Bucky Ball Day

Google was so kind as to remind us all that it is Bucky Ball Day - in fact the 25th.

Buckyballs are one of the most beautiful things you'll never see with the naked eye.

Just like diamonds, a beautiful thing we can see with the naked eye, buckyballs are made of carbon - and the reason that they can be is that carbon is what it is.

That carbon is what it is is why there can be life.

In fact, combined with how the rest of the manifest universe unfolds from something much smaller than a pin-prick, the way carbon is means that life not only did and does but has to be.

And because of life, we see and know the beauty of the diamond and the buckyball - and pearls and sunsets and the love in a lover's eye - that is to say, come into conscious awareness.

Now, isn't that a wonder!

Love - Being - Aware

Happy Birthday, Mr. Fat Man

Looking at another lovely day here in the Happy Little Kingdom, I realize that I had a bit too much to eat this past birthday weekend - all of a sudden the scales tend to tip upwards. That reminds me, it's Fat Man's 65th birthday today.

Poor Fat Man, he must feel a bit left out since they always make a fuss about Little Boy's birthday...

By the way, didja know, the US attended (in the person of the ambassador to Japan) the memorial services at Hiroshima for the first time this Friday?

It's about time one might say, for US to recognize our paternity of the little bastard. That, and a necessary gesture if moves towards nuke disarmament are to have any credence whatsoever.

On the other hand, a nuke exchange is inevitable as long as military force continues to be an prime option in resolving conflicts of interest between nations and their peoples.

Finally, the important birthday which every one always forgets in favor of those of Little Boy and Fat Man, is their poor little sister, Ms. Trinity - that is when the countdown really started

Wake Up?

What happens when you wake up an old fart? Well, I asked myself the question - quietly, so as not to wake myself or anybody else up. You gotta be careful about waking people up! You get a bunch of these "up woke" people running around - you got no way of knowing what might happen. Why, we might even find ourselves in a worse fix than the one were in now!

Lay Down, My Weary Spirit

Well, there I was, wild eyed in the wilderness, and yet, at the same time, in my living room with two Moroni Missionaries sitting across from me on my sofa - they noticed my little octave guitar and suddenly I was playing it and singing a melody, well maybe more of a caterwauling.

Over the years [since 1973], it developed into the song you hear here - a series of rhyming couplets plus a chorus:

There's a glory in the morning 'cause the earth turns 'round
and a promise in the evening when the sun goes down!
Lay down, lay down, lay down my weary spirit, rest you now
No, don't weep - just sleep!

There's an anger in the ocean, such an awful roaring sound,
but these troubled, darkened waters - they shall lay down!
Lay down....

There's a power in the growing of a tree from its seed,
and a lonesome, helpless feeling when you see how life bleeds!
Lay down....

There's a sadness in our joy when we meet old friends,
and a sweetness in our sorrow when we part once again!
Lay down...

There's a glory in the morning, such a precious sight to see,
and a promise in the evening that looks like eternity!
Lay down....

Scribbles on a Train #2

[a thick tablet of paper with scribbles between the thin blue lines fell out of a box while I moving some stuff around - I recognized it as notes I wrote during the spring of 2005 while commuting to and from work. They will be posted off and on as I find time to type them up - Elmer Eggplant ]

Our texts state: God created Man in Gods' Image - male and female created them.

First of all, then, man is not Man alone, for man is also Woman - the two are one, that is: the human.

Similarly, God is not He, nor She, nor It, but all of these, separately and together, infinitely more and none of them.

As soon as the human comes to exist, in a sense, God ceases to exist - in the world, so to speak, it is the human who "creates" God in the human image.

As soon as the human is, the world is there. It is the human who, through human being, determines which aspects of the eternal which will be revealed in the temporal, that is, the world.

This is why I am forced to say [although it is not correct in the absolute sense] that God is not Other - in truth, God is not "up there" telling is what to do, God does not have a "Plan" to impose on us which we must follow, or else. We might say that God, so to speak, has a "portfolio" of plans.

In our common humanity, we determine which "plans" may unfold - by our greed or our compassion, by our love or our hate manifested in the world, we determine the "face" of God to be revealed.

Tickling the Dragon's Tail

Not long after my fourth birthday, in order to refine the ability to make weapons of mass death ever more effective, experiments were done to determine more exactly parameters for the critical mass of the metal of death, plutonium. There was this fellow in the laboratory who’s job was to slowly bring together two halves of a hemisphere of death metal - as they came closer, the increase in radiation was recorded as the setup approached critical mass.

There was a safety mechanism to separate the silvery-white pieces should they come too close. The fellow doing the experiment found this an impediment which prevented him from getting really close as he “tickled the dragon’s tail” - so he disabled the fail-safe device. One afternoon, as he was doing the experiment he had done so many times before, sweat dripped from his nose as the two pieces came closer - observers watched in tense silence. Suddenly, his hand slipped - the two halves came together and touched, a blue light filled the room.

Without a second thought he accepted the death sentence and separated the two pieces of death metal, saving the others in the room. After six weeks of increasingly hopeless agony, Lois Slotin died - his tragedy burned an image in my young pre-teen mind when I first read about it.

It seems to me the image is a symbol of how our common cultural insanity can be seen as a form of “Tickling the Dragon’s Tail” - listen to the night winds wail!

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Deep Water - Diamond Body

The images of the ocean and that of the river descending, that is the River Jordan, the road, that of the mountain and other - they are revolve around and reflect very similar insights into a deep spiritual understanding. If you cannot lose all, you cannot win anything - nothing of value and certainly not freedom.

When I sang this song this afternoon I found myself telling a story about a fellow who won himself a diamond body and ended up losing it in favor of freedom

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Scribbles on a Train #1

[a thick tablet of paper with scribbles between the thin blue lines fell out of a box while I moving some stuff around - I recognized it as notes I wrote during the spring of 2005 while commuting to and from work. They will be posted off and on as I find time to type them up - Elmer Eggplant ]

With the twentieth century behind us, the century we thought was the worst in terms of human misery caused by human interactions, not disease and natural disaster, with the click of an arbitrary calendar date, we hoped or assumed that a better day would dawn in the 21st century.

However, seeing the storm clouds gathering and knowing what has already been perpetrated in this first decade, it seems that the 21st century may very well prove to be a David to the 20th century's Saul.

How simple it would be be if one could believe that all our troubles were the work of rapacious shape-shifting lizards who have infiltrated and taken over control of our poor world.

Ah, but it is all too obvious that it is the work of all of us people and nothing and no one else - what we see is the sum total of what we are are and what we are choosing to become: humans being or rat-like lemmings dashing to the sea.

The Crazy Bird

I first met the crazy bird on a dreary gray winter afternoon, wandering in the wilderness, salvaging shards of my shattered mind (I had been trying so hard to find answers to question of hope and truth and faith and love) - suddenly, I heard my love singing, a crazy bird singing the melody of life, of the reality of love being aware.

What I have never understood is that the lark sings in the summer, but this was the middle of the winter, 1973, in the Happy Little Kingdom of Denmark:

[This time I'm using PODBEAN I won't say that pod-o-matic is useless, maybe it's just that I can't figure out how to use it - but in any case it doesn't do what I think I'm trying to tell it to do.]

The Little Girl - an (almost) True Story

Well, dear hearts, I'm still working on it, but here is a live version of a little story I posted ages ago with a slightly different title

The story goes back to 1968 when I worked for the American Chemical Society - I suspect that it is somehow connected with my first marriage which was then in rapid deterioration after my wife found out that she had married a virgin - she was convinced that meant that I was sure to cheat on her - sheet! I didn't even know how to spell "cheet"