All aboard. People I very much appreciate:

Saturday, September 29, 2018

Torquing Locknuts Clockwise

Yes, it is I, Geo., torquing nuts on a new wagon assembled by Norma to bring our groceries in from the gate. Since my illness made shopping trips hard this summer, Norma arranged to have Belair Nob Hill Market drive things to our house. Our old wagon wore out, so we got a new one. I like it but it's all locknuts --life is like that sometimes.



It's still hard for me to exert myself, but I have a compelling message in pain: Nobody is alone. One wishes one could travel into the past and change things for the better, but there's no safe way to do it --except, perhaps, by memory. What we need to do, exerting ourselves --even in pain-- is work presently to repair the future. I learn this from people like Father Kelly. Please listen; you might be astonished at his voice:Father Kelly,"Everybody Hurts"

So, we take up the implements of improvement, adjust them, tighten them down to their jobs and in love, despite discomfort, hold on.

Monday, September 17, 2018

Leaf and Raindrop









"Hello, Geo."

"Eh?"
"Over here and up a little."
"You're a Privet leaf?"
"A Privet leaf and a raindrop. It sprinkled this morning!"

"I don't follow."
"Well, leaves convert sunlight into energy --it's how we live. Ordinarily we don't know what's going on around us but in just the right kind of sprinkle, we get a raindrop gathered and the whole world is refracted into our works."
"You see images?"
"We see all images, everything that transpires."
"Everything?"

"Only those activities that concern our observers. We leaves have no individual brains, you see."

"Ok, it's just finished summer here in California. What does it look like where summer persists?"

"Oh, you mean the seaside resorts of our planet! Lots of hot beaches: children at sandcastles, bathing beauties, families at pic-nics and old diseased colonels creeping around in the sun."

"And what of us, leaf, you and me?"

"The farther one walks toward the light, one's shadow grows up the wall --until past the light...well..."

"Then?"
"Geo., we get confused thinking about then."

"Sorry, my brain has a mind of its own." 
"What does your brain tell you now?"

"That we rename Lady Liberty (Fr. Marianne) or Gaia and replace the National anthem with this: (Help me Rhonda--Beach Boys)


"So, which one do you mean, Geo.? Gaia or Marianne?"

"Any division of the two."

"Who fired you up to this, Geo.?"
"Just a treefrog sitting on a fountain spout."
"Geo., you've had a hard summer. Maybe you should go lie down now." 

"Okey Dokey!"

Saturday, September 8, 2018

Coherence

Here is a Normaphoto of me working with a horse-shoe pillow and an ice-pack several days ago, trying to get my neck reduced to normal contours. It is my own post-surgery  exercise after undergoing a routine decapitation --during which my head came off, rolled down the hospital hall and escaped onto Broadway. It was returned by a middle school soccer team that was practicing in its path.


Human cells are programmed to put themselves together in certain ways. When that directive is confounded, terrible things happen and that was what was wrong with me. Correcting it is science and magic --and knowing where to look for it. That's all I know right now.  This week I'll know more. We're all in this together. Ora pro nobis.