Sometimes I feel Jon within me as I work and deal with things here. I can feel him as strongly as if he were sitting next to me...how you sense a person's density or warmth..... He never was very interested in the yard or the garden, always working on his van or his carvings. Sometimes he'd go out back and play with Wishes his silly chocolate lab. But when he's with me in the garden I tell him what I'm doing, why this plant, what kinds of things you need to do....the way he'd explain what he was doing with a carburetor.....I tell how you could weed from a wheelchair, or while using crutches. I remind him how I drove a stick shift with a broken arm in a sling.

I try to let him inside my arms and hands so he can feel strong hands again, untwisted by contractures. I pay attention to bird songs and the hot sun on my back so while he sits in his wheelchair staring at the ceiling, he might be seeing me watch a blue jay and a cardinal quarrel over some seed. While I weed I tell him some plants just are too aggressive to be allowed in the garden and some plants are just in the wrong place and need to be moved. Recently I realized that I have forgotten to allow in my meditations that the plants feel it when I tear their roots...Jon seems upset when I kill a plant so I have been trying to move them instead. We have a lot of white clumped violets in the walkway so I have to find a good bed for them where they won't get walked on. It's odd but when Jon first came to me and I let him in, I suddenly could feel a trache in my throat, the taste of the plastic filled my mouth and I could hear the hissing air. I decided that if feeling my son's pain was a price for letting him out for a walk in the sun, then I would take the pain any time he wants to come visit.

Jon comes, I think, around the time he's in coma stim, when they put on that loud movie and do random things to his body. I think that all that sensory stimulation is maybe misdirected, at least in his case. I think he needs somehow to be allowed to make some choices, so lately when I think he's in there I ask him what he wants to do. Sometimes I drive somewhere and he gets scared when pickups go by, I can feel him tighten up and I get old memories of accidents I've been in. It's a funny experience because he and I both have had about the same number of accidents and even when they had to cut me out of my car, I only broke a couple of vertebrae and walked out of the hospital about two weeks later. I've always had what they call "fey luck" I have good luck because I need it, whereas poor Jon had bad luck and didn't deserve it.

I hope my poor boy doesn't die before I do, because I may be the only way he can take a walk in the garden. I don't "know" if it's true, but I feel that it is and that makes some things easier for me. I just hope it makes some things, a lot of things, easier for Jon.

Maybe it's the meds, maybe it's the pain that still gets thru..... I just talked to the nurse taking care of Jon today. She told me that his trache had popped out and they had to put it back in. So I asked her why they put it back in and she told me the story about how important it is that they can get him unplugged if some mucus gets in the wrong place. See, I'm talking to a Christian and they don't think like us...us pagans...From my viewpoint nothing is outside the grasp of the Goddess, the Creator. Jon's trache popped out because he wants it out of there! When they suction him, when they shove a tube into his lungs, tearing flesh and sucking up liquids...it hurts like hell. His hands go up to his throat and his eyes get big and red and he hurts so bad..... but if the fluids don't get out of there they can cause pneumonia so the doctors want a short clear passage to the liquids so they can save him.

What are they saving him for? What is he coming back to? Twisted feet, twisted hands, broken thinking, loss of control, or memory....all this they want him to have until he dies....which will be fairly soon according to the statistics. Ten years tops.

I'm not saying kill him...hell no. But if they take the trache out he will see himself as not being attached to a hissing hose, not half plastic and half flesh. They will show him progress in his condition, something to build on. Without something to build on, what reason does he have to fight? Why should he want to come back to those hands, those feet, that fate? No, if we can't give him something that will make he think there is something waiting for him besides a wheelchair and tubes shoved down his throat...he's not coming back.

Pagans believe that this life is an eyeblink, that we go on and we live forever, because we are part of the Creator, part of the goddess. This life is short and should be sweet. We believe that someone like Jon can make choices on some level and those choices can impact on this life. He wants the trache out....I know because I've seen him move his hands to it, looking sad and upset. I KNOW how my son looks and thinks and feels....I am, after all, the person who helped bring him into this world. I am the person who walked with him at 3 in the morning when he was sick and crying. I'm the guy who taught him jokes and entertained him with puppets and noisey toys. He is a part of me.

I think Jon wants to try to make a go of it and the first thing we can do to make it easier for him is unplug him from that damn tube. He is breathing on his own, he coughs up crap, he swallows on his own.....he only needs help when he fails, and what if that time is the time he has chosen to go? Why should we pull him back if we pull him back only to a broken body, a damaged mind and no future? I would rather set him free to be reborn. He's done his time. But I sure as hell am not about to suggest that he be killed. Quite the opposite. I suggest we show faith in Jon and the Creator and take the trache out and let Jon try to breath and talk and grow stronger. I don't think he's going to get better if they keep shoving that tube down his lungs. If he doesn't see something good on the horizon, he's just going to hunker down, dream a little dream...maybe some spirit walking....but he won't try to recover anything if he thinks it's going to be what it is now.

I'm going to try very hard to get him into a nearby long term place so he will see that we are still trying. He will see that life can change and for the better.

Right now the car is in the shop, my back is waiting for the MRIs to tell someone why I hurt so much so much of the time. I can't go visit Jon and if i do I will have to dose up so much to kill the pain that I am risking everything for the visit. Who will care for Jon if I fall asleep at the wheel driving down to see him?

I want to be well, I want my boy somewhere close. I want the pain to stop.

Sometimes I wake up with an idea that won't go away. Today I woke up thinking about Herakles.

The first Labor of Herakles was the killing of the Lion of Nemea. There is a lot of stuff on the web about the Lion, about it's heritage and size and danger, but not a lot of speculation as to the source of the story. There is one page which says that all the myths are related to geographical elements, like the Goddess in the Moon. A quick look at those pages would make you slowly back away from the author with a fixed sick smile on your face. The man had some very interesting way of looking at patterns in the earth.

One thing that struck me about Nemea was the fact that much of what remains of the place that existed around the time of Herakles is associated with the Games. They seem to have been very important and like the modern Olympics many buildings, hotels and baths were constructed for them. So we have a stadium and tracks and such. Herakles was a massive man, strong and willful and generally considered to be a really nice guy, unlike his Roman counterpart Hercules, who was a violent drunk.

Many blues artists take names from previous or even contemporary artists so that when following their career one often comes into some confusion about which one the story is about. Voodoo queen Marie Levau seems to have lived an extraordinary time unless you understand that her name and legend were taken on by another woman even before she died. So Herakles is immortal in some ways because his legend lives on in the actions and deeds of others.

What the hell am I talking about? If we understand that everything has a source and that source can be both external and internal, we can start to see why a certain thing seems to be "special". Themes, archetypes, icons..... These are immortal in much the way Herakles and Marie Levau. They live on because we continue to give them life. They are living because they change, they take on new substance and discard unused substance. This form of life is acknowleged in the ancient times by bestowing Godhood on what had been a mortal.

Working backwards one can retrace certain steps and determine when or where a god became immortal, and perhaps, who that god was. Modern mythologists are quick to pronounce that Odin and crew were real people in a real migration into northern Europe, clashing with native tribes and then merging with the population. Individually we can see our life changing and evolving but it is difficult to peel the accumulated artifacts of a person and the core person.

Getting back to Herakles. Scraping off the Hercules parts we are left with an incredible strong person who risked his life to do certain things for the benefit of the people. When he killed the Lion of Nemea he was saving a nation really, or at least a good sized town. But who was the Lion? Why do I say "who"? Because the Lion became immortal, as did the various other monsters Herakles dealt with.

Years ago my daughter was watching Casablanca and Peter Lorie was huffing thru his lines, "Rick, Rick! You've got to save me!" and she asked "Why does that guy say his lines like a cartoon?" I asked her what she meant and she explained that he was saying his lines like that mad scientist in the cartoons, and I tried to explain that Peter Lorie was the source of those cartoons, but she found it very hard to see the chronology and insisted that he must have picked up his mannerisms from some early cartoon, because that character was so ubiquitous. And what if, in his youth perhaps, Peter Lorie has seen a play wherein some character who maybe even resembled him, said his lines with that whiney desperate voice? The actual character type might even be from Egyptian times, some now-nameless god or folk character who was the source for Peter Lorie. Now if you have a bug-eyed round headed person give that funny little laugh people are going to "see' him as a mad scientist, an evil doctor and the like. Could not the ancients have had a kind of Peter Lorie who became immortal?

The Lion of Nemea might have been an ancient athlete whose great prowess threatened the local hero, Herakles..... or someone who resembled Herakles. They meet at the games, there is a terrible turnover and Herakles defeats the Lion. Now this would be told again and again, like the Ali-Frasier fight, eventually devolving the Lion of Nemea into an actual lion, and so in the early images of the fight we see the two of them standing and clawing at one another like people, and then later we see them on all fours with the Lion acting much more like a real lion. Even today we have scenes wherein a person, usually a man, announces himself as the "son of a hurricane whose mother was the lightning!" or some such thing. So it was that the Lion of Nemea had a family tree of strange beasts and Herakles had an immortal father. Tiger Woods has a young son who is learning to play a very good game of golf. The son of the Tiger may be a Beast on the links someday.

We often find that our heroes and gods had mortal roots and then we become disappointed in them. Imagine the flurry if we found that Joshua bin Joseph moved to Greece, married to the ex-High Priestess of the Goddess...maybe had children, and died from complications he acquired thru a short period of time in which he was hanging from a cross and stabbed in the chest. Suppose his immortal father and mortal mother were both mortal.

Sometimes our legends, our ideals and our core source as a culture turns out to be mortal and, if extraordinary, still very real, very dead. George Washington did not have hand-carved wooden teeth, never threw a coin across a river, never stood up in a boat, never cut down a cherry tree and then admitted it. John Kennedy never slept with Marilyn Monroe and no one was ever healed by a tent-top preacher. But they should have and in our hearts, if not our minds, they did.

We have a collection of newspaper article titles. Dragons Come to Life. Witches Are Older, Smarter. Rams Crush the Vikings. Each gives us a mental image of immortal-like beings do extraordinary things. If such things were not committed to memory they would be told time after time and maybe someday we would have a story wherein these things happened as described, and if you investigated them you would find newspaper articles which seems to confirm that Witches were waging some kind of a war in the small town of Greenwich NY. Green-witch NY.

Paul Bunyan was or was not a real lumberjack who was strong and did great things and so people talked about him and the stories grew as did he. Or his story was a complete fiction which became confused with a real man or men.

Sometimes people get confused about chronology and myth. They get very "wise" in how things happened and tell stories about the devolution of a god into a folk hero into a concept. And sometimes the stories are designed to explain "why things happen", or to teach a lesson, like Aesop with his fox and the grapes, which could have been a greedy man down the street halting an effort because it was too hard and having his neighbors make fun of him, the foxy fool. Or Aesop saw a fox trying to get at some grapes on a vine. Sometimes, like Marie Levau, a person knowingly takes on immortality by deliberately aligning themselves with a myth, thus CEOs will declare in a resume that they earned a degree or medal which they did not in fact have. But if you embellish a story it is best to be sure you do so in such a way as to be consistent with the core value of the story.

Abraham was willing to slit the throat of his son for his god. Joshua bin Joseph was willing to die on the cross rather than attack his attackers. Nathan Hale announced that he regretted having but one life to lose for his country. Ronald Reagan was a great actor whose greatest role was that of President. Herakles killed the Lion of Nemea The United States of America is a democracy which saved the world in 1945 by vaporizing two cities. Charlie Manson was a mass murderer.

I went on a killing rampage yesterday. I tore and swore and ripped and killed. Dozens of living creatures, made by the Creator, died at my hands. Some I crushed with my foot, some I simply squeezed the life out. I made the choices of who would live and who would die. Many of my victims tried to escape, most just took it. Some had lots of uses and skills, many could cure human ills, but they all died.

Gardening is such a speciesist activity. I moved some strawberries into beds where they could grow and prosper, but the grasses I simply tossed over my shoulder. I know about all the good grasses can do, but so much of the yard has grass that I felt we had enough. The plantains don't often wander into the garden but when they do I let them live, unless they move too close to my allies, the beans, onions and herbs. Any weeds which also have pretty flowers would be moved to a better spot, "forced relocation" is an active part of my garden. Out in front there are a number of very nice edible plants but they are growing in the beds I have reserved for the bulbs, so they had to die too. The Creator is much more reasonable and neutral in her judgment and I know that the roots I leave behind in the soil will be the weeds of next year, or next month.

Usually during the year I simply make a wasteland of the walkways, pouring woodchips and such on the ground where I want to walk. Plantains and strawberries like the woodchips, as do the violets. Plantains are good for chest congestion when brewed at a tea. The chewed leaves can be made into a poultice for insect stings. The ribwort looks a lot like plantain and has many of the same uses, but is especially good for the lungs, hence the name. Valerian started growing in next to the driveway in the ditch and I have been moving them to a better spot in the flower beds. They grow big ragged leaves and tall pint umbrells which smell so sweet... the opposite of the useful roots which smell like old sneakers. The roots are excellent for muscle spasms and pain, like what I get in my back from digging in the garden.

I say all this in part because sometimes it troubles me to kill living things simply because they are in the way, but I see that around the world we also kill other humans because they are in the way. We select certain humans for preservation, relocate others, admire some and slaughter many. Even now the Israeli government is demolishing Palestinian homes near the Egyptian border to make them feel safer. That's what they say anyway, but putting close to 30,000 people into tent cities in the middle of summer will only make things less safe. We invaded Iraq and killed thousands of people, including children with uncles and brothers around the planet vowing revenge for the loss of innocent life. Obviously we know that doing this will make our life less safe, but only for those not protected by Secret Service agents and armored vehicles around our homes. People like my family will be unsafe to fly or travel abroad.

I wonder if the stinging nettles in my empty garden plots yet to be tilled are in fact freedom fighters come to punish me for my insolent disregard for life. If life is sacred and a gift from the Creator, why then are we so eager to end it? Why are we so easily led into rape and torture? Maybe mankind is insane or maybe we have bred this disregard for life and honor into our children and their children. Maybe without the occasional hero like Gandhi or King we would totally forget that the majority of people doing the slaughter claim to worship a god whose ten little rules include the warning "Thou shall not kill." Even if we translate the words as a warning against murder it seems to me the gist of it is that driving a tank over a person is considered a bad thing by that which gave all of us life.

So I try to preserve life when possible, but sometimes when it's spring and I am in a hurry to see my beans and onions and spinach and herbs grow under the sun and within my special place I have set aside for such things....I go on a killing rampage. It does seem odd, though, to celebrate life by planting flowers and food and then telling some harmless worm or beetle that it has no right to live and crushing it's head. Somehow I feel like more than my hands are dirtied by this act. But I move on. They aren't like us, after all. They haven't the same god or lifestyle. So that makes it alright.

There is a scene in Casablanca where the Chief of Police is told to close Ricks and he announces to the crowd that he is "Shocked! Shocked that there is gambling going on in this establishment!" This came to mind as I watched our Senators, defense Secretary and others announce how shocked they were that our troops were torturing and abusing prisoners. The little smiles one could detect in the corners of their eyes made me even more aware that they knew the TV cameras were on them. They probably sucked at school plays too.

I don't think we tortured people in WW1, although I know we raped and murdered. I don't think intelligence gathering was part of the ground war all that much and we didn't seem to have as many prisoners in camps. WW2 vets have said that they treated their prisoners almost as good as they treated our privates. In the Korean War, which is still being waged, we did in fact torture, abuse, rape and murder...not only prisoners, but civilians. The Viet Nam War, which we lost, we not only raped, murdered, tortured, pillaged and experimented on our prisoners and local civilians, but our own troops. The pattern continues along to Iraq and the other undeclared wars.

I wonder if the change came about with the Holocaust? Maybe all that video of the camps so impacted our psyche that as a nation we became obsessed with torture and abuse. It penetrated our blood, changed our DNA and was passed on to our children. Look at the games our children play now, look at the PS2 and Xbox games. The newer ones where you drive cars over nuns and babies for points. The games where you can rape and torture for points.

There was an article about a sharpshooter in Iraq. He was talking about going out alone at night with infra-red scopes. He shot people who looked like terrorists. One shot, one corpse was the title of the article. He was being portrayed as a hero, a noble, brave man who was risking his life to save America from terrorists. There was no notice that if a man told you that he goes out at night, hides in the dark and kills people who look like they need killing, you would think that he was a psychotic. Why is that sniper not a psychotic? Because he did it on orders? He still acts like a psycho and enjoys killing people in the dark. When he comes home, if he lives long enough, do you think it not possible that he might have acquired a taste for sneaking out at night killing people who look like bad guys to him?

After WW2 we obsessed about death camps so now he own them. We obsessed about tyrants, so now we are led by them. We obsessed about the decline of moral and ethical values so now we reward degenerates and prosecute "do-gooders". We decry phony elections run by party big shots who buy votes....So now we insist on hackable electronic voting machines which leave no paper trail and are manufactured by a company whose CEO says how important it is that we re-elect the Bush Cheney Regime.

Eventually the country will be run on trillion dollar deficits by psychotic idealogues supported by bloodthirsty military machines to insure the continuance of a system of civilian management which benefits a tiny handful of degenerated failed businessmen who dodged the draft and cheated thru school. Somehow I don't think this is sustainable.

I suppose we could get off the couch, march to Washington and demand our country back, but that would be most inconvenient and interfere with watching the latest Fox porn. On the other hand, if we all just stop it, just stop driving gas guzzling cars, stop supporting our troops by sending them into places that they are unprepared for, stop ignoring our children, stop cheating on our wives, our bosses and our employees..... if we started acting more like Jimmy Stewart and less like Arnold the Terminator....maybe we could start showing our faces in the world view again without feeling just a little bit ashamed and afraid.

Gardening is like graffiti. You go out into a world you didn't make and try to leave a mark of some kind, hopefully a nice one, one which portrays something about yourself. I think the people who go out and with cans of spray paint "tagging" box cars and the like are doing much the same thing. I use violets and salvia to make a pattern of color and form and some kid zapping the side of a train is making a swirling image of colors and form also. An element of movement adds to the fun of tagging, but my flower beds are always changing in some ways, so I have some temporal elements to contend with as well. I suppose taggers are hoping someone will see their logo and enjoy it, whereas I have mostly abandoned the idea that any of my friends are going to wander over and see my yard work. Everybody who enjoys flowers and plants is busy working on their own expressions.

I've been dumping woodchips in a rough diagonal line from the side of the drive to the garden gate. Along the line of chips I have been planting mints and daylillies, violets and sunflowers. As you walk up the path you come under a wooden arch that marks the beginning of the plantings. The lilac is small now but someday it may be towering over the archway and providing some shade for the clematis on the other side. I've been planting a lot of blues and purples and shades of pinks, but here and there I add a sudden yellow.

One of the problems has been the havoc it raises with my hands. I cut myself, the fingertips get dried and cracked, and my poor nails, usually bitten and short have developed real length to enable the opening of pocket knives and plastic bags. I have a bottle of oil made from sunflowers and comfrey plants to help heal the cracks in my thumbs, which look like they could use a trip to the ER for some stitches.

A few years ago I had this vision of the yard as a series of flower beds and wandering walkways. I saw my boy walking along using a cane to get to the garden. It was such a sweet vision that I decided to do my part to see it happen. Jon will have to take care of the rest and who knows but that the figure in my sight heading for the garden might not have been me in some unknown future? Jon won't be walking for several years if at all.... They never used splints on his feet, an early concern of mine. They did finally put splints on his hands, but they rarely use them and so someday, should he emerge from his hiding place, they will have to cut and lengthen the tendons in his wrists to enable his hands to open from the claw-like condition they are currently in. The feet have dropped pretty badly and they will need surgery as well. "Dropping" means they are pointed down due to the tendons shrinking from lack of use. He won't be able to even use them to help drag himself from his chair to the bed. They won't support any weight.

If they had followed the schedule for the hand splints Jon would have a chance to paint or even hold a pen for writing before his voice comes back. The splints are custom fitted to his hands, but without using them, the hands continue to shrink and curl and now the splints are very hard to get on him, if you can find them. Sometimes the aides just toss them somewhere, sometimes they get lost in the dirty clothes or separated in the closet or on the floor. Whatever the reason, not using them will cost my son years of therapy and months of pain. The reason they don't get used is that no one there thinks Jon will need hands again.

Jon used to sculpt wood. He would take manzanita wood and carve interesting shapes and then make a box out of the block. Organic curves and lines formed the outside, like tendons or veins and the lids often were spring loaded so you could flip them up and dig out what was inside. Most folks probably stored their pot in these boxes and Jon could trade them for other trinkets and music. Jon was also a chef, making wonderful meals in hamburger joints or 4 star restaurants. He showed me how to use the knives correctly and could turn an average meal into a work of art, rearranging the veggies and adding a sprig of color...."Presentation, dad, it's all about presentation!"

Jon liked to work on old cars, old vans like the 1960 VW van that folded around him and threw him out of the windshield. With twisted hands and folded feet Jon will not be working on cars, or meals, or boxes. His personal presentation is floppy, drooling, cyborg-like with tubes and props and a faint inhuman odor, the kind of presentation that makes little kids afraid and hide behind their mother. People think he's stupid because he drools and can't hold his head up. He feels stupid for the same reason. He looks down and sees those hands which used to be so strong and talented, those feet that hiked in Alaska and paddled in Arizona hot springs.

When I dig my flowerbeds and plant my salvias and daylillies, I think about Jon wheeling or stumbling or walking through my flowers, stopping to look, to smell, to taste. I think about how someday when I am dead perhaps my children, my daughter, my son will point out some configuration or visual pun I left behind. Maybe Jess will hand a root beer mint to a small child and watch their eyes grow round as the flavor hits home. Maybe Jon will wonder as he looks at the blues and pinks if his father was trying to forget his problems, or trying to leave something behind when he worked with cracked fingers and dried hands in the walkways and beds in the back yard.

I was thinking of you and Jess, Jon. I was thinking about Jessie living here someday, maybe even with you in some back room, playing with your carving tools or listening to your music. Maybe Jess has friends who come and eat veggie barbecues at a table I made and maybe her brother sits along with her as they talk about those terrible days before he rose and walked again. Maybe he doesn't recall the dark times when we doubted. Maybe they both are looking ahead to longer days and more yellows and reds in the flowers I left behind. Sometimes the flowers take root and grow more than even I expected, lasting longer and being stronger. Sometimes they shrink and wither and die. We never give up, we continue to plant and we wait in the winter and spring to see what summer has to offer.

Jon hated money, he used to tell me that it caused so much trouble that it wasn't worth having it. I think he'd be freaked out to know that his disability payments have accumulated to the point that he now has over $1800 in the bank.

Our car has a bumper hanging by two bolts on one side. It has over 200,000 miles on it, the seats are torn, the side map pockets have cracked off and there is a short somewhere that keeps blowing the fuses. The rear gate is rusted to the point that you can't lock it and the rear wiper doesn't move except once when you turn on the key. If Jon were in his best shape....like before the crash...he would have so much fun fixing the Volvo and that $1800 would be put to good use. Jon liked working on cars in much the same way I like working in my gardens.

I suppose that I could say keeping our car safe and mobile so I can drive the 100 miles to be with him is a thing for which we could use Jon's money, but then, it isn't a direct good thing because he does not own the Volvo. I bring this up because my sweety-pie is driving down to NYC tomorrow in the Volvo and the right front tire has a slow leak we can't seem to find and the fuses that blow kill the lights, the windows, the wipers, the radio and much more. Jon would have tried to fix this car for his step-mother to be safe on her trip. He'd probably go down with her to help collect his sister's stuff from college. But he can't because he's in a coma.

Is it ethical to use his money to repair my car? In the past I've sent him money to repair his van.... I even paid for the windshield that smashed his head. How ironic is that? Regardless, the people at Lake Katrine will only reimburse money spent on Jon when they agree that the expenditures are valid. They'd probably approve if I could explain the logic, but still..... is it ethical for us to use Jon's money while he's in a coma?

When he was first hit his friends started up a collection to help the family during our time of need. His room mate told me he went into one of the hang-outs Jon liked and turned off the juke box and stood on the bar and explain what had happened to Jon and passed the hat. They raised something like $3000 for him and one of the people Jon had been helping out volunteered to take the money and put it in a bank. She had been one of those "fringe" people Jon adopted from time to time. She had a bad rep and had stolen from friends but this was a chance to show her merit.

She took the money and partied for a few weeks until it was gone. She would send me emails saying she couldn't understand why I hadn't gotten her checks. I figured she had stolen the money but I was also kinda busy trying to get Jon to squeeze my hand to worry about it. Now that they got her to confess I think she is doing community service, because she has a young son and I sent the prosecutor a note saying that if she was convicted I felt she should be made to work in a long term care unit so she could come to understand the kind of people she had stolen from. I have no idea if she ever did that service. Nobody bothered to tell me.

Nobody has told me yet if Lake Katrine is going to be closed, or if they do what they will do for Jon. I suspect that all things being equal he may be sent to a hospital in nearby Kingston, still 100 miles away from the family, but close to doctors. We have a very nice hospital here and a long term care unit is actually inside. We applied for a bed and are waiting to see if someone will die or otherwise move on so Jon can come closer to home. If he had money to pay for a private room he could be there now, but he doesn't, he's on Medicare and Medicaid.... the programs the compassionate conservative President wants to modify so it's a pay-as-you-go choice thing.

"Jon, which hospital do you want to go to? Squeeze my hand if you want to go to Kingston. No? Squeeze my hand if you want to go to Saratoga. No? Lay there in a coma if you want to be dumped off your gurney in a local park...... good! Orderlies, take him away...."

Do I sound bitter?

I don't mean to be, but I am so very tired of leaving messages and not getting answers. If I had enough money I could hire a lawyer and try to put legal pressure on someone somewhere to find out what society wants to do with my comatose son, my slightly responsive boy. We tried to hire a lawyer to get guardianship of Jon for me, but the lawyers wanted to do other things and they never returned my phone calls. One seems to have left the state.

$1800 is not enough to save my son.

I bought shorts and shirts for Jon, and some new CD's to listen to, but I am never sure if they play his music or if he simply lays there in his bed staring at the ceiling in the dark. Sometimes that is how I find him: in the dark, staring at the ceiling.

Every two hours someone is supposed to turn him, to check for pressure sores and speak to him.

When I visit him I have to smell his hands for the scent of soured skin, which indicates he has not been washed enough. I check his back for sores and rub his feet with lotions. I have ticklish feet, but Jon seems not to mind. He frowns when I do my inspection, but of course the doctors say this is reflex. They don't say this to my face most of the time because they are rarely if ever there to talk to, but sometimes I read the notes when a pad is left in his room.

Some of his photos have been missing from his bulletin board, the ones of his red van he drove from NY to California with his sister. I had painted yellow flowers on the back with "Peace" and "Love" on the petals. I told him hippie vans had to have flowers on them. His sister painted this on the side: "I am lost. I went out to find me. If I should return before I get back... please tell me to wait." His friend wrote that on a pad on our refrigerator when he was visiting a few months before the accident. Jameson was Jon's best friend, he said. We haven't heard from him since the accident. I don't know if he knows what happened to Jon, but in three years he has not phoned or written Jon.

Do I sound bitter?

The American occupation forces spend tens of billions of dollars each month to occupy Iraq and destroy Iraqi resistance. Even more is spent to defend the oil that flows thru Iraq. We now own the second largest pool of oil in the known world.

They are closing hospital wards because there is not enough money to pay nurses and aides to care for people like my son and the law mandates a certain proportion of nurses to patients. This is to protect the patients.

I am told that American taxes allocated for the War on Terror cannot used to treat Americans in long term care units at home... only prisoners in secret military prisons.

The War on Terror is not not working. There are many time recently when I definately felt Terror in my heart, like whenever I think of what may happen to my son when they close his long term care unit for undisclosed deficiencies.

Soylent Green is people.

Collaterol damage is people.

My son is people.

I'm still trying to reach someone who can tell me what will be happening with my son. If they close down the facility where he is, where will they place him? How will they place him? Why would they shut down Lake Katrine? I get to leave phone messages, tell my story to secretaries and get increasingly aggravated. IN the mean time my oldest sister is sending me forwarded emails with glowing pictures of strong chinned American soldiers in Iraq with pithy political slogans......Go Army! The Iraqis are thawing out frozen blood in toilets because the Army has blocked the roads to a hospital. The same Army, or Marines maybe....is shooting up ambulances because the "bad guys" sometimes use them for cover. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just that anybody not wearing a green USA uniform is fair game. In the mean time, as I said, no one can tell me where my son might be tomorrow.

I read about an Iraqi mother whose son was shot up by our boys in green. They took the bleeding boy away on a jeep but would not allow the family to come along. They saw the boy had died and dumped him on the sidewalk a few blocks away. It took several hours of searching for the family to find the body. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but I recall during the Viet nam War hearing these terrible stories of massacres by the Americans and being told by my father and his friends that A) it couldn't be true, we don't do that sort of thing and B) that sort of thing happens in every war, everybody does it. Hard to reconcile the two.

My sister has a husband who served during the Viet Nam War so she is all pro-military, as is he. They are also pro-administration...except where it touches on them. For instance he used to tell me how screwed up the military was, how incompetent the officers were.... now he acts as if they could make no mistakes. I know a lot of folks who are really loud about the things that touch them...high taxes, bad roads, poor schools. Then you ask them about other countries, how they handle these problems and you get the line that we are the Best, we are the only true democracy, our people know how to do it right, etc etc...We are the best country in the world. Of course when the speaker is a fat, middle aged man who drinks too much and has never read any other section of the paper but the sports section...well, they lose credibility. Would our government lie to us? Our government is, by definition, OF the people, right? Which means the fat, middle aged drunken slob smoking ciggies and coughing up his guts is the same kind of person who is now sitting in the White House making choices. The same kind of person who won't return my phone calls and tell me what is happening to my son.

Angry at the world? No, just tired of not knowing. Tired of not knowing how many people this government is willing to see dead before they stop the killing. Tired of hearing about hospitals closing, VA hospitals closing, soldiers remains sneaking into the country by night, tired of hearing about children with no arms, no feet or legs.....drinking filthy water because the sewer plant was blown up. It seems like it's a war on all of us with no money, no power, no hope.

And then I read a mail from some gal whose husband is worse than my son. He is able to move and respond and such, but screams all day and seems so disconnected. Why is that worse? Because it's her husband! Because her love, her sweetheart, is screaming at her over the breakfast table, at lunch, at dinner and before going to bed. She sleeps when she can, still loving him, still trying to cope. Where's the therapy for him, where are the helpers? Well, there's only so much money to go around. Maybe in some countries there is universal health care, those OTHER socialist, unAmerican, nasty cowardly countries where they don't send their children off to war for oil and control of the Middle east. Countries where the high taxes pays for health, education and housing. Bad countries where the elected leaders are elected by the people, where the leaders listen to the majority of the people instead of the terribly important and wealthy.

Yep, it could be worse. I could be dipping water out of the stream, walking back to my blown up shack of a house, caring for my son myself. But then, I know of Americans right here in this country who do that same exact thing. People whose water was cut off because they had the choice of water or electricity and they need the electricity for their loved one's needs. The nutrient they pour into the tube that feeds into the stomach has to be kept cold.

So things are okay here.

When we were attacked by our allies the Pakistanis and the Saudis and the twin towers came down everybody on the street put out American flags. Some were actually made in America, but the little ones were made in China. I know, I looked. I asked my neighbor why he had a flag out. He said he was afraid not to. He didn't want his government taking him away in the night for being unpatriotic. He was serious. Would it have happened? We don't know, but I find it significant that he was actually afraid of his own government, in much the same way the Germans were afraid of their government. Nobody tried to stop the little painter from Austria and his bully boys in the brown shirts. They hunkered down, went to the theatre, worked in their offices and factories and sent their children off to school in their little brown shirts.

Every day I call down to see how my son is doing..."How's Jon today?" and every day I wait for the dial tone, thinking, "Maybe I'll get a recording....I'm sorry, but the number you have dialed in out of service at this time" And where will Jon be today? At therapy, or on a gurney in a park somewhere? Sitting in his wheelchair in down town Kingston with a sign in his lap, "Will do nothing for food" Couldn't happen here....this is America. America where we don't expose soldiers to chemical, nuclear and biological weapons without knowledge or permission. America where we don't lie to the people before launching a pre-emptive war against a defenseless nation. America where elections are free and people make the choices. That America where a helpless young man waits in a bed not knowing that his father waits, feeling helpless, for a call to be returned. "Where's Jon?" Where's my son going to be next week?

Other American fathers with sons in the National Guard or the Reserves are thinking the same thing for much the same reasons. No information, lies, switching stories, misinformation....doubts....fears.....

I started reading a forum for computer people... it had a section called the Coffee House and there was a discussion about gay marriages. It's funny but I have known a lot of gays and lesbians in my time and I have never heard them insult and threaten violence to a straight couple because they were straight. I recall growing up aroiund people who felt that way about blacks. I have seen flyers being passed around proving blacks were bald apes. Not a bad statement if you allow that whites are also bald apes. So now it's gays are inferior species threatening the future of mankind, as if the WMD we all own isn't a threat, or smokestacks in Ohio, or the draft coming back.

Shows to go you that computer folks are not subject to fits of logic any more than non-computer folks. Oddly enough, non-computer folks are also prone to loud, even violent declarations that they don't know computers, don't want to know computers.....exactly what these gay-haters say about gays. Except they're probably wrong, about knowing any. They may work shoulder to shoulder with one or more gay guys.

There was a guy at my job who told me one day that come Monday he would be coming to work as a woman, following that one year requirement before having the operation. I thought he showed a lot of courage, although he was, in fact, most likely crazy as a hoot owl....but he was a great programmer and was straight as they come...for a transsexual. Said when HE became SHE, she would be a lesbian, because he had no interest in men. I understand this is not uncommon. Oddly enough the men at work treated Alice very badly, hiding files, destroying property and so forth. So Alice retired early and before leaving she told me that there was one other person in the office who was having the operation soon, but had not come out of the closet yet. Nobody knew.

So is a gay man less a man for being gay? Is a comatose man less a man for being immobile? Am I any less a man for not working in an office or having never cheated on my sweetie-pie? Gosh I hope not. The only people who threatened my life, holding guns to my head and saying things like "I'm gonna blow your brains all over the desert!" were white and straight, so I have a problem with that group. And I'm in it.

There's a game where you try to explain certain things about life on earth to a person from another world. I think about doing that for my son: explaining things like the War on Terror being fought by breaking into a priest's house at 1 AM and blowing him and his son into comatose conditions. It was a mistake, the wrong house or something. "Why, dad?" asks Jon...... I don't know. Men with weapons and attitudes are running the show.

If Jon comes home, if Jon can communicate, if Jon can travel....maybe we'll all run to Sweden and try to find freedom and tolerance there. Funny how the American Dream used to be freedom and tolerance and now it's Global Domination and Acculmulation of Vast Amounts of Wealth.....preferably requiring collaterol damage. Because any country that sends young people to die and be blown into broken pieces and then shuts down VA hospitals is just screwy. Any state that closes down the only facility that has a long term coma stimulation and rehab program is just screwy. Any human that thinks other humans are less than human and deserve violence done to them is just screwy.

My garden is being planted. My herbs are coming up. I weed with trepidation....what right do I have to kill some plants and save others? Why should the grass be punished so I can maybe grow my green beans? I apologize to the weeds and try to find a way to transplant them to a safer part of the garden. I have found that most of the "weeds" are medicinal and good for my bronchitis or my back pain. Others taste good. So I have modified my pogrom, my genocide. I try not to kill things because I do not feel right about taking life. I want to be able to tell my children that I tried to be non-violent. It's harder than you might think. So many things are trying to kill me.

I pulled a tick off my arm and crushed it. It may not have been able to "see me" as life. I might have been a blood warehouse to it. Skeeters only bite if they are female and they need the food for their eggs. Life has a price but we don't need to tax it as well. I try not to kill people. I try not to kill birds or dogs or cats, and I try not to hang out with people who like to kill, or talk about killing. It seems unwise.

So there you have it. I'm a tree hugging, pro-choice, pro-life, anti-war, pro-technology and pro-organic gardening and I like to use wood to fire my kilns. The extra carbon dioxide may just change the weather long enough to distract governments from waging war. It's a small thing, my kilns and bonfires, but every little bit helps.

Since I bought these two antique computers, I ended up with a big box full of plastic styrofoam peanuts. A big collection of different shapes, too. So I was looking and thinking that I would have, as a child, seen an entirely different thing. I would have seen all the cool shapes and colors...mostly pastels, but cool shapes. Then I decided that as a kid I would have wanted to build things with them. I vaguely remembered that I loved to build things.

So I took a big pile of these things onto a TV tray and tried to stack them into a "shape". They were too short to their length for making walls except as stones. But I found that as I stacked them.....I had worried about static electricity... but they were so light, they couldn't hold a wall, they brokae up at maybe three levels. Try as I might, I found that a random pile of layers and directions was the only way you could stack them. And no matter how hard you tried to make something "Pleasing to the eye" it always ended up looking like various sizes of piles of shit.

And oddly enough, one may well be able to argue that, in life, no matter how hard you try, you end up with what appears to be various sizes of piles of shit. It's all a matter of perception. To an organic gardener, piles of shit are great! I, myself, have gone to great lengths to attend to great piles of shit. That's how my garden started. I suppose my marriage to my sweety-pie can be said to be based on that stuff. But isn't shit just composted stuff by an organic-walking-around-something-or-another? Yes, I say, eventually, with plate tectonics, we shall all be compost, and that to any other might be called shit. It's my life and i can see tomato beds if I want. Not quite the lemons=lemonade thing.... squishing lemons is a mess. Gardens are less messy.

But ya know, there was SOMETHING in that scene where the guy says 'This means something!'. Things just don't weigh down on styrofoam pellets and figure eights and tubes.... nah, they just "move aside" and the whole thing collapses. But then, their individual natures are not compromised. They cannot become an army of styrofoam. They'd just drift off. It's hard to tear them up individually, being closed cell foam, so all you can do is try to "stack them" and watch it collapse into a sea of beadies. Maybe in the end we can live as diffused bits in a digital sea of beadies. "Bee" Dee"...Buddha Dharma. See, ya don't need acid for that sort of thing. There's all kinds of connections. You just have to be perceptive and try to "Listen". Not act...not cut off the head of your neighbor with a machete.... No, that's what we call "Over the top" in technical terms.

And in the end, we have the whole relationship thing going, the "father" and the "son" thing..... When Jon was born I did his natal chart and I thought that this was the chart of someone incredibly near the liminal point. Everything was in his last house, his 12th house, except for one aspect in his 4th and one in his 8th. "Death and regeneration" and "Family".... and the 12th house is "Karma"....really an inaccurate term, but close. Closer to "Dharma", I think. So Jon is much, much further along than I. I mean, I have had a "Near-death" or two, but never as deep as this, never as long. Man, I don't envy the crawl back.

But at the same time, as "Father" I have to insist. As I insisted he walk before, and not put EVERYTHING into his mouth. There were lots of impositions based strictly on this "father" thing. And to be frank, I did not have a good role model. A violent alcoholic is just not the right role model. So I used Grand-dad and bits of this guy and that, people I admired, dad when he was sober. That's probably the way most fathers do it. But now, with my own father so close, I feel, to stepping over that I have to think about how it will impact Jon if I don't make it to see him recover. Odd concept, but a practical one.

So the image is Hansel and Gretal leaving trails of breadcrumbs to find their way home. The birds eat the breadcrumbs and they get lost. But why leave that element in the story? The part that failed... it didn't add to the drama of the story, and so I think it has to do with the nature of the crumbs. What did they leave behind? Was it really bread, or could you leave any number of things behind... like a record, like a picture. My goodness, if that was all you could do for your child was to leave behind something to connect them to a Greater-self.... why would you not?

Ah, the noon whistle. The False-alarm to let us know that "All is well".... unless someone attacks at noon, and then all the alarms will be ignored. Fortunately, no one but us know that we are vulnerable by our dogma and rituals.

I guess that's why I like being shamanic. The idea that each trip is just another trip and each fall is just an upside down smile... well, it just helps me thru the day. Each up is a merino sheep being found after 6 years of hiding, having accumulated some Xnumber of pounds of wool... the poor thing looked like a popcorn machine gone mad..... this crazy sheep, waving at the cameras, mouthing "Hey, you crazy bastards! I finally did it, I Malcolm Daley, turned myself into a sheep and am now IMMORTAL!!!" But nobody could read sheep lips, so the poor crazy genius was sheered, crated and shipped to Australia, 12,000 miles from his lab and the formula which will bring back his humanity....

Time for lunch. Where I will turn some organic life-form into compost, including myself. BUT I will also grow great freakin pocorn!

I just came off the phone with one of the doctors working on this coma device..... this is a system which includes an EEG machine...maybe modified. But they test someone wired to this device. They stimulate them in a variety of ways and senses and monitor the EEGs. Then they study these and maybe they can determine that someone is "thinking" and is "self aware".

Bearing in mind the Bell-Curve theory of the universe: That everything, every thought, pulse, experience.... can be plotted along a Bell Curve and so most fall on the top or near it.... and the rest drop off either side in a curve, like sand or bodies piling up at the foot of a cliff.... Some people can be at the top of the Bell Curve with full awareness. I presume that means like the Dali Lama or Fred, the janitor. Both at the top of the curve. Then there's the rest of us....remember that this is in maybe 11 dimensions, too... are less and less "at the top". By definition for every ONE at the top, there have to be an infinite number of "Not the tops", which explains why so much of the universe acts like it is pissed at something, and merely lashing out at you somehow. We forget that by definition of an "Infinite Something" there will also be just a TON of great stuff, if we choose to perceive it.We don't have to DO a damn thing, something is always GOOD happening to us. If we can get up in the morning, great, but save a cheer for being able to THINK of getting up. Literally. What if that concept was contained in a part of your brain which took the brunt of the hit when your van got hit?

So maybe Jon will first say, "What are these things hanging down from me?" and I will have to explain "legs" to him. Or me and his doctors. Times like this my back hurts... of course.

The information they may get from working with Jon may someday greatly help some other son or daughter to walk again, to speak again...Something more than just BE there. Which is, if you think about it, exactly how God must feel. Being infinite He can't go anywhere that he isn't already there. Being All-Knowing He can't play hide and seek with His Son, because He is All-Freaking Knowing. Well, goody for those who think that's great, but all it is, is All-Knowing. No Surprises. That would make anyONE go nuts from time to time. I think that explains the Balkans and the Mideast. And maybe Vegas.

If you were a doctor and felt you had mapped out pretty much everything modern technology could tell you about a person.... that is the kind of thing you can notice with machines.... and tell if they are noticing you. What if they notice and just don't care? This thing called TBI can certainly, I think, argue for a Near Death Experience. Big time. It just doesn't STOP, does it? Your brain is spending 99% of it's energy trying to plug holes. And once in awhile someone has the chance to look in and notice the guy pluggin' holes. It strikes me that for the guy pluggin' holes we might forgive him if he doesn't stand up and cheer, but HE'S PLUGGIN' HOLES!

So I wonder if that is what it might be like for Jon.

Maybe when he sighs and puffs out his cheeks and stares ahead... Maybe he's seeing himself being 60 or so, still in a wheelchair, still not able to move a limb and not really caring. You have to ask if maybe there is not a good reason to consider the idea that we need to be watchful and considerate and be ready to do what any person of good will would do. NObody will hurt my son. I had these tests once on my back, my leg, really. I guess they were working on the theory my numbness and pain came from damaged nerves. So this guy ran current thru my leg and measured how it went. It hurt like hell and I told him so. I told him several times and sat up and made him stop once. It hurt like hell. If I had to lay there and "take it like a man" because I couldn't make my eye blink the way I wanted it to... well, that will never do.

But these very nice people measure "little" currents. They don't impose their own. They want to know how Jon feels about things like pictures and touch and movement and light. And then we may be able to teach the kid to think about something easy to create in his mind and we measure a purposeful response. Ain't life grand? It all comes to being perceptive enough to see when someone is talking to us. Even if it is a "little talk" so hard to hear, or understand. Who is disabled, if WE have to have machines to "hear"?

Seems to me that instead of thinking like lines in a chart, we need to think like cells on a Petri dish, or mushrooms under Michigan.
I was taught as a kid that there were these things called "countries" and they existed as lines on a map and everybody in these "countries" spoke the same and followed the same rules. French guys all swore allegiance to their President and ate stinky cheese. As it turns out there are also French who speak German and eat sausages. There are Romani, who have no country and speak their own language but wander around owing allegiance to a local person. In Iraq and Afghanistan people speak many languages and owe allegiance to the local lord, like in the Middle Ages.

We tend to think that tribal societies evolved into countries, but in fact one group of people decided to change the way they thought of leaders and began to think they were a country. Not all of them, not everywhere, any more than everybody gets a spring cold in my neighborhood. But if they did you could say everybody in my neighborhood now swears allegiance to colds. The other people who did NOT decide to change the way they think are still tribal or uber-family oriented.

Online you may be part of a "government" which governs the way you live, obligates you to certain actions. Your economy may be thru Paypal or eBay. It may be barter through file sharing. Your army may be a group of hackers who meet online and do things online as a group or as individuals. A society is what we agree it is, and we can agree that it is mutable, flexible and heat sensitive. If everybody, or the majority or even a small group of people agreed that money was just flat green paper slices, and real labor was the currency of choice, like it is when homeless, then the actions of groups based on money would be extraneous to your ken. You wouldn't recognize it when you saw it.

The Mafia is a tribal government and so is a government like our own where there are agencies which exchange information and goods via a system not common to the civilians around it. Yet, it governs the actions of those inside it. If you want to deal with those people, you need to know the government which controls them and you HAVE TO be able to recognize a government when you see it.

There are hostages in Iraq, taken because the tribal government in that region takes hostages and barters them for some form of good or service. The people in that tribe may know some other tribe which will act as a fair broker. They naturally enough see our troops and their tribal form of government and expect we operate along those lines. Why else would a small group of men and women go into harms way if not directed to by their tribal leader, a person owing allegiance to a greater tribal leader and on up the line, sometimes going sideways for a distance as individual arrangements are satisfied.

Our government calls itself a Republic and is nominally ruled by a pyramid scheme of loyalties. The main tribal leader of the military is George Bush, but he has no ties to the people on the ground, they are not part of his immediate tribe, the tribe of incredibly wealthy oil brats. So bargaining has to take place in a disconnect. The hostage takers want certain tribal members released by the local American tribal lord. BUT that tribal lord must obey the commands of his leader and on up to George Bush. It is not a diffusion of tribal loyalties, it is a pyramid scheme. Who gets nailed in a pyramid scheme? The guy on the ground floor, the guy with the gun pointed at his head. The top tribal leader says "Bring 'em on!" ands "We will not negotiate with terrorists." which is silly because we are ourselves terrorists. Terrorists say "We will terrorize members of your tribe until your leader, in order to protect his tribe, agrees to our reasonable requests." like when fire-bombed Iraq, killing tens of thousands of women, children and old men. None of them were combat troops, so they should have been immune to the hit. Like in the Civil War you could picnic on the hillside and watch the battles. Now you are in them, part of them, a "soft target".

We have brought them to our form of non-tribal government. We have shown them the way we operate and they are operating in that manner. Shock and Awe. Take down a building, kill innocent people, make a political albatross. Deny responsibility for your actions. Pass the buck, follow the money, kill a commie for Christ.

The poor soldier never expected his targets would turn on him. He was thinking as trained, linear. He did not realize the kid with the flowers had a bomb jacket on. He did not realize that his commander in chief would not bail him out. He thought he could win, because WE have evolved past the tribal government. WE are superior, more advanced, less primitive. But if you had a dual-processor Unix driven many-gigahertz computer and a large rock to move, isn't a long stick a better tool? There is no linear evolution even in governments.

The local community organization, whether it is "Take Back the Streets" or the local mosque in down town Albany, is better equipped to deal with a rash of muggings than is the entire Marine Corps or the U.N. Those groups can not do a damn thing to help a man whose daughter was raped by the drunken son of a local Mafia lord. You have to go to the Godfather and make a trade of some service. So a Constitutional amendment is worth the paper it is written on with regards to how a redneck will deal with a flaming queen who is negotiating for a job. It is all tribal and all individual. Governments do not exist except in the mind of the beholder.

There is a tribe of people who believe that this world is a dream. The real world behind the dream can only be entered by the use of strong psychotropic drugs which grow nearby. When they go hunting or other activities which are vital, they take drugs, even dosing their dogs. Then they can SEE reality and bring him the meat. It works and has worked for thousands of years. If you were to deal with them, you would have to take these drugs or they would not see you as part of reality. You would be part of the dream. If you were to impose our reality upon them, you would kill the group, just as if you pull a happy deep water fish out of the ocean where it has swum for 40 million years, back into the sun and happy bright waters, you would kill the ancient fish. Other fish have evolved to deal with the shallow waters, even walking on land sometimes, but it is not a pyramid. The old fish has survived by not changing. It has shown us the folly of thinking that time is a line. It is a spider web which has caught us all. You walk on the non-sticky threads.

So by not seeing the world as a spider web we risk the sticky threads of life. Iraq is very sticky and even a fierce wasp can be eaten by a bunch of hungry little spiders if it walks on the sticky threads and is caught. Ants can be stuck and thousands of ants crawling on the web will not kill or capture the spider because they think in lines and will pile up on the sticky threads. If you imagine the sticky threads as not having physical presence, but being an idea, you can see that a people can be stuck in a form of thinking which is not in their best interests...even if all of them think that way, it still ends up on the web being eaten by tiny spiders.

Ancient forms, ancient gods, ancient truths. Not the truth the spindoctors spin, the threads of scam, cooked books and press conferences, but the thread which run from truth, to truth...from tribal lord to tribal lord. The uncle of the man who raped your daughter calls in a man who borrowed money to pay off a loan shark. The rapist is taken care of, will no longer be a threat. Now you have a debt which cannot be placed into a bank, but governs your actions. We are governed by our obligations, not our laws. All Americans break Laws. We speed, we cheat, we lie, we kill. We are out of control and some uncle will be called in to make a phone call to have some big man with a softball bat visit us. The two knee-cap buildings go down and the debt is paid, but since we cannot see that reality, we fail to see the balance.

When we firebombed downtown Baghdad, bombed a wedding party, machine gunned down a happy Iraqi family, calls were made, favors were called up, men named Ahmed rolled up their sleeves and packed explosives into a can of coffee. A balance had to be made. This is government, this is commerce. We fail to recognize it, but that is because we are not on the same drug, the same dream. To say there is such a thing as collateral damage only makes sense to those who can see a blown apart baby as a "thing" and not a godson or daughter. Family ties, tribal ties...these endure. Here and there, forever and a day, people pay respect to local leaders and wise family members. This is civilized, this has a deep, long history and has never been replaced.

So we invent a form of government based on laws we do not obey because we are drugged on power, on destruction power, on economic power. The bombs are real, but the money is a fiction, one which changes value every single hour of every single day. People don't always value your values and you cannot make them do so at the point of a gun. That just makes them angry. I cannot make you a pagan by killing your daughter and saying that GODDESS told me to do it. I cannot impose democracy from within a Republic ruled by the wealthy elite onto a tribal region ruled by local leaders who live with their neighbors and respect their beliefs. You can't give what you ain't never had and you cannot lose what you never had.

We never had a chance, we never had a democracy, we never had a plan, we never had a need. We had a dream and we shot it. We had a farm and we paved it. We had a child and we got a phone call saying our child has been killed by strangers because our leader put them in harms way, in front of the tanks. Phone calls are made, messages are left, form letters are mailed, but the balance is not achieved because we do not believe this reality. We want our dreams back, we want our drugs back, we want our child back.

This is an interesting time for me, both near and far. I strongly believe in rule by law, rather than rule by edict. I think that law allows for debate and review, but edicts just go out and make demands on the people. Tyrants rule by edict. When the President issues an executive order, he is being a tyrant. When he says it's okay for Israel to invade and occupy and annex, he is rewarding imperialists. Sharon said he is putting children before tanks by allowing the settlements to grow and continue and become part of Uber-Israel. This way if people try to take back what was stolen they will face children and by killing children they become terrorists. Oddly enough, when Israel kills children by firing missiles into crowds at street corners, only the Muslims call them terrorists. When Americans kill children by machine gunning them down in a dark corner of the world, nobody calls us terrorists because we cover up the act. Korea knows what we did to it's children, but they need our bombs, so they wait before condemning us.

They say Jon can't communicate for one reason or another. His brain has atrophied, his neurons are sheared, the connections are gone. These are the same reasons the CIA didn't stop 9-11 from happening. They couldn't communicate with the FBI, their staff had been reduced, their power was reduced, the field agents didn't follow thru. So like a brain injured man our country continues to kill babies and women and support murderers of crippled old men in wheelchairs. Oddly enough the hijackers of the cruise ship did the same thing and people around the world were outraged. Brain injured people have impulse control. They do things that are unsafe and then can't agree why they did it.

They may move Jon to a nursing home. We are looking for one nearby that will take people with traches and who are mostly unresponsive. Last time I checked there weren't any but now my sweetie-pie has found one nearby, within bicycle distance and we are checking it out. They don't have coma stim but they do apparently take care of total care people. Does a father have any say as to where his son goes? We'll find out. Jon is an adult, but he has no power of attorney assigned, nor was he living here when he got hit. So the law decides that he's just a guy and I am just a guy. The country that won't legally recognize love between the same sex, also does not recognize that a father of an adult might still be a father. We recognize occupying invading armies as legitimate, but not a father's love and concern.

A brain injured man when they emerge, sometimes cannot fit facts together properly. They may think they are God, or think that they have no wife or husband, or children. They may scream if their radio batteries are dead, scream and tear up a room, throwing things around. Once they get their batteries, they settle down happily.

A President who got there by manipulating the laws, by fixing an election to keep his family in charge of the greatest military force in the world may go slightly insane with power. He may invade a defenseless country. He may throw out the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. He may rule by "gut feelings", by insights and religious visions. He may start quoting from the Bible and saying that God is on our side. Hitler did the exact same things. So did Saddam, so did Sharon. None of them practiced religion except for the press and for photo shoots. They all want the world to see them as strong and powerful and deadly. They are none of the above. Sharon is fat, lazy and obsessed. Saddam was a psychotic. George was a perpetual loser/bully/drunk. Now he can punish those who laughed at him. Now he can remake the world. He is in charge of the world, in fact, he can order countries to follow our laws, his edicts, or face our wrath.

He tears down the towel rack, screaming that his batteries are dead. He wants his radio. He lays in a bed, staring at the holes in the ceiling, looking at the TV, glancing at his father. Asked to squeeze a hand, he thinks he does, he feels the hand squeeze, but now the holes call to him and he resumes counting. He stands in front of the camera and says that we will stay the course, that to do otherwise would be unthinkable. He says we will kill everyone who stands in our way, in his way. He says we will do all this because God has spoken to him and He says we can do this. He says that God has told him to cut the head off his oldest son. He has the knife, the boy is quiet, he listens for the Voice. A young boy is hit in the head by the wheel of a chair which was blown apart by an American missile fired by an Israeli soldier at a crippled old man who said that people should kill people who kill people.

So what I'm seeing is a society that is brain injured. If we use the analogy of the body politic, we can see that the brain is injured, it doesn't work anymore, not the way it was designed, not the way it would be safe for the people who create it.

If they allow us to suggest a place to send my son and I can see him every day as a result, he may wake up and rehab and become a man who screams at the TV, who tears towel racks off the wall and threatens to kill if his batteries are not returned. He may hear voices, he may want to hurt people. He could be exactly like the Presidents of the world, except without the military to arm him.

When Jon was first injured, I went and watched the sun rise and meditated. I suddenly was blessed with a phrase:"I remember why the Buddha laughed". Mom says you sometimes have to laugh because you can't cry all the time. Buddha decided that fasting and denying life was not the Way and he turned to Life with a gusto, eating, drinking and laughing. He was strongly condemned by the other Buddhas as being too flip, but in an infinite universe, there has to be room for the silly, the stern and the insane.

If the universe is self aware, as it must be, is it like a brain and can it be injured? Not likely, because the universe is All, and so there can be no accidents because everything is known. But if there are no accidents, then the universe is not infinite because it excludes accidents. So there have to be accidents, but accidents are by definition outside the scope of expectations. The only true consistency is inconsistency, and the only true inconsistency is inconsistent inconsistency. An infinite universe allows my boy to be somewhere and nowhere, aware and not aware, alive and not alive. He is my father, my brother, myself. He is the windshield and the brain, the Alpha and the Omega and the Omega-3 acids that help me avoid heart attacks and ending up like my father: a crippled old man, blind and in a wheelchair. Just like the man the Israelis thought needed a missile in the gut more than a trial and a defense.

Knowledge of Right and Wrong, partaking of the tree of Knowledge, is not knowledge of When or How. It just is that when you do it, you know if it is right or wrong. Not always you, but the man watching the missile approach him through his clouded vision, hearing the motor and the screams, knew something was wrong. Stroking the hair of a man in a wheelchair, my son, my father, a stranger in the hallway, I know I am right.

Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom."

so....as I read this, the Almighty has given everybody the gift of freedom....and therefore everybody is truly free......so what is it that George is talking about 'spreading' if everybody already has freedom as a gift from 'the Almighty'. Unless.......we know that many people refer to money as the "Almighty Dollar", so maybe he's suggesting that the War on Terror and Iraq is about spreading money around and/or controlling the spreading of money around. Like 'cooking the books' sort of so everybody is being controlled by the flow of money. Hmmmm. Somehow I take issue with that as a plan for a nation to take on. Insofar as it is my money and my life and my family's life that seems to be the equity on this money he is spreading around. Just a thought. or is he saying that HE is working for HIM, being that he is under an obligation to serve the Almighty in actually delivering this 'freedom'. It reminds me of a line in Dragonheart where the evil king is asked to set an old blind man free and he shoots him with an arrow and remarks that "Death is a release". The old guy was set free for sure, and it made the king happy. When the king is happy, everybody's happy. It's a trickle down.

Now it's Tuesday, right? Last Tuesday I got hold by email of a doctor in the National Institute of Health, who turned me onto a researcher in Germany, a Professor of Neurology or something, who turned me on to a lab, research place in Albany, an hour away. Now there exists a chance that they may be able to test Jon and see if they can tell if he is aware, but locked in. Now there's a quandary, because to imagine that he is aware of his situation and maybe for 3 years has been unable to tell us....Well, that sucks. But, we have to know every thing we can, all the time, and make sure people like these are "in the loop" because their work may someday set a person free without having to kill them.

There's a book which speaks of amputees experiencing great pain in absent limbs. Sometimes it doesn't respond to any kind of treatment, but this guy took a man who was suffering daily enormous pain in an arm which was gone. He put the left hand in a box with a mirror in it to reflect the left hand. The guy looks down and sees two hands, a right and a left. The pain disappears. So it's their self image that trumps 'reality". What a brain injured, locked in man may be experiencing could be as complete, as sensual, as what I experience. And one irony is that under the stress of trying as a father and a human being to help this young man, this person I helped create.....I try to avoid "input". I play computer games that I know I can either win, or at least have no time limit. I can just dive in, play a hand of solitaire until I win. Then I watch the fireworks and wash a load of dishes. I take pride in delivering clean dishes. In part I get all excited about a clean kitchen because it's a done deal. It may dirty back up, but that's life. What Jon is going thru is not quite life. It may not even be awareness, but then there have been times in the past when I was walking around numb. It happens. In Jon's case it may be a done deal, or it may be a bad trip. I have to find the appropriate mirror to show him the other side, the missing part. What I call reality. Just long enough to help me understand where I should be putting my energies. i don't have a lot to spread around. I am not free.

Last night they had a show on PBS that showed them wrapping stem cells around a broken spinal nerve and a year later the person is feeling something there and moving a bit. Now, how would you spread stem cells in a broken brain? Where would you put the stuff? Would it migrate to damaged areas. What if it caused tumors and now I have a son who is not only unable to communicate his awareness, but now he's aware of a terrible pain because we did something and that was the result. Maybe even be getting increasingly aware and able to communicate, but what he says is "the pain won't stop!". Now there's a freakin' bit o'irony. What a quandary.

It's not about 'damned if you do, damned if you don't.' I'm not damned. I'm doing all I can, but no doubt not all that could be done. The thing is you don't know what was the right thing to do until you see the results. So you want to do the carefully right thing, and maybe spreading cells scraped from his nose onto his brain....I don't know if we are there yet.

Then there's Jon all wired up, shooting out alpha waves to mean yes and something else to mean no and now he's talking. It's like something out of one of my childhood horror movies, "The Brain" only it's my son. Woof. What if he starts chewing me out...not an impossible scenario....typical, actually, for someone to lash out at someone close. You certainly have a right to be pissed. I'm not happy about having a bunch of busted, aching vertebrae so i have to figure that I would be raging if I couldn't move a freaking thing but my thoughts. I think I would spend a few hours typing out on a virtual keyboard every swear word, every angry phrase I could think of. But maybe not. Not if it hurt Margaret's feelings. I'm pretty careful about that. I think it's bad luck to hurt a sensitive, sweet, soul. Besides, she's my wellspring of hope and energy. I figure if she can stand being around me all this time, we ought to be able to stand all kinds of crap the world hands us. It's a kind of concept I have that were I to be unable to feel my arms again due to some accident or disease, I would strive to imagine a hand which held hers at all hours of the day. She wouldn't have to know, but if I could do that, I could probably handle the crap.

I'm taking a lot of pictures, using that digital camera I was given. I take pictures driving up to see Jon, sort of documenting how I get there and how I get back. I have doors, lots of old doors. There are shots of tree roots, some looking like they are pulling up and moving out. I also like waterfalls, in the Spring when they are full and vibrant. It's a great camera for that kind of thing. The chip holds 64 pictures, enough to go from home to Jon and back again and still have a lot of neat things to show. Next time I want to stop and take shots of old trucks and cars, the shells of autos from the 40's and 50's. There's a lot of that sort of thing, also hot rods, all shiny and hot locking. So one trip might be mostly images of the landscape. I want to write captions for them and put them into a book. Might even try to publish or print it up myself. You could make a few copies and give them to people who might enjoy them.

One thing I like is that I feel a connection with Jon sometimes, that I know he's hooked in and watching thru my eyes. Then I go looking at everything, just in case it's true. I look at clouds, at trees, dogs, women. I try to listen to great music, jazz and avant garde stuff like Laurie Anderson and Bjork. Stuff I like and he liked, so I'm doing for me as well. This is something I'm doing for Jon, or doing for Margaret, this is something I can do and get it done. I can enjoy life, think about the people I love, experience the world and document what I feel and see and think. Then if something happens and at 65 Jon is given a healing injection and returns to the walking, wheeling or sitting up in bed talking world, he may ask "whatever happened to Dad?" Someone could give him some books and say "He left these for you to read." In case he's blind, I have the masks and other ceramic and wood sculptures. They should allow anyone close to me to understand what i was doing and feeling. I'm kinda right out there to touch and poke. When I pass I think I want to take a little walkabout and experience things like black holes and such. I'm tired of entropy.

If healing is one of the obligations of a shaman, then dreams is one of the domains. I haven't talked much about dreams, but it's important to remember that sometimes a dream is just a dream, a cigar is just a cigar.... but a black bear is something special and a dragon is always something to be careful around.

There is a song and once when I was in a class studying comparative mythology and symbology I interpreted this song as if it were a dream. I didn't get a very good grade on the paper because the teacher, although familiar with myths, was unfamiliar with shamanic dreaming. Here are some of the lyrics of the song:
I had a dream the other night when everything was still....
A person has gone spirit walking, the stillness is a clue, because although dreams have no sound people who are merely dreaming nearly always never notice the lack of sound. Sound, usually takes the form of songs or music or people talking in jumbled, unclear sentences. Spirits in the dream world can take any form, even sound.
I thought I saw Suzanna a-walking round the hill.....
Suzanna is a derivation of Inanna, the Sumerian Goddess who walked into the underworld to become Queen of the Dead. When a Goddess is seen walking round a hill it means she is walking the maze, which is formed on a hill, like cattle paths. Cattle are sacred to the Goddess and she often takes their form, most famously as Hathor.
A buckwheat cake was in her mouth, a tear was in her eye.....
Small seedcakes are often given as offerings to the dead, even sometimes being placed in their mouth before burying. When Inanna went to the underworld she saw her sister, who was also her, mourning for her husband-son, a symbol of winter. Inanna allowed herself to be flayed and hung and when her messenger came to find her she was released by the fact that the messenger cried for the dead husband-son.
I said I'm coming from the south, Suzanna don't you cry.....
The South is the domain of the Dead, below the horizon. The dreaming is suggesting that he, too, will emerge from the realm of the dead and sorrow will turn to joy. The next line, the chorus, is an American addition and has no symbolism.

I had a dream the other night when everything was still, I found a black bear cub alone and lost and I took it up and tried to find it's mother, knowing that I might be killed by the angry mother, but it was important enough to take up the task. I crept along, hiding from others until I found a hole in the ground beneath the roots of a huge tree and I knew the mother bear was down there, so I put the cub near the entrance and gently pushed it down.

The black bear is a symbol of the Goddess as Protector of children. The cub is both the Goddess and the child. Hiding from people referred to the persecution pagans suffer at the hands of modern religions. The hole was the same hole that Inanna walked into to go to Hel. This dream was a symbol of my faith and my role as one who tries to defend the Old Faith even at the risk of persecution. It may refer to my hope that the Goddess will protect me and my family.

I dreamed last night I was with old friends from the SCA and we had all been to a tourney. There was a stream running by and many of us had walked into the waters to cool off. One of my friends was lounging in the waters with tiny fish tickling his skin. None of the people had aged, they all looked like the way they looked when I was with them.

Being with friends was an reflection of how friendless I have become in recent years. Few people want to talk to me because my emotions have become different, I am angry and saddened by wars and foolish chances, bad parents....more than before I tend to rage against the harm we do one another, especially children. Having a son in a coma does that to you. My old friends were always there for me before I left Arizona, up to when my wife had gone slightly insane and was saying terrible things about them, thinking people were whispering about her. They were, but out of fear and concern. She thought they were jealous of her beauty, but by being so foul mouthed she had lost much of her beauty, her eyes had become hard and lost. When I awoke I was struck most by the image of one of my friends being tickled by small fish, because his skin had been pale and it occurred to me in the dream how fish nibble at corpses in the water. Streams are often symbols of time and being in and out of time can be a symbol of how we are both in the stream of time as we age and move along, but we are also out of the stream of time, both by being held in the memory of friends, and by our being spirits, who never really age. A dream like this could presage a death.

Dreaming is different than spirit walking, when we enter the realm while awake. IN spirit walking most of the symbols are active and can even identify themselves. Once when I was spirit walking I can to a plain, a rounded plain like the top of a huge hill. It was the Earth, and the tiny crack I saw in the dirt were canyons. The pools of water were oceans and the little piles of dirt were mountains. On this hill were figures of paper, like paper dolls. One man figure represented all men on Earth and was the prototype. Spirits coming to Earth as men would look at this symbol and know their appearance by it. There were little paper dolls for all the races and sexes on Earth. The Keeper of this little place was there, the One. I asked where the doll was that I had looked upon to be born a shaman and the One told me that shamans had no prototype and that was how we were able to spirit walk without dying. When you dream it is as if you were really there, but when spirit walking you can see the silver cord which runs from you to your physical body and you know how to come back by following that cord. You know that you could, if you wanted, sever that cord and stay on the spirit plane without sickness or pain and that temptation is very strong. The trick is to remember that eventually we all die and return to the spirit plane, so patience is a virtue and a curse. I returned to my broken body and it's pain and sorrow, but also it's joys.

People like Martin Luther King Jr. are shamans without knowing it. I doubt anyone ever told him that, but his drive to heal and to wrestle the demons and spirits which sicken this country is obviously shamanic drive. His speech "I had a dream" is so powerful because he could use the Voice of Power and try to use his dreams as curative psychic potions. His loss was predictable, at least for me, because in part a shaman can always tell when another shaman is going to die, but also because he was working with a mixture of symbols, being a Christian and not knowing the nature of the god he worshipped. It is a typical thing for Yahweh-Trickster-Odin to promise life and give death. As Odin He frequently leads a man to battle promising victory and then, at the moment of highest expectations, he slays the Hero. King had dreamed of his death and tried to tell the people about it, but he confused the symbols and the timing. Trickster had told him lies.

It is impossible to heal a nation, it must be put down, either by time and evolution, or by a sacrifice of blood, because countries are fictions given by Trickster. There are no lines on the Great Hill which is the earth. No boundaries between nations, only canyons, seas, and mountains. Trickster says there is a South Dakota and a France or China, but in the end there is only the Earth. People who follow a person into war worship and feed the lies of Trickster. People who grow gardens and offer sacrifices of buckwheat cakes to their dead support and feed the Goddess. Shamans dance on the edge between waking and dreaming. We heal by singing, dancing or painting symbolically. Oddly enough, in the structure of things most ethnologists would suggest that shamans are part of Trickster's realm, in part because of his singing and dancing and odd costumes, cross dressing etc. I believe that Trickster is not the God of shamans but is a shaman himself and not a true god at all. I think he's lying.

Dawn and sunset are the main times of shamans, the liminal points of day and night. Midnight and noon are also liminal, but like the equinoxes are lesser times. A shaman would rarely Walk at noon, for that time is when the Sun is greatest, and the Sun is intolerant of shamans. Midnight is the time when Death is greatest and She is too great to dance before. Myself, I've always been fond of Dawn. She is so soft and beautiful and so full of promise. My best Dreams are at dawn.

Thomas Freidman of the NYTimes needs to read Sen. Byrd's speeches. Mr. Freidman says he wishes some politician would make a great speech that brought some clarity to American thinking, some positive note in this cacophony of editorials and testimony. Sen. Byrd was the lone voice during the build up to the invasion of Iraq who spoke with such brilliance and force. He was like an echo of the voices that sounded thru the first debates on the structure of our nation. It was wonderful and terrible to hear him begging for the Rule of Law and of thoughtful discussion before we threw our military might against the people of Iraq.

In the end, the bombs drop not on Terror, nor on tyrants. They drop on children and women and men who repair cars. They drop on homes and roads and schools. "Smart bombs" are as smart as the idiots who program them and build them. They are as smart as the guy next door who burns plastic in his pile of leaves and forgets to stir the pile as it smolders. They miss their targets sometimes and although our Secretary of War says that democracy is untidy, it doesn't have to be. It can be as sweet as making love if the people love one another as any true "born again" would have to. George's Christ never took up the sword, not even to defend his own life. He never told his disciples to storm the temple armed with spears and fire to kill the worshippers there. If this administration worships any god at all, they obviously worship a god of fire and death, a god who laps up the blood of children and laughs and laughs in sheer joy at the terror we have spread. I speak of "us" as the people of the world, because there are no countries, no nations, no Presidents and no dictators. There are people and what they agree to believe in.

From the moon came a picture of a beautiful blue marble shining in the black of space. There were no lines drawn on this marble, no colored states red and blue. Just a thin coating of water and little bumpy mountain ranges showing white and brown and green. From orbit we could see the smoke rising from the wounds we made in our Mother Earth, but She is so forgiving and so loving of all Her children that we triggered no earthquakes, no plagues or volcanoes. She took in the bodies of the children, of the soldiers and fathers. She calmly breathed in the carbon smoke, the lakes of blood, the decaying flesh, like She always has done. Her crazed children slashed and burned, raped and killed, but inside each one of us we have armies of bacteria and white blood cells doing the same damn thing. The Goddess of Life understands it all.

In my garden I have a sculpture of Persephone Rising. It was made form a mix of clays from many places around the country. It fired in the kiln I made from broken bricks and clay and grasses from my own back yard. In this kiln She melted and hardened and changed. Her breasts dripped glass from the Arizona clay my son gave me, green and shiny glass like dew on grass. Her face seared and whitened, burned and browned. In my garden She looks up from the soil, her shoulders just emerging from the earth. She gazes up for the first time at the sun and her scars are honorable and self-inflicted, for She is not the wimpy Persephone of the Greeks, but more the Queen of the Underworld of the Sumerians who traveled down into the darkness to give solace to the poor souls trapped down there. She is Spring.

Those who worship the Trickster can have no joy at the blooming of a small flower in a patch of sun. They can make no connection between the song of a bird and the laughter of a baby. Trickster had no children, but changed his body into a female form and gave birth to monsters, the Fenris Wolf, the Midgard serpent, the six legged Sleipnr who carries the God of Lies over the battlefields. Trickster is not a god of war, but delights in war. He knows the passing of time reveals the Truth, but he whispers into our ears to drown out the Truth. There is no end, life just begins again. Life is not an end, nor beginning and death is not an end nor beginning. It's all a circle and a band of shining light.

The Gnostic angels were dismayed when trickster Yahweh gave our souls form and introduced us to death and war and despair. Sophia strokes our foreheads and says nothing, because in the course of Time the Lies become Truth and the bodies burn away and the souls are freed again to soar into the cosmos. She does not explain as Yahweh does, that we are special and immortal, but Yahweh-Trickster-Coyote tells us that Eating of the Tree of Knowlege (Sophia) will make us "die, yes die" and in a way He tells a truth, for knowledge will set you free from Life by revealing your immortality. They saw they were naked, they saw that we were like all the animals and plants in the Garden. They saw that their Father had lied to them and they were ashamed of their heritage, so they hid. Now they knew Right and Wrong and their Father had done them wrong. Like a drunken angry father coming home from the pub Yahweh expelled his children and cursed them. He threatened and frightened and drove them from their home, from the home he had made for them.

In the Garden of Eden, named for the first Woman, there is a Tree of Life, the image of Goddess, the Bringer of Gifts. Like Black Elk says, the Central Mountain is everywhere, so when Adam and Eve left the Garden, She went with them.

One of the curious things I discovered when I read the Bible for the first few times was the issue of Names. I asked my Sunday school teacher if Mary was a Jewish name. She said that the Mother of God was named something like Mariam, but we call her Mary. So I asked about the other names and she told me to sit down and shut up. I discovered that none of the names in the Bible are true, they are made up names to sound less Jewish. The letters which formed those names were not our letters. I would not recognize the names in the Bible, they would appear to be to be squiggly lines on brown, aged parchment. So Joshua, or Yesua bin Joseph was not Jesus Christ, Mr. Christ of 85 Babylon Lane. And God was not named God, but something which we know only by it's abbreviations, YHWH, the tetragrammaton. It surprised me that nobody at the Temple knew His name but the High Priest, and he was dead and the temple was burned down. The Ark was somewhere unknown and the body of Jesua was lost. I began to wonder what it was they were teaching me. Why was the story of the crucifixion exactly like Isis and Osiris? Why did the Pieta look exactly like the carvings of Isis holding her dead husband-son Osiris? Why did Odin hang himself, pierced with a spear, sacrificed to himself and brought down with the knowledge of knowledge?

When a creature walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it is unwise to call it a horse and try to ride it. When a religion acts like a Death Cult, speaks like a Death Cult and destroys women and children, it is unwise to think that it is presided over by a Teacher of Righteousness. When a nation imprisons children, invades other lands and firebombs cities, it is unwise to think it values Freedom of Choice and Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. I doubt anybody in Iraq was happy upon learning that a smart bomb had destroyed a wedding, or that a carload of neighbors had been shot full of holes by trigger happy nervous American boys. You can't put a gun to someone's head and scream into their ears to smile or dance or be free. We used to do that and we were supposed to have stopped. We aren't supposed to be building concentration camps or designing new land mines or loading radio controlled airplanes with tiny nuclear bombs. We aren't supposed to cut down the Tree of Life and building computer desks from the sweet smelling wood.

But Mother smiles and strokes our hair and whispers into our ears that "It's alright, Father is just a little drunk and angry, but when he goes away, as He always does She will tuck us in and sing us to sleep and happy dreams will make this terrible day seem like a distant passing moment." The Promise of Life is that it never ends, it just begins again.