March winds bring April showers
April showers bring May flowers

Poll #1160899 June
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

May flowers bring _____

This has been a wonderful and merry Christmas so far. purpleglitter got me wonderful gifts, including a new birding camera — the same model as the broken one, so that it will work with my telephoto lens.

My parents gave me a brass clock once owned by my great-grandfather. It's an old electric clock and wasn't made with the ability to start up on its own. A knob in the back must be spun just right so that it "catches", then the electric power will take over. The neat thing about the clock is that it will run backwards if the knob is spun backwards. I used to always set it running backward when I was a kid, and it is running backwards in my livingroom now.

These icons play their animations only once. Some return to their initial states, others remain changed after the animation has played out.

            

            

            

I took these pictures of the Washington Elm in Cambridge Common last week while I was sitting under it with Jeff last week. It is the same tree which General George Washington stood under when he took command of the Continental army in 1775. That old tree has seen a lot in its time.


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purpleglitter and I watched the House of Sand (Casa de Areia) last night. Fernanda Montenegro is one of those actors that can speak volumes without moving her lips, a face that says more than words can.

A simply amazing movie. The move has an intensity so subtle and built up so steadily and skillfully that it simply envelops you and takes you on a journey to a place so far away that it seems like another world, yet still very much of this Earth. It is a pocket, a bubble of time, and the stories the lie there. If I still maintained my "100 movies everyone should see" list, this would likely be in the top 10.

More and more over the years Cyndi has become more of a guide. It's not like she wasn't before, when I was afraid of her, I just didn't understand what she was trying to show me: that no one could save me, I had to save myself.

She's still around and while she can still be a bit rough at times, she is more helpful. Yesterday, during our walk, she showed me how to control the flow of time. Now that may sound a bit completely fucking insane at first, but allow me to explain.

I'm not talking about time travel or anything like that, I'm talking about the speed of perceived progression. I'm sure everyone reading this has at one time or another experienced a dramatic moment that went in slow motion. Some of you may have taken one of the various drugs that can produce a time dilation effect such as lsd or seroquel. Yesterday, Cyndi was showing me how to intentionally trigger that slow motion effect without a dramatic event or drugs.

I'm not quite adept at it yet – I can do it well in a calm setting, but it gets significantly more difficult if there is a commotion around. With practice that may change. The ability to make the good things last a bit longer, or at least feel as if they last a bit longer, has a lot of appeal.

This photograph was taken about a little over an hour before I left Saint Thomas for London — after the hair fire incident. The candles in the photo are the ones that my hair was caught with. The robe I'm wearing in the photo is the inexpensive article of clothing I lost on my journey back to Boston.


photo by goldmourn

While not without it's tribulations, 2006 was a year of milestones and reunions for me. This was the first year in half a decade that I have spent completely out of psych hospitals. Although I took a couple of my old Ativans to get to sleep at a couple of points, I spent the year pretty much without any psych med prescriptions. I've become closer with certain members of my family than I have been in a long time. I've reconnected with friends long past. I've grown spiritually and even found God. It's been quite a year.

In just over 13 years, we'll be celebrating the beginning of the 20's. From that point on, people will not be referring to flappers and prohibition when they say the 20's – they will be referring to something new. This is a fairly obvious turn of events – it is the natural progression of things. But, it still feels strange. The 20th century is becoming less and less directly tangible and more and more a distant relic. The future is now the present and history is history.

Is God benevolent or malevolent? Does God love us? Is God wrathful?

These questions are fitting to ask of some man with a flowing grey beard that lives in the sky, but they are unanswerable as to God as All.

God is not only the sky above and the ground below and all that dwells in those places. God is not only everything we can touch, God is more.

God is all creation all destruction. God is life and and God is death. God is the bleeding wound and the passionate kiss. God is the roar as well as the silence.

God is all beliefs and doubts. God not just the concept of heaven and hell, but the concept that there is an above and below. God is the ideas we think as well as the air we breathe.

God is all emotions. God is all love and all hate. God is all benevolence and all malevolence. God is all wrath and all forgiveness.

God is our mathematics and our law. Our fears and our courage. Our arts, our poetries, our languages and the metaphors behind them. The truth as well as the lie.

God is energy and matter. God is the motion of the falling rock as well as the rock that falls.

God is the Happening that is the Becoming. God is what was, will be, and has been. God is even that which is not, has not been, and will never be; if what is not, has not been, and will never be is but thought.

God is the All of Everything, the Universe of Universes. This is why there can be nothing greater than God. No threat needed, no coercion. There can be none greater than All that Is, because anything else is simply part of the Everything.

I feel old. Last week, a 16 year old added me to their friends list. That in itself did not make me feel old. What made me feel old was that she was born in 1990.

Outside of that, there are many things contributing to me feeling old nowadays. I walk around with a cane, sometimes with a slow and laboured gait. My hair is grey. I regularly talk in decades rather than years. I've found my self starting sentences with "Back in my day...". I've become more forgetful (if that was possible) and my mind just doesn't work as fast as it used to. Health problems are one of my favorite conversation topics, and if you want to you can see my scars.

I'm 32, but I often hear it said you're only as old as you feel. In which case, I'm really 78.

I woke up this morning 10 minutes from now.

I have a feeling it's going to be one of those days.