Staying Warm

Tips on how to stay warm when winter camping--which is a regular day indoors in our 45 degree house.
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Keep changing your socks! Everybody forgets that your feet sweat, and THAT can make you cold even though you are layered up.
-Farmer's Almanac

Deborah Luster and C.D. Wright

She would dress up even when she was cooking — designer clothes and high heels. I mean, she'd wear a mink coat to a tractor pull. Red hair, big glamourpuss. But she never put on any airs.
-Debora Luster
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The Hidden World of Girls

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Essays

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Salvation Army

On Thursday I spotted a fifties looking retro sleeveless dress, simple design full skirt with four thin white ribbons across the chest ending in bows on the right side. It was on the mannequin in the big picture window of the Salvation Army. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I walked by on Friday to show my husband and they had put a black fur coat on the mannequin. Good I thought, now nobody will see how fabulous this dress is while I am deciding. I could wear it for performing I told myself. It would cost more to sew a dress like this, I convinced myself. Today I went in and tried it on. The ladies that work there and another elderly lady waiting to use the dressing room were as excited as I was when I came out wearing it. It fit me like a glove. I walked home smiling and took a detour to show friends at the public library. I am convinced my grandparents Nat and Sophie are hovering over the thrift stores orchestrating my lucky finds!

Winston Churchill

Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces.
-Winston Churchill

Maxine Hong Kingston

If aspiring writers were to ask you for some words of advice, what advice would you give them?

Kingston: Write something everyday. Sit for a few minutes, and write the word of the day.

How would you define a Woman Warrior? In other words, what would she be like, her attributes, her outlook?

Kingston: I am working on a Buddhist definition. With his/her sword, Manjusri cuts through ignorance and wrong views and delusion.

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Veterans Writing with Maxine Hong Kingston

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Michael Sims

If there is nothing new under the sun, at least the sun itself is always new, always re-creating itself out of its own inexhaustible fire.
― Michael Sims, Apollo's Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination

I am reading Michael Sims book The Story of Charlotte's Web: E.B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature an the Birth of and American Classic.

It is a fabulous book!

The Immense Loneliness Begins

A poem from Rilke's Book of Hours, which Joanna Macy translated with Anita Barrows and subtitled

Love Poems to God

You are not surprised at the force of the storm —
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees' blood rose. And now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit;
now it becomes a riddle again,
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.

Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

-Rilke

Joanna Macy

The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world — we've actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.
-Joanna Macy

The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you're worrying about whether you're hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you're showing up, that you're here and that you're finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. That was what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.
-Joanna Macy

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I Dreamed

I dreamed I was wearing a long white wedding dress with a seventy four foot trail. Someone said you can walk seventy four miles on the dress' train (by pacing). I had red leather thigh-high boots that were making me overheat so I stepped out of one without noticing, and had no idea where I left it.

Dog Love

Today Lily jumped up on my side of the bed to tell me she's back in the game. So we walked around and walked up the hill to see the expansive view of the city.

Taking your dog for a walk is an important ritual in keeping your dog (and dog owner) mentally stable. A dog, as an animal, is a walker/traveler by instinct. Packs of dogs get up in the morning and walk.
- Dog Breed Info


Before embarking on discussion of the Sufis’ attitude towards the dog and commenting on the dogs attributes, let me first introduce this text by quoting ‘Ali ebn Abi Taleb, the seminal figure of Sufism:

Happy is the one who leads the life of a dog! For the dog has ten characteristics which every believer should possess. First, the dog has no status among creatures;
second, the dog is a pauper having no worldly goods;
third, the entire earth is his resting place;
fourth, the dog goes hungry most of the time;
fifth, the dog will not leave his master’s door even after having received a hundred lashes;
sixth, he protects his master and his friend, and when someone approaches he will attack the foe and let the friend pass;
seventh, he guards his master by night, never sleeping;
eighth, he performs most of his duties silently;
ninth, he is content with whatever his master gives him;
and tenth, when he dies, he leaves no inheritance.

- Dogs from a Sufi Point of View by Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh

Sufism takes advantage of an Arabic pun: a dog (kalb كلب) and the heart (qalb قلب).

PTSD

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and
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Arundhati Roy

This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me.
― Arundhati Roy

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.
― Arundhati Roy

Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat shaped holes in the universe.
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.
― Arundhati Roy

Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.
― Arundhati Roy

There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Some things come with their own punishments.
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

When she looked at him now, she couldn't help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Lox Sherpa

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Mythic Salamander

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Howling with Wolves

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Pothier Mansion

Do you know of any daring folks who would like to live here in Woonsocket with us. The amazing and historic Governor Pothier Mansion is for sale, 85 K. Ask for Marilyn Bennett, Salzberg Realty.

Morning

I just walked Lily in the dark. She seemed to say "now please!" after her breakfast and aspirin.

It is amazing how dark our urban neighborhood is. Nearly every streetlight is off or flickering. The elderly high rise lobby is lit up and a few apartments are lit too.

My back neighbor is walking to his car in the parking lot carrying his squishy red thermal lunch-bag. We smile and say hello. He starts up his vehicle and it sounds like a death rattle.

The moon is out and bright with a ring around it.

I see the silhouette of my rotund neighbor standing on the grassy corner with his two Jack Russell Terriers orbiting him like small planets.

I know nearly everyone, so I feel strangely comforted walking by their homes. Some lights have been on all night. Some houses are dark. And some folks have kitchen lights on as they get ready for work.

I found a tiny three-inch plastic figurine of an Indian on the sidewalk. I drop it in my bag. When I get home I see he's bare-chested, wearing a loin cloth and has face painting. His waist moves when I twist him and his arms also move. He's holding a lumpy white gourd. I position him to look like discus thrower. The disc looks like a gigantic clove of garlic. I wash the Indian with green apple soap and scrub him with my blue toothbrush and place him next to the teapot. Welcome to my world.