Month: September 2005

One day, several years ago, I buried something very powerful. It was beautiful and pure, but also scary and daunting. And it contained a tremendous amount of energy. It overwhelmed me, and I didn’t know how to deal with the power contained therein. I couldn’t wield that much power myself, and with little promise of outside help wielding it, I was afraid, and had a very difficult time staying grounded when I held it.

So I buried it.

I’ve since visited that X-spot on the map many, many times, but last week, I dug it up again. It hadn’t really changed much. It’s still every bit as powerful as it was. But it’s no longer as scary. You see, I’ve become more powerful since I buried it. I now have no trouble holding it, admiring it, looking at it in the eye from every angle, and staying grounded while I do so. It still dazzles me with its beauty. It still awes me with its uncountable potential for good. And it is still utterly enthralling to the deepest levels of my soul.

Now I have to let it go.

It is nothing more than a beautiful image, a what-if, an alluring, prenascent expectation. And the wisest thing that’s been pointed out to me in weeks is “expectations are for amateurs.”

Now, there is something deeper still than this artifact from my past, something more pure, more real, something that feels good to be with, something that is comfortable and not the least bit awkward. Something infinitely more powerful, because it exists in deeper levels of reality. It is shared kinetic energy, not imaginative potential energy.

And it is right before me, making it easy to forget about past artifacts, no matter how brightly they glow.

I played some music last weekend, but beforehand an African deity manifested before my eyes. He was accompanied by a rock-solid bearded hippy white guy on a drum, keeping groovy time. The deity had a huge head, and he glided across the floor by shaking his feet and floating on the rattling.

He came up to where I was standing, looked up at me, leaned forward with his staff, and went “poink!” right in the heart chakra. The jolt seemed to send a brilliant white pulse through me, that purified and released. Zing!

Then I got to play 2 Freakwitch songs in a room full of people with their lights already on. And there were several master drummers in the room, some of whom played with us.

Then I got another pleasant jolt last Tuesday.

There is a lot of divine energy flowing through my heart chakra lately. Feels good.

So I have to wonder, what the fuck does this mean? “A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Thursday indicated fewer than half of Americans believe the United States will win the Iraq war.”

I’ve seen this so many times with cnn.com polls. The questions are worded in such a way as to be meaningless. What exactly does it mean to “win the Iraq war?” What are the conditions of victory?

Wasn’t the goal to oust Saddam? If so, doesn’t that mean we already won? Or was it about making sure Iraq has no WMDs? They don’t, so we already won, right?

This question reflects the big problem with this war: there is no clear, justifiable objective. Our troops have no mission there that makes any sense.

Apart from protecting the Halliburton employees in the oil fields, of course…

As always, one of the best starting points to understand the new lawsuit against Google is Lawrence Lessig:

Google wants to do nothing more to 20,000,000 books than it does to the Internet: it wants to index them, and it offers anyone in the index the right to opt out. If it is illegal to do that with 20,000,000 books, then why is it legal to do it with the Internet? The “authors” ‘ claims, if true, mean Google itself is illegal. Common sense, or better, commons sense, revolts at the idea. And so too should you.

This suit reinforces Lessig’s arguments that the old Intellectual Property paradigm is utterly outmoded in this digital age. Makes sense to me.

…. and I don’t just mean because I’ve lost some weight over the past few months. Though that certainly helps….

Last night I had the most amazing energy blast through me, both energy that had been stagnant and blocked (on some level) for years, and also some fresh new energy. It was one of the most intense energetic experiences (outside of playing music, which is always right up there on the intensity-o-meter) that I’ve had in months. Good-intensity, by the way. It felt fantastic, on both the releasing-old-stuff-that-I-don’t-need-anymore level as well as the nice-clean-fresh-new-energy-to-fill-the-void level.

At one point, I was observed floating up near the ceiling….heh.

But perhaps the best part of it was the connection (re-connection?) with someone very dear to me. Things feel less awkward, and a few orders of magnitude more authentic, in this moving from the slippery slopes and madness of what-ifs to the stark and pleasing immediacy of actual healing work. Whee!

There were reports floating around recently (that came from Symantec, the anti-virus company that profits from the insecure state of proprietary software) saying that Firefox has more security problems than Internet Explorer.

This may be fact.

But it misses the point entirely. To read that statement as a condemnation of Firefox (or more broadly, of any Free software) presupposes that some software will not have bugs or security problems. And that just ain’t so. All software has bugs and security problems. Period, end of report. The question is, how are those bugs and security holes responded to?

As this story points out, the fact that more holes are being found — and efficiently patched — with Firefox and other Free software applications is a strength, not a weakness.

It’s just not a strength that is easily profitted-upon. Therefore, corporations who depend on profit will throw more obfuscation out there around this issue.

Bottom line: nothing is more secure than Free software. Period.

Good question. For me, I’m not sure “belief” is quite the right word. “The most reasonable and elegant explanation for the phenomena at play in existence” is probably closer.

Just sayin’.

Because we don’t know whether or not global warming is true. Yeah, right.

Remember the mantra, the predicted effect of global warming: an overall average increase in temperature, and localized anomalies, storms that we haven’t seen in centuries.

Like, say, a category 5 hurricane smashing into a city below sea level….

I just downloaded the new t r y ^ d :: p u b l i c d o m a i n album, released under a Creative Commons license. Musically, it’s somewhat interesting in a audio-layering kind of way. Apparently the music is a long distance collaboration among the geographically-scattered members.

But perhaps more interesting is their belief in the Creative Commons way of releasing music. I must confess it’s something I’ve been very interested in doing with Freakwitch. Glad to see there are others doing it. I hope it works well for them.

I discovered two things tonight. First, dancing without a guitar in my hands feels strange.

Second, I am almost never compelled to dance to prerecorded music. And the energy throughput is much, much smaller than it is with live music and real musicians.

I think I need to learn to substitute “woman” for “guitar” to feel better about dancing when I’m not playing music… :-)