Gene Nelson, a woman, wrote about how women, even if prominent in their own time, tend to get disappeared between generations. Hannah Arendt was a heavily respected influential intellectual while alive, and seems to be heading in that directions.

She's brilliant, concerned about the greatly good, in touch with how horrible people can be, fairly optimistic considering and easy to read.

Praying as a full-time job is less common than it used to be.

Praying for frogs seems a good idea. Praying for frogs might lead to other actions for frogs but wouldn't have to. Some people could just pray for frogs as a major thing in their lives. Might help.

Frogs on down. Praying for the little bases of life, algae and insects.

Some small children are fascinated by small life. Encouraged in their enraptured staring at creepers and crawlers, these child could grow up to be life savers.

Understanding little life, helping it along, living so as to stomp on little life less, praying for bugs and slugs and frogs--these could all be futures for the little kid hunkered down watching little movers move.

Noticing gravity and both feet, I walk along. It was good of the ancestors to work this out.

Addicts are boring because their interests are narrow.

* In "Angels Fall," Nora Roberts has one of her characters who writes mystery thrillers think about how life sucks often enough, so why not have things work out well in entertainment fiction.

I sometimes get impatient when writers of literary fiction create a situation in which things could reasonably work out well for the characters, but the writer shows loyalty to literary fiction conventions of this moment by having things work out badly.

Take the generally terrific, you should read it "Losing Nelson." What a great way it is to learn much about an important person in history, Horatio Nelson. The main character in the novel is very focussed on Nelson, and is generally in life, barely holding on by a hair, mental health wise.

This all being the party before entropy, we sit and slowly sip our own sweet time.

The two o's in door in English are pretty cool. Open, open.

Hannah Arendt wrote that human history can seem like a long chain of unpleasant and unstoppable cause and effect. She wrote that everyone has two powers to change the chain that can have some of the effect of miracle. We have the power to act and the power to forgive.

Hannah Arendt wrote that human history can seem like a long chain of unpleasant and unstoppable cause and effect. She wrote that everyone has two powers to change the chain that can have some of the effect of miracle. We have the power to act and the power to forgive.

To make unrelated news.

To not react.

To stand here and do something different and gentle.

* We thank the sky lights for the sparkle and the shine

**[added Saturday senence at the end]In Russia they have nature preserves that are really nature preserves. No human action at all. In theory, no humans go there.

I read an article about a US women, speaking Russian from school and interested in the environment, who went to start a World Wildlife Fund office in Russia. She thought she'd be working on dirty environmental issues like pollutions.

She found out about the absolute preserves.

She found out how big Russia is and what huge amounts of it are untouched. In Germany or Denmark, she noted, you couldn't in fairness, totally lock human out of some of the limited land. But Russia is huge. The command economy, as she tactfully calls it, kept people totally out of some places. She started to think that this was a good idea and should continue.

Now, there ten years, she's moved a little. You need to talk with and listen to the people right next to the total preserve. Hunter or poachers, as they might be called. She working on these people knowing, if they stay out of the preserve, the animals inside with flourish and multiply and some of them will some out of the preserve to where they can be hunted and not poached.

*

A protected animal population makes for bigger healthier animals for hunters eventually.

[I read about this in the alumni magazine of the Fountain Valley School of Colorado Springs, Colorado, a boarding and day high school. I need to read the article again, check the facts and add the name of the woman and the Russia words for the absolute preserves to the above.]

I didn't realize before about thinking with breasts, that that's partly how we think.

In pictures of womem and statues made in Crete long ago in Minoan times, the women have a different relationship with their shoulders. They fully inhabit them.

The usual shoulder hunch of women may be to protect the breasts, protect the breasts as thinkers. Hunching shows a natural desire to not get hit right in the deep, natural processes.

"Think," "ideas,"--some people feel these words have nothing to do with anything they do. Sometimes maybe that could be from an inaccurate sense of inferiority.

Sometimes, it's accurate. People use their own local aliveness, the body soul they inhabit, to know. What they know they then act on to affect areas outside their body soul.

However, for some people "thinking" and "ideas" as usually used are too arid and too crammed into one part of the body to feel like an accurate description of what they do.

The woman who wrote the book "Radical Spirits" about nineteenth century spiritualism taught me that disdain and laughter can be signs of where women's power is. Follow the laughter, there is the power.

I'm reading "Fenwomen" about people doing hard physical labor, long days, all there lives, and wondering where I get to be reading and thinking. I can't read and think well enough really to make it up.

The trash can gave me a Mondrian poster. Piet Mondrian, the grid guy.

An irregular grid of thick black lines. The spaces inside the lines filled with often white, sometimes with black, most noticeably with strong colors--red, blue, yellow.

It can feel like old stained glass. A black outline is a good way to present bright colors.

Mondrian says a believable yes to grids and to things in general with his deep and skilled joie de grid.

Looking at the poster daily now, I'm thinking it's hard for me to feel his joy because I've seen so many office buildings with grid exposed and joy not evident. I've seen lots more of them than Mondrian did. He could see what grids could be at their best partly because he hadn't been inundated with the failure of potential.

If I keep looking at this poster and its power, maybe i can see with more joy the buildings I have to see anyway. I have primary color like things within me--maybe I can wake myself up and bring them to the many grids around me.

Naturally occuring sweetness moves mystically. You open up the honey here and eat some and fifteen minutes later its being sticky in all these yonders you don't know how it got too. The Earth covered with people going "ouch" is so hungry for sweetness that real sweetness feels the lack and travels impossibly on air molecules and coincidence to fill it.

I may be entering a period of picking up my email at wmulti@well.com

When I chose the address I partly wanted an address that wasn't guessable and partly wanted it to stand for women's multiversity, where women feel comfortable knowing in all the different ways they know.

Used to be women's camp up in the Sierras, attended by lots of women from the bay areas, college educated and more, heady, non-profitesque, liberal. Also by women from around there, who were more down to earth. Even if they had all the characteristics of the Bay Area women, they were more down-to-earth from living there.

Once when I was working to partly pay, I was doing opening day parking direction with a woman from the neighborhood. She had left her husband who hit her and insulted her. Almost everyone she knew disagree with her doing that, including her mother.

But that wasn't why she was there. She'd left him, she knew that was right, go on.

She came to women's camp because she wanted to have complete conversation about being psychic. She wanted to be able to complete the sentence, complete the story. when she talked about knowing non-standard things in non-standard ways. Not have people go all sick-looking or angry on her.

I said, "You've come to the right place." She said, "I know."

At that time my psychic knowings were pretty wispy. I knew they were there and correct but I had a hard time telling them from my own inner static and hopes.
So I wasnt the right person really to have the conversation she wanted, though I did the door thing by knowing what she meant and being matter of fact and welcoming.

Just to not be shut up when talking about important things is an education in itself. To not be imprisoned in some stranger's strange idea of what's important is like we can breathe the oxygen that was in our air all the time.

Playful prayer. Joke around with God when feeling good. God deserves a break.

Dancing on the road to. . .

We'll know it when we feel it.

A good effect the 1991 Gulf War had on me is that I got very down on words. If words can be used to such killing, lying effect, why use them at all?

I don't have an answer to that, but here I am.

Shared reality is loud but not complete.

The bookstore had a friendly New Year's resolution window with books about changing behavior and a sign that read, "Read more books."

I smiled at the sign and said, "No."

I do not now, in my opinion, read too many books. If I read one more book a fortnight, that might be too many.

Read less news. That might be good. The same amount of book reading, less news reading. Use the time gained to let brains cells graze in flower-filled meadows of their own choice.

There's a lot more than people--stars and pebbles and green growing from where the pebbles land toward where the stars shine.

Tree branches down. Creeks up. Sidewalks shining. Rain reigns.

More patience, fewer patients.

This little bump is how it's healing. I could smooth the bump and stop the healing.

Immigrants and Indians and people who were kidnapped and people convicted of crimes sent to colonies like Georgia--that's what we've got for ancestors in the USA. That's all we've got. Some people seem to talk like they came down from Mount Sinai like the Ten Commandments or something.

The brain looks like a deep sea creature. It exists in dark and wet. We know what we know through a kind of detailed splashing.

I open a science fiction book I haven't read and get
"Common Good smiled nervously."

Yes, in any reality whatever, Common Good has many reason to be nervous and be lonely.We've got to work out with Common Good, talk, combine our vastly differnt wisdoms to get a smarter reality.

--The book is "Neon Gods" by Marc Laidlaw

After the Berlin Wall was pulled down, and the Soviet Union didn't exist, I noticed with surprise that everything I thought that was faintly political smelled mildewed. I didn't know that I was that tied into that East/West, good guy, bad buy stuff. But where could I be, I guess, but inside it.

"Mutual" is a good word.

A couple of "you"s. Part of "all."

Part of "I'm"--the part with out the capitialized me.

Feel you twice, and much of everthing. Know what I am without the "I."

The tea that brews in the space between us, we sip and become warm and alert.

This could be the longest night. We learn to learn by touch.

I need to accept simple and easy when they are what's happening.

I could clev it up with cleverness, but if I'm wise, I won't.

Holy Frank! Can we live up to our city?

copyright 2008 Anne Herbert All rights reserved.