'A kid asked me a few years ago, "What do you do to get the [Nobel Peace] prize?"

I said, "It's very easy, you just need three things - you must have an easy name, like Tutu for example, you must have a large nose and you must have sexy legs." '

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

It was the year 3023. Fasil was eighteen years old, and this was her first time to vote. The poll worker, an elderly woman in a nuevofiber smock, placed a blindfold, snug eyeless goggles, over Fasil’s head and walked her to the voting room. She was told that on each wall was the projected image of a candidate running for office. She would have up to a minute to touch the walls. The first wall she touched with any part of her body for longer than five seconds would be recorded as her vote.

‘There are no obstacles in the room, and your vote will be timed automatically by the pressure-sensitive devices in the walls. Are you ready, dear?’

Fasil asked, ‘Who are the candidates?’

‘Sorry, Fasil. I do not know their names, and if I did, I wouldn’t be allowed to share them. Privacy rights, you know.’

‘Well,’ Fasil asked, ‘What office are these first candidates running for?’

‘That information is also confidential. All votes are based on the voter’s body intelligence. We do our best to make certain bad press, prejudices, rational thinking, and over-thinking don’t get in the way of electing the best person for the job.’

Fasil heard a clicking sound as the worker prepared the recording device. ‘Will you tell me who I voted for?’

‘’Fraid not. Look. I’m sure you’ve learned this in school. Blind Voting has worked much better than the old-fashioned process, and, because there are no campaign costs, there's far less expense to the candidates and the taxpayers. Much less animosity between neighbors, too. Now, are you ready?’

Fasil nodded.

‘I will count to three, and when I say, “vote” you may begin. One, two, three…vote!’

spiny shadows of desert plants
a drop of rain
we talk of mothers

Art on Ashby Avenue:

It wasn't right away, but within half an hour of hiking a couple miles to say thank you to a stranger, beautiful afternoon light was blooming on Berkeley street curbs and parking lots. A shop owner gave me a gift. People said hi, and some made funny statements and acted out silly gags. I drank a Pyramid ale and it was full of gold. A big white seagull was tailing me, and babies in strollers ate messy chocolate cookies.

A slender ribbon of cool air awakened me this morning, as though someone had opened a window, or as though the room were only a dream, and I were asleep on the leaf-carpet of a forest. Late in the day, I did come upon the poignant fragrance of a pair of redwoods. A flock of red-winged blackbirds perched like beads on a wire, chattered without pause. Two red-shafted northern flickers measured my pulse. A small flock of pigeons floated within the blue sky as though breathing in synchrony.

heat, color, and glass
Chihuly's art
explosion of
the molten heart

There’s a fine article on animal migrations in the November 2010 issue of National Geographic. Most of us North Americans have heard of the seasonal migrations of monarch butterflies, sandhill cranes, and the Mexican free-tailed bats.

But did you know that thousands of prairie rattlesnakes migrate up to 33 miles from an area near Medicine Hat, Alberta? They don’t travel as a group. Hundreds of snakes emerge from a den, then take off in a starburst pattern in all directions.

I read a long time ago that cattle egrets display similar migratory behavior. When a community grows saturated and it’s difficult to sustain the population, the young adults will take off in a starburst pattern, sometimes out over the sea, to find new territory.

Many migrations no longer occur because of encroachment of humans. For example, bison and passenger pigeons once migrated by the millions, but were essentially exterminated in a rather short period of time for sport. (The passenger pigeon is now extinct; with a few exceptions, bison are now fenced in as ranch animals.)

Wiki at this time suggests that squirrels do not migrate, but here is a link to an well-researched piece that documents a number of impressive migrations in the 1800s. ( Squirrel Migrations )

David Quammen who wrote the National Geographic article summarizes biologist Hugh Dingle’s factors that characterize animal migrations. Here are some of them:

Migrations ‘are prolonged movements that carry animals outside familiar habitats; they tend to be linear, not zigzaggy; they involve special behaviors of preparation (such as overfeeding)…Migrating animals maintain a fervid attentiveness to the greater mission, which keeps them undistracted by temptations and undeterred by challenges that would turn other animals aside.’



The above is a photo of a map from the National Geographic article.

Have you ever been a kid
on a full moon night?
The rustle in the grass
calls your secret name -
harmless faces
peer from the trees.

Walk, walk, walk.

What I learned playing Spider Solitaire:

Just when everything looks stalled and the end is near – sometimes you find one hidden overlooked move, and the game opens up and begins to impossibly bloom.

The appeal of a deck of card lies in the satisfying way it neatly collapses into complete organization. Fifty-two objects (fifty-four if you count the jokers) that divide into four complete sets – matching combinations of ten numbers and three people in strict hierarchy. There's a pleasing flexibility with the ace which can be either head or tail of the hierarchy, top dog or bottom, and in that way, permits the hierarchy of the set to be circular if you want to philosophize. Two colors, black and red, give that us-them divisiveness and attraction. The deck arrives in a compact packet, cards completely organized, hearts before spades, spades before diamonds, diamonds before clubs, all as it should be, all’s right with the world, the structure of the universe clearly divine.

Humans that we are, we shuffle the deck again and again, creating an apparent chaos in the card universe. We then spend our time solitarily or with other people following (and breaking) formal game rules to re-establish a predetermined organization once again, whether in the form of clever poker and gin hands or reattaining the order of the cards at their birth from the little box.

Playing with cards is a pastime that has consumed countless hours across many many centuries. As we build perfect hands from the random shufflings, we practice managing the dissarray within our own lives, lives that often feel like the game of 52-pickup.

And the jokers – ah, the jokers.

'...when people think they're going away from something, they very often find they've gone straight towards it...'
Mrs. Taswell
The Girl in a Swing
by Richard Adams

I've been listening to Leo Kottke's armadillo album this evening, absorbing the kaleidoscopic progressions and repetitions. Our brains somehow assimilate pieces of music that have complex weavings of instruments, beat, and melodies. They also integrate the many threads in our lives. Like with music, the mind does its best work if we flow with life experience, enjoy the many intricacies, and don't take it apart too much. Even if the brain doesn't at first get something, with time, it may develop pathways and connections, integrate new data, to deepen our understanding, if not on a concrete rational level, perhaps on a rich intuitive level.

One exercise in the Shintaido warm-up routine is called hip rotations. All you do pretty much is swivel your hips while gazing in the distance. The first year I practiced, I noticed a teacher seemed to unconsciously do hip rotations when he was guiding other students, and that it seemed to create connection, or heighten his ability to support the sword or karate exercise they were doing. Sometimes he had everyone doing hip rotations between activities, which seemed to create cohesion among the participants.

This will sound odd, but the rotating hips, when walking very relaxed like seaweed, can pull you toward emotional destinations as well as toward people you practice with. After leaving California in 2007, I attended a meditation workshop on Normandy Beach. On Easter, in the process of warming up before the first class, the hip rotations led me to the sand buried remains of a WWII ship, just as the sun was rising. After the workshop was long over, I returned to the beach, and the swiveling hips located the American cemetery, not from the road where there are printed signs, but from the shore where it is scarcely visible. Back in California, it led to an unfamiliar WWII memorial near Golden Gate Bridge.

When your body is very relaxed and loose, there are sudden sensations, as though the destination were a magnet and your hips were a metal powerfully drawn to the magnet. It's as though the koshi, the area of the body cradled by the hips, were activated and becomes receptive to the surroundings.

The last couple of weeks, the walking like seaweed with the rotating hips has been like having a guided tour. (I experiment more inside or in the dark to avoid attracting attention with the drunken-like movement!) The body has divining hips, a rather big, affecting, and hard-to-grasp experience.

The monarch butterflies float south in the fall in order to winter in the mountains of Mexico and parts of California. What impulse starts a monarch on its journey? What keeps it aloft for thousands of miles instead of gliding down for a rest in a juniper, feeling that this flight is too much adventure for one butterfly? And though millions migrate each year, and will overnight clustered together in trees or on boulders for warmth, the monarchs don't travel together in the way cranes and geese do. Instead it seems one by one they pick up, gain quite a bit of altitude, and try to ride a norther across the border.

Thousands of individual impulses to fly cross continent.

The monarchs show up right about this week each year in central Texas, some from as far north as Canada. No individual butterfly makes the whole trip there and back; each migration marks a span of three or four generations of butterfly. So how do they know not only when, but where to go? They find the same overwintering spots even though not a single one has been there before. 'Somehow they know their way, even though the butterflies returning to Mexico or California each fall are the great-great-grandchildren of the butterflies that left the previous spring.'
(monarchwatch.org)

If you recline on your back and look up to a clear blue sky, you’ll see the tiny silhouettes far overhead, floating, each one a weightless wonder, an awesome traveller.

sycamore limbs
with their brown thinning leaves
and seed balls for
little birds

Today, I picked up quite a find at a thrift shop benefitting a local hospice. Eisenstaedt: Witness to our time. First published in 1966, this book contains over 300 photos taken between 1930 and 1965 by the remarkable and prolific LIFE magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Many of his photos are of famous people, but not necessarily at their polished best. One of his most popular images is of a sailor exuberantly hugging a nurse bystander during a parade at the end of WWII. However, in most of the pics, serious expressions outweigh pleasantry and humor, and subjects tend to look as though they struggle with their roles in life. There are occasional very attractive portraits, people with great poise, but most are of flesh responding to the weight of realities of war and living. Even the whimsical cover photo of an ice skating waiter bearing a tray of wineglasses shows a man who experiences his work with weary intensity. Many subjects look like real characters, self-doubt mingled with bravado. He had an eye for capturing beneath the skin.

The book becomes a sort of pictorial history. Eisenstaedt covered the opera stages, streets, dinner tables, government halls, ski slopes, bars, canals, and deserts around the world. There are dogs, elephants, frogs, camels, spoonbills, roosters and cheetahs. Most animals, though, are pictured as they relate to people.

As an amateur photographer, I’m fascinated that perhaps a quarter of the images here aren’t clearly focused. Now that we’re living in an age of affordable digital cameras with amazing auto-focus capacities, it’s easy to forget that there was once effort involved in getting lighting and focus coordinated for each image on film. Critics today can harp if every part of a photo is not crisp. It’s refreshing to be reminded a picture can have great impact without perfect technique.

In a way, this book is contrarily cheerful. It gives the viewer permission to belong, to be a somewhat flabby, baggy, self-inflated, out-of-focus, dour, imperfect human along with hundreds of people Eisenstaedt photographed. In his fine work, even governmental rulers, great scientists, and movie stars are mortal members of the general mass of humanity.

The moon dangled,
a bright leaf
against dark blue dusk.
Moms strolled their babies.

a rare night,
the air shimmers with vibrations
of those who touch
ancestral threads
our lives rich
with blended harmonies
of friends, relations
this boy, that woman
who lived long past
or is still to come
whose hands are out of reach
but whose song resounds
within our hearing

I tried to feel one enemy's shoes
bruised and creased
on my feet -
they don't fit
they hurt in odd places
but it's hard to feel hate
standing in those shoes

flowers nod from stranger's cart
milk and cookies below
such tenderness

A salute to the lives of:
Phoebe Prince
William Lucas
Tyler Clementi
Asher Brown
Seth Walsh

A book recommendation:
All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Robert Fulghum

Cocoa the housecat wakes up at 4:10 am, wanders outside for an hour or two, then curls back asleep for another hour. Around 1 PM, Cocoa's catching zzz's again for another couple of hours. Shall we offer the cat pills for insomnia?

Are we certain humans are supposed to sleep eight hours straight? Perhaps we force ourselves into a modern-era time schedule when our bodies and their natural biorhythms are designed for something less rigid: a smaller block of night sleep, and a nap or two during the day. Research has already suggested the human body yearns for siesta early in the afternoon.

Perhaps our mammal bodies are also programmed for different amounts of sleep according to the season: more sleep in the hibernation-friendly dark of winter, less in the long hours of light in the summer.

All my life, I’ve awakened occasionally in the early morning hours. I learned I had the choice to worry about it, or enjoy the quiet hours, listen to the radio, walk outside and look at the constellations. Hard to do with high pressure job obligations the next day, but where possible, it's ok to listen to the body's requests and timing.

loud clatter
of plates and voices -
this scarred breakfast table -
a slender wrist

What barriers are there between within me and without me?
between us and me?
between awake and asleep?
between breathing and not?

No one leaves.
No one returns.

Just because you are experiencing page 29 of your life doesn't mean the rest of the book does not exist. Page 15 and page 110 are also existing as are your great-great-great-great grandfather and your great-great-great granddaughter and William Shakespeare.

Perhaps to cultivate consciousness is to cultivate awareness of the being of all moments.

guitar notes -
like water drops clinging to night grasses -
brilliant old moon

Haiku is a path to expansion through confinement.

Restricted to 17 syllables, it's the building of a little window to offer a big view. Using precise observations, it's a teaspoon of water to express the sea.

Sometimes, we put aside form to explore the expansion. (In other words, looks like this isn't going to be a haiku-only blog.)

disorderly thoughts
and stumbling words
yield to the carol of sparrows...

bay leaves,
empty wine glass,
night fragrance,
open window,
helicopter