The Rational Psychic

On Monday, June 23, 2008, I will begin archiving all of my blogs regarding Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination. I have left comments on a number of blogs asking and cajoling those who supported Clinton’s race to change their negative views, get on the bandwagon for Senator Obama’s presidential run, etc.

It has been at best negligent and at worst, hypocritical, of me to leave my blogs up for referral, review and to act as salt in the wound for those who supported Clinton during her primary run and continue to support her as she continues to be an important force in American political life. I apologize if you’ve run across these blogs since her withdrawal from the race and been offended. I know I would feel angry if the race had gone the other way and people continued to post items critical of Senator Barack Obama.

Thank you.

I admit, there are times when I am actually jealous of my blog-writing peers. They write something interesting I wish I had thought of first. Or, their economy of words and the most well-turned of phrases are used. However, there are sometimes posts put up by people you admire and realize that no matter who did the post, it’s one which is too important to be missed by others who blog.

KES, a very active blogger from the Gaia.com community was generous enough to allow me to repost her blog article. It’s about an electric car called the ZENN (Zero Emissions No Noise) which is currently made in Canada. Everything below is KES’s original post.

Recently I found out about this CANADIAN electric car called ZENN. Which mean Zero Emission No Noise, also considering my Canadian friends on Gaia, it was cool to find out it was made in Canada. I know we are all looking for alternatives to the raising gas prices…which is a total conspiracy in my viewpoint but that is another subject.

I was looking at a Hybrid because my husband and I already have two gas cars. So I was researching this on the internet and I found this cool little car. Believe it or not for quite a while they could only sell to the USA because Canada did not approve electric cars on the road! Well they have changed that now, you can drive in British Columbia now with other provinces to follow.

I was very impressed with this car and considering buying one.

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Thanks again to KES for sharing her post.

I don’t think that I’ve ever told you folks this, but…I would be Isabella Rossellini’s unpaid servant just to be in her presence. She could call me such things as “dirty monkey,” or “bad-smelling dog” –and worse! just so that I could listen to that woman and to see her as she goes about her day.

As with many artists, especially those in the field of drama and cinema, Ms. Rossellini is sometimes willing to give the voyeurs of the world (like me) a narrow window to peek through so long as the window opens up onto her genius.

In this instance, the window opens on her views of the sex life of bugs, with Isabella portraying a large number of bugs. In some naughty instances, Isabella plays the male bug. Ms. Rossellini talked briefly on the Sundance Channel about her reasons for making these short pieces and how she sees this as a new form for story-telling.

She points out the interesting possibilities brought out by the internet and how shorter video pieces can work well for a filmmaker with a short, almost buglike attention span.

Her budget was minimalist, the vision is childlike and lets you get into the sex life of the bugs she portrays.

The actual films are shown on The Sundance Channel.

When there are difficult times in my life, I am grateful to be forty-five years old. Though in many ways I feel young in spirit, there are those nagging memories of a lifetime that is longer than if I was twenty-five years old. These memories serve to remind me that I have lived through more hard times than I am suffering right now.

Besides the memory of dogs that could have bitten but chose not to, there are the things of beauty we pick up along the way. We have found people who loved us. We’ve seen the northern lights, we’ve read the Gospels or sat in meditation and found some peace in the middle of a chaotic existence.

I remember laughing at those who declared themselves disciples of Jesus or that their newfound understanding of the universe as a vast intelligence has brought them an understanding they didn’t have previously. That their souls have been touched by God.

I don’t laugh now because there are things like that in my life. My understanding of Jesus and the question of his divinity or humanity are not always orthodox. I owe a lot to the Buddhist teachers I have met and their different, though I believe complementary, view of the Divine and the practical means of changing one’s understanding of the world and spirit.

A poet who walks right along the division between these two worlds and makes himself at home in either one is Hafiz. Born around the year 1320 and died in 1389, Hafiz was Persia’s most beloved poet and lived most of his life in Shiraz, the town of his birth. At his death, he was thought to have written some 5,000 poems, of which 5-700 survive.

I beg Daniel Ladinsky’s forgiveness. Although the copyright would certainly have run out on the poems of a 688-year-old poet, the translations written by Ladinsky are copyrighted from 1999. The poems I quote here are from Ladinsky’s work, The Gift. I trust these few, short poems will fall under the fair use doctrine.

Many of my favorite poems by Hafiz are very short. They have the substance of a parable or a Zen koan. There’s also a quality about them by which Hafiz manages to have the whole meaning turn within a phrase. As in, “The Sun Never Says”:

The Sun Never Says

Even

After

All this time

The sun never says to the earth,

“You owe

Me.”

Look

What happens

With a love like that,

It lights the

Whole

Sky.

For Hafiz, God is the Beloved. And the love Hafiz knows is that of an adult. He makes no effort to say sexual love or desire can’t be part of the relationship. If were the creation of God, wasn’t desire God’s idea for us to experience and adapt to the situation? For Hafiz, the lover knows God as well as he or she knows the object of desire:

What the Hell

The

Real love

I always keep a secret.

All my words

Are sung outside Her window,

For when She lets me in

I take a thousand oaths of silence.

But,

Then She says,

O, then God says,

“What the hell, Hafiz,

Why not give the whole world

My

Address.”

If God had been presented as being so desirable by the church of my childhood, would I have ever left? If I had never left, would I have discovered other views of the Divine like those of Hafiz?

Even as you approach (hit?) middle age, your mother can play a very important part of your life–though sometimes it’s not an altogether welcome part.

Today my mom mentioned that I generally dressed well for a new job. She said that she noticed this when I was going to work last week. She told me she thought that my appearance was always professional. I thought that this was kind of her and am still working on accepting compliments.

Now, whether the early signs of dementia have begun to break down her social inhibitions or this is simply one of the martyrific Catholic-Jewish mother characteristics she’s always displayed, I don’t know. Choose the option which entertains you the most. Because, at that point, she chose not to stop at simply giving the compliment. Instead, she continued in a vein which made me (at least) vaguely uncomfortable.

“I thought,” my beloved mother, who gave birth to, but chose not to breastfeed me, “that if I were younger, I’d certainly go after you myself.”

If you didn’t just say, “Ewww,” to yourself, I want to know why. If you did and can offer any empathy, I’ll take it.

She also stated that I had a “swagger” to my walk, much like the character, Ridge, on The Bold and The Beautiful. This may have been a conciliatory note or another indication of the degradation of her mental abilities. She’s making an appointment with her doctor tomorrow. I’ll try to leave a message regarding Aricept.

God bless her, mom’s a hoot!

Congratulations to the Democratic Party! Congratulations to Barack Obama! He is the first person with an African-American background to be the Democratic Party’s candidate for President.

I need a guitar amp–but on the cheap side. Obviously, I want the best for the least. Analog or digital, but will pay more for a tube amp, 5-30 watts preferred. If the amp you have is not a tube amp, I will not consider it unless it has at least 15 watts of power. Working condition matters MUCH more to me than how good it looks.

Thanks, Barrie: barrieev@yahoo.com http://boutiquetone.com/images/product_images/605.jpg (like this, only smaller. Yee-ha!) Can make a drive to pick it up. These are all good-looking examples:

I have this ad out on craigslist for Minneapolis, also. I just figured that I have no idea who’s out there. Help me improve my brain and preserve my freeze-dried youth at the same time.

Thank you!

Note to self: Read the new “Marmaduke Explained” comic. Expect to laugh over adult deconstruction of a stupid comic starring an oversized dog.

Will you give me a hand finishing a poem? I’m currently feeling a bit impatient and am not willing to let this one sit while it brews through my brain.

I am happy with parts of it, some falls short and it needs reworking. However, when I do a rewrite, I usually have the feeling that I’ve written a final line for the version I’ve drawn out of myself. When this is missing, it’s really hard to go on with the process of revising. You have the feeling that while you knew you couldn’t see the flesh of the creature, you are currently missing a leg bone or some other bit of scaffolding that is equally important.

So, if you will, can you give a shot at writing the last half-line to line? Obviously, if it seems more than just a line is missing, you are more than welcome to add more and comment on what less would help the poem.

While you’re in a poetry-reading mood, why not check out this link to a poem written by my sister, Sandra Evans, who as honored with a selection of her work being posted to the Minnesota Artists.org website?

Currently Untitled

I have discarded myself—the better parts

and buried the fear. April’s floodwater

washed it clean in the Spring melt.

Which is best: discarding or recovery?

My answer is that it doesn’t matter:

I’ve watched people succeed with either one.

But this isn’t all of the truth, innocent one.

It’s the destruction, even of good things,

that calls the bones to mend, ___________________________.

And that’s where it ends now. It’s meant to be a short look at how impermanence can be positive, part of a cycle, etc., etc. But I think good language is more important, even if the new language, in its turn, undermines and redirects the preceding lines. There’s not much there and I’m not saying any of should be set in stone. Language, cool words are the best, so lay it on me, baby.