The light has risen;
You can now begin to see your life with clarity.




Sun 6/22


Boom! Bam! Cra-a-ack! The sky gods are speaking to us this Sunday with thunder, lightening, and heavy downpour. What are they saying? Clean up your act, baby! You've got to become a sieve that separates solid matter from the fluid and ephemeral.

Central Casting called this week with an offer of background work at the U.S. Open Tennis Center in Flushing. I hadn't checked in with them in a long time and was surprised they called. Turns out it's a commercial for Oreo cookies to be played on TV during the upcoming tennis tournament. A long day with a lot of sitting around doing nothing, I am merely part of the audience sitting in the bleachers Ð so I read. I've brought the doctor issue of New York Magazine, which has an article on hypochondria. Advances are being made treating its sufferers who are at last being treated with respect. Next on the list should be sufferers of psychosomatic illnesses who are consistently told there is nothing wrong with them and they are wasting everyone's time.

The next article was written by Kevin Baker whose mother came down with Huntington's Disease in late middle age. The brain shrinks with this malady until one is reduced to a vegetative state encompassing a complete personality change for the worse in the process. Kevin has been living with a mind bomb, as Huntington's Disease is hereditary. There is a test one can take to find out one's odds on getting it. That in itself is a pretty serious decision. Is it better to live ignorant of one's fate, or to spend the next 15 years in dread? After a few years of worrying about every bodily symptom being proof of the start of the disease, he decided to take the test.

The results were positive for the disease, highly positive. We're all going to die; it could be tomorrow or 50 years from now, but how do you live your life knowing when and how fate has prepared your demise? Baker suffered the Kubler-Ross stages of denial, anger, clinical depression, panic, not telling anyone about it, bending everyone's ear in search of sympathy, validation, wanting not to waste another moment of his diminishing existence. Reading about how he dealt with this news was enlightening.

One of the time-consuming activities he found to be a waste of energy, better spent at more rewarding endeavors, was listening to news and political shenanigans. If anyone has shown us how little input we have over events happening in our country or abroad, it is the current president. You've merely to look at world history to see how little has changed since humankind has organized itself under a single governmental authority. It means nothing in an individual's life. Governmental change occurs in the same way that individual change occurs, through calamity, chaos, and loss. That's how we learn.

I have for a while, been saying I should curtail my sessions at the internet. I only use it to of course maintain my site, then as a research tool, and lastly a source of news. After reading Kevin's article I decided to cut the news, but then the following night, for whatever reason, I tuned in to Democracy Now. The show took an in depth look at torture. If anything could convince me to stop watching the news that was it. Afterward, I was upset about the fate of those who've been caught in the web of horror and abomination, and I had no feasible way to change their fate. Why put oneself through that? Last week I watched a young military man refusing an assignment to Iraq because he no longer believed its cause worthy. Only the young (and the neurotic) can be made to believe that they are serving the cause of justice by engaging in war.

It's like the Buddhist monk said, If you want to end war you must start by achieving peace in your own life.