Holding onto Time or A Love Letter to the World

When I was 13 and at summer camp in Maine with three of my best friends I was having so much fun time was zooming by. One day I went into the empty cabin and held on to the metal bunk bed and said I'm going to hold onto time. I stopped and meditated and told myself this was what I was doing. I remember that summer so well. I played football and made linoleum cuts and orchestrated a cabin switch with the boys cabin in the middle of the night. Our counselor was so great she even came to visit me and Melanie with her psychiatrist boyfriend after the summer was over. We went to a diner somewhere. I remember he was telling us that he uncomfortable with the psychiatrist role.
I remember two friends from grade school Pat Devlin and Christianne Bachmann, they lived opposite each other and I would walk to school with them and we walked home together. I was the dreamer. I had a crush on Ted who lived at the bottom of the hill. I walked by his house every day with my dog. It was enough to walk by. I am still this way.
When things are going well I want to stop and hold onto time. We never imagine people dying or moving away. I don't. But they do and they keep doing it.
I have always liked grounded friends. I think it's because I am a kite scooped by the wind or caught in a tree. And many days I am a helium balloon. My friends need to be solid.

Valentine. I lay in bed wishing to tell everyone how much I love them. It sounds so silly but the next best thing is to meditate on this thought and make my writing and painting a love letter to the world.

Bill says put up road blocks to find my pepper biscuit basket. How about an ALL POINTS BULLETIN: missing oblong basket with red tea cloth. Dropped off at WPD filled with 12" pepper biscuits Thursday 11 AM February 18th, 2016. Any information about the whereabouts would be gladly appreciated.

Pat Devlin's mom made her scrambled eggs and toast and tea for lunch every day. They had a picnic table as a kitchen table and a schnauzer. They had two red cars a ford station wagon and a Volkswagon Bug shined to spotless. We were not allowed to touch them. She had an older brother who I never met and an older sister I rarely saw. Pat and I practiced our times tables in her room every day after school on a little slate. I think her dad was a fireman. There was a militaristic orderly and fearful streak in the family with a touch of paranoia. I remember her mother phoned and let it ring four times and hung up and did it again so the third time Pat would know when it was "safe" to answer the phone.

Christianne was from Germany. She was bilingual and everything was educational in her household. She taught me the German word for apple. When she went on a trip with her family they had maps and geography lessons afterwards. One day Christianne and I climbed around in her attic exploring and I had a terrible allergic reaction to the exposed fiberglass insulation. I remember turning red and itchy. My Aunt Gloria was visiting us. The one who loved animals and gave us our black cat Midnight. She was there when I got out of the shower. I showed her my lobster skin. I loved her. She died a few years later, found anorexic and starved in her apartment with many cats. She had a heart of gold and was gorgeous with flaming red hair and a keyboard smile.

This is what happens when I put paper under me upon waking. Unfiltered, unedited.

George Augustus Moore, Irish Novelist

"A great artist is always before his time or behind it."

"A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it."

- Writer's Almanac

Jane Hirshfield

"I don't think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life."

"One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen."

- Writer's Almanac

“L’omino con i baffi”

http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-22/remembering-little-man-mustache-who-made-coffee-all


Coffee icon gets buried in espresso maker

By Yaron Steinbuch

February 18, 2016 | 9:54am
Modal Trigger Coffee icon gets buried in espresso maker
Renato Bialetti's ashes were buried in a stovetop espresso maker.

Renato Bialetti, the man behind the iconic octagonal coffee pot from Italy, has died, and his freshly ground ashes were buried in a fitting urn — a giant version of the Moka that made him famous.

Modal TriggerThe Rev. Pietro Segato, the parish priest of Casale Corte Cerro, at Bialetti’s burial service in northern Italy.

The 93-year-old’s children, Alessandra, Antonello and Alfonso, brewed up the plan to bury their dad’s remains in a stovetop espresso maker on Monday, La Stampa reported.

The pot was blessed by a priest at a church in his hometown of Casale Corte Cerro in Piemonte, then buried next to his wife, Elia, in nearby Omegna, The Local of Italy reported.

Bialetti didn’t invent the classic pot, but he turned it into a must-have object in kitchens around the globe.

His dad, Alfonso, an aluminum vendor, acquired a patent for the gizmo in 1933 — but it failed to catch on with the espresso-savvy Italian public.

In fact, by the time Renato took over the company in 1947, a mere 70,000 pots had been made.

The younger Bialetti pumped a major marketing campaign into the Moka. Among his ideas was adorning all the pots with the caricature of himself, a mascot known as “L’omino con i baffi” — the little man with the mustache.

Business perked up quickly. As of today, some 330 million of the pots have been sold worldwide.

Hilma Af Klin

As a teenager she attended séances, and her desire to make contact with the world “beyond” grew after her sister died in 1880. A decade into her artistic career, she worked with four other female artists who referred to themselves collectively as The Five (De Fem), in making contact with higher powers. They engaged in automatic drawing and writing, a task undertaken by af Klint from 1903 as she developed powers as a medium.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/rediscovering-hilma-af-klin-the-original-abstract-painter-a6885826.html

Deep Sleep

Sleeping deeply is one of mother natures finest gifts. I've been noticing that if I have a teensy amount of coffee when I wake up at 4 AM and not any more for the day I have a great sleep.
Article

29 Cent Legs

Buttermilk Roast Chicken

This recipe was inspired by Nigella Lawson’s version. I fiddled a lot, changing the spices and sweetener, though my biggest changes were to increase the salt, garlic and marinating time. If you wish to use Kosher salt instead of table salt use 2 tablespoons if using Diamond kosher salt and 1 1/4 tablespoons if using Morton kosher. (Here’s why). I imagine that going forward I’ll be using this technque as a springboard for a lot of different recipes and spice combinations. However, even when using the simplest recipe below, the chicken was unbelievably tender and flavorful.

2 cups buttermilk
5 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed
1 tablespoon table salt
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons paprika, plus extra for sprinkling (I used Hungarian, a smoked one would also be delicious)
Lots of freshly ground black pepper
2 1/2 to 3 pounds chicken parts (we used all legs)
Drizzle of olive oil
Flaked or coarse sea salt, to finish

Whisk buttermilk with garlic, table salt, sugar, paprika and lots of freshly ground black pepper in a bowl. Place chicken parts in a gallon-sized freezer bag (or lidded container) and pour buttermilk brine over them, then swish it around so that all parts are covered. Refrigerate for at least 2 but preferably 24 and up to 48 hours.

When ready to roast, preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line a baking dish with foil (not absolutely necessary, but Nigella suggested it and I never minded having dish that cleaned up easily). Remove chicken from buttermilk brine and arrange in dish. Drizzle lightly with olive oil, then sprinkle with additional paprika and sea salt to taste. Roast for 30 minutes (for legs; approximately 35 to 40 for breasts), until brown and a bit scorched in spots. Serve immediately. We enjoyed it with wild rice and green beans one night; roasted potatoes and, uh, more green beans another. (Yes, I have a habit.)

http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2012/01/buttermilk-roast-chicken/

Dream Come True

Last night I called Sylvia it had been too long since I'd seen her. I asked her if she could come over for soup. "Just come for 20 minutes" I said. She agreed and I was ecstatic. It had been over a month since I'd seen her. She had been isolated suffering from shingles. Bill and Sylvia and I ate my ginger carrot lentil soup with pepper biscuits. We told stories and laughed our heads off. We had my bread right out of the oven sliced and buttered. I made herb tea and brought out dried figs raisins cranberries and my granola and sunflower seeds for dessert. We dropped the figs in the hot tea to soften them. She picked up the purple plastic kalidescope and held it to the light ooing and ahhing. I plugged in the police radio and she was in heaven. "It's all here!" We listened to the dramas unfolding. We promised to show her how to get the police radio on her tablet. "I'll sleep with it under my pillow" she said. I sent her home with soup and bread and pepper biscuits. It was a dream come true.

Knowledge versus Fear

Listen to what you know instead of what you fear.
- Richard Bach

Locked Up: As long as I have pen and paper and strong legs I can be free

When I was little we had recordings of fairy tales read aloud on records. I used to love to listen to Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel and Cinderella. I sat on the floor and huddled next to the speaker. I especially loved the imagery of a spinning wheel and a poisoned comb. When I was sixteen years old my mother locked me up in her country house for the summer. The house was located three hours from their suburban home in the middle of nowhere. She promised to let me come back to see my friends but broke the promise every weekend. "Next week you can come home," she'd promise and leave for the week. This went on for the whole summer. Finally I walked out of the house barefoot and kept walking by nightfall my feet were bleeding. I had walked ten miles. I arrived at a friends house and I got a lift home. Late that year I planned another escape, and another and another.
To this day I am terrified of being trapped. I will not go to anyones country house, boat, or you name it if it feels like a trap. On most days I feel that as long as I have pen and paper and strong legs for walking great distances, I can be free.

Alice Gregory

Interview

One Beat

“We're all one beat away from becoming elevator music.”
—Don Delillo Paris Review

Bicycling a Condition of Marriage

“Listen, girls, there’s nothing left in my orchard except firewood,” Ms. Suleiman said, using a Palestinian saying for being a spinster. “But you are young. I want you, when you get married, to make riding your bikes a condition of marriage.”

Atef Abu Saif, a Gaza-based writer, said that until the mid-1980s, “it used to be normal” to see women riding bikes in Gaza. “They did it for pleasure and fun, by the sea,” he said.

That was before Ms. Suleiman moved to Gaza, as a teenager in the 1990s, but she had cycled as a child in Damascus, Syria.

Her riding revival began with a bet: She and two girlfriends created a competition to see who could lose the most weight in two weeks. Ms. Suleiman, who also swims and plays the keyboard, shed 11 pounds by cutting out bread, rice and pasta, and collected $75.

“It was like ‘The Biggest Loser,’ but the Amna version,” she said.

She decided to buy a bicycle, figuring it would help her keep losing weight. And, she said, “I wanted to remind myself of my childhood, which was without problems,” recalling that she would sneak off with her neighbor’s bicycle for forays around their Damascus enclave.

At first she rode in Gaza only around her own neighborhood at dawn, when few would see her. She encouraged her friend Sara Salibi, 24, whose teenage brother taught her how to ride, also at dawn. The women shared a similar defiance against Gaza’s limited expectations of women, although they are otherwise quite different.

Ms. Salibi smokes, though only in private; reads Milan Kundera, the Czech author; and hums tunes from Jimmy Fallon’s television show. “I like to dance, but I don’t know how to dance,” she said. “I want to learn how to dance.”

“The role of our women is to obey their husbands and prepare food for them inside the house, not to imitate men and ride bikes in the streets,” said the man, 33, who refused to give his name but echoed the view of many Gaza men interviewed, and of multiple comments on social networks, after news of the cycling group reached the Palestinian news media.

A distinct minority approved, including Abdul Salam Hussein, 53, who was sitting near a cement factory. “So what if a woman rides a bike?” he exclaimed. “People have reached the moon already!”

“Riding a bike makes you feel like you are flying,” Ms. Suleiman said. Ms. Salibi echoed that sentiment, saying, “I feel free.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/world/middleeast/gaza-women-on-bikes-face-a-long-road-to-acceptance.html

Build the Ark: Seas Are Rising

Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries

The worsening of tidal flooding in American coastal communities is largely a consequence of greenhouse gases from human activity, and the problem will grow far worse in coming decades, scientists reported Monday.

Those emissions, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, are causing the ocean to rise at the fastest rate since at least the founding of ancient Rome, the scientists said. They added that in the absence of human emissions, the ocean surface would be rising less rapidly and might even be falling.

The increasingly routine tidal flooding is making life miserable in places like Miami Beach; Charleston, S.C.; and Norfolk, Va., even on sunny days.


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/science/sea-level-rise-global-warming-climate-change.html?_r=0

The Days' Doings County Clare 1871

Picture of Irish sea monster surfaces in London image archive

10 August 2015
From the section Europe

Image caption The image of the "extraordinary marine visitor" appeared in the Victorian publication, The Days' Doings

A picture of County Clare's equivalent to the Loch Ness monster has surfaced in a London image archive.

An account of the sea monster's appearance was featured in a newspaper article in the Victorian publication, The Day's Doings on 21 October 1871.

The paper reported that there had been "some excitement" in Kilkee at the appearance of the "extraordinary marine visitor".

It appeared before a "party of strangers, composed of several ladies and some gentlemen", one of whom was a well-known clergyman in the "north of Ireland", when they went down to "Diamond Rocks".

They were watching the heavy ground swell from the Atlantic when their "attention was arrested by the appearance of an extraordinary monster who rose from the surface of the water" about 70 yards from where they were standing.

The paper quotes that it had "an enormous head, shaped somewhat like a horse, while behind the head and the neck was a huge mane of seaweed-looking hair which rose and fell with the motion of the water".
'Gigantic creature'

"It's eyes were large and glaring, and, by the appearance of the water behind, a vast body seemed to be beneath the waves," the article stated.

The party were unable to judge its length but they all agreed it was the "most gigantic creature they had ever seen".

The sea monster remained for "some minutes" before it "vanished in the same mysterious way that it had come".

In a bid to understand more about this "extraordinary animal", the paper quotes the "renowned living naturalist" Philip Henry Gosse.

Gosse's own opinion, "formed after a mature deliberation" of the evidence, was that there "were existing still some specimens of a nearly extinct race of sea monster".

He concluded that the sea monster seen in Kilkee possessed "close affinities" with the fossil of an extinct group of marine reptiles known as Enaliosauria.

The Day's Doings ends the article by concluding that it believed it was the "first time that one of these strange sea monsters has been seen on the coasts of the British Isles, and much excitement has been caused by its appearance in this particular neighbourhood".

The article was found in the Mary Evans picture library, which she co-founded with her husband Hilary.

He was a pictorial archivist and keen collector of UFOs and other paranormal phenomena, including sea monsters.

Ram Dass: Don’t be surprised to be surprised!

Making Friends with Change
By Ram Dass

All beings are on an evolutionary journey, and not just a Darwinian one. There is an evolution of consciousness reaching toward perfection, oneness, and divinity. Hindus and Buddhists believe each individual goes through countless incarnations on this road to fulfillment. A lot of people ask me, “How do you know about incarnations?” I haven’t experienced my past incarnations, but from being with my guru, Maharaji, who’s farther up the mountain, I have an understanding of how it all works. He would speak of reincarnation as a reality, and I and the other people around him had a very deep relationship with him and each other that clearly had not come from our family backgrounds or upbringing in this life. Our human forms are composed of and surrounded by an infinite myriad of forms, all in constant motion, from the subatomic to the cosmic in scale. This is the lila, the enchanted dance of existence, the divine interplay of consciousness and energy. Amid this divine play we seek fulfillment, perfection, flow, freedom, enlightenment, Oneness.The dominant quality of form is change, because all forms are in time. That’s another way of saying we don’t know what will happen from one instant to the next. Or, as one of my guru brothers is fond of saying, “Don’t be surprised to be surprised!” For instance, I didn’t anticipate I’d be living in a wheelchair today. The way to live with change is to be completely present in the moment (remember, Be Here Now). We cannot cling to forms or our experience of them, because they decay and dissolve back again into their formless state. Attempting to hold on to anything in time is ultimately futile and a cause of much suffering. What is really there to hold on to? In reality there is nothing permanent, nothing solid, nothing constant except relativity and change themselves. When we realize how finite are the limits of gratification or possible fulfillment within the play of forms, then despair arises. That despair is born of the world-weary understanding that nothing in form can provide ultimate meaning. It also forces and demands awakening and seeks transcendence of suffering. If futile clinging to impermanence creates our suffering, letting go and making friends with change is joy, liberation. In youth our lifetime seems to stretch infinitely before us. As we age, the accumulation of our experiences seems to have occurred in the blink of an eye. Even now that I’m seventy-nine years old, I realize there’s plenty of change to come before dying – change in the body, change in friends and family, change in memory. These experiences lead to deepening wisdom and freedom and to diving deep within to the realm beyond form. Long before recorded history, human beings were awakening out of the illusion of form or separateness that the Indians call maya. A tiny fraction of humanity, but still many beings, finish their work and complete the process of realization, the integration of form and the formless. These awakened beings pass beyond the illusion of birth and death and attachments to this physical plane and every other plane. Their hearts fill with the bliss of that realization and with the infinite love that permeates the universe the way that dark matter permeates the space between stars. That love is the subtle texture of our material world, the unseen energy, the fullness of emptiness (sunyata). When they finally emerge from the illusion of separateness, these free beings can either merge back into that formless state or remain in form on one plane or another, or they can continue their evolution to the point where it makes no difference. They may or may not take birth again on the physical plane.
- Ram Dass (excerpt from Be Love Now, co-authored by Rameshwar Das)

Beautiful Blurry Moon

The SNOW MOON is out there. I was awakened by a screaming tea kettle. My husband set up the water and then got lost doing chores. I had dreams of bathing in milk on the street from a hydrant. My deceased nephew gave me a hug. I got up and ran down to rescue the kettle and make a pot of tea for my husband. Standing in the kitchen we were mesmerized by a broadcast of JONESTOWN
http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/jonestown.html
I toasted wheat berries yesterday and ground them in my hand-cranked grinder and boiled them. Wheatena!

8 ways you are killing the environment that you probably didn't even realize

Mother Earth
8 ways you are killing the environment that you probably didn't even realize

1. Anti-bacterial soap
2. Lawn mowers
3. Tea bags
4. Plastic bottles
5. Microbeads
6. Disposable razors
7. Paper cups
8. Wooden chopsticks from restaurants

EU must cut beef consumption in half to reach 2020 climate targets

The Only Dance There is

Doing Your Own Being
By Ram Dass

The only thing you have to offer another human being, ever, is your own state of being. You can cop out only just so long, saying, “I’ve got all this nice stuff, I know all this and I can do all this.” But everything you do, whether you’re cooking food or doing therapy or being a student or being a lover, you are only doing your own being, you’re only manifesting how evolved a consciousness you are. That’s what you’re doing with another human being. That’s the only dance there is! When you’re protesting against somebody, the degree of consciousness with which you’re protesting determines how well they can hear what it is you’re really saying. And consciousness does not mean attachment to polarity, at any level. It means freedom from attachment. And once you see that the highest mother is the mother who is the most conscious mother, the highest student, the highest therapist, the highest lover, the highest anything is the most conscious one, you begin to see that the way you serve another human being is by freeing him from the particular attachments he’s stuck in that turn him off to life. You realize that the only thing you have to do for other human beings is to keep yourself really straight, and then do whatever it is you do.

It’s easy to know this when you’re sitting up in a cave. It’s quite easy to sit and meditate and realize how all this is, to see how you get stuck in roles and how the life process, the spiritual contact, turns off the minute you think you’re somebody doing something. As long as I think I am speaking to you and I’m doing something to you – forget it! – I’m just keeping you out there as “them.” The question is, are you them or are you us? If I think of you using any model in my head that keep you being them, I end up turning myself off. My consciousness, my concepts of the universe have turned me off because I know that the higher consciousness state is a state of unity. It is, “Here we are.” I have experienced that. I know that. That’s valid. It’s absolutely obvious, now, that every time I perform an act which increases the distance, that kind of subject-object distance, I am taking myself one little jot further away from that unitive state which I now know, is. Only an idiot is going to bring himself down.

“Truth lies within ourselves; it takes no rise from outward things, whatever you may believe. There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness and to know rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape that in effecting entry for light supposed to be without.” – Robert Browning


https://www.ramdass.org/doing-your-own-being/

FRONTLINE: Chasing Heroin: Airs Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016 at 9 p.m. on PBS TV

Injecting heroin. FRONTLINE follows four addicts in Seattle, examining U.S. drug policy and what happens when addiction is treated as a public health crisis, not a crime.

February 2016

By Jennifer Robinson

Experience powerful investigative storytelling that answers only to you. From criminal justice to politics to global issues, the reporting of PBS’ flagship public affairs series takes you inside the controversial, complex stories shaping our times.
Related Article


"Chasing Heroin" - Facing a heroin epidemic, America is experimenting with radical new approaches to the drug problem. Following four addicts in Seattle, examine U.S. drug policy and what happens when heroin is treated like a public health crisis, not a crime.



Chasing Heroin

Obama Asks for $1.1 Billion to Fight Opioid and Heroin Abuse

February 2016

by Priyanka Boghani

FILE - In this Monday, May 6, 2013 file photo, a drug addict prepares a needle to inject himself with heroin in front of a church in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles. The death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in February 2014 spotlighted the reality that heroin is no longer limited to the back alleys of American life. Once mainly a city phenomenon, the drug has spread to the country and suburbs. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Fifteen years ago, heroin use and abuse of prescription opioids led to 7,000 overdose deaths annually. In the years since, such deaths have surged — quadrupling to 28,648 in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

On Tuesday, the Obama administration said it would ask Congress for $1.1 billion over the next two years to combat the growing health crisis — funds mostly aimed at expanding treatment for the addicted.

According to the White House, $920 million would go toward helping states expand access to medication-assisted treatment programs. More than 2 million Americans are in need of treatment, administration officials said in a news conference, but only 1 million currently have access to it.

“We’ve heard countless stories about people who encounter long waiting lines to get into treatment, to find a bed,” White House drug czar Michael Botticelli said.

The plan would devote around $30 million to evaluating how effective treatment programs are in “real-world conditions,” and another $50 million in funding for treatment providers.

The proposed budget would also direct attention to overdose prevention strategies, including improving access to naloxone, a drug that reverses overdoses, and training health care providers on the right way to prescribe opioid painkillers.

Opioid abuse is one of the rare issues receiving bipartisan attention, with Republicans and Democrats alike calling for reform on the 2016 election campaign trail. President Obama listed prescription drug abuse as one of the “bipartisan priorities” he hoped both parties could work together on during his last State of the Union address.

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, co-authored a bipartisan piece of legislation with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., to tackle the opioid crisis. The proposed legislation would expand prevention and education efforts, increase the availability of naloxone — the overdose-reversing drug — to law enforcement and first responders, expand treatment for addiction, including to individuals in prison, and increase monitoring of prescription drugs.

The Senate Judiciary Committee considers the bill this Thursday. Portman responded to Obama’s plan with a statement saying, “If the White House is serious about fighting the heroin epidemic, the president will signal his support for the bipartisan Comprehensive Addiction & Recovery Act.”

For more on the heroin epidemic, tune into FRONTLINE on Feb. 23 for Chasing Heroin, a special two-hour investigation from veteran producer Marcela Gaviria.