Here's the next set of commentaries and notes pulled from the Daily Tales and other places.

The notes are fairly chronological, but not too very. I'll be going in over time and hot-linking things; again, you certainly don't have to read all this, nor comment on it. But if you're ever terribly bored, or wondering about more of my history, I suppose this is one place to go. The only thing I have to say, in fairness, is that you may want to look at the last post on this thread.

I wouldn't normally draw your attention to it, because I don't mention this hardly at all, anymore - I don't see why I should, for I'm forming no dependent bonds with people who need to rely on me, or make a weighted gamble on my presence. But it seems like you should at least know, and then you can decide what you'd like to do, if anything...

-- Anonymous, June 12, 2002

Answers

December 1, 2001

... In my story that I'm writing, the one that these Daily Tales continue to be a Voice exercise for, the tension between governmental ordering systems is expressed through types of molecular bonding. The existing status quo is what I call an Ionocracy. Its grouping strategy is to form ionic - taken and privately owned - bonds, while its counterpart supports Covalence, the sharing of ions necessary to complete one's outer shells. Water. Diamond. Covalent. One of the points is the strength in a working and deep diversity.

It's been a fun metaphor to build an E-volution around. I look forward to working on it again - my plan, of course, when the store sells and I'm free for the Next Big Thing.

*************

...As I write, I think about de Chardin's Noosphere. I wonder if you and I - and so many other new friends sharing love and understandings in this way - are touching and coming to know one another in the space he described, arcing across the thousands of miles and decades of life's obstacles between us, to weave a net of even more special and unexpectedly novel genetic and memetic connections that, in their turn, become the intelligence that cycles in to regenerate the planet's balance?

When I was 16, in 1976, I was living in a small basement studio of a house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I remember travelling into a very prescient state one wintery weekend, and I wrote about something connective, between minds and spirits, that I called "The Net". It seemed to me that it was a Salvation of sorts - a Cosmic Rescue - and the punch line was that you had to be willing to do it without The Net in order to get the safety of The Net.

****************

The Sense of Options

It's early Thursday evening.

I'm preparing to enjoy one of the benefits of owning a natural foods store in Eugene, Oregon: great food, often from people I am connected to in some way. I never know for sure what I'm going to eat, especially nowadays.

...single life plays havoc with the menus, but I can also eat whenever I want, and I always get my fill of crab...

Tonight it's cold crab from the market down the street - the one that has their own fishing boats off the coast and comes into town daily - basil linguine that Kirk is getting to ready to put on the market and wants me to test; a new sun-dried tomato sourdough baguette that I'm considering for the store, a mesclun salad, and a pilsner. I'm glad I don't tend to put on weight, because this place would put more than a few pounds on me.

This hour finds me between transposing charts and running a mini-sound check for my gig tomorrow night. I picked up a new mixing board and need to test all the hook-ups and cables before I put it on stage.

I wrote quite a bit in some of the early Tales about a few of my musical hopes, and tonight my little abode looks less like a boudoir and more like an electric spaghetti factory, but it's all in the name of musical self-reliance and creativity, so to heck with order! Bring on the cacaphony! And we'll have a candlelight etude for dessert...

****************

I had one of my first lousy rehearsals Monday night, and it was a real shocker. As I said, I'm really a newbie when it comes to this music thing. Oh, I've been performing all my life, but coming back into singing this late in the game has its challenges. One of them - the upside face - is that because of my age, no one really knows I've just picked it back up, so I can get away with looking "like I meant to do it" more often than not. The downside of that same jelly sandwich is that I look like I know what I'm doing, so I'm expected to know it, and sometimes I have to be really quick, even much quicker than I can possibly be, in order to keep looking like I meant to do it when the other musicians do something fancy and I'm needed to keep up.

Monday was a pretty rough day, rehearsal wise. I took a bunch of charts in and had every single one of them crash and burn. I thought the pianist was going to faint - she was having a pretty rough personal week, and this was not what she needed 4 days before our gig (Jo Fed's books us about once every 2-3 months, so it's kind of The Gig around here). The fact that the charts fried was due to my ignorance about standard songs - I'd been working with cobbled charts that have been fine for my earlier sets of players, but since I've moved into the more serious professional camp, these babies just don't cut it anymore.

Fortunately, I was able to salvage everything by busting my tush and cranking out new ones that are, for the most part, more than fine. But it was a close face call.

I'm reminded of a similar situation, almost 20 years ago, when I began riding racehorses at the tracks in southern California.

In order to work at the track as a rider, you had to have a license to ride. But there was no formal way to get a license. It was all an inside thing. First, you had to ride well enough to look like you could handle a racehorse. If you were a new rider, you'd strategically pick your times to hang out on The Rail so that you were available when all the riders were booked up, and the smaller trainers who were struggling to find someone to ride their horses so they could get them worked and back into the stalls before it got warm would use you if you had two legs and were still standing up.

These trainers weren't about to check if you had a license - they just wanted a rider. So, then your job was to look good enough on the horse so that the Outrider, the guy who's watching everything on the track to make sure nothing goes wrong, just thinks you're a rider in from the fair circuit or something. He watches you pretty close for awhile to make sure you're not a danger to others, and when he's satisfied, he just looks the other way.

Until the first time you have a problem, that is.

My turn came when I was working a particularly feisty colt - and a "work" is when you take them up to speed, as if they were in a race, but you don't let them out except for a very short time, and then you have to pull them in (ha!) - and his bridle fell off in the middle of the backstretch.

I did all right, all things considered - kind of fooled him into thinking we were done, and started singing him down - but I had to be "caught", which means the Outrider had to come pick me up.

On the way back to the gates, he looks over at me and says "You got your license yet?" I was pretty sheepish, and admitted that I didn't. He smiled and said "Bring the papers over and I'll sign you on, but check your own tack from now on. These grooms will kill you if you don't."

Jazz is kind of the same way. So, I don't think I've lost too much face, since it happens to everybody. It's mostly my own confidence, and my own image, that's in need of repair, and I'm working on that one. Tomorrow night will make that job either simpler, or harder, depending on how it goes...but I always have fun, and even if I'm singing the wrong notes, I'll sing them as if I mean them - because I do.

*****************

I'm planning my weekend - moving's done! - and one last load of soil and pots and things goes upriver this Sunday (WITH the gloves and raingear this time - still no window, but I'll have plastic and duct tape, so no big). My task is to head into the woods and cut a lot of evergreen branches, and then put them into swags and hang them from all the rafters around the store. It's a lot of work, but It really does mean a lot to people in the neighborhood.

I've noticed something interesting over the years, and it relates in part to your Forbes message about happiness, self-loathing, and expression.

My store is located in the Whiteaker neighborhood. It used to be (and still is somewhat) considered a "bad thing" to be located in Whiteaker. Whiteaker was once the only neighborhood poor Eugene had to kick around, so it became the whipping boy that let our local police department communicate its reasons for existence - not to diss police, here, for I don't, but there was a time when serious crime reporting would cycle through the news about 2 months before the budget was set to be voted on by the City Council, every year for years, and then I started talking about it, and then it stopped.

About 5 years ago, I started running adds that used the word "Whiteaker" prominently, and now it's become a cool place to be again. But I digress...

Our hood is in a deep identity crisis. It has a vocal minority that vociferously hates the mass culture and denounces it at every step (while living in and on it and off of it - more on that another time). Holidays like Christmas are particularly prone to its vehemence. This is unfortunate, because Oregon is cold and damp and gray, and there's nothing like bright lights and yuletide good will to improve spirits around here.

I've decorated the store more often than not. What I've noticed is that when the store goes through Christmas in plain wrap, people are pretty much the same - shopping for groceries (although we do tend to have a colorful clientele, with a much higher smile quotient than the one you and Lotte have observed). But when I fill the store with evergreens, and the scent of fresh-cut fir fills the air, and I put a few twinklies around, everyone is much happier - perky, even. Chatty. Smiling. And the kids really love it.

Not too many people ever say anything - it's probably too gauche for the radical to praise the Christmas Spirit - but I can tell that it makes a difference. It's not the forest, but it's closer. It's not A Better World, but it's a glimpse through the veil, an alteration that reminds folks that things could be different; that things could look different, and feel different, and we'd be different within them. It may not be The Option, but it's an option, and if there's one, there could be a hundred of them. I think perhaps events like Christmas and these other wintering holidays that toy with the realm of possibilities more easily touched by candlelight, in darkness, can awaken our Sense of Options, a sense that's perhaps even more important than the tangible physical ones, and I like stimulating that.

It makes sense.

So I do it. Kind of like that Thanksgiving thing. I have a feeling that a lot of the children of these folks never see a Christmas tree, except for on TV. They don't have the experience of abundance, nor the feeling of bounty, even if it is contrived (again, it's about looking good -for if you can still look good, then *something's* going right!), that I had in my earliest years - bless my parents' hearts!

And, as I thought about heading upriver to cut the boughs for one more season - perhaps my last for this store - I found myself wishing you were here. It seems like it's something you might enjoy, driving up into the woods with me, choosing the boughs, and then dipping them in paraffin and wiring them into graceful swags for people who have no idea how much they will be enjoying them.

But they can't hide that pleasure, and I get to see it, and just writing about it here to you gives me energy to push my day a little past too long on Sunday and make it happen for one more year.

****************

It's 10:30. It's been one of those hard, kind of stupid, sets of days where things alternate between going horribly right and wonderfully wrong. Truly. I'm rewarding myself with some writing - I suppose it's become my way to go into The Zone.

Galen (my ex) and I used to talk about The Zone, but we meant it as a place in which we experienced being integrated into the circuitry of the perceiving biosphere and all its subtler realms, and not the dopplered red-shift of minds slowed under the brain-numbing hertz of the blue tube.

...I'm still careening toward Ruin, but I seem to be circling it, rather than being pilloried in the Town Square (*yet*) ...When I did that conference workshop last fall - "How to Crash Land Your Business Without Killing Everyone On Board" - I was surprised by the fact that 1) very few attended, even though I think I know the state of affairs in a number of businesses is/was definitely "off", 2) those that did attend didn't admit readily to problems (and I knew they had them), and 3) I could see clearly that the solutions I was offering were *not* being received.

was interesting, because the thrust of my talk was about my own resistance to recognizing the downward spiral, and the consequences of resisting it, rather than facing it. I was offering my experience so that others could learn from my mistakes. They weren't receptive, because they were resisting recognition of the downward spiral they were/are in.

5 years ago, my little business was predictably plugging along at a 15-18% growth rate, and doing about 1.3 million/year. Net margin in my business is 3% if you're extremely lucky in location and mercenary in product offerings. I'm neither, and like I've told you, like to play it close to the wire, figuring that all profit beyond necessities (and martinis are sometimes necessities, so I'm not a puritan ascetic) is dough that you plug back into the game, fighting the Bad Guys by doing more of the Right Thing.

...I consider myself a service business that offers simple ways for people to serve. I think it's the little things you do everyday that have a lot more impact than the things you do once or twice a year. I used to get completely fried when someone would splurge now and then on some faddish eco-tool, but still use disposable razors or paper tissues - I couldn't sell cotton handkerchiefs to save my life! (no, no, no, - I am NOT going to go off on a rant here....) < GEAR SHIFT >

Anyhow, back to biz.

We usually scraped by with a 1-2% net net - this is, of course, a measley 10K before taxes. The ROI doesn't even begin to approach passbook savings...When the store was bumping along at a brisk pace, we did OK - not a lot of cash, but a lot of time to do good work, and so I was mostly a farming and healthy food system advocate, writing letters, planning the future, stumping for organics, that sort of thing.

When the business started to plunge (and flat - "maybe it will get better if we just hang on long enough" - is definitely before plunge), post-divorce, post-Mother-moving south (I miss her), post-big-stores-mainstreaming-our-little-niche (something I worked hard to make happen, because this was The Cause, after all - I just forgot I was the next rung on the ladder to be climbed over by the Big Boys), I spent the next couple of years in a major squirm-and-writhe pattern. It wasn't a pretty sight.

I had to leave the farm that I was renting when I brought Nick back over from London. I had to stop share-cropping (I ran a 1200 bush organic blueberry operation for 3 years) and lost all the investment in that. I eventually had to close down the greenhouse. I lost a lot of plants. There were too many days where I had to work so hard that I was bone tired and just lay in the middle of the floor at night to cry all those toxic brain isotopes out . Sales fell almost 60%. I nearly closed the doors on the store in the Spring of 2000 because I felt I was on the Road to Ruination. It was a very frightening place, because I had to confront all sorts of demons - family (my mother's savings financed the store); how to re-pay her (I'm not exactly a prime candidate for high-wage work; mouthy, over-the-top, zero formal education), the closure's impact on the neighborhood, letting down my staff, stiffing my vendors who are also my friends, out-and-out personal failure - there were plenty of ghosts to populate my night times.

On top of it all, I lived - and still live - with The Checkbook.

I remember a day or three, back in July of 1997 I think it was, where my corporate checking account hit the black. Yes, I should probably call that Black July. Most of the rest of the time - and all the time since then - I'm running a deficit that would make my stomach tie itself in knots if I didn't keep it a secret. I don't tell people the number - they'd just gag to imagine living with that sort of literal negative day in and day out.

I think I handle it because I really do think "It's only money." The irony is that I work so hard for the little bit of money that I get (even though, in world standards, I'm wealthy beyond imagining) and I really do feel like "It's only money." Maybe that's one of the qualities that the Africans (I relate to the Nepali in this same way), who work so hard for so little money, have that you like so much - maybe it's just that they really see the truth about money. It's only money.

What I eventually learned was that Ruination can be one of those places that you come mighty close to, but never actually have to visit - of course, I'm not sure you can see that anywhere but in the rear view mirror. Business didn't improve that much. What happened was that I adequately managed the transition, and completely re-invented what I was doing and why, and - for lack of a better word - just simply changed.

I didn't like how things were growing in general - in my industry, the TFG is increasingly served through alcohol, tobacco, sugar, and evocative lifestyle imagery - so I determined to shrink my way out of the problem. I've long ago determined that companies need to be able to grow small just as adroitly as they grow big. They need to know enough about who and what they are *really* about to go either direction. Sometimes shrinking is exactly the way to survive, and there are ways to do it that don't destroy your business integrity or sense of mission. I also decided that I wasn't going to go down small, cutting my losses early and bankrupting out of the stress. I'd already decided that bankruptcy was not an option to choose - it was an option that would have to be forced upon me. If I chose it before I'd exhausted every single credit line Big Biz would extend me, then I'd have to stiff the community that was dearest to me, and damn it, if I was going to have to stiff them, then the Big Boys were going to have to bite some of the bullet, too.

I used the credit line to shrink, however, not to grow. I know this is probably not conventional business "wisdom", but my doors are still open, and that's one sure way to measure success.

I guess it was that attitude that turned the corner for me. Suddenly I saw options that I wasn't seeing before. I racked up more debt, but I just call it "Rent" - good money after bad, perhaps, but it's all Rent. I folded up some of my favorite dreams and put them down, or tucked them away in my heart for safe-keeping. This little studio that I'm in right now - happily in, right now - is the latest step along that road. I live on very little, and I'm actually very happy.

This is probably one of the most surprising things in the world, for if I'd imagined this scenario 12 years ago when I got into this business, I would have felt suicidal. In fact, I did when I imagined it. But it's just like that Swamp Thing - it's not always what it seems.

***************

...When I and my family first came to the Red Barn in 1989, we were "those people from California", during the time when dissing "Californication" had just become vogue. Since it's a favorite neighborhood pastime to speculate broadly about new folk that you don't know, I was surprised to learn that one of the rumors about us was that we were Born Again Christians because we smiled so much. We liked ourselves, and that was a serious affront to a number of people who weren't really hip to the fact that it was bothering them.

Happiness is not something I pursue. It pursues me. I often wake up smiling. I bubble. Douglas says I "pop up like toast." I drive people crazy - heck, I drive myself crazy with how interminably happy I am, punctuated by the most intense sadness at times that's probably all the more startling for the contrast. I'm sure I'd be clinically diagnosed as manic-depressive, and succored by the Prozac Nation at the drop of a twenty dollar bill. But I'm also schizophrenic, since I contain many different women. And I'm obsessive-compulsive when seized with A Calling. If I knew more psychological disorders, I'm sure I'd probably recognize them in myself (or at least in one of me...)

So, I think you might be right about this "pursuit" thing - not chasing it, it comes. On the other hand, I bear witness to the fact that being chased, caught and hog-tied by happiness is not something your neighbors and friends suffer lightly. Which is why most of us are out in the woods, giggling to ourselves, I suppose.

************

Lordy. I left with the sun shining. Shortly into the trip, I started to catch the rain. One truism about an old truck is that when it starts raining, you usually have to pull over to find the windshield wiper knob since it just doesn't stay on through the gear shiftings any longer. In fact, lots of things don't stay on any longer.

I had an opportunity to contemplate storm metaphors. Seems that one good thing about heading straight into a storm is that when it's at your back, you know it's finally behind you, and it isn't going to turn around. Unless it freezes, of course.

About two thirds of the way up river the rain turned to snow, and Plan B was formulating. Four miles off the road, a thousand feet higher, and Plan C was perking mightily, too. One thing about city apartments is they don't have a lot to do with a 64 Dodge loaded with plants, heading upriver in an unexpected snow - from town, I saw no portents of a reality that had any capacity at all to penetrate the sealed bubbleland of My Managed Life.

There's something to be said for the sheer orneriness of the natural world.

I'd left with few clothes - certainly not the snow trekking kind - and no gloves. jeez. *That's* not going to happen again.

Happily to say, I made it all the way. The road hadn't washed out yet - it usually does about mid January I hear - the mid-day temps made everything slushy but not frozen, and I made it onto the land with only a few fishtail waddles marring my flawless approach.

THEN it turned glorious! The downpour from the valley was now a fat flaked snow. I had no rain gear, and was soon soaked, and so there was nothing to do for it but throw all my wet clothes over the thermal radiators and jump in the hot spring with snow falling all around til my overalls and long johns dried out.

Thank god I got warm, because my driver's side window proceeded to finally fall apart, disappearing into the body of the door after 4 years of threatening to do so, and so I had to drive home with the window down through blowing snow and trucks spraying ice water. I found one glove in the box, and kept throwing it on the defroster and changing hands every couple of miles. What a silly sight I must have been!

I beat it back down the valley before dark, and then discovered (again) why rural and city life don't mix - white carpets! Augh! I was filthy, and usually don't think anything of it. Enough mud and you stay warmer, you know. And then, after I'd made boot prints on the carpet, I did the cardinal sin of trying to clean the mud before it's dried. Sigh. What a mess. Oh well. I'll get this city thing down. : : : : : : : : :

-- Anonymous, June 12, 2002

*************

The Covalent Metaphor - prologue On Sun, 2 Dec 2001,

... Comparative Intensity. The focus of much in relationship to one's self and anything. The measurement of "ouch" and "yumm", and the spectrum in between. I study shapes, and it's the variation in intensity, and the countervalent dynamics of shortened things (muscle) providing the space for lengthened things (different muscle), that creates much true original (as different from purely responsive) action.

Without asymmetry there would be no real movement, just a languid reflection of the greater flow around it (that I'm perfectly happy to also express, under the right circumstances, with the right person). So, thanks for the asymmetry, for it's a gift, and I hope you're appreciating it as much as I am.

> >In my story that I'm writing, the one that these > >Daily Tales continue to be a Voice exercise for, the tension >between governmental ordering systems is expressed through types >of molecular bonding. The existing status quo is what I call an >Ionocracy. Its grouping strategy is to form ionic - taken and >privately owned - bonds, while its counterpart supports >Covalence, the sharing of ions necessary to complete one's >outer shells. Water. Diamond. Covalent. One of the points is the >strength in a working and deep diversity. > > This is an intriguing, um, metaphor. Or description of reality?

Oh, most definitely - most hopefully - a description of reality. That's what's interesting about the exploration. That's what's challenging about it.

I begin with a hypothesis that interests me, a premise that maintains contact with an intuited truth as I run analyses of my actual and imagined experiences (experiments) through the personal history my rational mind has spun through its years of cataloguing the reality it has encountered.

The theory needs to be deeply interesting or I won't pursue it for as long as it takes to see what I want to. This particular hypothesis - started by the highest mystics in the form of "As Above, So Below", in all its varied fugues - has been growing for about 30 years in my mind.

I'm still refining its core statement, but its very unoriginal working thesis is that our collective social behavior (at least, the behavior that my class and my race is most focused on in the culture I have easy access to) -mimics to a great extent laws and patterns of nature that are currently known. These patterns are becoming more visible daily due to the incredible recording and information dissemination technologies that are exploding around us.

Much data is now collected by technicians and scientists seeking a particular (usually the death knell of pure science) track of truth - often an industrial or materially utilitarian one. It is *not* viewed in an objective, nor dispassionate, manner, contrary to its preferred mythos.

In fact, the technician relies almost blindly on the objectivity provided by a designed control system (Heisenberg? Heisenberg who?), even though in many cases the control system itself has been designed to bias the end toward a result that might meet other objectives: i.e, continued funding, regulatory approval, improved market position for the company funding the study - you know the score, and it is a "score".

Western science likes to give the impression that it is in the best position to understand these laws for two main reasons that I see: 1.) because it deems the province of observation to be that of the lab, using machinery that perceives in ways its priesthood says a human bodymind cannot, and 2) because it pretends that if the laws can be replicated in numerical equation, then that equation constitutes an adequate understanding, and no more needs to be said. (I explore this, and its ramifications,) in my story.

In fact, it goes so far as to say that if the laws don't replicate into an accepted numerical pattern, then they are not laws at all, but anomalies, to be discarded until they reappear often enough to "make a difference", i.e. pierce the pre-existing bias of the research. So, pity the poor truth that happens to be novel, or irreproducible, or with intervals that pulse outside of the researcher's purview, or- even worse - runs counter to the mercantile thrust of the original inquiry.

I believe the best analysts of this data will be non-scientists, and I suggest (daily, but primarily through the story I'm writing) that - when the information gets out there, widely enough - the next technological revolution will come from the artists among us, i.e., the folk who see the data with their own eyes, and not solely through the Dominant Paradigm's Operating System.

These Freed Thinkers will describe what they see using analogues relevant to their own experience, and concurrent with their own morality. When combined with my premise for a better business organization (where the Covalent metaphor really comes into play more specifically, and has plot and substance, because it competes throughout the story with the Ionocratic approach), this has the effect of Kuhn's paradigm shift, and gives me a positive upwards spin for the novel, something I decided that I wanted to do.

I am a great fan of the historian C.P. Snow, as well as a number of other scientists who were very frustrated with this artificial end-point that their guild had created to suit its own superficial goals - an end-point that the best scientists (ala Bacon, and all the frustrated observers who fought church tooth and nail to describe what they saw) always knew was counter to the heart of true Science and would, in the longest run, produce dark results. The irony is not lost on me that today the agency I am at odds with most often is the FDA, whose ignominious origin was the American Chemical Manufacturer's Association, in a marriage with the Allopathic Physcians, and whose original work was to destroy Homeopathy as a profession in the 19th Century.

But I don't knock all the work done in this conventional realm, though I think the intent contaminates the result and, as the line between lab and land grows much too thin, bad lab accidents (that happen all the time) will/are happening out in the field, and we've grown too powerful to "just say "oops".".

Theories are always, eventually, wrong. While they're not - while they're in phase with the flow of a cluster of us, they're extremely interesting, and can be trails to the next new places.

For a time, there was a theory about something called "Phlogiston", and it provided a working hypothesis for a number of chemical experiments that led directly to uncovering subsets of natural law. That, in turn, allowed aspects of formal chemistry as we know it today to be born. Phlogiston outlived its usefulness and was eventually discarded, replaced by other subsequent models that let new patterns emerge.

One such would be Mendeleyev's Periodic Table. Its original lattice framework (formed in vision and dream, btw) allowed scientists to predict, and then discover, an array of elements that, once observed, could be worked with in the manifest now.

In the beginning, the pattern itself was like a scented garden that pulled observers into its field of influence, and let them find the lilacs and the roses, the sod and the worms and the matrix of it all. When science allows itself to be pulled forward by vision, and when that vision includes beauty, (and this is another of my working premeses), then we slog more surely toward a Julia Set, someplace nice to sit in and watch the world from.

In the last 50 years, Mendeleyev's table has become cumbersome. It has lost its symmetry, and begs a new shape. Scientists have discarded using the *shape*, the pattern, for a guide, however, as they have now new tools and theories to replace the original inspirational form that was once empty, once begging to be filled.

15 years ago, I had a dream vision at the end of a fever and a month long illness, in which I saw a new Periodic Table - a new shape, for it, that solved some of the old grid's problems, and had a lot of spaces still, sitting open-faced like unanswered questions, or beckoning gardens. I have that Table, for I drew it out, and in the drawing of it I felt lots of other things begin to coalesce. I use it in my story. Among these Siren questions was the idea of the Covalency, born 25 years ago (! has it been that long!?!) although it didn't have that name yet.

************

A Dream of Rocks At Rest Dec 3, 2001

There's a curious edge to the aetheric weather that I feel today. I won't give it too many words - they're not coming, and not adequate to the task. Enron's bankruptcy is one of the larger, more visible, gusts we've had, and the NPR broadcasts are beginning to reflect the accumulation of data that corroborates earlier proclamations of "All is not well in happy face land."

It's not a surprise. Well, the specific giant taking the brunt of the First Fall is unexpected, but it's not unusual that, of the Iron Triangle (telecom, transportation, energy), the oil dinosaur of the energy leg (try hard as it did to diversify by eating a broad range of little things different than it) is the latest Big Fall.

I suppose it's "good" that natural selection is happening here, and that it wasn't bailed out for the "good of the nation" because it was "too big to fail." But damn, this is going to be a blow to a lot of key businesses, and the ripple effect is going to hurt. Another bumpy part of the Descent...

So, this sort of stuff affects me. Like you and others, I've been "tolling the bell" for a stupidly long amount of time - you know, the constant litanies around "If this keeps up then [...the food supply will be threatened, soil will be damaged, air and water harmed, people ill, companies bankrupt, liberties compromised....]. Not that anyone pays any mind to the grocer on the corner, but it's my nature, so I do it.

As the unraveling continues apace, and the dominoes fall with an increasing thunder, I invariably wonder if I didn't do enough, or say enough, or say it properly. Of course, I think I'm absolved of responsibility in the larger senses of the word (tho I can't be sure, and don't bank on it), but it is the smallest senses of the word that rigorously count, so I spend some time and energy examining my motives and my work, and my priorities throughout it all.

I also have great compassion for the Sisyphian (sp? that cat that had to roll the rock up the hill) struggle of well-intentioned good-hearted people - the ones who are going to be affected by this particular go round - and look forward to the day when we all walk away from a pile of rocks, motionless, at the bottom of the hill. My rock seems to be spending a lot more time at rest. That feels like a good thing.

*****************

State unemployment tax rate is going up. Electricity just up 38%. Lots of wholesale price increases, carefully calculated to put the retail prices - if we retained our customary margins - just over conventional price points, forcing the retailer to either pop over the price point top or eat the increase in the name of keeping business. I get the feeling the manufacturers are counting on tight competition in the retail natural foods industry to absorb the majority of the increases and not pass them onto customers for as long as possible.

The percentage of cash business is declining; credit card transactions are up considerably. I think food stamp purchases are up, too. I'm getting ready to look at my year-end data and will know for sure.

I'm doing my best to put lots of things on sale for people. I keep a handful of basics at a very low price and that, coupled with a special order program I have that rewards people for buying cases (saving gas and time, important public assets that I consider it part of a business's good work to conserve) of things with a substantial discount in exchange for their work of pre-planning, does make it possible for even the very poor to eat very nutritionally for minimal money.

One of my oldest rants is the complaint that good food is elitist. I've had people live out of cars, and out of my store at the same time. I watched one family cure their newborn of a horrendous set of health problems through organic and whole foods, in defiance of the State's Child Services Division (who tried to remove the child because he wasn't being given adequate allopathic care).

So, when people tell me they can't afford good food, I don't believe it. And especially not when I see them quaffing a pint of microbrew at the hip pub next door.

Sometimes I'm torn about the fact that I've withdrawn so much of my passion from the store. I know that you - and other projects or people, at various times - are the recipient of that diverted flow. I seem to be a meandered stream that crooked far to one side, flooded one spring when there was too much to be held, and now the store is ox-bowed, off to the edge of me, drifting behind and off out of sight.

The new channel flows swift, toward this deeper story I've alluded to, and I just have to hold the convoluted twists of the old valley of me and hope that not too many seeds I've planted strand out of niches they can continue to emerge in.

*************

But, the other side of this somewhat belabored coin brings me back, always, to one of the reasons I chose this business in the first place.

I chose food because it was basic. It was grounding. I was transacting in something that is necessary, and I've worked hard to make what I offer as good a necessity as I can.

It is still grounding. And the business of it is grounding. The cycles that I've held for this dozen years now, punctuated by fiscal patterns dictated by the IRS, the tax collectors, and the requirements of payroll and general financial equilibrium, hold me to a track that is somewhat regular, and allows only brief and intense flashes of my other sides to appear - a bit like the moon, I suppose.

I can feel some of the time for writing coming to an end unless I re-shape the next few months to accommodate it. I'd promised myself a short break between Thanksgiving and December to recuperate from the effort of moving, and prepare for the effort of continued moving.

...I've loved the writing of it so much, and have - as I said I would be doing - generated a sizable amount of material that relates to my story, as well. If I'm successful at crafting the time, putting that stream into words may be next. It's what I hope.

But darn it all if December isn't here. It's time for year-end books. It's time to get back on the track of closing out store affairs, an even larger task that my house-moving was only the preliminary practice and warm-up for. That means a lot of days like yesterday, with accounting done late into the night, and a blind stumbling from the computer keyboard into bed a short 6 feet away.

It means a renewed entry into the problems of the Barn, since working with the numbers, and the details of maintenance (the wind blew a sign down last week; the hydraulic door closer that I've replaced twice has failed again; the cookery needs to be organized; the book aisle needs attention...the list is, well, a list...) always bring me face to face with the mountain of obligation that doesn't just "go away". There is no "away".

Hopefully, I'll meet it better than I have in the past. The respite has been good. **************** : : : : : : : : : : : : : :

-- Anonymous, June 12, 2002

2001-12-12

The Balance of Little Things

Small story today:

Two customers came in, both buying nice little healthful break-the-fast munchies. Both were short money. The first one has to leave behind the avocados, the salad and the lone banana. The resulting subtotal matched what he had exactly.

(Actually, it matched what he *thought* he had. He handed me a dollar less than what he thought was in his pocket, and I hadn't the heart to destroy his delight at the symmetry of the moment, so I bought it quietly for a dollar.)

Some while later, the next lady came in. She had to leave behind an apple, but got the rest of the best. The subtotal matched what she had exactly.

I'd say it's going to be a day of exactly and just enough, including unknown gifts thrown your way.

*************

... I'm really struggling to make sure my priorities are *right* and in place; that they feel right. Not that they think right, or that they *are* right, but that they *feel* right.

The list

Feeling is important

Feeling strong is important.

Feeling physical.

Feeling present.

Feeling.heard

Feeling comprehension

Feeling hooked up/wired/connected

Feeling magical

Feeling loved

...I am so ready for a deep psychic adjustment.

I've spent the last 5 years crafting the room to have my mind and world changed, after spending the prior ones knowing something needed to change, but not quite sure what, nor how to go about "getting it". Now, I'm just months, perhaps a year, away from moving on through the store. Not "from", but "through", for I'm entertaining the notion that I'm still here because I haven't finished it yet.

Somehow, I haven't quite got the whole lesson. That's what I'm thinking I'm onto, here, with this sense of option growing continually acute; I'm hoping I'm tapped into the track that takes me through the Red Barn, finishing up whatever it is that I have to, and letting me move on to continue whatever can be wisely carried on.

I've been lucky, because I've been so hungry for the old roaming freedom that I used to guarantee myself, that I've built up a huge reservoir of desire for something different., for novelty, for the unexpected. And yet - perhaps thanks to the influences from my community for the last 12 years - the best food, a lot of good heartedness and light and joy, high wit and intelligence - I'm reaching for what feels healthful, what I inuit is appropriate, and what brings me joy and energy.

Feeling my way into creating experience, rather than primarily thinking it into being, is a very compelling place. It's also very different for me, for though I've felt a lot, I've thought more, and my thoughts once trumped my feelings more often than not. That's changing, rapidly. It's nice to feel a winning hand coming on.

Now, off to the kitchen table for dinner, just inches away - I wonder if this apartment is the size of apartments in New York? Mind, I'm not whining - I love this right now. But God, where am I going to set up the table saw?

*****************

Dec 8, 2001

Family chit chat - The Beal Mobile

It's late, but it's been another fun and interesting day. Gosh, how do these times get so full and layered?

Kamen's release of the IT, Ginger, has caused a little buzz in our family. About 15 years ago, my father began to circulate a design for a 2-wheeled vehicle he'd invented that was remotely piloted and stayed up on its own, using gyroscopes. He had a company called E-Systems (he's quite the inventor) and worked with a motorcycle firm for awhile on the project, eventually shelved.

We called it the Beal Mobile.

Mom called me at 6:00 am on Tuesday, wondering if "they'd somehow got a hold of [your] Daddy's vehicle." I ran a short e-mail message around to the family, and now we're all a-talkin' and it's really grand.

We've gone our separate ways for most of the last few years. We're a somewhat nerdy bunch - get us all in a room together (I've got brothers, and they all have sons) and it sounds like a bunch of geeks who won't leave the computer lab after school. We're hopeless.

Anyhow, we were all really supportive of my father's attempt to get out there and market some of his work.

He's really an amazing designer. When he took on the 2-wheeled vehicle, he was mostly doing it for self-amusement. I asked him why he didn't do a 3-wheeled vehicle, since it would be much easier to balance than a 2-wheeler, and he told me it was because it would have been too easy. (I guess I come by some of my stubbornness honestly, at any rate).

But, alas, the man's not a marketer.

However, he *does* have a completed 2-wheeled gyroscopic controlled vehicle invented and ready to go, which is no small feat to have accomplished on the eve of Kamen's groundbreaking announcement. And he owns all the patents.

He's generally quite the mild-mannered Clark Kent type (he says "shoot!' when he needs to cuss) so we were surprised to hear that he's actually going to check into whether or not any of the patents inside the Kamen invention are his - chances are they're not, but one never knows. After all, his work was finished in 87 or so (I think) - goodness knows where the xeroxes of the drafts and proposals could have inadvertently ended up in the ensuing years between then and now.

The best thing about all this will probably end up being that we're all talking - well, e-mailing - again. Even though mom and he were divorced 35 years ago, they're still friends. They still love each other. We're still a family, in an odd sort of way.

Mom even e-mailed me this morning, telling me that they talked on the phone and that Dad wants to know how to get me to talk to him more. I suppose what he doesn't know is that the way it works is that he tells her and she tells me and then I write to him more. Of course, he would never think to just say it outright, to me. I'm not sure if that's a Dad thing, a Man thing, or a Scientist thing. Whatever it is, I guess I need to be writing my daddy more.

Well, I suppose I am.

************ Dec 7, 2001

Red Barn Hands

************ Nice news on the selling front, today.

A while back I had a conversation with a couple of fellows - my main Red Barn hands - who work for me, about selling the store to them. I don't remember if I mentioned this or not, but it's turning into an option that mother and I are strongly considering. It's a very interesting solution that presents some problems I'll have to think through carefully. What's more, it's rolling forward fast, fast, fast...

This has all the makings of being a very alternative transaction and, consequently, lots of the standard business buying adages - qualified buyer; secure financing; return on investment; profitability; location - won't apply. For example, I know these guys don't have any money. There's money involved in this and no amount of liking them or wanting them to have it will make that any different. Mother provided the cash for the store originally, and I bought her out. (basically, no loans except for to mom) so it's owned outright. The principal is all family principal, and not a bank's. That's a good thing, but with its own set of thorns.

It took a bit of Other Peoples' Money- i.e., visa stuff - to cover operating losses for that 18 month period I was in total fiscal free fall 2 years ago. That's cash out, and owed, and due to the Piper, and I don't want to walk away owing that.

The price I paid my mom in 1993 is more than it's worth today, due to the significant gross sales decline *if* one is a business person looking solely for return on capital, and I just don't have the stomach to add the products that I know would punch those sales back up - the tobacco, alcohol, sugar, and cheap corporate organics from Asia and South America. I also don't have the energy and enthusiasm any more to take the biz partially on-line, where I'm sure it would be wildly successful, and where it should go next. That's a potential that I've laid the foundation for, but am not working yet because I don't - and won't - have/put the personal resources in place.

Therefore, the rationale behind the price (a bit more tricky) can't be solely about ROI, either. It would be a lot more about "can the cash flow make the payments" - possibly looking like perpetual rent, but there you have it. There would need to be a lot of creative financing. Mom's contemplating taking a capital hit (I paid her almost 3/4 of the loan already in interest - and she was almost completely out of the market when it fell) in order for me to have something left. If I carry paper on it, and continue my current light-on-cash lifestyle, I can perhaps scrape out enough time to finish the book, and let that carry me on to the next thing.

OTOH, the Red Barn isn't about making money. It's about making a lifestyle - it's rent that you pay in order to live largely, and differently. I think that's legitimate social change work. That's what I've done for 12 years. If a person buys this business thinking they're going to make money, they're not going to be happy.

That's what happened to Galen, I think. We got into this thing together, and 6 months down the road it was obvious to him that he hated it, and that it wasn't going to make him enough money to make him feel he was getting ahead.

I remember being very prepared to grit my teeth and get through to the other side. We talked about selling it after a few years, and so I proceeded to really "get into it", seeing an endpoint in sight, and just willing to put my head down and plod toward the goal.

I think Galen resented how much I appeared to be enjoying the work. I think he thought I was more "cut out for the work" than he was. It was menial to him, although now he's not proud of that, but that's the way it was (and he's changed). I wasn't more cut out for it - I was just more cut out for making the best of the disillusionment of it. I've had more practice at reaching for a rose and grabbing a thorn than he has. (One irony is that, after our divorce, Galen actually went to work for me, and remained working for me as my produce manager for almost two years.)

But it's true - I did enjoy the great things there that emerged to be enjoyed, and it wasn't an act. I got really into food, and what the food chain is all about. I went to Washington DC to lobby for legislation. I used the store to practice a form of practical benevolent neglect that gave the staff a tremendous amount of freedom while still being structured enough to operate as a system that I could recognize whenever I needed to manage it. I screwed up some, and stuck around and through, and fixed a lot of it. It's been a very cool time, in many ways.

And all this by way of saying that the right buyer is probably the most important thing that can happen here. The wrong buyer, and everything I've done changes rapidly, and perhaps some of the work, and the potential, is wasted. But with the right buyer - the one for whom this is certainly a passion place - everything I've done becomes so valuable, and a useful tool for them to use.

One of the fellows, Kris, joined me in 1998, out in the blueberry fields. You say you know someone by their dance. I know someone by their work.

Kris was great in the field. He has been one of my best over the 15 years I've hired folk. When we had an opening at the store, I asked him in, and he came. Several months later, his best friend, Daniel, (they're from Oklahoma) came out to join him. I grabbed him, too.

They wanted to farm organically. I encouraged them - pointed them to land, people. Gave them a market when they would get big enough (they sold me a lot of produce this year). Counseled them through partner problems with others. In 2000, when it became obvious that my own work with farming was going to come to a halt, I sold them the greenhouse.

They've continued to be diligent and thoughtful workers. We have a great - I mean, a *great* - relationship. Professional. Honest. Loving. Intelligent. During harvest, I have to give them "boss talks" about focus, divided energy, health. For example, Kris was a vegan, and getting damned anemic around harvest 2 summers ago, so I told him to go buy a quarter of a cow and start eating some meat again (hope you don't find this offensive - some people are really meat-sensitive, though it seems like you wouldn't be - if so, let me know, and I'll spare you my meat commentaries in the future). The next day, he came into the store with a big grin on his face, telling me I was right. Seems like a neighbor had shot a nutria near the river, and they'd roasted it over the fire like true barbarians, and he hadn't felt that good in years.

They rise to the occasion. We get through with harvest, and things get smooth again, like about now. And they have room to consider things like whether or not they (in their late 20's, one has a bad back, the other carpal tunnel) really want to (or can) truck farm for 20 more years; whether or not this lifestyle of dirt-farming on leased land is conducive to baby-rearing and wife-holding; etc.

My dream for the store (when I took on the blueberries; when I took on the plants and set up the greenhouse) has always been to see it producing some of the food that it sells, and *in that* - not in propaganda, nor classes, nor anything else but the simply doing of the work - deeply educating the community that serves and supports it. I know it can be done. I know that it will work in this valley.

Sunday, mother and I got more serious about Barn selling talks, and she asked if the boys (we call them the Boys) were still interested. Today they said yes (we'd agreed to sit on the idea for a month and let it perk around). I've put the idea out to a few folk in town who are interested in the future of the store, and know I'm at my time's end with it. They're willing to form a mentor-group, ala the Grameen Bank process, that will offer counsel if the guys get into a bind. My assumption is that they will when they begin to break the paradigms I was stuck in.

If Mom and I retain a lot of "deep pockets" responsibility (and thus, some fiscal oversight and control) for the store, their mistakes could be hard on the investment, and I might veto good things they want or need to do. If there's an intermediary mentor group of people I trust, I might be able to stay out of the picture, let the store evolve, cross my fingers and hope for the best.

We tried to turn the store into a consumer cooperative in 1991. We had 400 people who wanted to be members, but only 4 that had any time to work on the project. I've struggled with trying to birth the best form for this store here - sometimes I'm the midwife, sometimes I'm the zygote, sometimes I'm the womb - the sperm - the egg - ooh, la la, what a wiggle! Perhaps a form is finally budding out of the ooze of it all.

Kris said they talk about it every day. He said sometimes the idea of owning the Red Barn makes him dance around the house. I've been very upfront with them about the fact that there is no significant money to be made here, and that this is not about them buying a business that they can then turn around and sell for a profit. I repeated it today, and he looked me fully in the eye and said "We know. That's not what we're looking for." They already know it's not about money. They've been doing this work for free, just like me - well, room and board and an occasional plane ticket to see the folks - for several years now; and not even working for themselves. They've been doing it for me, and for the work itself. This is about freedom. It's a living - a very good living - because it makes a good life.

That works, doesn't it? "A good living makes a good life."

************

Writing this out has been very useful.

Today, for the first time, I let it sink in that these two might buy my store, and that I might find a way to make this happen. I think about prayer link I put up - one of the first - in One Abode, the one that describes how to pray change, and I practice that.

I contemplate what a gift it would be to not have to go through the process of transacting in cool real estate to people who really can't know what they're getting into, and instead transferring guidance of the store, and responsibility for the store, from one part of its current body to another part of its current body. Such a healthy process - a real internal expansion, as opposed to the common truncation in selling.

It is a very, very big thing for me to let myself have this kind of hope that this thing could happen. It would be so wonderful - like having one's sons take it on, and knowing that if anyone could succeed, they would, and if they failed, I'd probably find a way to be there with them.

Man, the Universe always writes better stories than me.

Now - it's off for the day, and more laughing wind into the sails of it all. ************* : : : : : : : :

-- Anonymous, June 12, 2002

************ 2001-12-13

Time Carving and the Notes between

Sometimes time cuts easy, like bagels, balsa, or red pipestone. Sometimes time cuts hard like sharp obsidian, with its own mind, along its own grain, and flecks into shards that sometimes trip and cut, and call me "late".

It's early enough. The morning's one of Oregon's own, softly greyed, and it matches well the chant I'm playing while I drink some mate and write, alternating between this note to you and music work.

Music Work. It's interesting how the two most creative modes in my life - music and writing - have such different flavors. The writing is always such a flow, with the impulses so much more developed in the undersides of me before it emerges, and the work I get to do is more refined, more subtle. Typing's easy. Grammar relatively so. Thinking - now, that's a bit trickier, but manageable with enough of the proper adjustments.

Music's a different baby - much more like bricks and mortar and cement in the wheelbarrow that's setting up a bit sooner than I want it to. It's more like work - interesting, so I'm not moaning (I love work - as I've said, it's one of my main dances) - and there's a kind of skillful application and linearity to it that I find very satisfying.

Over the weekend I was exposed to the Harmonic Chant of David Hykes. I ended up in a workshop the following day, and boy, did my bells get rung! I'm afraid I offended the fellow somewhat with my thoughts about jazz bars and sacred spaces. You know, most people don't get that at all - the Church of the Barfly, the Church of Champagne.

We had a bit of a prickly time of it - I suppose I can rub folk the wrong way (unless I'm completely charmed by them, like one fellow who stands out in my mind...) - and he told me flat out he didn't agree with me - as in, the first words out of his mouth to me were "I don't agree." I didn't take up the class time with an argument, but framed it in a note the next day, because we agreed to explore work on-line, since Hykes does offer what he calls "distance learning".

I wrote the following to him:

"...That's one reason I asked the questions I did about making choices [about pitches to move to during a piece]. I want to understand more about making them, and it seems to me that the contexts - your Above (cathedrals), my Below (jazz clubs) - might be bridgeable. Not that I have the requisite tools, but I sense that even the effort is commendable to at least a few of the angels.

"My working thesis is that if I sing this music (that I learned from my mother) with deep personal cognition, that it opens a door into a group of folk who have memories of it from other times and places in their lives. When this door is opened, aspects of the music can come into play within them that are far beyond what I can imagine controlling, or even directly influencing.

"The only thing I know for sure is that there are times, as I said, when I'm in a club and singing notes, and I can see by the look on peoples' faces that they are caught in something. I don't know what it is. Many times, their eyes aren't closed. They're open. They're listening deeply. They're looking directly at us. They're fully connected to something - and it's beyond us - but they're present, and they're accessing, and there's a kind of rapture in the rapport.

"No one calls it Spiritual - not with a martini on the table, and me in heels and a little black dress. But I maintain that it is, and I'm fascinated by it. It gets me up at 6:00 am, working away at the keyboard, thinking, reading, singing. It keeps me seeking..."

No direct response, but he's given me some exercises. I suppose that's a good sign. I've set up a working forum for the exchange. We'll see how that goes.

It dovetails with my current plans to visit Europe in 2003ish, and tracks me immediately into getting my vocal tracks into digital and transmissable form, so I'm going to pursue it.

Just the exercise of nailing down and e-mailing tracks with fidelity clear enough for him to hear overtones in the singing, and figure out how to exchange them, and then critique them, and then be able to adjust them, will be worth the work. I'm still a Macintosh anachronism in the modern joy-stick tech worlds of DAT and NET stuff, so this will be an effort for me. It's certainly a time investment - thank goodness I've been practicing carving out time.

In fact, I feel like I'm in school again.

I never really could handle that, you know. When I was a teenager, one of the first teens to gallavant through Ann Arbor, Michigan's very experimental Community High School in the early 70's, I took those College tests and was offered scholarships. Julliard's Theatre Department offered me a full boat scholarship and I turned it down. I wanted to be "free".

... had a hard time with the fact that my mother let me make my own choice on that one. For awhile, in my 20's, I felt that she'd let me down. I didn't value the freedom she gave me to make up my own mind (I did when I was 16-17, but not when I was an exotic dancer at 19, or a Hollywood waitress...). I thought she should have been a tougher and more opinionated parent at that particular juncture. I'm over it now, but you've got some precious cargo - and it sounds like you're doing fine, so excuse the unsolicited, probably unnecessary, "advice."

However, school this time is just about as exciting a time as I had when I was a younger. I've got great teachers. Jazz-Club Lab. A nice after-school job at the natural foods store (though I wish I didn't have to look at the check book). And a really sweet mentor-friend that lends me his ear constantly, without complaint, and inspires me just by being alive and walking around on the planet somewhere.

: : :

-- Anonymous, June 12, 2002

*****************

2001-12-19

Good day today. Most of them are. Even when they're teary or tired, they mostly end up being good.

Dinner's on - I roasted a lamb shoulder last night (3 day's rations for this little one...), and there's mashed potatoes with toasted pecans, and buttered peas. Oh yes, and a wonderful 98 Cotes Du Rhone I just picked up the last case of - Les Cranilles. Yumm.

That's another little closet piece of me - wine.

I'm untutored (surprise!), but I opened a small wine shop a couple of years ago when I realized I was going to sell the Red Barn and I might need something else to bring in some dollars, seeing as how I'm an absolute wutz (don't know if it's a word, but it ought to be - I speak gyiddish, that's goy yiddish, the improvisational language of an almost jewish goil) at marketing myself.

And I think I'm ruined for working for other people - don't know yet; perhaps I could handle ad hoc projects, but jeez! I'm such an opinionated person and I still haven't found that circle of folk that has figured out how to welcome opinionated people into their lives, and use what they *think* they know.

Anyhow, the wine shop is a relatively simple operation - I don't have to be there daily, because it's just a set of shelves and a bunch of inventory in a girlfriend's gift shop, about 3 blocks from where I now live. I did it in order to sell something I love (speaking of the Gods of Alcohol - thank goodness I don't have an addictive nature - what a blessing! -- oops, BS detector going off...I am totally in love with coffee...and air. I like air. Food. ok, beal, chill...).

Logic told me that wine was a product I could get behind. I already had a wine shop in the Barn. I could always drink the inventory if I couldn't sell it. I *love* doing product research. I get to visit wineries. Not too hard to figure, really.

*************

Nick came into the store today and warmed my heart. He had a little girl in tow, named "Asia". I was glad.

About 4 days ago, one of my friends from the neighborhood, a police officer named Todd, came in and told me about a woman who was just moving into the neighborhood. She has lymphoma pretty badly, he said, and she and her 80 year old mother and her young daughter were all living in a hotel in what we call "Felony Flats" down the street.

They'd just found an apartment nearby. Todd was helping her move. He came in to see if I could suggest anyone who might help her with cooking meals and caring for her daughter for the next little while, as he said that she hadn't yet really admitted that she was dying, though the cancer's spread to her lungs and it's terminal and she's deteriorating visibly, and very rapidly.

As he's talking to me, I'm thinking "Nick, Nick, Nick..."

The night that Nick was over and we wrote that little letter together, I was watching him do the dishes and I told him again what a great Au Pair he'd make. He really has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis over the last four years, John. My god - almost 5, now. I brought him over in February of 1997! How time is flying...

One of his great emergent talents has been the care of children. His gentle voice, big fuzzy giant feel, and soft British accent are so soothing. Moms love him (literally). Kids wrap him around their finger, and they're totally safe with him. His own path of being the Bending Sage, the Willow Man blown by the winds of human frailty, makes him ideal for the Nowness of little ones.

So, who should walk in as I'm talking to Todd but Nick. I smiled. I love, love, love the Universe - it always knows the right scene to run next.

And, long story short, Nick is now caring for this family, for the interim. What better man to hold the travails of a young girl and an old mother running a hospice for their own, who refuses to see that she's dying?

It's all so perfectly, perfectly short sometimes, isn't it?

: : : : : :

-- Anonymous, June 12, 2002

******************

Modally bemusing 2001, Dec. 20

Today is Tuesday - just barely. It's Mars' day - Phrygian mode, using only white keys, and starting on E. Fiery. Alexandrian. Alchemical. Barbarian.

Play it on the keyboard and it sounds like a somewhat solemn, relentless and purposeful march. Grab the E tonic bass and its fifth and octave in your left hand and lay down a walking rhythm that rolls through time like an old Joni Mitchell tune. Go anywhere in the white keys, droning on the tonic, and you're now playing in Phrygian Mode.

Move your tonic to the F, and you're in Lydian Mode, the Mode of Venus. This is one of Libra's home keys, for they're quite ruled by Venus, especially in her aural forms. Egyptian, receptive, telepathic - Tonic and the 5th, C, and all white keys, and you're playing Friday's Mode.

The tonic of A is for the Sun's day, Aeolian, the Natural Minor. It's the mode of the Heart's connecting. D tonic leads you into Dorian, the Thursday mode - Gregorian, the mode of sacred architecture, the Music of the Physicians - ruled by Jupiter.

I now call these the D,E,A,F - DEAF - modes, after tonight's very fun visit with Mage Extraordinaire, Christine Payne-Towler, another dear friend and mentor who pondered around in the notes of it all and played around with me and those selves of me preoccupied, like a musical bag lady sorting her notes on the bench in the post office lobby, with the numerical relationships of all things.

These are the modes that are shaking out when I compare what's emphasized in sacred harmonic singing and what's emphasized in jazz. I'm now pulling tunes from my repertoire that are either in these modes, or have aspects of these modes emphasized in significant passages, in order to see what lines up with what. The resulting set-list should be interesting.

Christine thinks I'm actually going to break through to the occidental sense of it all, bridging the expanse between my quantum physik, the sacred intervals of consciousness, and bar-room jazz, in an oddly accidental way. I've been extracting and overlaying partial musical maps of several very interesting people, none of whom know each other, each of whom holds an interesting piece of the musical world - the mage with her sacred numerology; the monks with sounds that fill cathedrals and caverns, reminiscent of the time when they may have actually moved the stones instead of just ringing between them, and the theorist/scribes with their chordal language that can tell people with instruments where to go. The overlays are a thrill a minute, and every few days I add a song to The List that has options I didn't see before.

Did you know that once, not too long ago, it was illegal to sing or play a major 3rd because it invoked the Devil? I have a whole new appreciation for the freedoms I have, simply to sing. Christine says that the third was actually an important part of the arcane arsenal of power through musical correspondences, and was really a foundation tone for important healing and spiritual work, something that the churches were keenly interested in maintaining control over.

All the modes above - the DEAF modes (I think they speak to our subtler bodies, under our hearing, perhaps weaving our concensus reality fabric, or at least perhaps being a warp of it) - lack major thirds, except for the Lydian, who still falls short of the sacred Tritone, two adjacent thirds.

In fact, it was the Mixolydian Mode, called the Peoples' Mode, Folk Music, beginning on G, that gave the first major tritone - the 1,3,and 5. If you play it, especially after playing the DEAF mode, you can hear an amazing lift and feedom in the opening of the interval as it stretches out from the minor third and into the reverberating potential of the major 3rd.

Kind of like the idea of rights for women, or an end to time slavery, or repeatedly and unceasingly choosing peace as a preferred option - there's an opening feeling to the major third, invisible from the minor, that shifts the burden a just half step and makes completely new chords possible.

Buckminster Fuller once defined synergy as the behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately. I'm sure being a musical bag lady has some part to play in a synergetic unfolding, and I take comfort in knowing that not knowing is a perfectly acceptable place to be.

****************

More grist for the mill.

Have you ever heard of a group called the Afro Celts? We were talking tonight about the connection between the polyrhythmic similarities between the tribes of Africa and the British Isles, and how that particular group of Eastern Atlantic Seaboard peoples shared a large amount of information (celestial, mathematical, spiritual) that the Mediterranean Inner Circle wasn't party to. I'm anxious to hear this music, for she says that the group has fused the rhythms of both cultures and the music is extraordinary, and that your body just has to move.

Tomorrow I'm going to try singing with another pianist. He came by to hear me at my last gig and is a theory professor over at the University. He's interested in playing "out" again, and I'm *really* interested in singing with somebody who will know what to do with all my analysis energy.

I was talking to my piano teacher about where to play, and how I was feeling a little guilty because I don't play for money, and I'm now surrounded by people who do. There's the constant tension between the professionals and the amateurs that arises because amateurs are seen as bringing the pay-scale down by playing for less than what pros need to make a living.

I'm pretty sympathetic to this argument, really, because it's like selling something for less than it costs to produce it. When there are hobby/wealthy farmers around, I really prefer it when they give their food away, or put it into markets where they're not competing with the Guild, as such - if they need the currency from the food, then they should hang in the market properly; if not, then they need to do something different with the food other than sell it.

I read of a market model that takes place in many old style African marketplaces. Apparently, one person (or a small group) sets the prices of all things on that market day - all chickens, all potatoes, all fish. The hand of the marketplace operates by rewarding one with time - if you produce the best, you're sold out the quickest, and you can go home. If you produce poorly, you may not sell what you bring til the end of the day, if at all. Quality in production is rewarded, just not through an inflated margin.

I'm not taking up too many paying gig slots in town, but this rationale does give me more reason to try and find musicians who don't need to make money from their playing, and would be willing to do benefits and play for hospice or shut ins - that kind of thing would be very fine with me.

My current pianist doesn't do this, because she doesn't play for free anymore, and Steve's professoring might just give him that kind of economic latitude. There's nothing at all like singing this music for that generation of people who heard these tunes when they were 20, but will never make it down to the basement of Jo Fed's Jazz Club, and so we may play sometime in the lobby of the Eugene Hotel's retirement complex - I'd like that.

A small and simple aspiration. It would be nice. : : : : : : : :: : : : : ::

-- Anonymous, June 12, 2002

*****************

2001-12-19

Good day today. Most of them are. Even when they're teary or tired, they mostly end up being good.

Dinner's on - I roasted a lamb shoulder last night (3 day's rations for this little one...), and there's mashed potatoes with toasted pecans, and buttered peas. Oh yes, and a wonderful 98 Cotes Du Rhone I just picked up the last case of - Les Cranilles. Yumm.

That's another little closet piece of me - wine.

I'm untutored (surprise!), but I opened a small wine shop a couple of years ago when I realized I was going to sell the Red Barn and I might need something else to bring in some dollars, seeing as how I'm an absolute wutz (don't know if it's a word, but it ought to be - I speak gyiddish, that's goy yiddish, the improvisational language of an almost jewish goil) at marketing myself.

And I think I'm ruined for working for other people - don't know yet; perhaps I could handle ad hoc projects, but jeez! I'm such an opinionated person and I still haven't found that circle of folk that has figured out how to welcome opinionated people into their lives, and use what they *think* they know.

Anyhow, the wine shop is a relatively simple operation - I don't have to be there daily, because it's just a set of shelves and a bunch of inventory in a girlfriend's gift shop, about 3 blocks from where I now live. I did it in order to sell something I love (speaking of the Gods of Alcohol - thank goodness I don't have an addictive nature - what a blessing! -- oops, BS detector going off...I am totally in love with coffee...and air. I like air. Food. ok, beal, chill...).

Logic told me that wine was a product I could get behind. I already had a wine shop in the Barn. I could always drink the inventory if I couldn't sell it. I *love* doing product research. I get to visit wineries. Not too hard to figure, really.

*************

Nick came into the store today and warmed my heart. He had a little girl in tow, named "Asia". I was glad.

About 4 days ago, one of my friends from the neighborhood, a police officer named Todd, came in and told me about a woman who was just moving into the neighborhood. She has lymphoma pretty badly, he said, and she and her 80 year old mother and her young daughter were all living in a hotel in what we call "Felony Flats" down the street.

They'd just found an apartment nearby. Todd was helping her move. He came in to see if I could suggest anyone who might help her with cooking meals and caring for her daughter for the next little while, as he said that she hadn't yet really admitted that she was dying, though the cancer's spread to her lungs and it's terminal and she's deteriorating visibly, and very rapidly.

As he's talking to me, I'm thinking "Nick, Nick, Nick..."

The night that Nick was over and we wrote that little letter together, I was watching him do the dishes and I told him again what a great Au Pair he'd make. He really has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis over the last four years, John. My god - almost 5, now. I brought him over in February of 1997! How time is flying...

One of his great emergent talents has been the care of children. His gentle voice, big fuzzy giant feel, and soft British accent are so soothing. Moms love him (literally). Kids wrap him around their finger, and they're totally safe with him. His own path of being the Bending Sage, the Willow Man blown by the winds of human frailty, makes him ideal for the Nowness of little ones.

So, who should walk in as I'm talking to Todd but Nick. I smiled. I love, love, love the Universe - it always knows the right scene to run next.

And, long story short, Nick is now caring for this family, for the interim. What better man to hold the travails of a young girl and an old mother running a hospice for their own, who refuses to see that she's dying?

It's all so perfectly, perfectly short sometimes, isn't it?

: : : : : :

-- Anonymous, June 12, 2002

****************

2001-12-21

More Beality

Well, I'm putting the finishing touches on my Christmas present to the family this year. I've made us a web page, with a couple of interactive bells and whistles, like a forum (similar to my "Daily Tales", for you and I, where these little notes get stored) that's devoted mostly to the Beal Mobile, and talk of a family reunion, with a couple of add-a-link gizmos - that sort of thing.

I call it the Beality Page, for we're all a little obsessed with ourselves, and I figure we might as well pool the obsession, and even commodify it a bit. "Beality - it's not for everybody" - you know, that sort of thing. Actually, we're really a frighteningly normal bunch, if you don't count my stepmother, who *is* the reincarnated sister of John the Baptist. We're not too dysfunctional (well, we put the "fun" back in "dysfunction"), but we're not too connected right now, while getting to the ages where connection is returning to a place of importance in our stories of things. That makes me glad.

I figure the page will be especially useful for the college kids, and so I'm going to try to get them to use the forum as an interactive place. Well, "try to get" is probably a misnomer. I'm going to put it up, use it myself, show the kids some tricks (but not too many) and see what happens.

Mother's getting more comfortable with being on-line (was this what happened when the telephone was invented?) and so I'm starting to forward her a couple of the articles that I get from non-traditional sources. I'm going to put some news links into the Forum so she'll have some news sources to tap into other than the mainstream line.

She's actually a pretty worldly person. She stays somewhat current on events as they're fed to her by the normal media, so she's not a total bon-bon couch cushion. She spent a number of years as what would probably be called a "corporate diplomat's" wife. Her second husband did a lot of travelling for the aerospace firm he worked for. His job was to sell rocket projects (mom had a thing for rocket guys) to NASA and other governments' aerospace or aeronautical departments.

Since mom was a lovely woman, and very nicely mannered while being a hoot, and plain speaking to boot, he took her to a lot of places, primarily out of the country. Her style may not have gone over amongst the Nouveau Riche in America (for she just didn't do the name or label dropping thing that well, at least, not back then), but I know they really liked her in Argentina and Brazil, for they went there quite a bit.

They worked as a team, the way husbands and wives used to, and I think I've mentioned to you in the past how much that shaped me. It hasn't been easy growing up in this feminist time as an outspoken Southern woman who was raised to be a partner to a husband, but happens to have had a wild tomboy streak that ended any chance of a respectable match years ago. I suppose I'll never get over the consequences of being a man-loving tomboy who wants to be treated like a woman.

Still.

Unfortunately, Christine says that my astrology is about leaving the old partnership model behind and making room for a new one - at least, that my chart makes it clear that I have to be doing *my* thing fully, and that most of my chart's energy is actually concentrated in the next years of my life (I have a classic "late bloomer" chart), manifesting my own work instead of someone else's, for that *is* what mother did, to a large extent, and I suppose I don't have to go exactly *there*.

She says that the desire to partner is a legitimate force that I will need to honor, because I have a lot of Libra, and all of my selfish Aries planets are partying in the house of Relationship, so I naturally put my primary focus in a one-on-one relationship, with lots of deep but relatively loose peripheral connections. But I think she's suggesting that, rather than do the woman thing of supporting my man's rise in the outward world, she thinks that I'm going to have a partner who's going to enjoy working to support whatever it is that I'm supposed to be doing.

This would be odd, and certainly surprising, completely unexpected, and maybe even hard to accept, since I've just spent years and years with fellows who wanted nothing to do with what I was doing. Go figure. I suppose this would be par for the funiverse though, wouldn't it? Make the girl write on the cosmic blackboard ten thousand times "Don't ask him to participate", and then trot in someone who wants to participate, and see if I'm paying attention (not that someone like that has come along, mind you - we're strictly in fantasy astrology land, here - but it's supposed to be up ahead, in the cards...I'm game...)

She also says that I'm getting ready to have a LOT of fun. Well, actually, she says that the Pluto conjunct Saturn transit (yours just finished, I think, but don't know your birth time/place so can't be sure) coming into my chart in the next two years can suck more than gravity, because Pluto likes to go out, always, dramatically, in a blaze of Glory, and Saturn likes to prove it to Pluto that it really is just a slow grind to fine powder, no matter what sort of flair you strive to bring to your meteor's fall.

I asked her how to navigate the transit of these two less-than-auspicious forces in need of masterful reframing (for I find the metaphors extremely useful), and she said that the only way through it was to recalibrate my take on Death (rather important right now), and to prepare to have an extraordinarily youthful - in fact, messianically youthful - rest of my life.

***********

-- Anonymous, June 12, 2002

*****************

A Weightless Noise

20 Dec 2001,

...I'm grateful for the words. I haven't always had them. I don't always. And, even when I have, I've not always shared them. I've held them back. But it's not my desire to use words that mute your voice, and I wonder if I should change something? I feel like I've moved in the field, that I'm clumsy, and that I might, in speaking, drive away the very thing that I came into this forest to see.

...I'm frightened of being seen so deeply, and I feel like writing is one way to exercise the courage of being seen. Shortly after September 11th, my dearest friend Tom Atlee was asking the question "What would have prevented this from happening?" My immediate gut answer was "Telepathy".

We're not ready for telepathy, are we? We're not ready for this kind of raw nakedness, in which privacy disappears, as well as many of the treasons and trespass that privacy is supposed to protect us from. What an amazing world that would be, yes?

By writing to you I practice opening, and feeling seen, and dissolving the fear of being understood - or being misunderstood. I suppose those are all sensations that will be necessary for us to embrace without resistance if we're to have a culture sane enough to fluourish on this planet.

I don't know about future/other readers, though I'm hoping that the Voice that seems to be emerging - the one that wants to talk to You; the one that feels as though it's been buried deep inside me for years and is just now seeing some light at the end of the tunnel - will transfer into a good story somewhere along the road.

Sometimes I feel that if I can leave behind just one great yarn, one Tall Tale that excites others' imaginations about the possibilities of this good world the way hundreds of Tales fed me, then I think I'll feel ok about not leaving behind babies, or a strong family, or some other living echo of my joy while here.

>Much of what comes through you is so exquisite and new that I feel wasteful of it, as I would feel if Kandinsky had been painting only for me.

...Off my bookshelf, on the fly: "When religion, science and morality are shaken, the two last by the strong hand of Nietzsche, and when the outer supports threaten to fall, man turns his gaze from externals in on to himself. Literature, music and art are the first and most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt. They reflect the dark picture of the present time and show the importance of what at first was only a little point of light noticed by few and for the great majority non-existent. Perhaps they even grow dark in their turn, but on the other hand they turn away from the soulless life of the present towards those substances and ideas which give free scope to the non-material strivings of the soul..." --" Wassily Kandinsky, "Concerning the Spiritual in Art", 1977.

************ : : : : : :

-- Anonymous, June 12, 2002

************ 2001-12-13

Time Carving and the Notes between

Sometimes time cuts easy, like bagels, balsa, or red pipestone. Sometimes time cuts hard like sharp obsidian, with its own mind, along its own grain, and flecks into shards that sometimes trip and cut, and call me "late".

It's early enough. The morning's one of Oregon's own, softly greyed, and it matches well the chant I'm playing while I drink some mate and write, alternating between this note to you and music work.

Music Work. It's interesting how the two most creative modes in my life - music and writing - have such different flavors. The writing is always such a flow, with the impulses so much more developed in the undersides of me before it emerges, and the work I get to do is more refined, more subtle. Typing's easy. Grammar relatively so. Thinking - now, that's a bit trickier, but manageable with enough of the proper adjustments.

Music's a different baby - much more like bricks and mortar and cement in the wheelbarrow that's setting up a bit sooner than I want it to. It's more like work - interesting, so I'm not moaning (I love work - as I've said, it's one of my main dances) - and there's a kind of skillful application and linearity to it that I find very satisfying.

Over the weekend I was exposed to the Harmonic Chant of David Hykes. I ended up in a workshop the following day, and boy, did my bells get rung! I'm afraid I offended the fellow somewhat with my thoughts about jazz bars and sacred spaces. You know, most people don't get that at all - the Church of the Barfly, the Church of Champagne.

We had a bit of a prickly time of it - I suppose I can rub folk the wrong way (unless I'm completely charmed by them, like one fellow who stands out in my mind...) - and he told me flat out he didn't agree with me - as in, the first words out of his mouth to me were "I don't agree." I didn't take up the class time with an argument, but framed it in a note the next day, because we agreed to explore work on-line, since Hykes does offer what he calls "distance learning".

I wrote the following to him:

"...That's one reason I asked the questions I did about making choices [about pitches to move to during a piece]. I want to understand more about making them, and it seems to me that the contexts - your Above (cathedrals), my Below (jazz clubs) - might be bridgeable. Not that I have the requisite tools, but I sense that even the effort is commendable to at least a few of the angels.

"My working thesis is that if I sing this music (that I learned from my mother) with deep personal cognition, that it opens a door into a group of folk who have memories of it from other times and places in their lives. When this door is opened, aspects of the music can come into play within them that are far beyond what I can imagine controlling, or even directly influencing.

"The only thing I know for sure is that there are times, as I said, when I'm in a club and singing notes, and I can see by the look on peoples' faces that they are caught in something. I don't know what it is. Many times, their eyes aren't closed. They're open. They're listening deeply. They're looking directly at us. They're fully connected to something - and it's beyond us - but they're present, and they're accessing, and there's a kind of rapture in the rapport.

"No one calls it Spiritual - not with a martini on the table, and me in heels and a little black dress. But I maintain that it is, and I'm fascinated by it. It gets me up at 6:00 am, working away at the keyboard, thinking, reading, singing. It keeps me seeking..."

No direct response, but he's given me some exercises. I suppose that's a good sign. I've set up a working forum for the exchange. We'll see how that goes.

It dovetails with my current plans to visit Europe in 2003ish, and tracks me immediately into getting my vocal tracks into digital and transmissable form, so I'm going to pursue it.

Just the exercise of nailing down and e-mailing tracks with fidelity clear enough for him to hear overtones in the singing, and figure out how to exchange them, and then critique them, and then be able to adjust them, will be worth the work. I'm still a Macintosh anachronism in the modern joy-stick tech worlds of DAT and NET stuff, so this will be an effort for me. It's certainly a time investment - thank goodness I've been practicing carving out time.

In fact, I feel like I'm in school again.

I never really could handle that, you know. When I was a teenager, one of the first teens to gallavant through Ann Arbor, Michigan's very experimental Community High School in the early 70's, I took those College tests and was offered scholarships. Julliard's Theatre Department offered me a full boat scholarship and I turned it down. I wanted to be "free".

... had a hard time with the fact that my mother let me make my own choice on that one. For awhile, in my 20's, I felt that she'd let me down. I didn't value the freedom she gave me to make up my own mind (I did when I was 16-17, but not when I was an exotic dancer at 19, or a Hollywood waitress...). I thought she should have been a tougher and more opinionated parent at that particular juncture. I'm over it now, but you've got some precious cargo - and it sounds like you're doing fine, so excuse the unsolicited, probably unnecessary, "advice."

However, school this time is just about as exciting a time as I had when I was a younger. I've got great teachers. Jazz-Club Lab. A nice after-school job at the natural foods store (though I wish I didn't have to look at the check book). And a really sweet mentor-friend that lends me his ear constantly, without complaint, and inspires me just by being alive and walking around on the planet somewhere.

: : :

-- Anonymous, June 12, 2002

Walking With Dragons - Warnings, Disclaimers andtherestofthefineprint.

...I'm a housewife just waitin' to happen. I know it doesn't look like it - it certainly mustn't right now, at any rate. And I do think all the marrying kinds take one look at me and just can't imagine living with this many women at one time. I wasn't kidding about the Harem Within.

Oh, I'm not dangerous. [Well, actually, I do have one deep side that I've met a few times on some internal rambles. She probably comes closest to the essence of someone out of a Ridley Scott/Wim Wenders film. Fascinating girl-woman. Absolutely riveting - strong and wise and as ruthless as Winter's Nature. But she never comes fully out - she does not like people that much - doesn't see what they're good for. She has only begun to trust me in the past few years...but these are stories for later, and only hints for now]

I don't talk about this really (in fact, this is the first time I've put it to paper this way to someone), but I suppose it rides just under the surface of me, and must have some spoor folks sense eventually.

Harboring this sort of complexity is difficult, especially when all of the developed facets cluster around this core person that tends to look people straight in the eyes, say exactly what she thinks, feel exactly what she feels, or be so obviously and miserably failing at being straightforward as to be hopelessly transparent all the time.

Sometimes I think the cynics have an easier time of it, for modern people can believe and trust cynicism more easily than they can the naivete that I've fought tooth and nail to preserve. (This is, by the way, one good reason for a healthfully bifurcated personality - one can have a warrior part that defends an innocent part, and the good of the Realm is maintained. Of course, having a Queen has been useful, too.)

I think this kind of transparency is difficult for other people, and it's hard on me as well. And I have no option but to strive all the time to be completely forthright and honest, for I figure that if I'm going to ask someone to deal with this wide a range of emotional phenomena, then the least I can do for them is be totally sincere, so they don't have to wonder about that part of it, at any rate.

Sometimes - often -I end up contradicting myself, but the contradictions are held by two legitimate parts of me that are struggling, each in its own way, towards integrity, towards integration. The contradictions are actually the workspace of myself (and the Other, when he chooses to play/enjoin), where I'm exploring the edges and the ramifications of various potential choices I could make, and slowly negotiating a compromise that brings the disparate - but not dismissed (hooray!) - parts of my mind together, so that I can grow to be of one mind.

I suppose it can be selfish, and I have to practice being considerate, and I could do a lot better job of paying more attention - these are all things I'm willing to, and have, continue to work on in everything I do. But there's some special ground that's laid between two intimates in love, and it's a very good place to heal one another, deeply - kind of like a zero gravity place, where baggage doesn't mean as much, nor weigh as heavy, and burdens are lifted and joys remembered.

I think I've developed this Inner Tao consciously, choosing to use myself as the bifurcated plane of consciousness that argues a truth into being, rather than taking one side and having/tricking/forcing my partner take the other. I never function well in argumentative relationships because I always see both (and more) sides. I enjoy animated and far-reaching debate, and I like to have an application for my conclusions - hence the stories and the songs, and the poetry.

As far as the housewife thing goes, it doesn't appear that I'm going to get around to that for awhile, if ever ... I know that I'm not going to be staying in Eugene - so there's work to be done to leave and get long-term responsibilities into a strong holding-pattern. I'm a business person. I'm societally active, and I'm an artist.

That doesn't leave a lot of time for husband shopping and, believe me, one glimpse of the little black dress and the martini, and any leanings in that direction are history for most guys anyway, happy as they'd be to think they could actually handle it. Mix it with a 64 Dodge beater, a real personal history that Tom Robbins would have probably given his eyeteeth to know, combined with the essence that writes these essays and, well, you can imagine the rest of the story...

In my practicality, I also know that very few guys are really cut out for my kind of partnership. Very few. You see, I really want that bit about "til death do us part." I want to mean it. I want to do it. I just don't want to stop living before I get to the "death" part.

...I, on the other hand, love the work of connecting. I love the reward of succeeding. I like the boundaries of commitment - I like their changing landscape, their negotiation, the juice of mis-steps reconciled and the respect of roads-not-taken. I was married for a decade, and I plan to be so again." ...

**************************

...I know this one, too, and well, this blinking neon sign at the Lone Man Cafe that flickers "open 24 hours - closed sometimes" throughout the lonely nights, a beacon for every woman within dancing distance who hungers for someone, just once, to really touch her soul.

And some of us seek out these places, and we'll trek through a bone-bleaching wasteland just to get close to someone who knows how to say that they know how - that they want to - love.

Good for you for having the courage to admit it. Good for you for having the strength to take it, and to take it all - every last piece that you can pull into your heart - for in the end, what do we have left but the love that we've actually known?

Not the love that we might have had, or that we once wanted, or that we died waiting for, but the love that we pursued, that we called for, that we prayed down into us and that, once present, we managed to clasp close and hold as long as our hearts could both breathe one air together.

>Despite many clear and cosmic messages that women (and death) >were meant to be the curricula of my life -- my dharma -- and that >practically everything I've done has been about trying to understand >them, I resisted formal matriculation into this perilous course of >study until well past the age when most men have already given up and >settled into monogamies as comfortable and unquestioned as their >football loyalties.

I think I danced this story in reverse. If you think back to the time when you were 26 or 27, and you saw a beautiful, tiny and lithe 15 year old girl swaying in the sun, long hair down in tangled waves, breasts just beginning to swell, arms raised, eyes closed to the music in her head, and the whisper of leaves - perhaps at dawn, perhaps by a lakeside, perhaps under a just-setting moon; that could have been me...

Perhaps you saw me once, at some gathering, on some mountain, in some field...who knows? Maybe you wondered about her life? About where she might end up, and what she might do - or even just how she got by from day to day, how she spent her nights, and what in the world did she possibly dream?

I spent those years often on the road, in between bouts of high school. The only monogamy possible was my commitment to freedom and to love - and I was completely faithful in my marriage to freedom and love.

What I learned over the years was more about the physiology of love and the endocrinology of connection. It is that knowledge that has moved me fully into a physical and emotional monogamy, still in the service of the fullest love.

Something happened when I was 19, and suddenly - literally, overnight, and I remember distinctly the night it happened, and the morning after, when I awoke - this young Cynthia, living with another Cynthia, in the Cynthia Hammond Apartments, on Hollywood's Cynthia Street just a block from the Roxy and the Rainbow Club (for I was a Rainbow Girl) - and painfully learned that I could no longer sleep with more than one man.

My body no longer lets me. It doesn't respond. And, if I push myself past the warning lights (that I sometimes, in the heat of it all, try to ignore), I have physical pain that lasts for days.

My body has become my own soul's sacred temple guardian. I suppose it figured out that my heart took the phrase "love everyone" completely literally, and had to step in to create the protections that my other legitimate selves - primarily physical, astral, mental and aetheric - needed in order to keep it all straight.

...For me Fidelity has been completely an act of Nature, and one that was imposed upon me by Nature, no less. My act of will has been to try to penetrate the whys and wherefores of this strange state of a free spirit in joyful bonded alliance to One Being.

I alluded to it in a previous post, this condition of taking on the aetheric energies of a man into me. I began to notice this in my early 20's. I don't know if it's a normal or uncanny sort of sensitivity that I have - it does at times feel like the sort of thing some of Them might have burned me for, had I lived 500 years ago.

But I feel as though the natural work of me, in relationship to a man, is to reflect that man in subtle but deeply reverberant ways that let him touch parts of himself that he may not have known, or loved, before. I feel that part of a woman's job - the work of it, and I mean the effort, as well as the natural flow - is to be a good mirror, through keen observation, reception and perception, and let the one I love see himself as clearly as I can see him.

Since I have a lot of junk in my own field, it takes work over time to set him clear in me, and to carry him in a way that doesn't frustrate nor inhibit the evolution of either of us. And the quality of what I resonate is directly proportionate to the capacity for love and focused attention that he can bring into us, and the strength that he has for staying engaged. Truly - these are rules of engagement.

I don't demand fidelity, but what I notice is that men wear women's fields, too. It becomes too murky after awhile when the man I hold wears more than my field. When it's murky, I can't resonate well. When I can't resonate, the love changes from Eros to Agape, and Philos, and other sorts of things that are grand, and full, but different. Eros is the only love that keeps my body open.

.**********************

And now, since we're on the subject of baggage, I'd like to close with my final bit of baggage for the evening. .. as my dear friend Tina Lear says "If you don't have any baggage, you're not going anywhere."

There's another reason I'm not so desirable for short-or-long term, as most sincere people I know have good intentions for longevity and strive towards it, but will accept the risk of abbreviation - especially when it's their choice.

...I have to reframe a lot of difficult things here, and so this has to be a no-fear zone, and it isn't yet.

I have a tumor.

I do the right things. It's been biopsied twice. There's an 80% chance it's benign. We don't know. We can't know unless we take it out. If we take it out, benign or cancerous, we still have to remove my thyroid gland. Just the operation puts my vocal chords at risk and I may not sing again after the operation. I also go on synthetic hormones, or have to begin to engage in dramatic work to naturally supplement them. I can't do any of this while I own the Barn, anyway. The doctors say I don't have to do anything until it changes again.

So, I'm tumor racing. Packing a lot of life in while I can. Trying to sing. Trying to sell the store. Trying to find another Voice. Gathering courage. Trying not to leave a mess.

Mostly trying not to leave a mess... * ************ : : : : :: : : : : : :::

-- Anonymous, June 12, 2002

You have much Grace. You open frightening subjects gracefully, apparently even when talking to yourself. I haven't had the chance to read this before. What's funny is the hints that I already knew some of it or intuited something similar from your letters. Remember my talk of the "attic needing acleaning"? There's similar stuff in here, rather coincidentally.

My Dad taught me about wines and spirits. He was an alcoholic. I am not.

Your Dad sounds interesting and brilliant. I'm not surprised.

That stuff about your "personal history". You like Tom Robbins? Ever read Jitterbug Perfume? Allobar and Kudra are based on my old friends Babadas and Shakti. NO question. I was floored when I read the book. They moved to Hawaii in the late '70s. I have no doubt he met them.

I lost my virginity at 19. I was waiting for someone I loved who loved me enough to "do it". No such-a thing. I'll send you a picture of me at 19 in 1972. I settled for the prettiest woman I could find who would fuck me. The first time I had intercourse I couldn't come. I didn't know HOW. I had never masturbated. I lasted forever though, but then just petered out (heh). I woman didn't say anything but apparently was confused. The next day she said, "What happened last night?" I said, "Something nice." She said, "Something nice." We fucked again about 30 times. Of course, the NEXT time all systems were go. I got non-specific urethritis from her that didn't manifest until we had parted ways: I had to stop in Denver at a Clinic to get antibiotics on across-country trip (my first). It was ugly. About halfway through our little affair she said it was "the best she's ever had".

I get that all the time. Or used to. Don't get your hopes up. That's what I was talking about on the phone when I said "I'm REALLY out of PRACTICE."

-- Anonymous, July 07, 2002