Thanks Kathi for sharing this. I am reblogging this from “Everywhere Once” and intend to view it many times.
This is possibly the best “Flash Mob” ever. To commemorate the reopening of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum on April 13, a large portion of which was closed for a decade’s long renovation, performers staged an elaborate re-creation of Rembrandt’s most famous work The Night Watch before an unsuspecting audience.
I love Easter as a time of rebirth, a resurrection of life. When I was a child, there was always a new outfit, hand-sewn and often cut down and reworked from other garments, new white shoes and a new hat, usually white straw with flowers, chilly to wear when Easter was early as it was this year. To me, it was an unparalleled celebration of light, a miracle – like finding the horse radish root pushing green up out of the newly thawed soil.
In those days, I hadn’t heard about the Easter bunny. He didn’t come to the hills where my family farmed hardscrabble soil. But the hens had started laying eggs again by then and they were served in abundance on Easter Sunday breakfast. It wasn’t unheard of for a farmer like my father to polish off a dozen when he came in from milking and before we all set off for church.
Once we moved to town there were still new clothes at Easter and our growing family might even present itself at church, but that was a special occasion. I would have been the only family member who went for all the Sundays in Lent and right the way through, I would have been looking forward to the exuberance of Easter Sunday.
My love for the Anglican liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible were enough to keep my child self coming back for more.
This past Easter Sunday, I revisited some of that poetry as I drove north to Barrie, Ontario for brunch. I fired up my iPhone and listened to the second part of Handel’s “Messiah”, beginning just before the “Hallelujah Chorus”. Handel took the passages from the Bible and set them to his stirring music. One of my favourite pieces is the soprano aira, “I know that my redeemer liveth”, (Job XIX, 25-26) which ends with “And tho’ worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God”. The remaining songs are taken from Psalms and the writings of the Apostle Paul, mostly the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians.
I have been lucky in my religious education. I listened to the beautiful King James Bible being read aloud in church and at my grandmother’s, daily in the latter case. I went to church religiously: I sang in the children’s choir. And the university I went to was affiliated with the Baptist Church still when I attended it. Not my church and at the time, I was not happy with the mandatory religious studies, but it gave me a ‘grown-up’ perspective on the New Testament, especially on Paul.
As I listened to “The Messiah” – and drove northward, I remembered reading Tim Harpur’s book The Pagan Christ at Easter in 2004 and I got to thinking about Paul’s letters to the early Christian church. The Apostle’s letters are actually the earliest writings in the New Testament and are “virtually” silent “on the whole subject of a historical Jesus of Nazareth” (Harpur, 166). Paul’s writing predates the earliest gospel, that of Mark, by about 20 years. First Corinthians probably dates from 55 A.D. “Paul was a mystic and he knew only the mystical ‘Christos’, Christ not ‘after the flesh’ but after the spirit. As he says, ‘The Lord is that spirit’.” (Harpur, 172) Paul does not talk about Jesus Christ as a personal saviour, in other words, he talks about redemption through the Christ within. It was the next generation of writers, working from an oral tradition, who wrote about a historical Jesus who died 70 years before.
Harpur, like other scholars before him, noted the similarity between the story of Jesus and the stories of other divine sons of God like the Egyptian, Horus. He concluded, after much research and soul searching, that the Gospel stories were “true myths” but not meant to be taken literally. This was not an easy conclusion for him to come to. It had unsettled him badly at first, but ultimately, it lent depth to his faith. It meant that he as an individual was responsible for his own salvation, the Bible having shown the way. Jesus Christ had to be born in the cave of his own heart. The stone had to be rolled away from the tomb of his own deadness, the oblivion of being incarnated in flesh, so that the Christ within would be resurrected and true spiritual consciousness be attained.
By the time I read The Pagan Christ, I did not find the idea surprising. I had worked my way around to a similar position reading Buddhist and Taoist writing. It seems to me that all religions come around to that idea. The 13th century Sufi poet, Rumi, speaks of the ecstatic union with the Friend as a sort of drunken abandon. My Aunt Mae dwelt in great joy with her best buddy Jesus. You could hear her singing His praises as you walked up to her isolated, tiny house. I do not doubt that she saw heaven on earth.
At such festivals, I find myself reworking meaning, sorting out the literal from the metaphorical. But in the end, I do not doubt that “my redeemer liveth… and in my flesh shall I see God”.
Cooking easily digestible rice led me to a struggle with my Lagostina pressure cooker, which I described in an earlier post http://115journals.com. I seem to have found a solution in a ‘new’ method, which turns out to be anything but new and apparently Persian.
A friend sent me a copy of a recipe she found in the Los Angeles Times by Russ Parsons – ‘Back to the basics of rice’http://www.latimes.com. Parsons cites a cookbook by Yotan Ottolenghi as his source. Once I began talking about it to other cooks, I discovered they were already using this method and, indeed, I came across recipes for other grains using the same method.
Basically, there are 4 steps. First, the rice is washed and soaked for at least an hour in salted water. Second, it is cooked in a large amount of water like pasta until it is almost done. Third, it is drained and set on the lowest heat with a tightly fitting lid for 35 minutes. (Note that Parsons recommends sprinkling a few tablespoons of water and/or oil over the drained rice, which he mounds, so that it does not get too dry.) Finally, it is removed from the heat, the lid taken off, the pot covered with a tea towel, the lid replaced and allowed to sit for 10 minutes.
I had to experiment three times before I got what I wanted. The first few times were edible but not as delicious as the 4th batch. I soaked my short grain brown rice 24 hours for easier digestion. The hard part was getting it nearly done in the ‘pasta’ step. It took much longer than white rice or even basmati. It is taking about 20 minutes. The low heat or steaming stage also took some experimentation. At first the lowest setting on my stove proved to be too high. Parsons recommends a heat diffuser but kitchen suppliers just stared blankly when I asked for one. I couldn’t even find one on-line. But hail to Lagostina. My heavy bottomed pressure cooker proved to be just the thing – a built in heat diffuser, especially since its lid sealed nicely. Of course, I didn’t choose the pressure setting.
The goal, according to Pasons, is to produce ta-dig, ‘a crisp crust of browned rice that forms on the bottom of the pan’. I have achieved that once or twice.
What I like about this method is that the individual rice grains retain their integrity so-to-speak. My old method of using a measured amount of water in an Ohsawa pot in the pressure cooker produced a mushy rice that I would not have served guests or taken to a potluck dinner. Yet, with the increased soaking time, it proved to be digestible.
Parsons includes a recipe for a pilaf he calls muceddere which is made with basmati rice, lentils, chick peas, and tomatoes. I made a double batch and took it to one potluck lunch and was only briefly taken aback when an Iranian woman about my age -that is a cook of many years – helped herself to it. She didn’t comment but at least the vegetarians enjoyed it. I also tried the recipe using dates and almonds but preferred the muceddere.
(Of course there is a spoiler of sorts for The Phantom as well as for The Snowman.)
Yikes! as they used to say in the funny papers, is this the end of Harry Hole?
I get to page 440 of The Phantom and have to stop to phone Georgia, who gave me all the Jo Nesbo books for Christmas.
“Tell me it isn’t true!” I demand, but she doesn’t have time to talk. She has to rush off. “Yes or no, doesn’t take long”, I grumble as she disconnects.
I had listened to an interview with Nesbo, in which he conceded that Harry wasn’t going to go on forever, but not yet, I’m not ready to let him go yet.
It’s way past time to get dinner, but I can’t go on. I sit down, reread that page carefully, read the next ten pages very carefully, cogitate, examine and finally, go on line. Dinner is very late.
If you have read any of Nesbo’s series about the Oslo detective, Harry Hole ( sounds like whoole with the e sounded), you know that Harry is not sufficiently hardboiled. He can take any amount of physical abuse and pain, but he suffers from the emotional aftermath of his cases. The ghosts that haunt him in his dreams make his alcoholism worse. At the beginning of The Leopard, he is living in Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong. The name belies the sordidness of the accommodations. He has fled there after The Snowman almost succeeded in killing Rakel, the woman Harry loves, and her son, Oleg. He is controlling his drinking by using opium. Kaja Solness has been dispatched by the police department to bring him back to catch a new serial killer, The Leopard. Harry would not have returned if she had not also brought news that Harry’s father is very ill.
Return he does and fights his way doggedly through a labyrinth of scant evidence and best guesses, taking the usual wrong turns in his search for a murderer who uses a bizarre weapon only available in the Congo. He accumulates ever more angst, including another recurring nightmare, and new physical scars and, having solved the case, flees back to Hong Kong.
Where he gets a job although it’s just as well not to inquire what his mandate is as long as you are clear that it requires wearing a suit, linen for the climate. He is neither drinking nor getting high. This time, he returns to Norway at his own behest. One of his ghosts is in trouble. The one causing the trouble is an invisible figure who gives rise to the title, The Phantom but not one who deals the blow on page 440.
So what did I conclude after all that pre-dinner research and careful rereading? It’s a matter of interpretation, no doubt. Mine prefers to err on the optimistic side. Who is that “poor man” the priest gives a twenty krone coin to as he muses about the beggar’s “innocent blue eyes of a newborn baby that needs no forgiveness for sins as yet”.
http://literarytreats.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/review-phantom-jo-nesbo/
I have made additions to my green soup post after realizing its potential for helping prostate cancer patients. See 115journals.com and put “green soup in the search window 115journals.com/?s=green+soup if this link doesn’t work.
Satire, like irony, gets misunderstood, especially when delivered deadpan. Deadpan artists find themselves harangued by the serious-minded at home and in the boss’s office. More than once, I have found myself explaining this difficulty to irate parents and the principal. I have taken a vow then and on other occasions not to “joke” with maturing minds or in emotionally fraught situations. To no avail.
Satire can be dreadful.
Think of that awful man – what was his name?- Jonathan Swift, who made a “modest proposal” that the babies of the Irish, who were being starved out in the eighteenth century, should be served as Sunday roast to their English landlords. Now I ask you is that an essay to teach to young minds?
Several things made me think about satire: my post “Zero Dark Thirty: lessons in self-love” http://115journals.com, reading Jo Nesbo’s novel, Headhunters and Martin Amis’s novel Lionel Asbo: State of England as well as George Saunders‘ Tenth of December.
My post on Zero Dark Thirty considers the dark subjects of torture and family abuse, not amusing, indeed deeply unsettling, not to say anguishing, so dreadful that my instinctive response was to resort to satire, to treat them flippantly. I depended on the reader to work it out that since it was apparent that I know the dreadful effects of such brutality, I was not actually treating it lightly. My words grew out of deep compassion for suffering, just as Swift’s did. He portrayed the monstrous behaviour of the English landowners by proposing a solution that mirrored that monstrosity.
Martin Amis’s novel, LIonel Asbo: State of England is about a lottery lout, a recidivist, so often in and out of jail for petty crimes that he has changed his name to ASBO, naming himself for The Anti-Social Behaviour Order, a distinction that he claims to have won at a younger age than anyone before him. Basically, he was society’s enemy long before he started school. He is a brutal low level thug who keeps vicious dogs and feeds them Tabasco sauce to render them meaner and more effective help in his loan-collecting business. He has taken in his orphaned 15 year-old nephew, Desmond Pepperdine. They live in a 2 bedroom council flat high above Diston Town, a fictional suburb of London,, and the dogs live on their balcony. Desmond has a small secret: he is having sex with his 35 year-old Nan, Lionel’s mother and Desmond is certain that Lionel will kill him when he finds out. Meanwhile Lionel goes back to jail and while there wins millions in the lottery and emerges a media darling.
The novel covers a number of years, during which Desmond is able to give up incest, get an education, marry and have a baby, all while still living in the flat – Lionel having risen above it or being back in jail- the dogs still on the balcony, still scoffing down the Lionel-mandated Tabasco sauce, still ravening monsters. The question is does Lionel learn about Desmond and Nan. The question is not who let the dogs out.
British reviews were not flattering. The Brits themselves were deeply offended. What does he mean ‘The State of England’? They said it was Amis’s final insult as he moved to New York City. Which only goes to show that his satire succeeded brilliantly.
What is the target of Amis’s satire? The ever younger age at which the disadvantaged are having sex and getting into trouble. Being famous for being famous. Lionel’s girl friend, “Threnody” is a glamourous model who insists that her name be spelled in quotation marks. But it is the absolute despair of Diston Town, the unemployment, the complete lack of opportunity, Amis takes aim at. Culture and beauty and interesting ideas don’t even come into the picture. And the absolute lack of humanity: Lionel who has more than enough money to help out, does nothing, on principle, even for his own family. His mother dies in poverty of extreme old age before she is forty. Exaggeration is a tool for satire and of course these things are grossly exaggerated. Aren’t they?
Jo Nesbo’s satiric novel, Headhunters, is a surprising change of pace for a writer who specializes in mystery thrillers. Set in Norway, Nesbo’s home territory, it is narrated by Roger Brown, headhunter par excellence. He begins by detailing an interview with a potential placement for a job as CEO of a well known company, a man who is 14 centimeters taller than himself. Roger is a relatively short man, 1 meter 68, about 5 ft. 8 as near as I could figure out. (I know, I know – I live in a metric country, but I still do height in- what- imperial.) Like Nesbo’s detectives, Roger conducts the interview according to the FBI nine step interrogation model -submission, confession and truth are its basic principles. Roger rejects the candidate but outlines how improvement can be made.
Roger Brown is a driven man, financially over-extended in an effort to please his beautiful wife Diana, who, he is afraid, will leave him for a taller man. He moonlights as an art thief, stealing valuable paintings off the walls of the wealthy, including this client and replacing them with photocopies. Into his life walks a taller man, Clas Greve, who shows up at Diana’s art gallery and charms her into getting him an interview with Roger. Turns out Greve is even better at the FBI’s nine step method than Roger and soon gains the upper hand in the interview. Turns out Clas has found a hitherto unknown Rubens while renovating his apartment. Turns out Greve takes advantage of his height differential. The self-assured Roger soon finds himself out of his role as master of the universe, the mere tool of the more masterful Greve.
There are genuinely funny scenes, which had me laughing out-loud, not least of which occurred in an outhouse on a remote farm. Let’s just say that Roger finds himself in reduced and unsavoury circumstances.
Headhunters like Nesbo’s detective stories includes the grotesque and unexpected but it differs in allowing a measure of redemption.
On one level, Nesbo is satirizing the Gordon Geckos of the business world. He carefully itemizes their designer suits and ties and their Italian shoes, carefully calibrating the nuances of the hierarchy. He is attacking ego and greed and the lust for power with his considerable wit and insight. But on another level, he is satirizing our human propensity for trying to control life that is fundamentally chaotic and beyond control. Even if we are 6 ft. tall.
George Saunders’ Tenth of December is a book of short stories that Saunders says reflects the good fortune of his life at this point. (These are far from his own words and he could have fooled me.) Saunders is referring, I assume, to his commercial success and his contentment with his creative writing professorship at Syracuse U. One of the stories is set in the near future when drugs are capable of resolving any inconvenient emotional state while, in reality, creating others equally problematic. In “Escape from Spiderhead”, convicts are serving their time in a research facility. Initially, the experiments deliver drugs that heighten pleasure and even include what every writer dreams of – “pepped up” language centres. They move on to include extremely good sex with an inmate of the opposite sex and then they morph into something much darker, something which tests the subject’s willingness to harm another. In “Exhortation”, a boss writes a memo encouraging those under him to do their jobs with a more positive attitude; otherwise, he and they will be replaced by a team that will. It might well have been written for those doing the experiments in “Escape from Spiderhead”. In “The Semplica Girl Diaries”, a father who is fast losing his middle class status, seeks to gain status by filling his garden with Semplica Girls. Gradually, Saunders reveals that these are not cute garden gnomes but living women, from third world countries, who have contracted to be strung together and displayed in fetching arrangements. In “Victory Lap”, a teenaged boy, an only child, who has been warned never, ever to put his precious self in danger, watches the kidnapping of a neighbour girl in conditioned paralysis, until he can’t. My favourite story is “Tenth of December” in which a boy lost in a fantasy world in rural New England, comes upon the trail of an older man, dying of a brain tumour, who has decided to commit suicide by freezing to death. In the ensuing and hilarious chase as the boy tries to catch up and save the would-be suicide, a sudden turn of events proves heart-stopping and redemptive.
Saunders’ stories, published in New Yorker and the Atlantic between 2000 and 2011, deal with contemporary situations, including returning veterans, who have lost their families and their way. They deal with the hollowing out of the middle class and the on-going economic downturn. They satirize parents who try, despite their reduced circumstances, to give their children nothing but the best. “Victory Lap” takes aim at health food nuts and ecological freaks who attempt to stunt empathy. “Puppy” is a darker look at the gap between the well-to-do and the poor. Suicide crops up in 2 other stories, which do not have such positive outcomes as “Tenth of December”. Yet, in one case, it represents a moral victory and “Tenth of December” seems like a reminder that life, with all its pain and despair, is worth living intensely right up to the last second.
I’m reblogging this from Power of Positive Thoughts for the vibrant colour and the good idea.
What I want is to get on with my post about satire in which I discuss with my usual clear-eyed insight novels by Jo Nesbo and Martin Amis and short stories by George Saunders. What I want is to finish my post about my new way of cooking rice, which is apparently actually old and Persian.
What I want is to be the 27 year-old second ballerina, I dreamed the other night, with a gorgeous male partner, capable of lifting and protectively holding me.
What I’ve got is 50 more years and doggy bootcamp.
Georgia thinks it’s funny. Georgia says write about that. But she’s just a baby septuagenarian, just barely started, so what does she know? Blake and I have seniority. I’ve known Georgia since I was 6, longer than anyone else still extant, that is to say ‘above ground’. Blake I met when I was 16, so he’s the oldest friend apart from siblings. We have had various septuagenarian adventures together, but this one is a solo. (See 115journals.com under septuagenarians)
The crux of the matter is that Blake has gone walkabout or, more prosaically, flown off to the west coast to see his daughter, who is, coincidentally, my daughter. The thing about children, even adult children, is that they cement you together. So when Blake cast about to see who could dog-sit, I came immediately to mind. Why not? He had taken the measure of my mothering skills some years ago. And I had mothered quite a few dogs as well, notably a big black Newfoundland throughout her long, lumbering life, but also a couple of her playmates including a spaniel. A 7 kilo sheba innu would be no problem.
“She’s a zen dog,” he assured me, alluding to her Japanese origin, “and she only needs to be walked 3 times a day.”
I felt better already.
March in the north -can I call Toronto north?- is unpredictable. Last year temperatures got up to 20 celsius, well into the 70s F. This year not so much. It is below freezing, there are brisk winds, especially from the north and a windchill. Okay, no problem. First walk of the morning: undershirt, merino wool long-sleeved undershirt, short-sleeved wool undershirt, ribbed cotton turtleneck, wool cardigan, vest and long down-filled coat, not to mention wool tights and fur-lined cap with ear flaps that tie. What?! Did I say I’m old? Did I say I was born in an unheated bedroom? Did I say God didn’t hand me an internal thermostat?
Right, we’re ready to head out the door. Despite the gear, I can still bend over enough to put the dog’s collar on. True she immediately starts to retch and gag. I still have something to learn there. Out the door. Well, not quite. We have to stand testing the air first. There could be danger. Down the front walk, turn right. Stop dead. There is a tree here and there are messages on it that have to be carefully ‘read’ by sniffing. Boy dog messages no doubt. ‘I was here. Where the hell were you?’ It isn’t a matter of gently tugging on the leash. Her 4 paws are glommed onto the frozen ground. There is no moving her. The bad news is that there is a tree in front of every house. And I have forgotten much in the last 25 years. A quick stoop to mark is not the same as an actual pee. It will take several walks to teach me this.
The second or afternoon walk is meant to be longer. Typically Blake hikes with the dog along disused rail tracks or up hidden ravines that wind under city streets and emerge miles later in its centre. Then they hike back, I make a foray down the bike path beside the woods in the afternoon. We come upon five robins foraging for worms in puddles that are about to freeze over. Initially, there is a strong smell of skunk, but that doesn’t concern Ms Zen. She moves on inspecting the leave-strewn margins minutely until, finally, she finds exactly the right spot. It transpires that I have a lot to learn about poop and scoop. Suffice to say, I am glad she is in favour of a quick return. I desperately want to wash my hands.
The rest of the afternoon is devoted to rest and recuperation. Yes, I exercise every day but I don’t go out in the cold and walk up and down hills. After dinner the wind is roaring and another walk is on. I long for the good old suburban dogs who stood in a writhing heap at the back door. I would open it, they would dash out and one of them would shout when they wanted back in.
And how does Blake even have a life? All I can seem to squeeze in is a short trip for groceries. Tai chi class seems to be out of the question. Gear up,walk, take the gear off, collapse.
Days pass. It becomes clear to me who’s in charge. She chooses the direction or rather her nose chooses the direction. There is absolutely no discussion. If I tug the leash too hard, she throws up. Simple as that. One sunny afternoon, we get as far down the paved path as the mown lawn. Having done her ‘job’, as my grandmother used to say, she stands gazing into the woods. These are the woods where she, Blake and I came upon 3 deer last year. She stands and stands. She gazes and gazes. A twitch on the lead. No response.
“Let’s go,” I say, my voice rising, my best kindergarten teacher voice.
She looks at me balefully, as if to say, ‘that voice!’ She looks back at the woods. She wants the lead off. She wants to run up and down those wooded hillocks, following those hidden paths. And if she were my dog I would let her. If Blake were here he would let her, but not and not. (Dear Blake, The weather is getting warmer. Your house is fine. Your roof hasn’t leaked. No one has stolen your car. Yours truly, Joyce p.s. Your dog is lost.)
It is only when a white-haired man comes down the path that she deigns to move. She thinks it might be Blake.
The first 2 nights she sleeps in her bed in the living room near the front door. Surely, he will return for her! On the third night, she accepts a helping hand onto my bed. I’m not keen on a bedmate but, otherwise, she is just going to stand beside the bed and stare at me. Weekends I sleep in the second best bed (See 115journals.com “Consider the Second Best Bed” ), a narrow bed. I sit her bed beside it. No dice. I drop a quilt there. Well maybe. As a septuagenarian I am acquainted with the night and I observe that she alternates between the bedside and the living room couch. In the morning, I discover a wet spot there.
Now Blake has assured me that this former show dog never has an accident. I believe him. I am familiar with an ‘on-purpose’. My Newfie dog once protested the fact that she was not permitted on the couch while the cats were by emptying her capacious bladder in the middle of my bed. Fortunately, I wasn’t in it.
Okay, no problem. Georgia can tell the story of having to change her entire bed at 4 a.m. because her Springer Spaniel did have an accident.
When Ms Zen arrived 5 days ago, I typically got up bent from the hips and shuffling, your standard septuagenarian gait. Ten minutes of tai chi put the spring back in my step. Now I walk like one of those extreme body builders I used to see in Venice Beach. My thighs are so stiff, they can barely scrape by each other. It takes a long hot shower to limber me up enough to do tai chi to limber me up. On the other hand, once it gets going, this old body seems more balanced and functional.
While it’s true, she eats only home-cooked meals, Blake brought them, frozen for easy ‘heat and serve’.
She’s just rolled her body off my bare feet and gazed at me with what looked like adoration.
Reminds me of living in El Segundo, near LAX.
.
Sara was inspecting the garbage when she shrieked, “Who put this in here?” She was flourishing a dirty tissue which she had fished out of the black garbage bin and was now flinging into the green compost bin. At lunch she announced to me and our mutual friend Robin that she no longer gave to ‘people’ charities. People were a blight on the planet, she said. She gave to animal charities and environmental causes only now.
A few days later, I was talking to Robin on the phone. “The world is not going to be saved by recycling,” Robin said. We agreed that it might be saved by empathy, by caring for others and by extension for Earth.
“But if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter because God is already perfect,” said Robin.
“And God is within us?” I asked, just to make sure she wasn’t talking about that remote, supernatural fellow, the church used to tell me about.
“Of course,” she said.
“So, in fact, we are already perfect,” I concluded. And we changed the subject to family.
But it began to get to me, that February week. I had shingles. Again! Economic recovery still hadn’t kicked in. I had seen one too many shows about terrorism and torture. And I had shingles.
“What the fudge, is it all about?” I asked my sister, Georgia. “Why are we here, working hard like you, hurting hard like me? What does it mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” she replied. “It’s what Shakespeare said, ‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players’. It’s when we go off stage, we find our real life. But then, I’m a simple soul.” She didn’t add, “Unlike you who make everything complicated”. Then she did say, “We just do our best. It’s just practical.”
And that is how she lives. She devotes herself to making life better for others.
But she was right in her unspoken assessment of me. I couldn’t drop it.
My osteopath explained to me that the herpes or chicken pox virus that had been lying dormant in my body for these many years was doing its job and attacking the nerves. That was why I had had what I called the achey flu since mid-January, but now that it had surfaced in the form of a rash, I would begin to recover. The aching had already diminished as the itching increased. Recovery would come through rest and relaxation, not through yet more exercise and effort, he said, thus dismissing my default methods.
More time to think. Just what I wanted.
Maybe I hypothesized, we are trying to perfect the material world, to raise its consciousness. Okay, but the maple tree outside my window seems pretty perfect as it is. And the sheba innu I am going to dog-sit next week, ditto. Hum!
How about this? Out of the One came the many. Are we just trying to get back to the One, trying to remember that we are not isolated, victimized, powerless individuals but part of the powerful Whole?
So I posed the question to Julia in a long, long-distance phone call.
She said, “We are God experiencing Itself.”
“Well, why does it have to be so painful?” I demanded.
“That’s the nature of perception,” she said. “The nerves are part of the mind.”
I had a fleeting thought that as soon as there is mind, there is pain. That brought my mind back to torture.
“Someone like Thomas More,” I mused -I was thinking about how he was portrayed in A Man for All Seasons– “is invulnerable to torture because he is at one with God’s perfection.”
Perhaps during my relaxed and restful recovery, I could take short excursions there.
Isn’t there a liturgical blessing, “May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God…”?
115 journals 