, grumbling and thrashing about. She had placed her laptop on the desk directly under the stain on the ceiling. I know I have warned the ladies about this, but they thought my last adventure with the tar bucket had solved the problem. I have no confidence and was proven right. So with several buckets stuffed with towels to soften the sound everybody got back to sleep. The faint drip sound eventually drove me to the living room where I lay down under a throw and tried to get back to sleep. The old cat Oona decided she wanted attention and came up to yell at me and purr loudly. The cat has the loudest purr I ever heard. I grabbed her and in a fit of unjust anger, tossed her out into the rain. She hid under the car in confusion and the rain continued to pour down.

Now I'm up and about, drinking many cups of coffee. I let Oona in and apologized and gave her some wet food... she has no teeth. She happily purred and yelled at me. My neck is stiff, the back is sore, the eyes are red and in a couple of hours we're all going to go to a happy birthday party for a 9 year old, the daughter of good friends who live in town in a house whose roof does not leak, despite it being a hundred years older than ours. I like that house. It has a lot of funny little stairs leading to servants quarters, to the basement, odd little bathrooms with nothing but a toilet inside. It's the kind of house I figured someday I'd live in, except it has no tower. I always figured I'd have a house with a tower. Maybe the second floor of the garage where I keep my clay studio counts as a tower.

From that tower I can see the new beds in the garden I built last week. The second crop of lettuce is sprouting and the snow pea bed is ready to be cleared off and replanted. I added a couple of beds to the garden in happy hopes of growing more dried beans and other foods to augment our meager income. I have a barrel full of dirt and potato plants growing, secure from the chipmunks. It's something I think I got from Mother Earth News. If it works, when I turn the barrel on it's stand the potatoes will pour out and we'll have happy purple tater pancakes. If it doesn't work I'll have proof that chipmunks are even smarter than I thought. If it works I have another barrel I will cut and build a stand for next year. The raised beds have produced a huge crop of green plants, but not as many squash and beans as I expected. I have found out that birdhouse gourds not only love raised beds, but will grow over the top of nearby bean plants, driving them to the ground. If I can make birdhouses out of the gourds maybe I'll make enough money to buy dried beans to make up for my bad planning. Next year the birdhouse gourds grow on the fence, not in a bed. I'll add loofahs, too.

Jon had a stay in the hospital to deal with a urinary tract infection induced by a catheter. Instead of using a diaper and risk his skin breaking down, as it sometimes does, they shove a catheter up his dick. Needless to say the thing is sterile at first, but if the nurse drops it on the floor she uses it anyway. I've seen this. I mentioned the idea of using sterile catheters and she changed the device for a new one, but I know that when I'm not there she uses the dirty one. Jon gets fevers very easily but since the doctors have abandoned helping him emerge from his coma-like state, the nurses follow the cue and just maintain him. they talk to him, in much the same way you talk to a teddy bear or a car with a bum battery, but they don't really talk TO him. They talk at him and around him but not to him. He's inside now, not listening, not paying attention to the catheter being shoved up his dick.

When Jon comes to visit I can feel his hands take control of my hands. My chopping changes style, becomes more effective, more profesional. Jon was a good chef. He starts adding herbs I rarely use and lectures me on the overall look of the meal. Maybe this is a memory of his lectures from before the accident. Maybe I'm just imagining what Jon would be doing if he had used a seat belt back then and was dropping by in person to help me prepare a meal. Maybe his soul is still trapped in that broken form 100 miles away. Then again, maybe all I need to do to get rid of the pain in my back is accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal savior. Maybe all I have to do to get rid of the pain in my back is to accept the Lady Bjork as my personal savior. Maybe all I have to do to get rid of the pain in my back is to accept that my back is broken and stop paying attention to the pain. Lots of maybes.

The rain in Spain may fall mainly on the plain, but the rain in upstate New York falls mainly in our bedrooms. In my universe there would be a great geodesic dome over our living space, preventing the rain from dripping into my life. I'd have a few panels of clear glass, a few of stained glass and a few of solar panels for heat. I'd also be living alone, because I'm the only one in the family who likes domes. I'm also the only one who really believes that Jon comes to visit in spirit form and advises me on my cooking habits. I'm kinda used to being the only one who feels certain things. The typical shaman is a solitary person and even in the 21st century in an all white household filled with computers and cd players, the resident shaman is a lonely man. He misses his son, he misses having a roof that doesn't leak, a back that doesn't twitch and jolt with pain, and the feeling that the rest of his life will be all smooth and under control in a house with a lovely productive garden and a great looking tower where he runs off to create his art.

I still run off to the garage studio to create my art. The garden is productive, if only for biomass. My son still comes to visit, although nobody but me talks to him. And if I was smart enough to suspend a spider plant under the leaks I'd have an automatic watering system instead of an annoying household problem. Why didn't Jon mention that last time he was here, why does he always try to tell me how to cook? Oh well, he always liked cooking over gardening, and I guess a leaking roof was never something he had to deal with. I wonder if I could shove a catheter into that stain on the ceiling and redirect the drips to a bag on the wall? It's a thought.

Sitting in the living room with my daughter, laughing at some funny cartoons. The phone rings. Jon is having a "not good day". Heart rate is up, breathing is down, blood pressure is off. Urinary tract infection because they always use a Foley catheter instead of a Texas catheter. They could use diapers or towels and a plastic sheet, but that means more work for the aides. So they shove a plastic tube up his penis and every now and then innoculate him with a bacteria. Fever of 102.7. If it goes higher should we send him to the ER? Yes, please. High fevers mean seizures. We'll keep you informed, just wanted you to know.

Now the laughter is gone, the smiles are gone. I have a headache. My back is tight. It's almost time to take some pain meds. Sleep will come in one hour slots, I suppose, as I worry about the fever.

If we lived in Sweden, Britain...even Finland, Jon would not have these fevers and I would not have this pain. Jon would be sitting in his chair watching the cartoons with us, his family. I would have a nice new disc in my back, or a pump squirting in low doses of morpheine or something to kill the pain. Jessie wouldn't be borrowing $100,000 to go to college. My car would have a rear bumper or we wouldn't need a car. The roof would not be leaking. Mold would not be growing on our ceiling. If we lived in a civilized country.

I can't get high enough to kill the pain without killing myself.

How to learn to love the pain, to admire the folly, to feel no remorse? They don't teach you this in those nice meditation classes. I'm not trying to learn how to relax, I want to stop hurting. Why won't they let me stop hurting? Why do they have to hurt my son?

There is no "why". It's just the way it is, here in America, the best of all possible worlds. Tomorrow the rain may be gone, the roof may stop dripping, the back may loosen up. I may just go eat some pills, maybe double up on the pain meds. Find a way to find a way.

Tomorrow or the next I'll dose up, hop in the car, drive 100 miles to hold my son's hand and tell him I'm sorry he hurts and try to convince them to make the effort to reach him, not to maintain him, but to reach him and explain why it's so important to shove a tube up his dick and make him sick. To give him fevers and seizures and a shorter life span.

Ancient blessing: Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies.

Live to see your grandchildren, have children of your own, your children live on after you have gone. Something like that. I still have a chance to have grandchildren. I can always move the family to Sweden if they let us in. Time to take some pills and watch some cartoons.

Tonight I'm stuck in a world of pain. It doesn't make a lot of sense because I had reikei on my back this afternoon and didn't have any alcohol, no red meat. I watched an interesting bit of TV and went to bed early and woke up a couple of hours later in pain. Typical that my back would sneak up on me like this. I dug up some wildflowers this morning, so the shoveling might be the problem. The irony of this is amazing. If I do things which make me feel complete, like gardening or art, my back and arms knot up and lock up and then no pills, no herbal teas, nothing helps.

I've been told I'm too serious. I can't quite understand this. We have had our government taken over by bloodthirsty, religious zealots who think the idea of the End of Times is a justifiable goal. I have a son in a coma losing hope and running out of time. My back has crushed bones and damaged nerves and the drugs you take to help with one problem cause others. I sleep in one hour increments with my mind buzzing, my arms twitching and my dream erratic. But I'm too serious.

It's hard to think like this. I've been through drug withdrawal before and this is similar, but I haven't stopped taking any drugs recently, so where is it coming from? I thought about the rebound effect I get sometimes when I do the right things, like get therapy for my back. The muscles relax nicely and then snap back, tighter than before. I'm at war with this back of mine. I think it's winning. Lack of sleep causes pain, pain causes lack of sleep. This is where legal medical pot would be so handy. If I could grow the stuff I'd have a nice salad, saving my poor lungs and affter awhile I'd be nighty-nite. Instead I will probably be drinking hops tea some more and see if the mild narcotic will help me sleep. It's not that I can't get to sleep, but the pain wakes me up too soon to get into REM sleep.

When I was having reikei I had a vision just towards the end. I could see the wooden archway that is at the path to my garden. In front and blocking it was a seven headed monkey, like a hydra. I wonder what kind of spirit it was, maybe a messenger from trickster. Cut one head off and two more grow. Well, maybe a flame thrower would fry the bastard. What's the spiritual equivalant of a flame thrower? Peyote. Yeah. I should shove eight buttons up my butt and have a little trip. That would certainly be distracting but chances are my sweety-pie would object. Besides I haven't done that kind of thing in maybe 30 years and it would be a shame to stop my heart just to relieve a little pain.

What I need is a good massage and accupuncture. I wonder if the local accupuncturist makes late night early morning house calls? A sauna might do it but the sauna remains incomplete due to back troubles. Ah, there's the rub. Everybody who has enough skill to make the pain go away lives about 3000 miles away. I'm so tired, Uncle Albert, and I haven't done a single bloody thing all day. Except dig some wildflowers, try to help my back out and eat healthy. Strange. If I had had a half dozen beers or a few shots I'd probably be sleeping like a babe, but waking up with a migraine. Damn this body of mine, I wish we could work up a treaty of some kind.

Okay, the pain pills will kick in soon, if they are going to do anything. I'll make some more hops tea, take some more neurontin and hope for the best. That freaking mokey can piss off as far as I am concerned. Sooner or later I will pass out and maybe sleep for more than an hour. That would be great. Risa, if you want me to loosen up and lighten up come on down and use those massage skills on the tightest back you ever saw. Otherwise go out back and tell that hydratic monket to piss off. Tomorrow is a better day and I will never be hungry again. Sleepy yes, hungry, no. I have patty pan squash out the ass in my garden. Not the same as peyote up the ass, but it will have to do. If my daughter wasn't a vegetarian we'd be eating fried chipmunks. The little creeps are digging up my herb garden. I hate that. Ah well, pain and lack of sleep makes my grumpy. Maybe a good book on quantum mechanics will make me sleepy. Oh, yeah, it's not being sleepy that's the problem. I'm plenty sleepy. I just can't sleep.

A simple proposal came to me. As usual, I was weeding and meditating on the act. We've seen the genocide allusion and bigotry concept go by and thought about the idea that I was not killing, but trimming back, becaue I certainly know that all grass in interconnected and long limbed, so I was brushing aside. then I had the thought that really I was harvesting yet another growth which thru my action or inaction I had some responsibility for....well it just snowballed. Or dirtballed. Anyway, I have pretty locked onto the idea of Life as Change. that all life changes and all that changes is alive in some way even if I am ignorant of how to say HI. But I got into a talk with a fundamentalist evangelical lady who always assures me that God even loves me, the Pagan. She's cute, but she makes me think about, How could I say anything to make her understand anything of what I mean by "spirit"? So I practice speeches. And edit them in my mind while I weed. I figure the speches are changeing, ergo they are alive.

And what do living things do first off? They try to stay alive. Every living thing does things early on to stay alive, or.... they die, yeah? So everything tries to stay alive, usually by establishing some room for change, establishing "space". This often means killing other things. But it's okay, generally, if you kill "others", like so called weeds. Flowers, things that you like or make you feel good, can stay. That is pretty much a right of all living things. That said, I asked, What else is there?

If everything that changes is alive and everything changes, and certainly all things change, what's left over? IN my mind's ear I heard it as I was thinking it, probably whispered to me by Trickster. "GOD NEVER CHANGES" No, God in the Big Three is unchanging, all knowing etc. If God does not change, then God is not alive, or not living. This would make sense because the metaphor of life on earth is of non-life sustaining life, and God is said to sustain us. So God is the Great Unliving. Not the living dead, because they require human blood and you can't seem to shake them with anything but symbols, and you better believe in them symbols strongly because the strength comes from within. Then I realized I'd described Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But those date back earlier, maybe to a volcano god. Which could have been the Goddess when she was pissed. Maybe Yaweh is Momma Pissed Off. Shades of Glory.

But I digressed a bit. God as the Great Unliving is also the AllKnowing. Now, I know that gnosis is the domain of the Goddess, and gnosis is knowing, but gnosis is also understanding, the goal, the perfection. Yaweh's gnosis is imperfect so he's just allKNOWING, not GNOSIS. Now, as some thinker realizes that the creation of a God requires a quantum collapse of emense proportions, they understand that "Whenever three or more of Ye are gathered..." is more Hermetic, but Hermes was the God of messages. The point is that making a God requires a lot of people to think it up, to sustain it. If you sustain a God long enough it elevates up to a level where it is the Biggest Crab Grass on the Lawn! Or at some point, whether it was a god in waiting and a prophet delivered it to the people, or created by some prophet and sustained by the people makes not difference. You got a God out there. You brought it home, and by YOU I mean the people who sustain IT. You have to feed it, to pick up after it, teach it something, don't let it just lay around and get fat, like those Goddesses over there....

But the gods made this way are merely metaphors for the ONE, which, in a fit of self examination created the Living Universe, the one that thinks and changes. Slightly different from the Great Unliving which created it. We don't know how long the Great Unliving was about, thinking about itself until it established what it was and what it wasn't, which created duality and the illusion of time. Before two there was no time. By then the paradoxes of daughter creating mother cause a ripple effect of paradoxes and the Physical universe comes into being, the Group of Four. Four dimensions. Four directions, four elements, nice difraction pattern formed by fours and waves of light and radiation, what a blast.

I weed because it makes me feel good. I harvest to make food and to spread life, why I compost. Understanding compost is to understand entrophy. I realize that I cannot see the Great Unliving because it does not change. It can't wave, it has no fingers. Unlike me prying through the violets plucking out grass sprouts, God is reduced to sending tablets of stone down. But how could IT, the One send anything out? Couldn't, it would have to be one of the grandkids or one of the cousins. Someone with room to change and the inclination.

A people define their god by their habits, by their history, what they are willing to take on and to pas up to their God. You don't see vegetarians worshiping a meat eater very often. Sometimes they are picky eaters. Sometimes people get the idea that to make enough people think of a god a certain way you need to make them run in one direction. So they kill someone up front and the whole flock just runs to the right, then the left, tramplings can happen and it just never works out well. People who worship cattle tend to want to be in big flocks going in one direction. It's why congregations happen. Whenever three or more of ye are gathered in my Name refers to the creation of a Holy Name.

The trick with a Holy Name is that the fewer people who know it, the holier it becomes, so it becomes SACRED, like secret. It's a secret, don't tell mommy, and don't tell daddy, or uncle or whatever he calls himself...don't tell anyone, it's a secret. That just so sounds like a dirty old man about to expose himself to some little kid. The Burning Bush indeed. But there you go. That's why it's important to have esoteric knowlege, that is Hidden Knowlege. But then that's a damn secret too. And on it goes. All of Mom's brothers want to play games that don't seem "right". Like when you're asked to lay your son over a rock and slit his throat so He could drink the blood. Well, He didn't actually make the kid do anything except slit the throat of a living thing and let the God drink it's blood. Then in a few hundred years the God gets the kid anyway, because all living things die and are reborn.

Gods that are living must therefor die and be reborn. And in between Death and Life, Dark and Light, is the domain of Trickster. The God of threshold events and quantum collapses. He keeps cranking out new Truths and they still don't get the joke. He's just watching us until the ONE returns, and don't try to tell the ONE what Uncle did, because One already knows and doesn't care, because you've all been bad. You.... ate that fruit! That Bad Fruit, you thought that thought, slept with that person, worked on the wrong day, you're all bad and all your children will be bad, too and the ONE will not like you at all, ONE'll turn away from you. The ONE can't turn away, because the ONE is ONE and there is no duality so there is no question, no answer, no goal or destination, or anything living, because living is change and the ONE cannot change.

But the virtue of Trickster is that Trickster is OUTSIDE, coming from Chaos. Trickster can allow the ONE to change, or close enough for tunnel work. By holding up masks of all the faces of ONE and exciting the imagination through symbols, Trickster can empower the masks and give a form to that God. That is the example of trickster in his Creative Role as Great Mother or maybe Great Aunt, probably named Freya. But, as I say, once you've asked for one, created one and sustained one, you know they are living and so must die someday. Maybe in your lifetime and if you are devout enough, this will be a bad time, maybe the Last of Times.

I figure we'll all just go to the shelter and find one with nice eyes.

As I stepped out of the studio and onto the path toward the house, I noticed that the honeysuckle had grown or something, maybe bent over from the heavy rain, but anyway, it was in my way. I had to step a half step to the right. I took another step and thought that I should come back and trim the bush back, maybe with a chain saw and cut it all the way back so I could finish that small deck and roof I have wanted to do for decades. Then, as I often do, I thought about what I was saying from the standpoint of the object in discussion, in this case the right of a plant to live in such a way that I had to take a step to the right, instead of merely remembering where the plant was, what it had looked like the first time I passed it. No, I thought about whacking a living thing so I wouldn't have to step sideways. Why there are people who pay money to go somewhere and step sideways while some excitable person plays loud music. Just amazing.

Anyway I was thinking about this concept of feeling like I had a "space" that I had to defend, even to a point where I would kill something in that space without my permission, or something. Although there are plenty of other animals who also seem to feel that way, starting at least with that white faced hornet growing a tribe in my lawn tractor. He loves his space. So I flexed my shoulders and thought about that space. I always think of my friend when I start flexing and thinking about my "body space" because he is so aware of his most of the time. He tries a lot to be aware of himself because he almost lost himself once or twice. Anyway, of course in defining one's "self" as selft you always have to deal with and define the limits at which point you are a finer "you" than this body is, was or maybe is soon not to be. Why do I "need" so much buffer room?

I got to thinking about something I see a lot of lately, mud, and all the things living in it, in a different space. Like the earthworm living in it's tube while being themselves something of a tube, as we learned in high school biology class. I think that with biology should be a smattering of spirituality. If, for instance, I had at least listened to someone read about that great story where the mystic shows the god a line of ants and reveals that each ant had been a god at one time, well maybe disecting that worm could have been a spiritual journey. There's a segment of a show I saw once where the young medical students are being introduced to their cadavers, being told something about them and a small lecture is made about respecting the dead forms. Well, it would have been nice to have the same lecture for the worms and frogs. They all have spirits and deserve respect and there I was getting ready to set back a living form to control a space I can't control anyway.

Think about that worm space, Many of us must have dug tunnels or played in the sand so the idea of soil on arm is not a bad feeling. Now expand that sense to where you draw up your consciousness into that long, thin form down under the soil and it's all your form. That's you moving blindly about sniffing. When you find something that smells good you open your mouth and dig into it, swallowing, digesting, modifying, transfering out wastes and expelling. You leave behind an imprint from the inside of your passage. How many times do I feel that I am leaving an impact of my passage? Being an artist it's easier to leave stuff, but if I look at the stuff...

I read so many times about Egyptians saving up fingernails, hair and such so in the afterlife all your parts would stull be there or something, as if cast off parts are something you'd ned when you had transcended form? They apparently didn't think highly of the idea of transcending form. Odd, because the butterfly certainly understands it. We all deal with the idea of a agg hatching into a worm which becomes a catterpiller and that turns into a cocoon or crysalis which then splits and turns into a big winged thingy that lays eggs. Yeah, it's a great story and analogy, but if you treat it as a template and extend the metaphor or something, then we think about that honeysuckle and that space not being mine to control, I sure don't control the space that I normally think of as me very well. It hurts, and I don't want it to hurt. And it didn't used to. Like the egg thing may have hurt like hell so many times along the way as it became a winged thingy, which then did something else. It stopped flying and fell apart, becoming soil, dust, that sort of thing, scattering out into the environment. The assumed form becomes quite large that way and just as tenuous as the form I had back in 1974. It didn't hurt and it didn't last. So if I had all my body parts saved in jars, maybe I'd have some back parts that could plug in, that'd be great.

Actually, an earthworm has no backbone to hurt. Although getting stepped on has to be real tough, even underground. Great apes dent the earth. But ordinarily I bet the thing is, just keep digging and sniffing. Eventually they must from time to time dug up to a dead earthworm, maybe torn by a shovel or something. I don't know what they do when they run nose first into dead Roy, do they pause and give some thought to "It could well be me." or by eating dead Roy, shoving him into their tube allow Roy to become, for a time, them. Do they eat crying over some wormy memory? Most would say no, but that is specieism or something because we have no way of knowing, without becoming worm bait ourselves. Which most of us will do, even if the bait is deferred by way of the crematorium. Or sent to a hospital, as my dad wants to do. Bravo, dad.

I have been told that my son cannot donate his body very easily in terms of organs and all. Except as a package to a medical school where someone can learn something from that form which once I assumed was him. I'm not so sure any more, in no small part because I am not exactly sure how I became that which I do not recall advocating for. I would have liked a lot more warranty on the back thingy, but then, interestingly enough, in terms of population the beings most impacted by sudden changes like death are bacteria. Which live in me and are always trying to eat me. Like little worms or tube thingys, eating me from the inside. Or if you like merely trying to get me to become them for a time. They may see this as a form of greeting. They have to be fatalists because if I ever do answer back it often takes the form of dietary changes to elimintae most of them, another genocide to my credit. But life goes on, changeing form as life does.

We got all these tubes running in all directions causing changes of forms which could all boil down to a confusion over the difference between "Eat me!" and "Hello!"

As I type I drink water from some unknown source filled with life forms becoming me or as much of me as I can normally see. Curious criteria for what I consider "me". I mean by and large the part of me that I can't see that mutters in the dark and plans things and projects itself through time and space, well that me I can never see. So just because I can't see it doesn't mean it isn't me. And since most of the universe as I am willing to conceed exists can't be seen, then there exists such a very good potential for my being infinite that by and large this should make my back feel beter. I keep asking myself is any of this going to stop the pain in the back which for some reason I seem to having a difficulty today. With.

Maybe it's trying to say hello, like a toddler fumbling it's first words. Maybe my form is stumbling toward a greeting. Well, trust me to misunderstand something like that. We must go through our entire lives screening calls we never knew we got. Like filters on an email program we don't know what we lose. Lately gnats have been buzzing around and now and then one flies into my ear. It sounds a bit like feedback from a microphone but maybe the guy is simply apologizing for his friends bumping into me like that. Maybe he was listening to his echo.

Maybe when I sleep my consciousness seeps through into the bed like water draining out of a strainer of sushi rice. Like a "sea in a bottle" my mind sloshes back and forth. It may seem calm to those watching but to one inside it might feel sometimes like a tempest. Wow. A tempest in a teapot would still seem a tempest to a bacteria, I'll wager. On his way to becoming me.

This is from a letter I wrote to a friend, talking about how to convince the doctors where my son lives that he is responding to people. She suggests that when aides tell me stories about Jon reacting to them I should have them write down these stories to show the doctors in charge of his care....

I'll try to do this, if they have the time, but you know that these aides and/or nurses are usually talking to me as they are going from patient to patient and don't have much time to sit down and write something up. It's a good idea, I guess, but in the end what will the result be? They may fear "crossing" their superiors and risking their jobs, which could easily happen, especially if the superiors think I may use this information to get them in trouble with the health department. It'll come down to them saying they know more than the doctors do and that won't go over too well. Even if I have a 500 page report from janitors, aides and nurses saying Jon seems to respond in a coherent manner, what would be the result? They still don't have the funding for special therapies like HBOT, they still don't have enough aides for patterning, they can't give him drugs that the Medicaid people say NO to.......I'm just saying that this is not a democracy and no matter how many votes Jon gets for being "in there" ol' Doc Shroud can be perfectly within his rights to say "No, he isn't" and keep doing what he's been doing. The chief advantage might be for moving him, to convince the place I want to move him to that he is capable of being much more responsive. So in that case we are waiting for someone to get better and move out, or die and leave an open bed.....and we need Jon to be first in line on the "A" list. That's a hard one, because he's just another person waiting for a bed. ON the plus side, if the new place should ask the guys in LK if Jon is a problem patient the answer is "NO" and does the family support and advocate in a civilized manner the answer is "YES" so we have a good record to go on.
Does anyone know of a device to measure hand pressure? I remember various doctors measuring my squeezing capabilities to determine the extent of nerve damage in my back...I'm wondering if there is an objective test, like a grip with a dial. I could put it in Jon's hand and ask him to squeeze and on a good day he would squeeze and then I can record the pressure...maybe even document smaller pressures that I didn't notice. Another potential record would be measuring the electrical input to his hands. Even if the muscles don't move, if you ask for a squeeze and the brain sends signals to the hand, then he's reacting, right? These guys are going to want objective data. How much does it cost to fly a guy to Germany? I wonder..... if I can get Jon to Dr. Birbaumer's clinic in Germany, then we would have the expert using the equipment, seeing if Jon is "in there" AND in a country with universal health care! Something to think about. At least it isn't like the guy in Cuba with the stem cell therapy and nobody from America can go there because Cuba is "EVIL" damn socialists. Another thought I had...that book The Butterfly and the Diving Bell was written about the clinic where the publisher guy was discovered to be locked in, not PVS. As I recall the place became a major research center to explore this locked in stuff. Does anyone else remember that? More research for Will to do. Finally, here's a crazy idea from a crazy father..... I used to do a lot of theater stuff when I was a mace-swinging mail-wearing Viking guy. I liked to do puppets, white face mime etc. Well, there's this nice picture of Jon as a toddler looking at a marionette I had of a Scotsman. I was looking at that and suddenly had this thought of Jon as the puppet, all tied up from above. You move the ropes and Jon's legs move.... so in patterning they want the legs and such to move like he's a baby, right? Why not have a rig to hold him up vertical, move his arms and legs as if he's walking and let the feedback loop help him recall what it felt like and how it happened? Just a thought. Couldn't require any more equipment than a ceiling lift. It might take fewer aides than patterning and if you did it in front of a mirror he'd see himself move....

Hang in there Will, hopefully Jon will be at home soon.

Jon's doing alright, kiddo. Just between you and me and the several hundred others on the list, crazy Will the Shaman gets "visits" fairly often these days. I told Jon he can spirit walk over and sit inside my head and visit when I can't get down there. When it happens I can feel his body from my side, feel the trache, taste the crap in his mouth, the tube in the gut, the catheter....like a distant feeling, but it's there. And in exchange he gets to feel my hands moving, taste my lunch, help me drink a beer...8-) It has helped him stay sane, I think, because it shows him that I am working on his problem even when I'm not holding his hand. I can tell when he's feverish this way too and call down to LK to tell them to check...he's always sick when I say he is..... Jon is rational outside the body, the chemistry is not there to upset the balence. The thing is, I think sometimes he thinks he's dreaming the visit and I tell him that if he is dreaming, it's a nice dream, so he shouldn't fight it. Then again, maybe I'm dreaming as I walk around feeling like two men in one body, maybe I'm just crazy now, but if I am it's a nice crazy...well, not really nice, but it helps me deal with my little problems. How can I be too despondent over my pain when I can feel that trache, and the back pain and the cramps in the feet and legs and arms.....? In this way my faith supports me, reinforces the concept that the soul, the spirit is not bound to the body and although it can be effected by disaster, the true "self" is free of such concerns. In the end we are all ONE and this life is just another in a string of lives, like a poem made of stanzas, some of which leave the spirit flying high and others which seem forced and uncomfortable. Over all we like the poem even when we get grumpy with the poet.

Will, Jon's dad

This feeling I get when Jon visits is like the feeling you get when you are sudden aware that you are drunk or high. You feel your thoughts are not quite connected to your body and it's possible to be more objective about the pains and such you normally feel, even to the extent of ignoring them. Then there is the feeling of someone standing just behind your shoulder so that if you turn your head you will see them standing there. I relax and let Jon "in". I feel his arms in my arms, his body slowly superimposing itself on mine. I can feel the places where plastic tubes come into his body and taste the plastic of the trache in his throat. It's useful for me to know how he feels but useless in terms of being able to talk to the doctors about it. In fact, it's important that I not tell them that we do this sort of thing, because as good Christians they would think very badly of a man who thinks people can control their spirit and leave their bodies.

I'm not sure what would happen if you had a party for shamans. Like if there were a room full of people dressed in whatever they think of as "party clothes", maybe feathers in their hat, like I wear, maybe feathered cloaks like the Central American shamans like to wear. We all have sticks of some kind, all have special rocks, special bits of flotsom, maybe animal friends like old Fred the cat, or spirit friends and guides. What kind of music would a shaman party have? No doubt drums would play up big, and a bonfire, maybe a sweat lodge. What a nice idea to be somewhere I could talk to others who know about spirit walking, about distance healing. I'd like so much to be somewhere I could talk about what it is like behind the veil, how the spirits assume form, the kinds of things you have to do or not do. They wouldn't look at me funny and move away. They wouldn't suggest more drugs or counseling. They'd show off their crystals and rocks and mirrors. Talk about dead ancestors coming around, maybe introduce me to their guides. What a nice party that would be.

But shamans do not have parties and do not come together for support groups. Maybe I should start one, if I could be sure that I wouldn't be in a room with some neo-pagans talking about urban pagan myths and wiccan spells. I don't need to hear from wannabes, I would just like to listen to some serious spirit guy talking about a bit of business done some equinox by a bonfire in the desert, involving birds and snakes, turtles and foxes, huge semi-transparent figures against the sky and some friend getting a good report on their latest MRI's. No credit, no claim to fame, but somehow helping those who need it. That would be interesting.

It's a lot like going to a jail, going to see my son. My wife and I, and Jon's half-sister drive two hours down country roads in order to have some relaxing moments before entering the world of traumatic brain injury. I showed them a historical Dutch barn that had been reconstructed and we took some pictures. We looked for interesting houses in some of the litle hamlets, chased an interesting bus to take a picture of it and then discovered that it was carrying a bunch of crazy religous zealots who once tried to convert Jess. Lots of things happen before you pull into the driveway and walk thru the automatic doors at Lake Katrine.

You have to sign a book when you arrive and there are two of them at the desk. There's always some confusion because they label them strangely, so that the book that seems to be for visiting families is actually the one for more commmercial visitors. A TBI survivor is almost always there to greet you and sullen, damaged individuals stare at you from their chairs until they recognize your face from before and then they wave. It always makes me feel better somehow when I see the wave. It means their memories work, their vision works, they can control their hands and arms. They know what to do when they see someone they know. Funny, isn't it, those things we never think much about when we live in the world or normal functioning brains.


You also have to sign a book once they let you in to the vent unit, and I often can't recall which desk has the sign in book. It all serves to make you feel like you are entering a prison, which of course in a way you are, but it's mostly to protect the residents from hurting themselves or being hurt by people from outside who would take advantage of them.

Jon was not having a good day. His forehead was hot and sweaty, his lungs were rattling, the sheets were damp and his skin was pasty and broken out. Another infection. Each one can take his life and I noticed the two IV bags hanging at his bed, empty. He'd been sick for a few days, but none of the weekend staff could tell me with what or for how long he had been infected. UTI, pneumonia? Doesn't matter, they both can kill and they are both treated the same way. I've been thru this so many times but it always scares me. He looked almost as bad as when he was down in Scottsdale, but still, much better than those terible days. No bloody wounds gaping and smeared with shit. No piss stained sheets or gum smacking, unconcerned nurses. He was being taken care of.

The room mate, Charlie, was being visited by his wife and fat old dog, Skipper. Skipper likes to sneak over and give Jon a kiss and wait near his twisted hand for a stroking. They tell me Jon gets to see the dog often and between this dog and the therapy dogs Jon gets a visit every day. I wish it would be Jon's dog, but Jon's dog was taken by a friend and it seems isn't coming back. Funny how people feel okay about stealing things from a man in a coma. Even his dog. Skipper is a kindly old dog who shows me clearly that she knows Jon is sick, but reassures me that she is there for him. Jon likes to have a dog nearby and smiles his twisted litle half-smile and he struggles to breathe.

I tell Jon about how we're trying to find a facility close to home, how we're arranging to fix the leaking roof and set up his old bedroom so he can come visit. He smiles at me a bit, with a film over his eyes, but the fever seems to be breaking and his skin feels cooler. I stroke his dampened hair, wash off his face and we turn the pillow over to a dry side. HIs hands are tighter than before and haven't seen a splint in months. they may have lost them, the aide says, as she hasn't seen him wearing one in a long time. I told her that the place has thrown in the towel on Jon, given up, no longer trying. She seems uncomfortable, but doesn't bother to contradict me. It's the truth.

She tell me about how she was telling Jon some funny story about Frank Zappa's kids and how he smiled at her. She told the other nurses that Jon reacted to a story, but no one believed her. the woman with the dog tells me he responds to the dog, looking at her and smiling when he has his hand on the dog's head. No one believes her, either. They don't believe me, they don't believe the visitors, they don't believe the aides or the nurses...anyone who says Jon is responsive is dismissed as imagining things. Otherwise they have to deal with the fact that he is locked in and understands what's going on around him, and that is too depressing a concept so they dismiss the stories. To them he's just a corpse waiting for the grave, a body filling a bed until he can find his way into the ground. Somehow that's easier for them than the idea that he may be someone who requires more care, not less, who requires equipment the government won't provide, nursing they don't have enough staff for, and more stimulation than he gets. Better accept defeat than accept that nobody with the power to heal, to help, gives a damn.

I tell Jon it's time to go, to drive back thru the rain and darkness to our little soggy home and he frowns and bites his lower lip. He pouts like he did as a child and closes his eyes, refusing to look at me again. My wife, his step-mother, bends down to say goodbye and give him a kiss. He looks up at her. Not responsive means he can't understand that we're leaving, so those appropriate reactions have to be labeled as "reflex", as if sorow at being left behind is a reflex, not an honest reaction. Well, maybe it is. Everybody hears about how coma patients can laugh and look and otherwise seem so aware, when they're not. But then a smaller group has read the studies that say 43% of the people diagnosed as "vegetative" are later proven to be "locked in" and get better and sometimes even walk and speak.

What to do first? Find a facility with beds free and fill in an application to move Jon in, except none have available beds. Fill in the applications anyway. Visit places and get to know the staff, except the staff is too busy to stop and chat and I don't want to get in their way. Research, search and more research, trying not to get panicked, trying to shut out the sight of the boy sweating, wheezing, maybe dying. Take it one step at a time, except there are no steps for Jon, no clear paths to some form of better days.

He was scared last night because of the problems he had breathing. I could feel the pain from the pneumonia in his chest, feel the rattle in his lungs. I could feel how he wanted to be free, to leave that bed. Our connection doesn't usually bring me those feelings except when he's pretty sick, and then I get the "pleasure" of sharing his feelings. I mentally stroke his head, tell him I'm somehow nearby and things are getting better. I know that if I call the place and ask about his fever they will tell me it's back, but no one will be able to believe I knew because he told me. Nobody will believe that a shaman father can join his shaman son on a plane of existence closed to most people. Nobody will even want to hear that spirits can walk and sick people can leave their tattered bodies to travel around. It doesn't matter what they believe as far as I am concerned. Their faith in their science and in their drugs is unshakable and my job is not to convert people to a piritual life, my job is to make sure the people of their faith don't kill my son through their ignorance.

I'm really tired and the meds are kicking in. My pain is fading away to a dull ache and my eyes are heavy. Jon is probably waking up to his daily routine. More meds, more cursory massage, more people calling him by another's name, ignoring the signs in the room asking that they call him "JON". I have to organize my thoughts and start looking up addresses and phone numbers. Time to Google around looking for a new bed for the boy to sleep in.

Prisoners came by this morning and chopped up the plants growing in the ditch in front of the house. A week or so ago the town went through and cut down the plants along most of the roads in the area. Here's how it goes. Spring arrives and melts back all the snow. The sun comes out and warms the flesh of the Goddess, our Mother earth. She receives this warmth, this love and becomes healthy and filled with life and love. Seeds sprout, plants flourish, flowers open up. Before long the roadways are lined with day lillies, chicory, sunflowers, clover.... a riot of color and life. Then the town comes through and cuts down all the plants, leaving a swath of dried, dead plants. Ragweed grows up between the dead stalks. It grows about four inches, just the height of the mowers' blades and then make little blooms, dispersing huge amounts of pollen. The pollen gets tossed up in the wake of passing cars and everybody gets red swollen eyes and stuffy nose. So instead of streets lined in yellows, blues, reds and whites we get barren shoulders of brown and red itchy eyes. No one can explain to me why this is an improvement worthy of my tax dollars.

For those who refuse to believe that Life is change, that things change and become different than their parents, I refer you to those ragweeds and the dandelions. Ragweed grows up to the height of the blades on the mowers the town and state use to destroy the life along the roadsides. There is no reason for the plant to stop there, it's a good healthy plant growing in reasonably good soil, but if it grows higher the mowers get it and it will be injured. So it stops at four inches. This is why when you drive along the local highways you will see a faint yellow haze from all the pollen.... which, by the way, most people are allergic to. Now there's the dandelions. We brought them here from Britain as a salad plant. Rich in vitamins, easy to grow, useful in many ways: salads, cooked, dandelion wine. In the warmer climate of North America the plant jumped the garden, as do most garden plants when moved to warmer climes...or when the climate changes....Now you have fields of wonderful yellow flowers, rich tasty leaves filled with valuable minerals and vits. So we spray it all with Round-up and other noxious chemicals, making it useless to every living thing. We mow it down to create a false environment, an ethnic cleansed yard, a monoculture, vulnerable and weak. So the plant, which can grow to a couple of feet high, now produces flowers at ground level. The seeds can be ripened on cut stalks lying on the ground and scattered by the mower. We evolve these plants ourselves and spend millions a year to continue the changeover from a tall useful plant to a short, useless plant. We spend millions every year dealing with the increased pollen from our new ragweeds, in medicine and gasoline and mowers. I have many friends who spend hundreds of dollars on new lawn tractors. I have neighbors who ride a lawn tractor around in circles for hours in their little lawns, chopping weeds and flowers and herbs, medicines, food.... replacing it all with a puny, weak grass which produces a dull green yard and lots more pollen. Instead of a mix of pollen-free clover, plantains, dandelions, ground ivy we get dead brown roads and dull green lawns. This is evolution under management, like what happens in our schools.

Every great mind was a mind in isolation, free of the crowd mentality. We teach this. We show how Einstein was a poor student, unwilling to follow the school line of thought. He got a second rate job and instead of sitting with the boys talking about soccer and sex he thought about Life and the Universe. Hawking sits in his chair, isolated in his dis-ease, speaking by proxy and thinking not about soccer, sex and "Survivor"...although he might..... Edison was nearly deaf, a maverick and a loony who slept hardly at all and tried many times to make something work, without thinking about the black skin of his assistant, just about the work. Yet in our schools we teach team work. We teach children to repeat facts without questions, to rely on the knowledge of others and the facts of the moment. We teach them lies and when they find out that the lies were lies we teach them that sometimes we lie to make a point, or to prepare for a greater truth. Like teaching the long way to do a math problem rather than a quick way to solve the same problem. We memorize false facts about our history and if some poor kid should raise his hand and ask, for instance, why we teach Jefferson thought democracy was great when he wrote that it was dangerous and should be avoided because the masses were uneducated and silly. Then he screwed his slave, chatted with his wife and sold his children. The kid is sent to the office for being a mind in isolation.

What would it be like if we nurtured these minds and this kind of thinking? If the kid being teased for being weak was given extra classes and opportunities would he then not bring an assault weapon to school and murder the teasers? What if instead of young men being told to "Kill them!" as they entered the football field, what if they were taught aikido, yoga, herbalism, reikei, philosophy, debate, dialogue and compromise? When if when that young weak man was attacked by the football players he was able to twist them down onto the ground, without pain, and force them to rethink their attitudes and assumptions? What if black kids were allowed to give speeches about the founding father's support for genocide and slavery? What if instead of apologizing for past repression we took the money we spend on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and rebuilt the inner cities and trolley systems and built windplants on the corners and roofs of the big cities? What if we considered aggressive thoughts to be a kind of mental illness? If people who wanted to join the police in order to "get the bad guys" were weeded out and given therapy so they joined the "force" to mediate and assist in neighborhood disputes? What if we made sure everyone had a home and enough food to eat and then took the excess resources and healed the world?

Ethnic cleansing is in our culture and it always has been, in much the way that a gene for a disease is in so many people. Something triggers it and people die. That we so easily kill the things around us, the flowers, the herbs, the natural medicines, shows that we have been indocrinated into this form of thinking. The lone mind, in isolation, in a basement corner, typing into his blog suggesting ways to make things healthier is the aberration. Even he must think hard not to flinch when, walking down the city streets, he sees a young black man approaching. Even he must force his eyes away from the breasts of the young woman bending down to pick up her child. To think about what you do is to introduce a higher form of life into the equation, a more expanded kind of consciousness. So, when you weed or chop or kill, you think about what and who you kill. You honor their deaths and think about the life you have changed. The seeds of the dandelion ripen in the sun and fly away. Maybe they fly away because the mother plant has told them that "Here there are men with their blades and chemicals." Maybe they are flying away to a better place, with stories in their isolated minds about a time when they were cultivated and cared for and grew tall and bright in the sun.

I thought awhile back that this next election would be "fixed" like the last one. I figured that if things were hard to do one way a backup plan could be used, maybe even suspending the election due to terrorist threats. Yesterday they announced that some unspecified but credible threat had been detected that may target gatherings like conventions or even polling places. So it might not be safe to vote, ya know. Might be more prudent to stay home, to wait and see. Can't change horses in mid-stream and changing Commanders-in-Chief in the middle of a war would be insane, even dangerous. So I'm thinking we will see four more years of the same group thinking that has killed so many tens of thousands of people. The Other White Meat has chosen his running mate. I wonder, do they run, do they mate? He says we should "Stay the course" which seems to me that he has the same handlers as the Burning Bush.

Trickster loves to fool around, to teach the masses that things change and that group thinking leads to poor thinking. The Trickster is the ultimate mind in isolation, the Shaman God. In all those myths through all those centuries, the solitary mind tries to change things by extraordinary means. If it ever worked it eventually failed, because people like to think in masses, like dandelions. Eventually we learn to keep our heads down, to bloom down low and send out our seed even after our own deaths. We teach our children that things change and they must be willing to change and travel far sometimes in order to grow and prosper. Then Trickster comes through with a busload of prisoners, free thinkers and thieves and mows down all life along the way, except the deaths are not forever and Life can only be changed, so in the end the Great Trick of the Trickster is that he is helping us change and promoting Life.

An aspect of guilt has come to my attention. The spinning in circles kind of guilt that leaves you breathless but seems to accomplish little. In this aspect it is like the Dervish, whose accomplishments are more in the spiritual side than in the obvious whirling side.

It starts as a guilt over having survived. This is well documented and there's probably a 7th step to work thru it. Nevertheless, it is insidious and pervasive. IN fact you are often told by some well meaning person that "You mustn't feel guilty." For someone who always says "Screw the establishment" this is a red flag to guilt. But it doesn't hold water because you haven't survived any more than your son has survived, or for that matter any one still alive at this time has actually survived in that we all have "Moved on". You have to, because you are alive and "Alive" is change.

So you have to have survived in some form.

There is the Superman guilt over not being a Superman who can somehow make things right. I imagine that Jehovah feels this sometimes. But if you feel that you should be doing more, you tend to do less because less is more. That is to say, that Less is more, somewhere else. See, unless someone spends way too much time thinking, which I would have to concede is all pretty much my son can do.... So if at some point they can unscramble Jon's brains and bring him to some point we'd all recognize, it wouldn't work, because I am not the father he last saw and spoke with any more than he is the same son I spoke to last. So we both have moved on, like a scene fade in a Swedish movie. It's not the same as "Goodbye". But it is a bit of that whenever you part company with someone you love, now...Each day they behead someone or blow someplace up. Someone could decided that brain injured individuals are God's Blight and go behead them all. Yes, it could happen. So each "goodbye" might be, yes, a "GOODBYE".

There's suddenly an awareness that what we leave behind for some future archeologist, some child of my children perhaps, is "what" we were. A bit of pottery might hold some imprint decipherable in some future technology, the sound of the potter having a conversation with people in the room. You just never know what may be a fewmet to some might be a revelation to some other. Best not to start with shit, unless it be compost.

You want the house to be nice, so you work at it. You want money to somehow be in some bank account, so you arrange for it to be there. But so rare the opportunity to leave behind a voice. And then there's the mute. Or the guy with the hole in his throat. A man with a vocalizer spoke to me at the gas station and it took three repeats to make me understand what he was saying and answer intelligibly. What if the ONE uses a vocalizer? It might take so many misunderstandings before the POINT is made. Lots of stuff could happen that didn't make much sense, because as we know, God Said the Word, and the Word was Creation... or some such thing.

So if you take the time to sit and Document Yourself for your future child, perhaps child of your child....to help understand some other Clue you might leave behind... We might be a series of generations of mumblers, leaving behind fragments of expressions trying to explain to a toddler of some 50 years why the earth rocks and why men have knees. The important stuff. By then you are losing the ability to remember the important stuff yourself. IT just starts to remind you of What Dreams May Come and you get to play all the parts. Good for a Movie but kinda sucky for Living Thru.

I threw a loaf of bread out to the chickens today. Jalapeno Cheddar with some mold. I hope the mold isn't psychaelic because for a chicken the world is a bright and colorful place. They focus on just everything and having a hot pepper in your craw could just "bend your mind, man" as a Rhode Island Red might cluck on psilocybin.

In all my childhood dreams I never would have thought of the irony of looking up at the lawn, as I do now. My parents lived in a basement apartment briefly when I was born, so then too I looked up at a lawn. I used to dig holes in the back yard and join them up with tunnels. My dad was upset that I didn't shore them up but I had plans to and they always got shut down before could get the lumber. As a metaphor for life, life proves a difficult metaphor. That's why we tend to use myth. If life is proving difficult to understand, then myth is the perfect way to make it understandable, as long as one understands there is a difference and moves to live life and understand myth.

Wondering about the gods. I find myself thinking a lot about the gods these days. Especially I think about Isis and Osiris and the story of her traveling to reunite herself with her husband/son and restore things to a balance. There are a lot of variations of this story but I think that there is a need to understand a few things about myths. Like Joe Campbell, I see myths not as ancient stories, but as ongoing images which guide us in our lives. Thus, Isis and Osiris easily slides into the masks of Mary and Jesus, although I think originally the story was more like Mary Magdalene and Joshua bin Joseph. Nevertheless the female buries the male and he emerges healed and together they rule the world.

Knowing a few things is sometimes enough.

Let's work on a scattering of pieces of the story and names may change and faces may change but it's the best that can be done in this life. Trickster is in charge as we speak. Seth, Odin-Loki, Trickster, is causing us to wage war...sure.... but how are we waging war in the first place? Not why, for we are told there is no why. That might mean we should toss "Y" out of the alphabet to understand that particular puzzle-code, or maybe just the same thing our father says to us the 40th time we ask "Why?" and He responds with "Because I say so." or as when Moses asked too many questions, "I am that I am". Always a question answered with a puzzle, another mark of the Trickster. This is a good clue that He is in charge and has been for awhile, at least as long as the ancient Jews.

Now, in the Isis story she finds his parts and brings them together. Whose parts? Her husband-son. How is he both husband and son? Because She is the mother-wife, the one who gave birth to the son and thru him gave birth to the others. The symbol that Anhkaten used for his One-god was a solar orb with many hands reaching down with gifts. The normal European view is that it is a solar orb reaching down with gifts, but if the symbol is of a greater truth the symbol would not be literal, but a guide for the mind to meditate upon, like the mandala. So the big round yellow-gold thing can be a source of pure energy, the ONE from which all other things come down. I have seen the image of shafts of light descending thru the clouds and thought how we are like that. Our souls are but parts of a single soul which passes into many manifestations to create infinite knowledge and life. Thus we have a neutral being split initially into two parts, called male and female, form and force, Isis and Osiris. Each half begets halves, usually described as opposites, but perhaps should be thought of as ends of a single piece, as in the alpha and omega are ends of the whole. Thus the First Mother can be expressed and understood by seeing the more male part of her personality, the mask she wears in her butch mode, and the more feminine part, the mask she wears when she is light and dancing and sexy. The First Father, Binah, is seen in two modes, his female caring, giving side...the farmer...and the masculine side maybe slaughtering the sheep or humping the mother.

Splitting hairs like this, like the view in the cyclotron window, we see the tree of life take form.

Now the Evil Uncle Seth kills the Father. Taking the form of the First Father is a sign of the Trickster, like Loki taking on the form of the Mare, which is a symbol of the Great Mother, older than Freya. Like Thor taking on the form of the Bride to retrieve his hammer. If the hammer is seen as a symbol of destructive force we get one meaning, but if we see the hammer as a phallus we get another. He dresses as a woman to get his mojo back. And Trickster helps.

Why? There is no Why, only how.

So inverse some of the traditional myths we are taught, because Trickster is in charge now and he always will reverse the clues. Thus the God of Life and Light, Great Yahweh, becomes the God of the Atom Bomb. America, land of the Free, becomes a fascist state in order to promote democracy. Each inversion is a sign of the Trickster being in charge. Gay marriages are signs of devotion and the rule of law. Two people love one another and wish to express that two have become one, like the lightning going back up the Tree, but that will be a union which will bring back the One and then Trickster will not be in charge...which in the BIG PICTURE, is exactly what He wants. This is why the One takes on the mask of the Trickster. Well, not why, but how. There is no why.

The father tells the son a story of monsters, to frighten and make the son stay in bed while the father humps the mother. But the son wants to be strong, like the father, not understanding the need for the humping and he leaves the bed and marches into the bedroom where he hears the moans and struggles and thinks to kill the monster. He kills, instead, the father. Now he is the father, the man of the house and he gets to hump the mother. IN the realm of the gods the son can hump the mother while the mother seeks to restore the father. Because the gods don't die, they simply put on another mask. The father wears the son mask to further excite the mother so the sex is good. And sex is about union, about achieving the ONE, the climax, the top of the Tree. Cross dressing gods look down on cross dressing humans and the Trickster stirs them up with unending wars and confusion. He scatters the Word with Bibles and Korans and Babylon becomes the primary motif of the 21st century. That's why we are in Iraq. But there is no why, only how. You don't ask why you want to hump, only how do you get some.

The scattered pieces of the Father can correspond to the scattered tribes of Israel, but only insofar as the story of the scattered tribes is the story of the scattered pieces of Osiris. The idea being to bring together the pieces, to connect the dots, a phrase we hear a lot these days. The image will appear time and again, the codes will be broken, the puzzles will come together and the Father will be rejoined. He gets to hump the Mother again, the Earth is renewed and things grow again. The U.N. can be a symbol of the union of the tribes, so the Trickster, in the form of the American President, seeks to bring it down. The Father who isn't, because the Bush was not elected but selected. He burns with a inner fire, says he is Born Again, like Osiris was born again and Christ was born again, but his answers are as unsatisfying as "I am that I am". What the fuck does that mean? Just that He exists. The rest of the Answer is in the scattered pieces of the puzzle.

Truth is a lie, in the words of the Trickster, because the Trickster is a Lie. He is the Uncle, the brother of the father, and he wants to hump the mother so he assumes the Mask of the Father. He sends the Son out on a mission, which will save the people and bring great power to the Son. The Son will then, in all likelihood, get to hump the Mother. Go
get the Arrows of the Sun and return to become the leader of the tribe. The arrows of the sun are the arms of the Aten, the scattered tribes of Israel, the pieces of the puzzle. And it gets the kid out of the house while the uncle humps the mother.

Meanwhile the mother searches for the pieces of the puzzle, the parts of the Father. Thus we get pagans suddenly springing up, helping eco-warriors and praying by the full moon, empowering the Mother and bringing from the Lies in the Books words of truth. Mary at the Tomb was Mary Magdalene, Priestess and representative of the Mother. Presumably Jesus was humping Mary in symbolic, if not physical, form. The Trickster, wearing the Mask of the Judas, the Goat, betrays with a kiss and the Christ is reborn and the body is scattered. We get little wooden boxes with the toe of a saint and bits of glass with a piece of the cross soaked in Blood of the Lamb. I suppose Judas wanted to hump Mary as well.

Hamlet wondered if he should Be or Not, as the Father wondered if he should Be or Not. The "Not" in question cannot be a not as in not here, because nothing can be destroyed, only changed, or disguised, as in wearing a mask. So is the "not" a "knot", another symbol of the Great Mother? The women in pre-tech tribes taught the men to weave nets or webs and it got them out of the house while the women made pots from clay, the flesh of the Earth. In secret wombs of earth they fed in flesh of the trees and added the force of the sun in the form of fire and created that which was new, but not new, useful for holding and hiding. And the men came back with nets and bloody flesh and the women took honey and held it in the pots for a moon of time to create a drink which made the men both strong and weak, clever and silly, sexy and sleepy. Men, drunk and aroused, wanted to both hump and hide, to climb back into the womb. And in time they did, buried with flowers and spears and nets, taken back to change and emerge as new men. Life was Good. No whys but how. Not wise, but whole. Mother-sister-brother-father-lovers became as One, became One and the circle was perfect.

Trickster exists in imbalance, in movement. Trickster is the force of change, therefore of Life, for Life is Change. The perfect circle excludes Trickster and he breaks out, and you get a moron in the White House raining fire onto the children of Babylon, in the Name of a God who preached that even to protect your own life you must not strike out, better to die on the cross and return to the Mother than kill your brother. Thus the crime of Cain could be atoned for. But the followers of Trickster wrote the Book and the Tower of Babylon was burned and toppled and the People scattered. Not Why but How.

The Serpent was probably the Uncle, the Trickster in a different form. He told the truth to Eve, the first Mother. The Father did not destroy the Garden, but excluded the first family. How? By placing an angel with a fiery sword at the gate. Would the angel have used the sword on Adam and Eve, taken their life if they tried to come back into the garden? Would murder be the tool of redemption? Say they turned around and refused to leave. Would the sword have struck them down, spilled blood on the Earth and lost the first People? Odd that this is not the story, that taking their knowledge of Good and Evil they did not confront their Father and asked "Why" did you lie to us? Why did you say we would die when that fruit brought knowledge, gnosis, not death? But there is no Why, only How.

How did the Father deceive the Pair? With Words. Words which are not Truth are marks of the Trickster. Thus the first "Father" in the Garden was the Trickster, not the Father at all. Chances are the Father was meditating on something arcane and wonderful, like weaving nets or naming plants. The Uncle, the Trickster, the part of the Male which was extreme and out of balance, wanted to climb that Tree of Life, the Great Mother, to hump the Wife, and drove the kids out of the room, the garden with a phony sword and a quest to multiply, suffer, die, conquer, goof off, get into the White House and generally stay out of the way.

Hmmmm.

And then the question becomes "What?" What to do with this knowledge, this gnosis? I suspect we need to tear off the mask of the Trickster, reveal him for our Uncle, not our Father. We need to go into the Garden, to replenish the earth, to honor the Mother, to hump Her sweetly and help her find the parts of the father so Osiris can tell Seth to piss off. As I understand it, it has something to do with making the Child immortal, or at least better than before, to follow the sweet smell of the Tree and to ask for, not take the Tree. The Father will be changed, but the Family will be made whole and the Garden will be ours again. Next time we should not ask Why, but Who? as in Who are You to tell us what to do? I suggest we check with the Mother when the Father tells us something that sounds suspect, especially if it involves killing our brothers and sisters.

A week ago a doctor and the director of the brain-computer interface project went to see Jon. I was hoping he would have a good day, that the dogs would be there and Jon would have his hand on the dogs, watching them and getting excited. I hoped that when they called his name he would turn his head and look at them. He had a bad day. He didn't acknowlege them at all. Now they aren't sure what to do. She says she is not really very good at doing what the doctor in Germany does, "coma detection". It's when they run a bunch of tests to see if the person is responding, but unable to move. They can track the brain waves and see appropriate waves when certain stimulas are given. She wants me to come down with her someday when I can, to see what he will do with me.

I'm putting siding on the house, staining it grey and trying to make a 1940's ranch look like a contemporary. I had them put in a back door, one that opens into Jon's old room. It's a small room but now, with a ramp, Jon could come home and see his posters on the wall and the view from the window would be one he knows. He can't come home until the trache is removed. I can't push a plastic tube down his lungs and suction up the liquids which build up there. I know a woman who does it to her mother and she says she cries while she does it. I think I would just lock up, freeze in place. I don't think I could get my arms and hands to do that thing. I know it's a good thing, like shots of insulin to a diabetic, but I have my limits.

The vertebrae in my back have bony spurs on them and inflamed tissue around there. Some of my discs protrude, banging into the spinal nerve and causing shooting pains down my leg like a nail gun has ben fired into my thigh. It tingles all the time, which is odd because the thigh has become otherwise pretty numb, like a sheet of leather has been grafted onto it. But it stings, burns and tingles under that leather. I have just the south side of the house to do now, but that's one of the sides with a peak, so the top it about 20 feet up. I need to rent scaffolding so I can get up there and not be clinging to a ladder with some boards attached. I did that on the north side. Today I moved a ladder without looking and a hammer fell from the top and hit my head. Wheneever I get hit on the head these days I immediately see the empty bed in Jon's room. I think about me in a wheelchair next to Jon, learning to move my fingers again. A simple bump on the head can do that. I've met people who fell from ladders, or tripped on a sidewalk. I don't want to lose the few things I do well, like my sculpture, my writing, even my hugs,

I'm on the same drug that Jon is on. Mine controls most of the sciatic pain, Jon's controls his seizures. It also makes you a bit sleepy and damages your memory. I forget a lot of things, like going to the store and forgeting the one thing I went in to get and coming back with half a dozen things we already have. We have a lot of paper towels now, anyway.

This morning we missed the bus for my wife to go to work. She wasn't happy with the outfit she had on so we went back to the house to change and I would drive her down to work. It's a 2 hour drive there and back again so I was anticipating the amount of pain I would be in by the time I got home. As we pulled into the driveway we both saw them at the same time. Two beautiful young does were in the back yard, standing butt to butt in exactly the same pose, like bookends. Perfect twins. We stared at one another in silence, then they bolted and ran off to the slope where we have apple trees and a small pool of water. My sweetheart loves to see deer. One year one was muching apples a few feet from our bedroom window and we could hear her chewing!

So, despite the bumped head and acheing back and stained fingers, and despite being frantic to get to work on time, the Goddess Mother let us see her daughters and so we are blessed. Things are good, work is being done, my boy is still alive and healing, my daughter is still beautiful and smart. I have a beautiful wife and a cute little house, mostly. I have a studio and kilns and under the apple tree as I write I expect you could hear the soft movements of the deer under the moon and stars, doing what they do while I do what I do.

There is time enough for everything to happen if we can remember to wait for it.

In two days the people from the Brain-Computer Interface project will drive down to see Jon, to see what kind of shape he's in and if they think just offhand if maybe he's "locked-in" or just dead in the water. They may end up with him wired up to a machine that will detect electrical waves from various parts of the brain, parts that reference things like arms and legs, but also memories and vision. As they prod and stimulate and ask him questions, they hope to be able to figure out if he hears and recognizes, sees and understands. They also will try to develop some idea if his mind can stay on the subject long enough for him to do something, even if only in his imagination.

This is one of those projects which has so little potential to create profit that it would be cancelled in the blink of an eye if funds got short. This is one of those projects which could prove certain people in powerful positions wrong in such a dynamic manner that lawyers could be brought in and suits could be filed. This is one of those projects that could enable a silent mind to speak up, by blinking a light or moving a cursor. Like Helen Keller having her palm scribbled on, Jon could find himself being prodded in his dream.

Last week Jon turned his head to look at his sister. He focused on my face as I spoke to him and when I stopped, he looked at the ceiling. A dog trainer with three Australian Shepherds took Jon's hand and stroked the head of one dog. Jon's eyes went wildly from side to side, either trying to find the animal or to control his excitement. Then he caught the dog with his vision and stared as the owner moved his hand along the head of the dog. Jon remembered Wishes, his silly lab now being held in Arizona by a sometime friend. He remembered the summer in Alaska with a buddy and his dog, living in the van and watching the sunsets, looking for work, hiking in the woods.

Jon remembered and when I told him I would try harder to find a replacement for Wishes, he looked as if he didn't really believe me, but towards the end he looked as if he might just try. Now I have to figure out if a puppy would be good for him, sitting on his lap, chewing on his fingers, barking at the wrong time, but being lovable and piss-silly. Or would a mature, trained dog like one of these three be better? A dog that wouldn't jump up on his lap, pulling out the feeding tube, licking an unprotected trache site.

We need a dog that could sit in the car for two hours, waiting to see the man in the bed. Jon needs a dog that would make him want to lift his head, to focus his vision, to go out into the sun and toss sticks with his bent hands. They've given up trying to find the hand splints to correct the twisted fingers. They've given up trying to tell me that Jon is going to rise up some day and learn to use a walker. But has Jon given up? The machine might tell us.

If his electrodes carry the right signals at the right time, even if Jon is staring at the ceiling, the doctors may be able to tell me that Jon knows I am there, maybe even probably even knows who I am.

In a box in the past, a stainless steel box on legs with wheels I held a tiny hand and said "Hello, Jon, I'm your father, and I will be taking care of you in this life." In a chair in the present, a chair with wheels, I hold a twisted hand and say, "Jon, this is your father and I'm trying to take care of you."

My father always told me I was worthless as tits on a boar hog. My sister once told me I had ruined Jon's life and should do the world a favor and put a bullet thru my brain. A wife once told me that living with me was Hell. An employer once told me, as I sat in a drug fogged haze of pain and tension, that I was just not trying. With all these assets, with all this encouragement, I am facing off against the medical system, against people with college degrees and years of experience, and I am trying to reach out to my boy and give him a lifeline to the world.

I've already said my goodbyes to Jon, years ago when I left the ICU and those terrible beeping boxes and pumping machines filled with his breath. I am trying to say "Hello again." If this new box should, like Pandora's treasure, be opened and reveal demons and ghosts and recriminations and guilt, I have some faith that at the bottom still is hope.
I'm a gardener. I plant seeds and water and guard and encourage. In the end I sometimes am nurtured in return. I AM trying to be worthy, and as I guide my boy back from Hell, I remember the instructions to never look back.

Today I find myself with the control over the life of another. I could take this life or not, free the beast or not.... lots of things to do or not. A skunk might have been chewing on my beans and sunflowers... hard to say, but someone did, maybe a skunk, maybe a woodchuck, but the skunk in the cage was the one that I caught. And now I could walk it down to the stream and lower the cage into the water, slowly, slowly...asking questions it doesn't understand while it tries to figure out how to get out, how to run back to it's home and even maybe it's children. I don't even know if this animal is a female or male. And I don't care. My garden was violated and some one must pay. Tonight the trap goes back out, empty and waiting and maybe tomorrow some other beast will wait in fear for the appearance of the Great Ape and destiny.

Our boys and girls in Iraq had a similar problem and did rather badly with it. I fear the grade at the top of their papers must read "F".

The analogy of the Garden is found throughout history....long before the Jews and their Testaments and Genesis and Moses. In later years the Garden is also an analogy to the Body and our Spirit is caught in the cage of our Body, with God the Gardener having control of us, asking questions we cannot understand, sometimes lowering us into the Stream of Time while we, panicked, try to claw our way out. Sometimes all we did was Believe in Truth as we saw it. The fruit, the bait was there and we took it as we always do, unaware that this fruit was not to be touched. So we find ourselves in a cage not of our making, waiting our fate.

In it's own world the skunk is powerful and yet peaceful, attacking only when pressed... no pre-emptive strikes in the Real World, just animals in the Stream of Time, scratching at the walls of the Cage, trying to understand why that blob of peanut butter...such a rare find...so out in the open....was wrong to eat.

The skunk is not a powerful beast per se, but it hides a secret, a power so great that it can blind and make the strongest beasts run, screaming into the waters. The skunk warns and stamps and pleads in a way for the confrontation not to occur, but the attacker will not listen and so the weapon is unleashed and even the plants nearby will die and for some time after the area is unclean and dangerous. This is it's fate and now I hold it's life in my hands. I cannot see very well in the dark, and wandering in my garden in the moonlight I have held out my hand to the skunk, thinking it was a cat, risking my eyes and body. This is not acceptable in my mind and in my eyes and so the trap was put out and the Garden will be cleansed.

I have a white cloth from the days of my daughter's crib. It served as a sheet and today I will drape the trap in white and remove it to a far away place where skunks run free and peanut putter is unknown. Maybe the skunk will try to explain the trap, the white cloth and the journey in the dark, and maybe the others will not understand. I wonder about it, I try to explain to others, but they will not understand, they cannot see the analogy. Like walking on water or feeding with a loaf of bread those many people on the mount, they cannot and will not understand. Mistakes may be made and people may be plunged into the waters, screaming and afraid, but not because I told them to. I never said kill the children for the crimes of the father. I never said hate those who make mistakes or who cannot understand the words I spoke so long ago. Lifetimes pass and summers burn and winters freeze and another skunk pushes through the weeds and berries, aware of those which feed and those which hurt. It smells and feels food ahead and wanders where it shouldn't and another foolish beast is caught and carried away.

You never hear of the First Parents weeding in the Garden, just wandering, naming and eating, right and wrong. The cage they are caught in is the Truth and their bodies are the reason they were trapped in their nakedness, but in Truth, all they learned was that their Father was not the First, that the Fruit was not poison and that Father was to be feared. They were not ashamed of their nakedness, because all the animals in the garden were naked. They were ashamed of their foolishness at believing a lie. I think if they had not been cast out they would have left sooner or later, because their Father had lied to them and then they knew that their Father could not be trusted, but had tricked them into a trap not of their making, but a trap which condemned them to a fate.

You can't go back again, but you can find another place to go. When the cage is opened and the new land is revealed, you can go, free, and tell the others. Tell them all that the Garden is closed to them forever, and the peanut butter of Truth is not for them. I say this now knowing that others will, in truth, follow the wrong path. They will partake of the forbidden and will be cast out of the garden and perhaps children will wail in some dark hole, waiting for the parent that will never return. By my hands have I done this, and my heart is heavy as I do this, but the fruit of the garden is for me and mine, and not the beasts.

Now the garden is dense with plants. I'm choosing and picking and plucking out weeds, herbs and so forth. I transplant the ones I know have something good for me, sometimes I tolerate a weed that simply looks nice. I noticed that some of the nice looking young weeds turn into gangly, awkward looking things that have hooks or needles or foul smelling blooms. Some plants like valerian have terrible smelling roots but beautiful flowers that fill the air around them with perfume. The roots are what kill the pain and since they can come up from root parts if you are careful when you harvest them you can propagate while harvesting.

I was thinking about God as gardener. The first book of the Old Testament deals with God as Gardener. The two first sons of Adam and Eve were hunter and gardener. Given the choice of sacrificial fruit or sacrificial animal, guess which one Trickster took? Curious how many times old Trickster took the opportunity to drink blood. But as a gardener Yahweh is interesting. He tills under whole cities to clear room for his Chosen Ones. He burns, plagues, and floods, and when that doesn't work he sends in the troops. Always choosing the slain, choosing the ones who will grow and worship Him. He feeds on worship the way I feed on radishes.

Sometimes you take a nice young tree, like Lot. You cut off some branches, bend the ones you left and end up with a pretty shaped tree against the wall. And during the whole process Lot insists he doesn't mind. Doesn't mind losing his wife and kids, doesn't mind being given others. As long as the roots are not cut in the garden everything will grow and prosper. Fat chance.

When it rains and when the sun shines the garden grows like crazy, as if growing were the one thing you think about. Putting out shoots, putting out seeds, making new versions of yourself. Some plants grab at God as He walks thru the garden, reminding Him of promises, of encroaching weeds....those of other faiths. The Motherwort bush is a fine weed with pretty white flowers and dainty leaves. It's value for women is known throughout...hence the name. Lactating women find it valuable to maintain the flow of sustenance to their young ones. Yet the gardeners pull it out and throw it away, preferring useless grass in vast expanses. Flat featureless planes of green is the choice of so many. All the same mindset, all the same patterns. God on His John Deere making sure nobody gets ahead of anybody else.

Trickster put on his Son mask and went down into the Garden. He pretended to die, to heal, to forgive. Then when the play was over and all the plants were waving in happy unison, he left. The plants grew willy nilly and everywhere, spreading the word, spreading the roots. Then He came and weeded and chopped....the Crusades, the Red Plague, the Vatican....WW1 (war to end war) or (end to end war) I always forget which is which.

Nixon was born again, always praying. The two Bushes from which we receive the Holy Word are both born again. Both weeding and plucking, weeding and plowing under all those who do not like green lawns and John Deere tractors. I think maybe they need to be born a couple more times, just to be sure. Maybe as a Pagan following the Goddess Way, maybe as Jains with bell-hung sticks to warn off the bugs and mice. See Jain run, see Jain run for President. See Dick fall to his knees praying for the Viet Nam War to go away. See Spot, see Spot run, see Spot run not blot. Running like a dog let loose, like Cerebus barking and guarding the garden, running off those who will not mow.

It's June, time of the Solstice, bonfires burning in the night to welcome the middle of summer, the waning of the daylight. The door is opening to winter, but in the meantime I am out in the garden, sowing, not mowing. Planting, not stamping. My battle against the weeds is more of a forced relocation than a pogrom or an ethnic cleansing. She watches me move around, my Mother of the Weeds. She gives me rain when I need it, rain when the plants need it. When me aches from bending and shoveling She gives me valerian with it's pretty pink flowers and soft smells of summer. I sigh and close my eyes and send the sights and smells thru some cosmic connection to my son in his bed, to my friends around the world. I hope the smell of the garden will drown out the smells of the gunpowder and blood which wafts around the ruins of the First Garden, the one Adam and Eve were thrown out of.