Month: June 2005

The People Own Ideas! is the new article by Lawrence Lessig. Reading it now.

OK, I finally saw What the Bleep Do We Know, a really nice movie in the quantum-physics-meets-mysticism genre. I enjoyed it immensely. I was surfing a bit around this movie, and found the following quote from one of the physicists interviewed in the film, Dr. Fred Alan Wolf:

Every moment of my life is spiritual practice. I don’t distinguish between anything I do as being different from spiritual practice. Spiritual practice to me does not necessarily mean you go off to a church, a temple, a mosque, or a corner of your room and meditate. Spiritual practice means being aware of yourself in every moment of your life. For me, life is a continual meditation.

Right on. I’ve been talking to friends lately about how ritual isn’t as important to me as it was years ago when I was first getting into paganism. This quote sums that attitude up nicely.

The main point of the film is that we create our reality. This is no news to any pagan; as a good friend of mine says, he wants to design a bumper sticker that says “now that science has proven that magic works, I’d like an apology.” And living this way is a moment-to-moment exercise, not just when in meditation, or in ritual, or in circle.

‘Nuff said. But what the fuck do I know?

I’ve been reading about the new Live 8 concert being organized by Bob Geldof, 20 years after the Live Aid phenomenon. Apart from the news that Pink Floyd is reuniting for the show, there are several political phenomena surrounding the event that interest me. The first is, in the above link, people are finding it ironic that an event to help Africa has only 2 black performers on the bill.

But deeper than that is the shift in focus in terms of the source of the poverty over the past 2 decades. Geldof is getting into the IMF/WB/G8 scene — which is to say the antiglobalization scene — with the upcoming G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland being very much in the foreground of his mind. He knows that much of African poverty — and indeed much of the poverty of the world — can be traced to these policies. This is a marked shift from the previous “help those poor Africans know it’s Christmas” paradigm. It is clear how the global economic climate has shifted over the past 20 years with neoliberalism, structural adjustment, and the increased emphasis of corporate profit over people since the Reagan/Thatcher years. It’s good to see a solid understanding of these issues in the mainstream.

The weather has been crazy the past few days. Lots of thunderstorms, which are rare in Maine. Both yesterday and today were hot days with some serious sudden temperature drops. Today it was in the 90s, and it dropped to 59 within a few minutes. It was also humid, and all that humidity turned to fog with the cooler temperatures.

Yesterday I was driving to my studio in the rain with the windows cracked, and in the space of like 200 feet the temperature dropped dramatically; I had to roll the windows up to avoid the cold, and my outside mirrors fogged over instantly. Very cool.

I saw The Day After Tomorrow a few weeks ago, which of course deals with sudden weather anomalies, to a much more catastrophic effect than what I saw here. But it got me thinking.

And global warming — where the net effect is an overall rise in temperatures, with local anomalies and irregularities — is a myth. Yeah. Right.

I still don’t have net access at home. Bleah, hiss, pfftth! I went to a coffeeshop with wifi yesterday to try to at least download my mail and to say hello to some people on chat, but I couldn’t even get all my mail. This really sucks.

At work, we are seriously shorthanded; they’ve hired more people but they don’t start training until Monday. Which means it’s been busy with calls in queue all day long. This makes my job much less fun. Not that it’s normally fun by any stretch. More accurate to say it makes my job much less tolerable.

All for now. Don’t feel like writing much else.

Oh yeah. Freakwitch has a gig on Wednesday. Come see us at the Asylum at 7pm.

We are now official residents of Munjoy Hill. I don’t have net connection at home yet; they aren’t scheduled to come out until the 15th of the month. They are very busy; apparently this is the time of year when all the summer residents return to Maine and want their cable reactivated. So that kinda sucks. We’ve obviously been busy with the move, so I haven’t had a chance to take my laptop to a coffeeshop to get online.

The move went well. We moved on Tuesday. Tuesday morning it was raining. By 1pm, when we started the move, it had stopped. And it’s gotten progressively nicer ever since, culminating in today’s stunning 85-degree sunny day. And of course I’m inside working. Bleah. But it’s clear that the weather thought a change of scenery was in order for us.

My mood seems to have improved along with the weather. There are a few reasons for this, I think; one is physical; I’ve done more physical work this week than I have in a long time. And I’m just coming out of 2 illnesses, so this is like the perfect shock to the system to get my body back in gear. I still have some lingering chest congestion, but I feel better today than I have in weeks, now that the soreness from the move is dissipating a bit.

We had so much help on Tuesday, we got everything moved well before dark. Thanks to everyone who helped! We couldn’t have done it without all of you…

Wednesday was spent unpacking. We pulled our stuff back out of storage and into our new apartment, so there was plenty to do. There were of course boxes everywhere; we had to move boxes out of the way in order to make room for things like beds.

The first night, Edgar (my daughter’s dog) was freaking out utterly. Finally, when we cleared space for the bed and made it up, he jumped on the bed, and collapsed with an expression that read, “Thank GOD there are beds here!!!!!” It was funny.

We got the bathroom and the kitchen set up first, followed by our daughter’s room, and lastly our room, which is also the main room of the place. The bookshelves were a huge part of it; for the first time in many years I have adequate shelf space for all of my books. This is essential to feeling like home; it gives me a link to my intellectual history, something I’ve very much missed over the past several years.

The shelves were made of pine 1x10s, and are each 4 feet wide and 6.5 feet high. Both of them together occupy an entire wall of the apartment, floor to ceiling. Nice. I’m very happy with how they turned out. Those of you who helped carry all the heavy boxes of books will now know why when you come to visit.

I got to walk to work today for the first time in months. This was fantastic. I didn’t walk hardly at all while on the beach, at least in part because there were no specific destinations within walking distance. So it’s nice to have a reason to walk again. Nietzsche was on to something when he said “only thoughts reached when walking have any value” or words to that effect.

I really love Portland. I’m glad to be back. Hopefully I’ll be online again soon.